After Suburbia: A Place to Live in the 21st Century
by James S. Russell
BOOK CONTENTS
Preface: Liz
A fictional young woman, just starting her career, considers the increasingly difficult dilemmas urban life imposes today.
Introduction: What’s a City For?
The weeks and months after August 29, 2005, exposed both the tangible and fragile nature of the vast networks of physical infrastructure and urban social connections that make our lives possible. As the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina rushed into New Orleans through great rents in its levees, we learned how reliant we are on infrastructure we rarely think about and how vulnerable we become when we neglect it. We learned that when this slowly shrinking city stopped working, so did a vast network of oil and gas drilling and processing in the Gulf of Mexico. We learned that much of the Midwest’s agricultural success depends on a functioning New Orleans’ port.
As the time came to rebuild, we learned that the Gulf South had no well-established ways to convene its leadership and involve citizens in planning for a future that had to take into account the city’s long-term economic challenges. Since urban-development skills have atrophied nationwide as well, aid came poorly organized from outside the region. The security of New Orleans depended not just on the enterprise of its citizens and fixing its levees, but on restoring vast tracts of coastal wetlands, which may entail redesigning the way the Mississippi River spills into the Gulf.
New Orleans’ plight should have awakened to us to the size and interconnectedness of the urban realms we inhabit. We have tended to focus on the quality of life and politics of our neighborhood or community, when many of us live lives that span town, county and even state boundaries. What happens to these very large landscapes affects our lives much more than the oversized master-bedroom wing our neighbor hopes to build.
Now that stockbrockers juggle deals from mountain hamlets and moms do tax accounting from their kitchens while dandling babies on their lap, it’s not surprising that we should question the relevance and purpose of a city. Do we need those skyscraper downtowns, those cubicle-crammed office parks?
Meeting and connecting–that’s the basis of thriving cities for millennia. Technology change and the vast scale and complexity of today’s urban economy are remixing what’s valuable about cities. When is living and working close together important and when is it not? Should we be thinking any longer of cities and suburbs at all, but instead of large, economically interconnected, multi-city metropolitan regions or even systems of metro regions that may be forming vast, multi-state super-regions?
These questions vex even experts, but we can all consider how we fit into the evolving nature of “cityness.” The way urban places work determines much about what kind of economy we’ll have, what kinds of investments we’ll need to collectively make, how we’ll have to think about the role of government, and what kind of quality of life we can expect.
PART I: What Happened to the Best Places?
Chapter 1: Landscapes of Speculation
Rather than proactively plan to develop the kinds of environments it desires, America has traditionally left the making of cities in the hands of developers and speculators. Communities assert their collected values by entwining the development process in a costly and ineffective regulatory apparatus. Coming to terms with the urban future, however, means coming to terms with conflicting but deeply held values relating to the role of private property in society. When should community values trump individual ones? How do we accommodate wealth-creating economic dynamism with the upheaval it perpetually creates in our communities?
Chapter 2: Mechanics of the Growth Machine
Most of us consider the forces of urban growth as reflecting natural economic flows. But American patterns of growth are anything but natural. The nation has created several mechanisms, which, largely by default, simultaneously drive and restrain urban growth: Simplistic real-estate finance methodologies drive lowest-common-denominator development. Infrastructure–roads, sewers, water supplies–engineers urban growth, putting experts in gallons per minute or auto throughput in charge of our urban future. Enormous tax advantages for home-ownership shift wealth to what’s called the “favored sector” of the developing edge, helping to drive disinvestment in older, less affluent communities–urban and suburban.
These mechanisms don’t work well together. They stifle innovation, they fail to recognize unique circumstances, and they create many unintended consequences, heedlessly anointing communities winners or losers. Instead of looking at what these mechanisms themselves do, we keep being surprised that the beautiful forest next door gets plowed under, or that the new freeway intersection down the road dumps a torrent of traffic at our doorstep. We’re always slapping on some new regulation to stop the latest development outrage from repeating itself in what often seems a futile effort to preserve some order, civility and quality of life.
And yet, to create communities that are desirable to live in yet dynamic and entrepreneurial, we’ll have to align our growth mechanisms much more closely with the strictures of a 21st-century economy.
PART II: The Mutant Metropolis
Chapter 3: The Megasuburbs
Towns people thought would remain appealingly uncitylike (leafy, friendly and manageable) have blended together into giant new megasuburbs. They flow along the beltways and outward across town boundaries, county lines and even into adjacent states–as far as the network of urban freeways will permit. These far-flung landscapes amalgamate much of the nation’s wealth and most of its best jobs. People move to these places for the opportunities they offer. But they are finding housing increasingly unaffordable near good jobs, while commutes to affordable communities grow from miles to dozens of miles. The clearly bounded and comprehended suburb has become more impersonal as it grows larger, and more dispiriting as real-estate development chews up more land less efficiently. They can look comfortably leafy and safe–while isolating children amid a cordon of thronged arterials, which seems insufficient to protect them from such urban terrors as sex predators, child kidnappers, and drug gangs.
Chapter 4: The Neoburbs
They look rural, but these “last best places”–in the mountains, at the seashore, or at what once seemed a safe remove from cities–are suburbanizing fast, and losing the uniqueness and authenticity that drew people in the first place. These should be places that unite vibrant economic growth with traditional notions of nature stewardship. But such communities now have only the most awkward, costly, and time-consuming tools to shape growth in a way that recognizes local circumstances or community aspirations. Whether in the exurban hinterlands tantalizingly beyond the outer outer beltways, or in gorgeous redoubts by mountains or bays, neoburbanites trade scenery for job opportunities, low-cost housing for schools that are often both cash-strapped and distant.
Chapter 5: The War Between the Suburbs
As the benefits of growth continue to accumulate in the newest most affluent “favored” urban sectors, bypassed older communities and cash-strapped exurbs are finding that the expectations built into the late 20th-century suburban ideal–low-density, high-amenity, localized government, auto-dependence–isn’t cheap. More communities are declining to pay the costs and have begun to fight for a better deal. They zone out families to keep taxes down or embrace tax revolts that move government burdens from established families to new ones moving in. They fight new highways and new developments to preserve a quality of life they feel they have been promised. They are winning these battles, and in the process created unending fiscal crises even in communities of great wealth. As important, they are ending the public consensus that has made suburban-style growth affordable, or even possible, over the last 50 years. Now the once homogenously middle-class suburbs are rapidly dividing themselves into “favored sector” enclaves of wealth, a struggling inner-ring, and developing-edge ‘burbs that can’t afford the good schools and nice neighborhoods suburbia used to promise.
Chapter 6: The Future of the Center
Business is rediscovering downtown as its appetite for talent exceeds the possibilities offered by vast suburban distances. Dense, urban places are finding they succeed as category-breaking cauldrons of intellectual, cultural and educational talent. Even in a wired-together age, putting together products and services of mind-boggling complexity demands that pools of people with rich and diverse skills must be found nearby. As a result, some cities are flourishing to an extent unseen for decades. But many big-city challenges remain. Most continue to lose their middle class–an essential component of economic health. Blocks from penthoused highrises, acres of burned-out buildings and concentrated poverty remain. A growth machine tuned to 1950s suburbia proves ill suited to broadening older-city revitalization. In some cities, disinvestment flows beyond old political boundaries, moving from poor older neighborhoods to vulnerable aging suburbs. At the same time, global trends reward bigness, as we enter an era of the 50-million-person metropolis. With that comes a new huge scale of global business endeavor that threatens to make the most desirable American cities seem like quaint, smug boutiques rather than vibrantly competitive centers of entrepreneurialism, innovation, and creativity.
Chapter 7: Where Do I Live?
Metropolitan economies in America are rapidly dividing themselves into three distinct types, each of which are increasingly vulnerable to decline. It adds urgency to a question ever-mobile Americans ask–where should I live?. Knowledge Work Cities are what many places seek to become: the capitals of creativity, entrepreneurialism, and innovation. They’re often slow-growing, though, because they’re good at keeping people out, especially middle-income families. Hypergrowth Metros represent a different kind of business ideal. They are culturally wired for growth, and they lower barriers to business entry. The roots of these economies can be shallow, however, and they can grow in people without growing in wealth. A poorly prepared workforce can make wealth-building elusive. Stagnant Company Towns struggle. They have lost their great industrial economic engines and have failed to find another path to prosperity. With low barriers to entry but high taxes and a hemorrhaging workforce, these cities grow slowly or not at all. Wealth and talent moves to their outermost suburbs or to other regions altogether.
PART III: How to Live in a Megacity Era
Chapter 8: A Stewardship Ethic for Land
Environmentalists, farmers, and ranchers are finding common cause in an emerging ethos of land stewardship that keeps people working the land, while restoring degraded environments and taking advantage of the economic benefits of tourism and second homes. Between the extremes of pure landscape preservation and absolute property rights, new kinds of “ownership” merge diverse agendas to nurture this new kind of authentic coexistence of man and nature. Activists from Montana to upstate New York are starting to tune the mechanics of the growth machine to reward developments that create wealth while taking risks to offer public benefit. The potential scaling-up of these ideas could drive economic growth that reduces the nation’s reliance on foreign oil and cuts the carbon emissions that cause global climate change.
Chapter 9: Creating 21st-Century Community
We thank past generations for creating park systems, for building great museums, for erecting a remarkable skyline or for building public and private structures that evoke pride and create a specific sense of place. Visionaries from the past offer urban dreams we can adapt to a future that demands we manage enormous urban landscapes and infrastructural systems. Cities as diverse as Portland, Vancouver, Berlin, and Barcelona show how to harvest public consensus and individual leadership to comprehensively nurture urban revitalization–forging a contemporary identity that merges business and citizen commitment to the future. New ways of planning are permitting cities to reconcile entrepreneurialism with livability. Russell posits a “loose-fit” urbanism that would allow cities (not just the empty land outside cities) to become the canvas on which enterprising businesses and visionary individuals can try new things and new ways of adapting the aging city to the ever-evolving economy. And he proposes a public-investment ethos that strategically involves the public in the investment of tax dollars to keep older communities vital, while building new places that can adapt to the future, rather than exhaust their economic possibilities in a generation or two.
Chapter 10: Building Real Places
At times, America has aspired to build cities that expressed our values, aspirations, and confidence in the future. Today, America is a rich nation that builds poor. The value the nation accords to the preservation of historically significant properties shows how economically powerful our concern for history can be. In spectacular museum structures or in modest, place-sensitive libraries, we can transcend our habit of making cities almost entirely as an assemblage of ventures that leave no room for any value other than profit. Pragmatically, architecture can express a confidence in the future and a commitment of a community to survive bad times. By contrast, we signal through barred windows and razor-wire defenses that a city or a neighborhood has given up. The chapter asks readers to consider more deeply the expression of a civic life in that most public and permanent of forms: architecture.
Chapter 11: The Future City
The scale of world economic activity is driving the creation of urban conurbations of unprecedented size and complexity: The biggest of the old American central cities preside over ever-growing megasuburban hinterlands and increasingly form the center of even larger urban entities, metropolitan regions and super-regions–creatures of the vast size, rapid growth, and integration of the world economy. But these places will pose unprecedented issues of traffic-congestion, environmental degradation, and a growing spatial division between “haves” and “have nots.” The global economy rewards large urban places with a density of human resources, a diverse economy and high-capacity, integrated infrastructure. What comes out of these forces will undeniably be a city, but one that will place extraordinary demands on us to form it to our desires and shape it to work effectively.
PART IV: How to Make a There There
Chapter 12: Policy Prescriptions for Real Places
These are the “sacred cows” of public policy that must be rethought if we hope to achieve urban vitality and civility.
- The Federal government will save money, spur economic revitalization, and help lower-income people achieve stable lives by focusing housing subsidies on only those who need them, innovatively aiding the supply of housing as well as peoples’ ability to pay for it.
- Government transportation funding must be rationalized, subsidized according to need, and integrated by mode so that each transportation mode does what it does best.
- Government must bring innovation, dynamism, and choice into urban development, trying out new development methods and rewarding the adoption of successful methods by the private sector.
- Government can encourage financing methods, as well as planning and development schemes, that recognize community values as well as short-term financial values. Focusing on planning and development innovation can help constantly changing economic dynamics take sustainable urban form.
Chapter 12: Tools For a Civic Planning Dialog
These are new ways to meaningfully involve the public in the resolution of contentious urban-growth issues.
- Charettes and workshops engage people in making development tradeoffs and uniting conflicting aspirations.
- Design competitions for urban planning and public buildings are useful ways to bring new ideas into the development mix. They’re an economical way to find solutions that are the most responsive design for a given set of circumstances.
- Demonstration housing exhibitions are a means by which the viability of innovative housing methodologies can be tested and find acceptance.
- Dynamic techniques for planning, design review, and peer review, replace top-down, one-way, one-size-fits all community decisionmaking with methods that are adaptive rather than prescriptive, as simple and understandable as possible, and that are inclusive and innovation oriented. These methods unite leadership and invention with tactics aimed at consensus building so that new solutions can be rationally considered while parties at odds with each other can help hash out acceptable tradeoffs.