The Forces Reshaping America's Cities
Architectural Record, March 2000
Schaumburg, Ill., a freeway-entwined landscape at the far northwestern edge of the Chicago metropolitan area, is a modern-day seat of suburban plenty, where people speak of enormous choice, where home businesses proliferate in McMansions that spread like crabgrass across the prairie. Among the upscale malls pop low-rise towers sporting the names of the region's high-tech employers: Motorola, Lucent Technologies, 3Com. Here marks ground zero of the sprawl debate as it is usually portrayed. The freeways have clotted, the meadows and forests have vanished, and lines of sport utility vehicles pouring into the Costco lot have replaced the storefront-lined Main Street.
The Village of Park Forest, 30 miles South of Chicago's loop, tells a different kind of suburban story. The tidy bungalows and split-levels have changed surprisingly little in the 45 years since William H. Whyte dissected the town's culture of aggressive conformism in the seminal 1956 sociological study, The Organization Man. Behind the neatly trimmed lawns today, however, trouble brews. Population and household income have slid; single-income, single parents head more families. The once nearly all-white suburb now trumpets its ethnic diversity, but racial tension, gang activity, and other social ills have appeared. Park Forest's most obvious sign of decline is its nearly empty shopping center. Once a style-setting composition of low-slung wedges and covered walkways snuggled around an intimate, grassy court [May 1951, page 93], it was all but abandoned in the mid-1980s. Three remodelings have failed. Recently, village manager Janet Muchnik has tried to jump-start the nearly empty center along neotraditional lines by pushing streets through its once pedestrians-only precinct and adding new brick sidewalks and old-fashioned lamps. A year ago, she gamely pointed out a new pizza restaurant, hair salon, and movie theater -- the blips of life interrupting the flatline of vacant storefronts.
Park Forest is ''flat on its back and won't come back under today's circumstances,'' says Myron Orfield, a Minnesota state representative and executive director of the Metropolitan Area Research Corporation, Minneapolis. Although it is far from the worst case in the Chicago area, Park Forest is a loser in a Darwinian struggle that is fast developing in suburban America, says Orfield. He is just one of many observers who think the kind of decline and disinvestment that has long plagued older cities is moving into the inner-ring suburbs built in the two decades after World War II.
In policy-making circles there is less debate about whether people are abandoning the homes and businesses in older suburbs than there is about how serious the trend is. Though this is a potentially explosive urban issue, it is just one of several trends affecting American cities, any of which could have profound social and land-use consequences. William Fulton, editor of the California Planning & Development Report, sees a fundamental unraveling of the whole system that made the rapid, relatively inexpensive growth of the postwar era possible. And he finds nothing replacing that system. Sprawl has gotten the headlines, but ''it is only one of the issues we're dealing with,'' says Michael Gallis, a Charlotte, N.C.-based architect whose firm uses strategic planning and design to help urban areas position themselves in the emerging global economic framework. He fears that the nation's failure to halt central-city decline and its ignorance of fast-changing globalization will have serious competitive consequences.
Whether or not these prognosticators have properly diagnosed America's urban ills, American cities do seem to be sailing into uncharted waters. Do architects have a place in defining, if not designing, whatever cities become? ''No one thinks architects have anything to say about shaping regions and metro areas because we have defined what we do in such a narrow range,'' asserts Gallis. ''At best, we decorate the city with fascinating and interesting objects. At bottom, we are service providers, warehousing people.''
Gallis is one of a small but growing number of architects unafraid to get their hands dirty tinkering with the mechanisms that drive what sociologist Harvey Molotch has dubbed the urban ''growth machine.'' And Gallis thinks the profession's future depends on architects' understanding emerging urban issues and engaging themselves more deeply in making the urban environment.
Parasitic suburbs?
If Orfield's research is correct, the most immediate crisis affecting urban America is the abandonment of the older suburbs. This trend could lead to an enormous growth of poor, blighted communities. While largely poor census tracts within Chicago number in the dozens, Orfield counts 87 troubled suburbs surrounding the city's western and southern edges, stretching in a mind-boggling 65-mile crescent from just south of O'Hare airport through Park Forest into the northeast corner of Indiana (map,page 77). Few have the boarded-up buildings and weed-infested lots long associated with big-city ghettos, but in terms of household poverty, percentage of children that eat government-provided free school lunches (a harbinger of poverty), the trends in these communities are alarming.
Schaumburg, however, sits in what has been dubbed Chicago's ''favored quarter'' of newer, outer-ring suburbs. It is an emblematic ''edge city,'' of the kind made famous by the 1991 book of the same name by Joel Garreau (Doubleday). Even Garreau, who considered edge cities a pioneering urban form, recognized their opportunistic quality. They sprouted near already wealthy areas with few tax burdens and took advantage of highway and airport infrastructure paid for by older communities. Edge cities perniciously wield their wealth to secure the lion's share of business-attracting infrastructure, says Orfield, thereby generating enormous job growth at the expense of older downtowns and, nowadays, older suburbs. He frames his arguments in the influential book Metropolitics (Brookings Institution, 1996). Sears, for example, moved its headquarters from its famous Loop tower to favored-sector Hoffman Estates about 10 years ago.
Older communities have few tools with which to resist the ''pull'' exerted by edge cities, says Orfield. As a result, a vast, land-eating and stunningly inefficient shift of urban settlement outward, is leaving in its wake a trail of urban devastation. (Schools are shuttered in older communities while growing areas struggle to raise money to build new ones, for example.) Worse, he says, such concentrations of wealth and poverty impede overall metro-area growth. To the extent Orfield is correct, political polarization will follow spatial polarization as wealthy ''have'' communities battle poorer ''have nots.'' Orfield sees significant political realignment as struggling suburbs make common cause with older cities.
The fragile underpinnings of growth
Not surprisingly, the leaders of the stable, affluent suburbs reject the accusation that they are parasites on the body of older communities. Even here, challenges abound. Land is being turned to urban uses at a much higher rate than population growth, as is the mileage people drive. Because the ''privileged sector'' is seeing a very high percentage of this growth, the green spaces that define their laid-back, bridle-trailed ambiance are disappearing, replaced by road-rage inducing traffic congestion. While the Los Angeles area's population grew 45 percent from 1970 to 1990, for example, its land area ballooned 300 percent. The population of Cleveland declined 11 percent, while land consumed grew 33 percent. Similarly, the annual miles people drive have increased three times as fast as population growth in the largest metro areas. So it is little wonder that the wealthiest communities -- those that have derived the greatest economic benefits from urban growth -- have joined the antisprawl movement to slow traffic growth and land consumption.
But the benefits wealthy suburbs enjoy may be threatened. Antisprawl activism is one aspect of the collapse of a consensus that has long fueled growth, says William Fulton, in his book, The Reluctant Metropolis (Solano Books, 1997). American urban growth has relied on the idea that ''current property owners and residents paid higher taxes to support the debt-financed construction of new facilities (roads, water pipes, parks, etc.) to be used by newcomers who would then help finance the next phase, and so on.'' (He calls this an urban-growth ''Ponzi scheme.'') Californians passed a tax measure that shields existing residents from dramatic tax rises, so housing developers ''now must pay for all the community infrastructure, which can be $ 30,000 to $ 40,000 a unit,'' Fulton explains. Because residents fear that new development will damage their quality of life, developments must also run a costly and complex environmental and community-approvals gamut.
The result, far from reducing sprawl, can exacerbate it. Such burdens ''drive growth down the path of least resistance, which is further and further away. By the time you find a town that will accept the growth, you are halfway to Las Vegas,'' Fulton adds. Another unanticipated consequence, is the exacerbation of sociological spatial separation. ''You have to supplement property taxes, especially with retail,'' Fulton explains. ''For retail to succeed, you have to have an affluent community nearby. This has created a scale of class and income segregation in California today that is unprecedented.''
Consider Silicon Valley, the 40-mile corridor of office parks and executive housing south of San Francisco [see ''Correspondent's File,'' February 2000, page 45]. Computer and software businesses have created an economic juggernaut of unprecedented size in this emblematic low-density landscape. There is widespread fear that congestion, astronomical house prices, and environmental decline are killing the goose that laid the golden egg. ''Much of the manufacturing and the low-paying jobs are moving out of the valley,'' observes Erik Sueberkrop, a partner at Studios Architecture, a firm with many computer-industry clients. ''It is still ground zero for high-tech companies here, but in a lot of ways it no longer makes sense.'' An ethos of cheap, garage-based creativity is reeling in the face of median house prices pushing half a million dollars. The 140-member Silicon Valley Manufacturers' Group, which is said to account for one-third of private-sector jobs in the Valley, shares Sueberkrop's assessment. The group promotes initiatives for more transit and affordable housing and advocates policies to drive growth into needy, older communities.
Emerging building types for the changing city
For those who don't want to engage the fractious political issues urban change portends, there is likely to be more work for architects as cities compete more aggressively to succeed in the rapidly changing economic landscape. Urban change is already altering traditional building types. Where once Portland, Ore., was almost entirely a city of one-family houses, designers now have to come up with new higher-density strategies to conform to the city's strict growth boundaries. Sierra Designs, for example, builds new, higher density, mixed-use projects in the growth-boundary-encircled city.
Cities also find themselves competing by using ''trophy'' urban projects, many of them with a high design profile. Appealing to relocators in a skills-short economy is a key reason cities all over the country are building museums, sports stadiums, aquariums, zoos, and performing-arts complexes [''Building Types Study 773,'' May 1999, page 223]. ''Most suburbs will be worse off than central cities because they don't have the universities, the downtown commercial core, the museums, and the cultural and recreational facilities to build on,'' says Orfield.
Infrastructure is also becoming a higher priority. Gallis charts a vast global realignment of trade routes that is occurring as huge new populations are brought into the world marketplace in the wake of collapsing Communism [map opposite]. According to Gallis, trade is moving at new speed to a new scale, one that is gigantic without precedent. ''To sustain the global economy, you have to continuously move people and goods as well as information around the world,'' he says. ''Metropolitan areas [cities and suburbs together] are where the population concentrates and where production and consumption take place. They are the hubs in the network, which is why metro regions are more important than ever before.'' This new world order may call for new kinds of multimodal facilities, such as the air, sea, rail, road, utilities, and communications ''Multi-Port'' he has proposed for Charlotte.
European cities have gone on an infrastructure spending spree, upgrading airports, rail, road, and transit systems. The costs of new and upgraded facilities are now too large and costly for a single city to finance, Gallis says. His research concludes that large, established ports have the advantage, but it is one they could lose to smaller, smarter, and more agile players. If the three states and dozens of cities within the New York metro area can't find a way to cooperate to reduce congestion in the harbor, airport, rail, and highway infrastructures, Gallis found in a recent study, the region could lose out to other Eastern Seaboard cities.
Confronting the barriers to innovation
A larger role for architects in building skyline-defining projects is by no means guaranteed. Architecture is still too often an afterthought when businesses, institutions, and governments make decisions that profoundly affect the future. Those architects who have carved out a larger role in defining what cities can be have done it by directly confronting the barriers to architects' participation.
''There was an early moment in our South Florida work when we began to see how many other influences outside the client and the designer were constraining what we could do,'' explains Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, faia, dean of the architecture school at the University of Miami, Coral Gables, and partner in Duany Plater-Zyberk. ''The first rude awakening was zoning codes. We had not previously understood the degree to which they were preventing what we thought was appropriate.'' The firm, and other New Urbanists, have developed new codes of their own, which have influenced development nationwide.
New Urbanists have also attacked road-design standards, such as mandated widths and turning radii that they contend encourage excessive speed and impede the making of more walkable, socially cohesive communities. ''We thought we had seen everything,'' says Plater-Zyberk. ''But in one community the turning radius had been determined by the size of the fire trucks, which were very large. We found that these trucks were used because they carried the number of firefighters negotiated by the union.''
Architects must confront rigid real estate industry lending standards if they want to build innovative, less sprawl-inducing projects, says Christopher B. Leinberger, managing director of Robert Charles Lesser & Co., Albuquerque. A longtime real-estate analyst and relocation advisor, Leinberger describes a taxonomy of 19 readily financed ''products.'' Many of which are simplistic, congestion-inducing types like strip malls and the big-box retail outlets that are increasingly rejected by communities. But real-estate lenders regard these types as low-risk. Newer typologies such as apartments over stores are not understood by the industry and are virtually shut out of the conventional lending market, which greatly raises project costs. ''To do New Urbanist projects, urban infill, or ecologically innovative projects demands a high level of architecture and quality,'' explains Leinberger. But because banks see only higher risk, ''you can only afford the financing if you decrease quality. It's a Catch-22 situation.'' Robert Shaw, a developer of infill housing in Dallas, ticked off lender objections to what he does: ''They say the land costs are too high. They don't like city lots because they don't meet HUD standards. They want you to gate your development, which is bad planning. If you gate, the public sector -- which these projects need -- won't participate.''
How can such daunting barriers to change be overcome? ''You have to identify them, find out their ultimate source,'' says Plater-Zyberk. ''There might be a local or a national standard. Then address whatever put it in place.'' Leinberger travels the country, speaking to pension funds and other real-estate development underwriters. He hopes to persuade them that their long-term income goals can be aligned to high-initial-quality projects that pay back over a longer time horizon than the five-year span now commonly recognized in the financial community.
Get involved in the political process, say architect-politicians Harvey Gantt, faia, former mayor of Charlotte, and Richard Swett, faia, once a U.S. Representative, now ambassador to Denmark. Indeed, those who have tackled the mechanisms that drive patterns of urban growth note the near total absence of architects at political, civic, and institutional forums for change.
Who designs the future?
Planners, developers, and politicians argue that there is no place for architects in the broader urban growth and development debates. With sociology, technology, economics, and demographics so strongly driving urban change these days, is there a place for architects beyond the hope of appropriately packaging emerging or altered building types? ''The purpose of architecture is the housing of humans and the activities they perform,'' says Gallis. ''Large-scale urbanization has had a hard time delivering environmental sustainability and quality of life, so we fear it. Cities are physical artifacts and they can be managed and designed.''
For 15 years, Gallis' firm has been helping clients see the physical connections and implications of changes in cities. One of his strengths as an architect, he says, is to use visualization tools to help clients understand how their cities are growing and what the key issues are. Trained neither as a planner nor strategist, Gallis simply stoked his passion by educating himself, and turning his design skills to rendering urban futures as they are and could be.
For architects willing to dig deeper into the powerful forces affecting urban growth, the challenges are likely to be profound -- but the result could be a much more important role for architects in the making of cities.
Consider the effects, for example, of wide-bandwidth electronic communications technology. It appears to be exerting a strong decentralizing force. The city is ''flatlining,'' MIT architecture school dean William Mitchell writes in his new book, e-topia: Urban Life Jim, But Not As We Know It (MIT Press, 1999). ''Traditional urban patterns cannot coexist with cyberspace.'' Indeed, cybercommuters work from Vermont villages and Colorado mountain resorts. Satellites have turned the software parks of Bangalore, India, into a low-cost electronic suburb of Santa Clara. Some electronic forums -- cybershopping, for example -- may displace bricks-and-mortar retail stores. Mitchell, however, argues that architects can help define appealing new, nonvirtual places.
But there is another, apparently contradictory trend emerging. As metropolitan areas fling their borders ever farther outward, they are simultaneously becoming more dense. Traffic congestion is everywhere cited as spurring a new interest in living downtown. ''Historically, consumers have been willing to drive for value,'' Greg T. Logan, of the real estate analysis firm Robert Charles Lessor & Co., told an Urban Land Institute conference in Chicago last spring. ''They have been willing to trade lower housing costs for higher transportation costs.'' But with Americans working longer hours and with gut-wrenching traffic jams becoming a fact of life from Atlanta to Seattle, a significant percentage of the market will pay more for housing, says Logan. In-town residences must offer convenient access to ''a major employment node,'' good quality schools, and proximity to desirable retail and services.
Thousands have moved into the once resident-free downtowns of Denver and Dallas. Loft conversions are proceeding at a torrid pace near Chicago's Loop, and housing prices have skyrocketed in Manhattan, Los Angeles' West Side, and both Boston and Cambridge, in Massachusetts -- areas rich in jobs and amenities. Because housing is so tight in Silicon Valley, younger high-tech staffers are moving into San Francisco, 40 miles north, where housing seems inexpensive only compared to the Valley. The city also appeals, however, for its diverse social and recreational opportunities. Sueberkrop, of Studios, says his firm is designing a new downtown complex for companies that want to attract these young workers.
Geometric growth in computing power allows organizations to assemble teams of specialized expertise of unprecedented complexity to attempt projects of heretofore unthinkable size. And sometimes new kinds of places must be created for these kinds of interaction. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, for example, is helping the New York Stock Exchange figure out what form the trading floor of the future should take [''SOM Takes Manhattan,'' page 68].
It is the depth of the highly trained workforce that keeps Silicon Valley a magnet in spite of its high costs and congestion, says Sueberkrop. The presence of a wide variety of specialized businesses and a large, highly trained workforce are also the engines powering commercial revival in many of America's downtowns. Manhattan's burgeoning Silicon Alley draws on New York's concentration of media, advertising, art, and entertainment leaders for both expertise and clients.
Envisioning the emerging city
An architect can help people understand that abstract concepts have real implications on the ground. Gallis, for example, maps urban areas not in terms of how people traditionally think about them, but in terms of the forces that have created them and will affect them in the future. While people tend to associate themselves with the town in which they live, for example, Gallis' maps play down political jurisdictions. That's because people increasingly move across municipal and county lines for work or leisure. Gallis maps metro areas -- the conurbation of cities and suburbs together that are today's real ''cities'' [page 78]. People may say they dislike large, crowded metro areas, but these are exactly the places people more often choose to live. Though the largest cities are not growing quickly, more people live in the most populous metro areas than ever before. Nor is the trend abating, primarily because large metro areas offer the greatest choice for careers, places to live, and recreation.
In this state of urban flux, Gallis says, a key role for architects is to help people recognize that cities are not planners' abstractions or formless blobs, but follow relationship patterns that can be traced, understood, and analyzed for their implications. So Gallis maps cities as webs of relationships that rely on infrastructure. He even maps the satellite nets that power urban communications networks.
Metropolitics for metrocities
One of the reasons so many analysts look at metro areas rather than individual cities is that a consensus is growing that traditional political boundaries are impediments to growth and stability. Suburbs and cities too often compete wastefully with each other, critics say, inducing sprawl by subsidizing the location of new business on greenfield sites through tax abatements and below-cost infrastructure extensions. One of the reasons suburban congestion is so bad, says Orfield, is that favored-sector communities, which usually have many more jobs than residents, use restrictive zoning (mandating large lots, prohibiting apartments) to keep out lower-income workers (whose taxes may not cover the cost of services). These workers then clog highways because they must drive as much as 30 to 60 miles to reach their jobs.
Policymakers today debate ways to induce jurisdictions within metro areas to work together cooperatively. In his 1993 book, Cities Without Suburbs (Woodrow Wilson Center Press), David Rusk argued that ''elastic'' cities -- cities that could annex their suburbs or were otherwise able to act in concert with them -- were more successful than ''inelastic'' ones, which he defined as those cities trapped within a hostile ring of suburbs. Elastic cities have less racial polarization and smaller income disparities and such metro areas also grew faster, asserted Rusk, a former mayor of elastic Albuquerque.
Antisprawl activists see metrowide planning agencies (such as Portland, Ore.'s elected metropolitan council) as better able to coordinate such sprawl-inducing activities as restrictive zoning, sewer extensions, and highway expansions. Such environment-enhancing activities as setting aside greenbelts and preserving sensitive ecological areas are best handled at the metro level, say environmentalists. Orfield says solutions to urban polarization can only be implemented on a metro level. He advocates tax-base sharing to give poorer communities a better chance to compete, and he wants to see privileged-sector barriers to affordable housing removed.
All these factors may portend a realignment of important government functions. Although numerous government entities exist that operate the utilities or coordinate highway planning within jurisdictions that unite cities and suburbs, few have broad planning powers or the dollars to back them up as such agencies often have in Europe and Asia. Planning across metropolitan areas could encourage higher density commercial and public development tied closely to transit and highway corridors. The benefits of a more European-style approach says Pietro Nivola in Laws of the Landscape: How Politics Shape Cities in Europe and America (Brookings Institution, 1999) are far fewer highway miles per person, far lower rates of land consumption, far more efficient use of transit, and a much higher percentage of trips taken by bicycle and on foot.
These successes would also seem to vindicate the much greater role architects play in the planning of cities, especially in Europe. Consider the Netherlands, which has long conferred enormous powers on planners and architects. The central government defines how much urban growth can occur, in which cities it can occur, and what land may be consumed. Local governments devise master plans -- often made by architects -- that further determine where commercial, institutional, and residential uses may go. Specific tracts are then master-planned to a more detailed level, then a developer may be chosen by the local government in another competition. At no stage is the owner's ultimate profit or preferred use judged more important than citywide planning and design criteria. In short, Holland is a country largely shaped by the vision of architects.
But Dutch people historically have shared far different values than Americans. They have trusted their future to planning agencies because they regard the good of the community to be more important than the aggrandizement of the individual (though there is now growing controversy about the degree to which design should come from above).
While the AIA and the Urban Land Institute (the chief think tank of the real estate industry) have signed on to many antisprawl ''smart growth'' initiatives, libertarian advocates are taking aim at the antisprawl agenda (the Dutch mode would be unthinkable). They urge recognition that American patterns of development, for better or worse, simply represent the collective decisions of landowners, writ large by developers as agents. Altering this system, they say, especially in pursuit of architects' taste in urban development, tampers with very deep-seated American values.
Writer Gregg Easterbrook took up arms in the ''pro sprawl'' cause last year in the form of an article in The New Republic titled ''Suburban Myth: The Case for Sprawl,'' which largely echoes the libertarian Reason Public Policy Institute's policy report, ''The Sprawling Of America: In Defense of the Dynamic City'' (www.rppi.org). Both contend that sprawl is not a significant problem, and that low-density settlement patterns reflect consumer desires, which should be respected. While analysts like Orfield argue that suburban subsidies ''pull'' residents out of older cities, Reason and its allies argue that a substantial ''push'' comes in the form of higher taxes, higher crime, and poor schools found in older communities. It says that higher densities concentrate pollution and that infill development can be as environmentally damaging as leapfrog development.
Nivola notes some other crucial distinctions. Both the low-density American patterns of urban growth and the high-density European ones are undergirded by tax and other government policies. America subsidizes drivers and subsidizes the purchase of large homes on big lots. Our tax system penalizes savers and urges consumption. European housing subsidies are often tilted to lower-income renters in government-sponsored housing estates. All forms of consumption are taxed heavily, so that the purchase of a large house or luxury car is an expensive purchase indeed. Gasoline is also three to four times more expensive outside the U.S. and Canada, primarily reflecting added taxes. Noting that sales tax on autos is nine times higher in Holland than in the U.S. and 37 times higher in Denmark, Nivola says it should not be surprising that streets in Amsterdam or Copenhagen swarm with bicycles while hulking SUVs crowd American roads.
Likewise, Nivola thinks many of the measures promoted by antisprawl advocates won't work unless government policies are radically changed. But he does not think Americans would willingly adopt the European anticonsumption bias. This may be the most important lesson of all. Countless American urban renewal schemes failed in the face of taxation and other policies that powerfully drove investment in another direction.
No one can be blamed for regarding the urban future as too abstract, too policy-driven–just too overwhelmingly complex. But just as architects' forays into planning have often proved simplistic, the mechanisms of urban growth today operate with no overall goals and often at cross purposes.
And yet, the stakes are high in places like Park Forest. The shopping center is doing better, said Village manager Muchnik in a recent interview. But progress is hard won, she says, even in a robust economy. She can't offer the generous tax abatements the western suburbs can, nor the infrastructure, cultural, and recreational opportunities their commercial tax base can underwrite. ''For us to support vital government services, taxes are higher, which prevents business from coming here,'' she explains. ''It becomes a vicious cycle.'' She does not expect change soon, but ''eventually people have to wake up and recognize that it is really in the best interests of the whole region to work together cooperatively.'' The Village, founded as an idealistic vision of emerging suburbia, is not willingly submitting to time's harsh hand.