After Suburbia: A Place to Live in the 21st Century
by James S. Russell
From Orient Point where the storm-swept eastern end of Long Island projects deep into the Atlantic Ocean, a bus begins a 100-mile trip to New York City early every morning. At about 65 miles out, it enters a carpool lane as the strip centers and gas stations start to form a continuous line along the Long Island Expressway. Not long after, the three lanes of traffic that run parallel gradually slow to a crawl. As the bus passes the Suffolk County suburbs of Ronkonkoma, Islip, Melville, and Plainview, the throng in the adjacent lanes still creeps. Once the expressway enters Nassau County, about exit 48, there’s no letup until well into New York City. This is a traffic jam that stretches close to 50 miles. A thumbnail calculation indicates that the bus passes 10,000 vehicles, perhaps 15,000 people, stranded in this mess.
This coronary-inducing jam is not an unusual experience on the Long Island Expressway. It is no longer a rarity to find congestion that stretches dozens of miles across three counties. We accept the bumper-to-bumper slog as an everyday fact of urban life.
Ever-thickening traffic is just one way in which patterns of urban growth and change are transforming our lives. Good jobs, it seems, can only be found in unaffordable communities. Nice places to live are overrun by development and traffic congestion. Communities that are affordable come at the price of limited opportunity, inadequate schools, and nonexistent amenities. These may sound like old laments but in fact it is harder than ever to answer the question where should I live?
Consider why hundreds of thousands of people daily subject themselves to the time-wasting and nerve-jangling ritual of the Long Island Expressway. Most of the people on it would rather be somewhere else, naturally, even though most of them in this morning rush are headed to jobs–jobs that are often satisfying and well-paying. That jammed freeway is in many ways a symbol of success. Still, how many dream of a different way of life?
A lot of people do. Mutant Metropolis: Living in the Emerging American City is for them. It explains the new, little-understood waves of urban transformation that have upended our expectations, quietly–before our eyes–transforming the places we thought we knew into new, little-understood urban life forms–ones that pose increasingly difficult and unanticipated dilemmas. The story of urban America is too often that of people moving–to find opportunity–then moving again and again to find a better life. We exile ourselves from community after community, leaving behind places that are exhausted after a couple of investment cycles, and yet find opportunity and the good life always more difficult to reconcile.
Mutant Metropolis helps readers understand how manageable, small-town-style suburbs have become megasuburban urban realms that stretch, seemingly out of anyone’s control, over county and even state lines, absorbing farmlands and precious wild places in their path. It uncovers the forces that transform the most precious rural places into precisely the kinds of ordinary demi-suburbs many of its residents thought they had escaped. And it reveals why cities are gentrifying into glittering urban boutiques for the wealthiest, driving away their middle class, yet failing the aspirations of the legions of poor they house. The book shows how to come to terms with this fast-unfolding urban future and how to take it in hand. In short, it’s about how to make a place to live in the 21st century.
In more than 18 years as a full-time journalist covering architecture and urban growth, author James S. Russell has harvested stories, consulted dozens of experts, and pieced together trends from throughout the nation and the world. The book will help nonspecialist readers come to terms with an urbanity that has moved beyond conventional categories of urban, suburban and rural into a new reality that is only just beginning to be understood.
In traveling the nation and overseas, James S. Russell has made sense of what is–decoding the profound change that has overtaken urban places amid their apparent sameness. For example, he applies the term “cities” to places most people would regard as suburban or rural, simply because America has become almost wholly an urban nation with people living urban lives and sharing in the urban economy even if they live in apparently wild and untouched places. He’s also considered what could be–introducing a range of emerging ideas about how to think about places -- how to help old cities and new neighborhoods come to terms with a future that demands that we create “community” at a much larger and more intimidating scale than we are used to.
The tired conventional debates–about a vaguely defined “spawl” or an absolutist view of “property rights”–prevent too many genuinely new insights from reaching people bedeviled by communities that no longer act the way they are “supposed” to. With his journalist’s eye, Russell headlines the most compelling trends uncovered by scholars and policy analysts–ideas that too often fail to escape the universities and think tanks in which they have been incubated. And he puts these ideas in jargon-free, concrete terms illustrated by real examples that people concerned about the future can understand.
Though urban experts speak of economic flows and debate the consequences of government policies, Russell is especially attuned to cities as constructions of culture, creations of meaning and intention. People, by choosing to defend, nurture and create community in places they love, for example, have found that they can trump tired policy conventions and received economic wisdom. Because Russell is an architect, he is particularly expert in the growing role creativity and design play in economic growth and urban quality of life.
The book tells the stories of individuals who are forging change: A real-estate developer, who invents a way around the hidebound finance system that fails cities with untapped potential; an architect who, with cheerful flair, packages inexpensive housing for those at the bottom of the economic ladder; an activist who struggles to retain authentic values in a rural economy that’s fast going urban.
In 13 chapters, Mutant Metropolis explains why urban life presents choices so much starker than was true a generation or two ago. In Part I, it considers the cultural attitudes, the values, and the policies that shape the urban realms in which we live.
America’s values and sense of itself are deeply entwined with the land. It has long been the most tangible expression of private property and individualism as well as nurturing the spirit. The nation’s attitude toward land seesaws, however. We may undertake the most elaborate means to preserve treasured landscapes from insensitive development. At the same time (and often in the same locales) we decide that private property rights trump all forms of regulation or community interest. These kinds of conflicts, Mutant Metropolis argues, are expressions of American values in conflict–values that in this volume receive a much more critical examination: How does a nation founded on agrarian individualism live together as modern life entwines us in ever more complex ways? How do we nurture innovation and entrepreneurialism while reconciling the dislocations they cause? How can we lionize the great beauty and wildness of our land while doing less and less to gracefully coexist with it? How can we admire entrepreneurs and make heroes of those who “make it,” while fleeing the results of unfettered capitalism as it undermines the stability and civility we’ve come to expect in our communities?
America has rarely taken an active hand in the shaping of its urban places, therefore they look and feel like the results of the economic, governmental, and social forces that act on them. These forces are the levers that work a vast growth machine: tax policies, regulatory regimes, infrastructure-development policies, real-estate accounting practices, and ingrained habits of commercial developers. We should not be surprised that this accidental culture of growth doesn’t work very well. We often call the results sprawl, but the unanticipated consequences of these growth forces are felt everywhere and highly unevenly, tending to bless new and well-heeled communities at the expense of older, and less affluent ones. Without considering how to make the growth machine nurture the kinds of communities we seek, no economic-development strategy nor government program can save urban basket cases and no slow-growth scheme will stop the erosion of places we deem most precious.
In Part II, the book describes the new kinds of unintended places our unexamined attitudes and growth-distorting policies have created–neither cities nor suburbs but new urban entities altogether.
When half the nation moved to suburbia over the last generation, the comfortably manageable bedroom communities of the 1950s morphed into multi-county–even bi-state–megasuburbs. These unfathomably huge and shapeless places envelope older cities or comprise new ones, like Atlanta, Houston and Phoenix. They have no fixed identity, no way to come to grips with what it means to be more than a collection of malls, office parks, and subdivisions entwined only by freeways. These are places more people live in–and more people want to leave.
The growth machine drove people out of cities in the decades after World War II. Now it mindlessly propels a perpetual migration even farther–leaving behind older suburbs for newer ones at dozens of miles from stagnating centers.
When people leave the megasuburbs, they often head way beyond the urban edge–to the last, best, rural places, only to find that the strip malls follow along, turning places with unique character and a place-based way of life into anonymous neoburbs. Many of these last, best places now must find a way to accommodate affluent telecommuters and long-term families whose children can no longer afford to live and work where they’ve lived for generations. In other locales, towns with clear boundaries and distinct identities are being swept into vast metropolitan regions–a metastasizing of megasuburbs into territories tens or dozens of miles beyond established city-and-suburban conurbations. These developing landscapes can be dominated by depotburbs, enormous swaths of million-square-foot warehouses and distribution centers that serve urban areas along once sleepy, now truck-jammed, hundred-mile freeway corridors.
Communities have steadily become fed up with what urban migration on such a scale does to their quality of life–dumping more traffic into established communities while sucking wealth into new ones, for example. The growth machine, unintended, pits older towns against young ones. The tax revolts that periodically sweep the country are the most prominent means by which “victims” communities resist their “oppressors” in what Mutant Metropolis dubs an anything but civil “war between the suburbs.” In these battles, communities have dismantled, piece by piece, the consensus system that has made their growth possible over the last 50 years. No new growth mechanisms have risen to take their place, and the growth machine now threatens to seize up.
With the megasuburbs ever less able to deliver on the suburban promise of civility and amenity, a wave of people are forsaking the traffic jams and school-funding battles for older central cities, with their handsomely restored neighborhoods and buffed-up downtowns. Mutant Metropolis sketches the good-news/bad-news future they face. Many have become high-wealth global hubs–and also traps for the poor. Still unhitched from the suburban-oriented mechanics of the growth machine, they continue to lose the middle class essential to their hard-won success.
The heedless way America makes cities has not only driven the creation of such new kinds of urbanism as neoburbs and megasuburbs, it has powerfully affected the fate of entire metropolitan areas, driving wealth toward Knowledge Work Cities and Hypergrowth Metros, while sapping Stagnant Company Towns of vitality. The good life can be found in any of these cities, but they are, each in their way, unstable, unprepared for the future.
Can we make our cities and suburbs differently? In Part III, Mutant Metropolis says yes–but not without reconsidering values and attitudes that have locked the nation into the same tired dilemmas.
These chapters don’t offer rote recipes; the recognition of today’s urban reality is too recent. But they propose a new kind of urban citizenship that can transcend the ancient battlelines. Given the gigantic scale of urban places today, Mutant Metropolis comes to grips with Americans’ traditional ambivalence to city life, helping readers recognize that urban places need not be pure instruments of the economics of the moment, but can become vessels of the nation’s culture and aspirations. They can be–indeed, will need to be–more livable.
An emerging stewardship ethic of land ownership, for example, can permit economic use of valued landscapes while enhancing ecological values. Such an ethic is perhaps the only means to come to terms with stresses imposed by the world market for agricultural goods, unstable energy supplies, and a rapidly changing climate.
Russell proposes metaphors driven from the multi-city and multi-state planning and infrastructure endeavors of the past to forge an urban citizenship suited to the intimidating scale of megasuburbs and far-flung metropolitan regions–and the new opportunities and responsibilities they entail. He draws examples from cities worldwide that have already learned to engage this fast-moving reality. He spells out a “loose fit” urbanism that unites public and private realms to develop and redevelop cities adapted to fast-changing economic flows. Cities, he argues, can accommodate entrepreneurialism and growth while addressing peoples’ reasonable expectations that urban places be amenable and civil. Confounding prognosticators who have perpetually promised a more convenient, less-messy “virtual” urban future, this book presumes that cities will remain with us, even as waves of globalized economic, technological, and social change transform them. Cities aren’t getting easier to manage, but many globally successful cities make an art of orchestrating community desire. They are making all those faceless bureaucrats work toward common goals in a way that would make an American mayor’s head spin. Maybe you don’t need your trash sucked away by an underground pneumatic system, like Barcelona has, but you could probably use the acumen that could put such a system in place and run it economically. A more competitive world economy will demand that of America.
The book urges us to think of cities as constructions of culture, not simply as instruments in the making of wealth. There’s no reason that the communities we live in can’t express what we share rather than aggrandize only who each of us thinks we are. The architecture of communities records our aspirations, embodies our hopes for the future, and leaves a legacy for future generations to build on. Communities unite to memorialize people and events. They broadly support the preservation of historic buildings. These movements speaks to a deeply felt desire to make places that embody values, that retain important amenities, that express a creative and innovative culture.
As yet, the nation has not developed many ways to express these yearnings. In today’s economy, too, amenity (cultural, recreational, natural) is a keystone to growth. In such terms alone, taking the future of communities more consciously in hand is becoming a necessity.
At the beginning of the 21st century, the nation is not only overwhelmingly urban, its people are accumulating in larger and larger metropolitan areas. We have not come to terms with urbanity on this scale (though it is almost quaint when compared to such huge conurbations as Tokyo, and the networks of million-plus cities forming in China and India). These great urban landscapes can respond to global opportunity by amalgamating extraordinary talent and resources in entirely new ways. But they pose equally extraordinary challenges: Can their great possibilities be realized when they involve so many people over so much urban space? Can they be governed? Can they assure quality of life?
In Part IV the book offers policy prescriptions–especially to address the government tax, housing, and infrastructure policies that so powerfully distort growth. But Mutant Metropolis also addresses emerging methods for managing growth informed by community values, like innovative ownership concepts or land-conservation schemes that combine environmental stewardship with economic development. It proposes a more dynamic way to think about planning–means to test ideas and to “institutionalize” innovation in real-estate development and government policymaking. In this way communities can take advantage of the economy’s dynamic nature and deal with the inevitability of rapid change rather than be whipsawed by the consequences of it.