When Suburbs Become Megaburbs

Architectural Record, August 2003

By the early 1970s, the collective population of suburbs equaled that of cities -- a triumph of the suburban ideal it would seem. Wrong, wrote Robert Fishman in his influential book Bourgeois Utopias. That’s the very decade when the suburban era ended. Fishman, a prominent historian of suburbanization, had not suffered an outburst of academic petulance. He had only recognized that the American suburb had made itself into something quite different from what it had promised to be over the preceding 200 years.

The idea of the suburbs, in Fishman’s formulation, meant a place that depended on the central city - as did the commuter - filled bedroom communities in the 1950s and the railroad and streetcar suburbs that preceded them as far back as the 1880s. The suburb had historically acted as a residential refuge from the city, which was the dynamic factory of capitalism, perpetually tearing itself down and building itself up to respond to the market’s incessant demand and ever-changing whim. “Pure and unfettered and bathed by sunlight and fresh air,” wrote historian Kenneth T. Jackson, these commuter retreats “offered the exciting prospect that disorder, prostitution, and mayhem could be kept at a distance, far away in the festering metropolis.”

In the 1970s, however, American suburbia began to transform itself into a diverse and economically independent urban entity-a city, yes, but one that only looked suburban. “We lack a convenient name for this new city,” Fishman wrote in his book, published in 1987 -- a problem we still have.

Americans have not fully come to terms with the dissonance between the historical suburban dream and what is emerging as a megasuburban reality. But it can hit you -- if you consider it -- as soon as you pull out of your driveway. Even the leafiest and most tranquil of cul de sacs today tends to be girdled by eight-lane arterials. And they lead to the net of beltways and cross-town expressways. As the congealed traffic of a five-lane side of the freeway, broad as a jet-plane runway, lurches round a curve, and a group of identically anonymous mirror-glass towers shimmers through the windshield haze, you may well ask yourself what happened to the uncomplicated life promised by the American Dream suburb?

The arrival of urban-style employment opportunities transformed the discreet bedroom communities into vast, contiguous lowrise urban landscapes, flowing over villages and counties. The place names and political boundaries that once defined the small-scale, residential redoubts of the suburban era may remain, but, tied together by freeways and highway strips, they are now components in an economically integrated, wealth producing and consuming machine. Call it a megaburb.

It’s not a pretty term; it is not meant to be catchy, but to accurately reflect a perceptual divide. Megaburbia is what happens when three-quarters of a 282-million-person nation live in what we are used to calling suburbs. Many are places that have grown a hundred- or a thousand-fold over the last 30 years. They are the places that have nurtured high technology, research, and advanced manufacturing. Now the beltway ‘burbs and centerless lowrise cities overshadow the central cities in both population and economic activity. Silicon Valley, in California, the pharmaceutical belt in northern New Jersey, and the bistate suburbs of Washington have built economies comparable to entire nations.

Aside from schools and libraries, suburbia has not placed much stock in the skills architects offer. But architects can help communities reconcile the innate urbanity attending to diverse and expanding economic opportunity with the order and amenity that have always been at the root of the suburban dream. It won’t be easy. Conflicting but deeply held values underly the issues that endlessly rend communities -- like land use, traffic and open space.

Inescapable bigness
As sociologist Robert Parks saw it, “The city is a state of mind.” Megaburbia is an economic and physical fact, but it is not a state of mind, which is why it’s easy to think of it as something it’s not. Most megaburban residents live in a smallish town or city politically, and believe in small-scale governmental and social institutions that are close to the people they serve. But nowadays people think nothing of the dozens of towns, school districts, utility-service areas, counties -- even a state line or two-they cross to run errands or make a journey to work. And yet the decisions made in all those political jurisdictions are what cause megaburbia to so unpleasantly intrude in the form of traffic, large-scale development, and runoff-clogged streams.

The quintessential emblem of megaburbia is the commercial edge cities that Joel Garreau tried to make sense of in his book of the same name (Doubleday, 1991). They’re the wellsprings of megaburban wealth, but the suburban mindset has not come to terms with the steadily growing scale of American business and its invasion of the garden-city arcadia by the 20-story tower erected astride a parking garage housing 1,500 cars that one finds at Perimeter Center, Atlanta, or hugging I-5 at Costa Mesa. Those vehicles don’t slip down spacious country byways, but pour onto massive arterials. A modest-sized edge city ejects 100,000 autos into the feeder highway system, requiring no less than a 10-lane freeway-more often two or three.

The endless edge
While the edge cities lie along the beltways, the hottest growth in megaburbia, its new edge, is often 15 to 30 miles farther out in what Robert Lang, director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Polytechnic University, calls Edgeless Cities. (He’s written Edgeless Cities: Exploring the Elusive Metropolis, Brookings, 2003). As the name implies, there’s no edge, but there’s also little sense of city. While edge cities sprawl over thousands of acres, edgeless cities consume dozens of square miles. “Individual components of Edgeless City often may have an identity (the ‘so-and-so office park’),” writes Lang, in a recent report for the Brookings Institution, “but collectively these places seldom strike an observer as unified in any meaningful way.” Amid the remaining forests and farms, the large-lot houses and residential ranchettes, the odd subdivison (familiar to more suburbanized precincts) along with lowrise strips and big-box discounters aimlessly splotch the landscape.

Edgeless city development, Lang argues, now comprises as much as 60 percent of growth in some metro areas, far outpacing that of edge cities, and is implicated in the giant leaps in land consumption that have been documented in fast-growing and slow-growing metro areas alike. It is what makes modern American suburbia even more ambiguous and apparently uncontrollable than it has ever seemed.

Orlando, for example has built a megaburban freeway net that stretches well beyond built-up areas in an elongated 30-mile-diameter loop, but the hottest growth zones range much farther out, in what Bruce McClendon, until recently the chief planner of Orange County (which includes Orlando) calls “extreme suburbia.” He adds, “It feels rural now, and you don’t mind driving 25 miles to the Publix.” But to him, this phase is inevitably temporary; urban-style density will inevitably arrive. “They’ve set themselves up for unending battles,” he concludes. These edgeless developments also dump 100,000 unexpected commuters into the employment centers in Orange County, which McClendon expects to at least double by 2010.

The sprawl imperative
The edgeless city phenomenon makes clear that what academics might call “The megaburban project” -- meaning the entire process by which it is created -- must sprawl, which puts it on a collision course with the quality of life that has for so long animated the suburban dream. The fast-growing megaburbs like Charlotte, Houston and Dallas build highways (or promise to build them) as far out as possible, opening as much land to development as possible. This assures a surplus of buildable area (and buyer choice) which keeps real-estate costs from skyrocketing. As in Orlando, unfortunately, the edgeless-city newcomers add to the traffic woes in the employment centers of the maturing inner suburbs.

Opening huge territories to development also involves lots of jurisdictions and they tend to compete for growth -- especially commercial growth, because business picks up much of the tab for government services. Businesses benefit from inducements offered by officials: we’ll reduce your taxes; we’ll build the road you want; we’ll acquire the site you want -- the list of goodies is lengthy. This kind of competition is what keeps fuelling the megaburban growth engine.

Should architects take sides?
As suburbanites in mature communities -- or should we call them megaburbanites -- find the tranquility they sought upended by the dynamic, disorder-inducing forces of urban capitalism (in the form of the new corporate campus or megamall planned for the farm fields next door), they have organized an impressive array of means to fight the very kind of wealth-creating growth they have benefited from. Architects often get caught up in these battles. In a given town, some may side with neighbors rallying to stop the newest development. But others have fumed as the latest antisprawl regime stalls a key project. Still others stand passively by; the issues and solutions look political not architectural. But sometimes the political is the architectural. First, consider that most of the pitched battles in modern suburbia concern quality of life: the zoning debates, the loss of open space, farmland preservation, design-review dramas, traffic and transit. Architects, and other design professionals, should have something to say about that.

Growth control: resist it or design it?
There’s no clear road map, but considering big-ticket conflicts through a megaburban lense may offer a means to find answers. The business-as-usual process of suburban growth sparks major conflicts in places where quality of life is intrinsic to urban identity. To avoid “becoming LA,” Portland, Ore., and its suburbs (most prominently among several major cities) have drawn a line and declared that everything inside can be urban while the area outside it must remain rural. The urban-growth boundary has done exactly what advocates have said it would -- preserving close-in open space while driving density and transit use up.

This does not mean it has lacked controversy. It trumps individual property rights, cry libertarians -- a potent argument in the independent-minded, live-and-let-live West. Oregon has committed itself unequivocally to the notion that the people, not individual landowners, will determine what becomes urban. It has declared war on the traditional deference to landowner choice (the idea that everyone’s entitled to build pretty much what they want anywhere) that has turned suburbia into megaburbia.

The growth boundary also drives up housing costs, assert free-market critics like the Reason Public Policy Institute “by artificially restricting the land supply.” But the supply of housing could still outstrip demand (key to keeping it cheap) if developers find ways to build at higher densities economically. And architect Gary Reddick, of Sienna Designs, for one, has come to the rescue. He has persuaded owners to make better use of supermarket parking lots by erecting housing over it (Record, December 2000, page 148). Architects in costly cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles and Boston have built innovative, high-density developments (many for the “affordable” market) that offer exportable models to suburbs growing denser (see Record, October 2002, page 227 and Feburary 2002, page 149). Similarly, if the reduced costs of supplying infrastructure to infill development are passed onto taxpayers in the form of lower taxes or better services, there will not be a “price” to be paid for reducing the supply of developable open land.

Breaking edge city gridlock
For most people, the chief suburban evil is traffic, which ever-worsens. Everyone -- experts and the traffic-weary commuter alike -- knows that megaburbia cannot build traffic lanes fast enough to accommodate travel growth. (Nor is there enough money.) Among urban analysts, there has long been little disagreement about the solution: If land-use decisions cannot be coordinated with transportation planning, there will never be a solution.

Why has so little changed? Orlando’s Orange County attempted to focus growth within fiscally and environmentally responsible “urban-service boundaries” (a less comprehensive and therefore less politically volatile solution than Portland’s). The developers moved out to the next county, which welcomed growth. One local official summed up surrounding towns’ responses to Orlando’s attempts to slow scattered development: “The big dog is not going to tell us what to do.” New Urbanist architects have been in the forefront of the movement to remake the suburban ideal around transit-oriented nodes of development. But no effort in the states compares to Vancouver’s vigorous coordination of development, which has spurred high use of its Skytrain public transit system.

Well-meaning architects and planners have failed to convince towns and cities to link transportation and development as long as anything-goes jurisdictions farther out are prepared to give developers and relocating businesses whatever they want -- they’re hungry for the tax receipts that development will bring. So tax-and-spending equity must inform the architect’s vision.

New Urbanists have worked with often-reluctant developers, with the result that few such communities have convincingly broken the conventional-development mold. The “town center” nearing completion at Avalon Park, outside Orlando is a pale stage-set imitation of one of Duany and Plater-Zyberk’s most ambitious early efforts. Similarly, the second generation of Kentlands, in Maryland, has reverted to the vinyl-sided spec-builder norm. Given the aversion to innovation that prevails in the real-estate industry, it’s still tough to develop new development models that engage suburban fears while lowering land consumption and encouraging greater use of auto alternatives. It would be nice if the national government -- or states, or municipalities -- would underwrite innovative demonstration projects, as is the norm in places like Germany (the International Building Exhibitions in Berlin being the most famous, but only one among many). It will take concerted efforts by architects and allied activists to create these opportunities.

For suburbs to transcend megaburban dilemmas won’t be easy, but the stakes are only getting higher. In an unprecedented way, quality of life is implicated in economic success. Architects are uniquely qualified to unite the too-often-at-odds aspects of the urban and the suburban. It could prove one of the chief challenges of the coming decade.