Research Topic - Sprawl & Isolation in Suburbia

Stalling Sprawl – restoring place to the suburban-city

Steven A. Munger, September 28, 2007

"When man goes blind, there always remains the question whether his blindness derives from some defect and loss or lies in an abundance and excess."- Martin Heidegger

THE SELF LOATHING OF SUBURBIA

Neither truly urban, nor truly rural, the suburb exists, almost universally, at the edge of any modern city. Suburbia is comprised of strip developments, auto dealers, fast food restaurants, freeway interchanges, corporate office parks and above all else, single-family residential houses, usually in beige. Suburbia is a lot like elevator music. By trying to offend no one, it inevitably winds up offensive to everyone. Suburbs are viewed by critics, either as too conformist, or too individualistic, as a product of a laissez-faire attitude taken toward development, or the presumed excesses of zoning and automobiles, as alienating and isolating. The cry of the critics is nearly universal: The suburb has failed its inhabitants and will surely be the ruin of us all! It will destroy our cities, and force us into a life not worth living! Critics of suburbia would have us believe that if
only we realized how bad suburbia is, surely we would pack up our bags, and return to an urban model of living. If it were that simple, wouldn't we have done it already? If suburbia really is so bad and so isolating, why is it that solid majorities of Americans continue to live in a suburban environment? Unlike most of the critics of suburbia, I have spent considerable time there; in fact, I now live, and have lived most of my life in a suburban environment. I agree that much of the criticism of contemporary suburbia is valid, and I share many of the concerns of the critics: The suburbs
are hard to walk. You do need a car for every trip. Mixed use is absent. Sprawl is a huge problem, perhaps the defining problem of our time. There is a sense of placelesness, of not belonging. Suburbia is difficult to navigate; the fractious sprawling nature of suburbia renders it impossible to understand the relationship between city and country, between center and periphery. However, to blame suburbia, and suburbia alone, for "the downfall of the American dream"
is hyperbole at best, and most likely trying to sell you something. To understand why these conditions exist, to understand why the contemporary city looks the way it does, we must examine the larger picture of what a city is, what a city does, and how a city manifests itself.

Cities exist, first and foremost, out of a social process; the difference between the rural and the urban environments is a result of the interaction of large numbers of people with one another. Without this interaction, there isn't a city to begin with and the discussion about the problems of the city-suburb is a very short one. This interaction however is more substantial than people just coming together in one location. The city serves a purpose, and three primary systems, collaborate to shape the nature of the city. First, there is the interaction with productive resources (economics and jobs), which provide us with a reason for coming together as a city to begin with. Secondly, the social contract (politics and laws) which govern how we interact with each other and with the surrounding environment, also providing a framework for the final force: Ambition (trade and transport), which serves to distribute goods and services. It is transportation above the other systems, which shapes the city. The economy, community, and transportation of cities are inexorably interwoven; and cannot exist without each other. When any of these three systems is absent or defective, the city itself becomes dysfunctional. Only once we understand these three forces, and how they shape our environment, can we hope to propose solutions that are more than skin-deep marketing ploys, and temporary or false solutions which will further the problems of the city-suburban environment. Such skin-deep solutions will continue to create unending, wasteful, sprawl. It is sprawl that de-humanizes, sprawl that isolates, and sprawl that accounts for many of the problems attributed to suburbia. If this all sounds depressing, you are not alone in thinking so.

THE NEW URBAN RESPONSE AND REALITY.

"When Americans are depressed by the scary places they work and dwell, contemplate some antidote, they often conjure up the image of the American small town. However muddled and generalized the image is, it exerts a powerful allure. The idea of the small town represents a range of human values that gigantisisim and corporate enterprise has either eliminated or mocked."

- James Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere.

This statement epitomizes the attitude taken towards the problems of suburbia and toward sprawl, by the New Urbanists. The ideas put forth by Kunstler merit examination because New Urbanism is, perhaps, the most influential planning movement of the last fifty years.

New Urbanists view the coupling of insular design with zoning requirements that favor the use of the automobile as furthering the process of urban degradation. The movement of New Urbanism, fundamentally reactionary in nature, strives to look at the perceived failures of modernism, and seeks a return to a "more human" solution to the development of the city, which they term "traditional neighborhood design".

Although new urbanism is effective at spotting the ailments of the modern American suburban city and in marketing the ideals of urbanism, it lacks the substance to be an effective stalwart against sprawl, and suffers from a Post hoc, ergo propter hoc,

confusion of cause and effect. The New Urbanists criticize the Modernists for ignoring the relationships between things, while obsessing about buildings, which they attribute to the discontinuity of the suburban "sprawlscape". One could ask if the New Urbanists are making the same mistake by attempting to recreate the DNA of the traditional neighborhood, and not focusing on the larger systems that lead to the creation of successful neighborhoods and cities. The New Urbanists continue the fetishization of object over the framework of creation.

By focusing on the neighborhood alone, New Urbanism has been very successful as a tool for development and for sprawl. They seem to say, "If we only do it right this time..." Arguing that the sub-division must be re-configured is quite easy. A much more difficult task is to argue that such growth should be limited to begin with. Additionally, New Urbanism does much to undermine the civic institutions of small towns, which it purports to hold dear. The city of Celebration, Florida, often upheld as one of the paradigms of "good new urban design" is a prime example. Celebration was built as a model "town" by the leading New Urbanists Andres Dunay and his wife Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. Upon closer examination of the "Town" some unusual patterns emerge. At the center of the development is the "Town Hall", however, the "Town Hall" does not house a democratic civic organization, but by a privately owned property management company. Celebration is not alone. Many New Urban, as well as other suburban developments, contain similar organizational structures. This doublespeak about community fosters an illusion of civic involvement while simultaneously encouraging the rejection of civic governance. This rejection of civic life and of the democratic process in favor of private government is both disturbing and harmful to the suburb. It is also harmful to the larger city of which the suburb is a part. Rather than encouraging participation in public life, one of the three forces that shape the city, we see a withdrawal from the public realm. Retreat from civic life at the neighborhood level creates a ripple effect, which causes a retreat from civic life at the city level. This leads to dysfunction. This civic withdrawal is viewed as one of the worst qualities of suburbia and would seem to undermine the New Urbanist argument for "Traditional Neighborhood Design".

New Urbanism is so appealing because it pretends to offer a panacea for all that ails the modern city. In reality, New Urbanism ultimately continues the trend of sprawl, at a slightly reconfigured scale, and undermines the genuine political nature of place. Building yourself out of sprawl is an exercise in futility. It is as futile as "gorging yourself thin," but it is what the New Urbanists tend to promise. As it relates to cities, difficult decisions must be made. Do we really value the "towns" of early twentieth century America? Do we value the civic institutions? Are we willing to make the necessary political decisions to create the conditions for real urbanism? If the answer is "No" New Urbanism may still hold some appeal for you.

PLACE MATTERS

Taking a page from the New Urbanists, let us examine the cities and suburbs of early twentieth century America, but this time, let's ask some questions that are more than appearance driven. If we value these environments, what is it about their nature that we find appealing? How does this stand in contrast to the contemporary suburban-city? Certainly, we value their sense of place. We value their character, and their individual sprit. We admire their individual character. None of these are controversial. However, without looking at how these areas fit into the larger city, and the forces that shaped them, we fall back into the flawed logic that produced Celebration.

Much of the disgust experienced with sprawl is a result of a sense of placelesness - the sense that you are nowhere, that location no longer matters. The self-styled urbanist Paul Virilio asks a telling question in his discussion of the contemporary city, "Where does the city without gates begin?" This is the starting point for recognizing the importance of place. To be considered a place, there must be some concept of boundary. Sprawl has destroyed any nature of a closed system, any sense of periphery or center. Although individual neighborhoods can be conceived of, a larger, holistic sense of place cannot. Sprawl has also reduced the character of the city, reducing its vibrancy and making it so that nothing unique remains. More simply put: if everything looks the same, everywhere is the same; it's nowhere. Without being able to identify a specific nature of place, we are unable to take ownership of it (which paradoxically is required for place to exist.) Without being conceived as a whole, or without contrasting from its surroundings, we cannot take ownership of place nor can we use it to orient ourselves. We will remain un-oriented, confused and unsatisfied. So, in spite of Robert Venturi's professed love of strip development, place matters. Places are created by the methods we use for moving people and goods from location to location. So, transportation creates place. Transportation in the form of the freeway can create sprawl, which acts centrifugally to destroy place. It is a vicious cycle.

WHAT CAN BE DONE?

When evaluating suburbia, using the criteria of economy, politics, and transportation, clearly suburbia is not in opposition to the city, but is an extension of the city, or more appropriately, the suburbs can be seen as a part of the city itself. Suburbs represent a new economic reality in which people live, work, and recreate. The problems of the city therefore cannot be solved by setting up opposites of urban = good; suburban = bad, but the system must be seen as a whole. Cities exist as a combination of economic and political force, urban and suburban alike. The freeway is the main instrument of transit in this new paradigm of city, and is largely responsible for the sprawl that has been created. If we intend to reduce sprawl, we must advocate for several things.

First, growth boundaries are necessary to limit sprawl. By establishing a perimeter, we acknowledge that the city is finite. This perimeter both halts sprawl, and allows for the city to be conceived as a whole. A growth boundary restores the balance of the city, allowing for the making of place. As architects, advocating for limits on growth can be a frightening prospect. Common wisdom would suggest that to limit growth, would be to limit work, which for an architect could mean a cap on revenue. This thinking is incorrect. Cities remake themselves every fifty years, so while this may mean less big-box work and less green-field development, very few architects would find themselves out of work. I would suggest that those who found themselves in that position would only have karma to blame. Growth boundaries also remove the impetus of the developer to make an overwhelming amount of oversized beige housing. If we advocate for limits on boundary and we are able to achieve these limits, sprawl will cease its relentless march. The growth perimeter could be a continuous ring of metro-parks, which can act as a buffer between the urban and the rural, while providing for recreation for the city.

Second, growth boundaries also acknowledge the interdependence of a region, politically, economically, and physically. We should advocate for the creation of a metropolitan government, which oversees matters of transportation, and growth, as well as sewers, water, and utilities, but which leaves essentially local matters in the hands of locals. The benefits to the architectural profession would be immediate, only one building department to deal with, only one set of regulations. This is an architects dream.

Americans have always been skeptical of government, and for that matter of cities, but from its inception, the government has shaped the nature of growth in our nation. Only in the last fifty years, have we given over the realm of the government to private corporations, which do not serve the broad public interest. This is contrary to our principals of democracy, and like Celebration, Florida, should be viewed with skepticism. In the words of Franklin D. Roosevelt:

"The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism-ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power."

FDR's statement reveals much about the relationship of the government and its responsibilities to its citizens. Government should not eschew its responsibility to the public to the point where it no longer acts as a stalwart against individual control. A metropolitan government restores the political component of a city and would prevent individual developers from playing small suburbs off against one another. No longer are the participants of PUD's CID's and suburbs allowed, to "opt out" of the political discourse. Because the suburban dweller is engaged with the region politically (assuming they use the roads, water or, sewers), they should have a stake in the metropolitan government. As architects who are dependant on growth, and redevelopment, we should encourage regional government to set up the framework that regulates, not the form of a city, but how a city forms itself.

Finally, transportation is the primary force that shapes the metropolitan region, and our decision to build interstate freeways within our metropolitan areas has been particularly destructive. If we really want to recreate the small town and early twentieth century suburb… if we want to make place unique… if we want to increase the density of the city, we must be prepared to stop building freeways, and perhaps to remove some of those that we have built. The early suburbs were walkable (as the New Urbanists are apt to point out), because they were streetcar suburbs. Mixed uses existed because pedestrian foot traffic was sufficient to support commerce via the daily commute. Things were within a five minute walk, because that is what was necessary as a result of the form of the transportation. If we want these attributes in our neighborhoods we must be willing to advocate for mass transit, and as architects to plan our developments with mass transit in mind. Cities exist as a complex overlapping web of social interaction, so transit should not be viewed in a linear fashion, going from point "A" to point "B". As architects, we should be flexible enough to realize that in the modern city, transportation does not necessarily mean going from downtown to the suburbs, but frequently from suburb to suburb, from neighborhood to neighborhood. The form that the new city must take is far more complex and tangled, if we wish to repair the newly established edges of our metropolitan city.

Mass transportation should not eliminate the automobile, but it should make it less convenient to use. We as architects can play a vital role. Strive to eliminate parking in urban environments, and curtail it in areas that are available to mass transportation. Think of all the land that would open to development, if only we could eliminate the vast sea of parking. It should be the goal of architects to eliminate the necessity of automobile use, for every trip, every time.

Therefore, architects should act as advocates for change, while understanding that urban form does not spring into being, but is the result of the interaction of transit, politics, and economics. Architects should get involved with local government, to educate the public about development patterns and consequences. Architects should plan for systems that rely less on automobiles and freeways and encourage our clients to consider alternate development patterns. Architects should lobby, for limits to metropolitan growth, and the creation of a government to oversee the development of the region.

A REGIONAL APPROACH TO PLACE

Addressing good neighborhood design involves not looking specifically at the sub-division, but rather at the subdivision as it relates to the city as a whole, politically, socially, economically. It involves examining the relationships between the neighborhood, the city and the larger metropolitan area. It involves an understanding that the decisions we choose to make, have far reaching consequences past what we originally may have intended. The forces that shape our cities, our suburbs and our regions are far beyond, the direct control of architects. It has been arrogant for us to assume that our own visions are able to shape the form of the city. It has been near sited of us to focus on anything smaller than the city as a whole. We can however, still impart positive change by advocating for smart policies of planning. For limits to urban growth. For cities, not private individuals to set the formwork for the built environment, and for a regional cooperation, and a regional approach to placemaking.