Can New Urbanism change American priorities?
I’ve lived in cities for most of my adult life; in Chicago: Wicker Park, Logan Square, Humboldt Park, and Philadelphia: East Kensington, Fishtown, Port Richmond. Places where I could walk to get my morning coffee, to work, restaurants, art galleries, and city parks. I owned a bicycle, but never a car. My apartments were small, but the world outside my door was expansive and abundant with food, culture, and entertainment.
And then I moved to the suburbs. People don’t mince words for the suburbs. Even in academic research, abstracts start with a sigh.
That suburbs are ugly has been taken for granted by many architects and journalists [2], generally regarded as epiphenomena of the urbs [8], Why do architects hate the suburbs? [7], Suburban growth may impose social costs such as lowering local quality of life [4], and so on and so on.
This dichotomy, of the derision we feel for the suburbs and their unstoppable growth (70% of the world population will live in urban areas by 2050) transforms suburbia from a place people live into a juggernaut overladen with significance: the suburbs are isolating us from each other, they’re destroying the environment, a crime against aesthetics, the death of small businesses. However, there’s great potential for sustainable change in the suburbs. In the post-pandemic world, those of us living on the outskirts of urban centers have never been more ready for a dramatic structuring of our communities.
A gathering sea change.
For someone to move to the suburbs–or to stay in the suburbs–requires a constellation of needs to form an incontrovertible truth that a home in suburbia is the best choice: an ideal cost of living, access to a reliable car, a spacious home or property with a yard, a job where they plan on being for years, children who need a good school district. Each, a celestial body in the structure of what it is to build a life; until a black hole consumed our universal understanding of living––COVID-19 and over a year of quarantine.
The fear of another pandemic or a return to quarantine was enough to realign people’s priorities to move into homes with built-in social distancing.
Pre-suburbs, I worked 60 hours a week in a restaurant in Philadelphia. I commuted on a packed subway and lived in a four-unit apartment building nestled between row homes built so tight against one another that it felt like shared air pressed through the brick walls into each other’s spaces. Leaving the city for suburbia was an act of desperation, if not survival.
The suburbs are more than parking lots, stop lights, and razed earth. In New Visions of Suburbia, the researchers begrudge:
suburban areas mix convenience and quiet with spaciousness and a green landscape that is highly attractive.
The article explains that your perception of suburbia has a lot to do with where you focus your attention. It sounds almost like a therapist’s platitude for depression, focus on the good things in your life, but I’ve found it rings true in my experience of the burbs.
Spaciousness brought me to suburbia. And when I keep my focus trained on the massive cottonwood trees in my apartment complex, the coyote calls outside my window, and the foothills just minutes from my home, it’s easy to find this place as opulent as my neighborhoods in Chicago or Philadelphia.
Are the suburbs good or bad?
Intrinsic in the success of suburbia is the affordability and accessibility of private vehicles. As one article puts it:
Municipalities in the suburban zone were first defined on the basis of driving distances. [6]
The space needed to support individual car ownership–parking lots, paved roads, sprawling neighborhoods–along with the destructive CO2 output are both causes for concern with the growing burbs.
When we talk about climate change and the damage by overdevelopment in the suburbs, the focus is on the planet.
Globally governments and nations have largely accepted that significant attention and effort, and a change in behavior, is required to ameliorate the environmental damage already done to the planet.[5]
Still, there’s damage done to individuals, communities, and families.
As insidious as micro-plastics, ozone depletion, and rocketing CO2 levels is the way we spend our days. Our atomistic approach to living: the compartmentalization of work, leisure, school, and recreation feeds the ever-growing sprawl of the urban environment.
The problem isn’t suburbia; it’s us.
A 2021 article in Architecture Australia distills the problem with the suburbs down to their functionality.
In only providing spaces to live, rather than spaces to work or learn or share, are these projects serving to further reinforce the mono functionality of the suburbs?
We haven’t been able to shake out of the habits of suburban development, despite longstanding recognition of their toxic effects. Perhaps because we continue, decade after decade, to double down on the ideas of the workplace. We commit, above all else, to commuting, existing for the sake of commerce and oppressing the other for the betterment of ourselves.
That was, of course, before COVID-19. With the Zoom calls, the athleisure uniform, the Slack channels, and the work/life multitasking came liberation from the commute, time with family and pets, daily walks, and more shared meals at home.
It’s almost disorienting, wondering why we were doing those things before–compartmentalizing our work, our leisure, our home–distant but drive-able, leaving us feeling rushed, scattered, and for much of the day, very far from home.
It’s (probably) not about the environment.
In an alternate timeline, where human motivations didn’t orbit profit, greed, and selfishness so close, land affordability outside of cities may have inspired different choices. Replacing the sprawling McMansions and cultivated green lawns would be affordable housing densities built to accommodate population growth for the next century or five centuries.
As it stands, we’ve devoured natural landscapes for parking lots, golf courses, and long-abandoned shopping malls. The hand-wringing about the gluttonous way we build suburbia is nothing new.
In a 1994 issue of the Journal of Urban History, Adam Rome wrote of the above series by the aerial photographer William Garnett. It shows the suburban development progression. Rome interprets the series:
Surely…there must be less destructive ways to build.
These photographs are from 1955. Almost seven decades and the same question plagues the way we plan, design, and build the places we live, sacrificing the ecological wellbeing of our homes to do so.
But there’s a lot of research out there that says the suburbs are not as devastating as we might think. An article from the University of New South Wales describes how even the medians in highways contain biodiversity critical to the ecology of our planet. It cites results from a study performed in Central Park showing the “artificial” green space mirrors global biodiversity.
There’s research that shows rural and suburban coyotes have more in common than suburban and urban coyotes. Walking in my neighborhood, I’ve encountered foxes, deer, rabbits, and owls––I’m 10 minutes or less from two highways and a major interstate. The sense of despair about the destructive capacity of suburbia may be overblown. Or at least, it may be easier to course correct our systems of development than we’ve been willing to believe.
We’re still adaptive creatures striving for survival.
The design of the suburbs was always a byproduct of American’s teenage crush: the automobile. They’re planned and paved to get workers from jobs to home, oozing out radially from city centers–property values intrinsic to commute times. As the suburban environment grows, so do the freeways bringing people from its teetering, affordable edge into the covetable boroughs with culture and commerce.
According to a 2000 article by Matthew Kahn on the suburb’s environmental impact, suburban residents only use their vehicles 31% more than city-dwellers. A 2019 post from Bloomberg CityLab states urban residents spend just 15 more minutes commuting every day than those who live in the burbs.
Consider then the aggressive demand-driven scale-up in recent years of production of electric vehicles. Just one of the many eco-friendly, environmentally conscious, green adaptations we’re making to make the suburbs feel “okay.” If we can make them less damaging to the environment, less destructive to build, less toxic to live in, then we’ll find some solace in living here. But is the environmental impact the real problem?
The suburbs do exactly what we want them to–and that’s the problem.
Rory Hyde describes the issues succinctly in an article for Architecture Australia questioning where urban sprawl goes from here.
We know that our approach to suburban development needs to change: we must achieve greater residential density, sustainability, affordability, and diversity.
Rory’s assertion is limiting in its scope. It’s not just our approach to development that must change; it’s ourselves. We must become more accepting of more–and more diverse–people living cooperatively together, practicing sustainable lifestyles, supported by the wealth of our nation.
Instead of looking at a property’s value by its proximity to work, why aren’t we looking at our work’s value by its accessibility from home?
Maybe the reason we haven’t been able to shake the yolk of suburban civil engineering for the fifty years following when Garnett captured the demoralizing, mundane birth of a subdivision is that we just didn’t know better. Until a global pandemic forced people into their homes, igniting a fundamental change in how people saw the structure of their day and their life values. Now, almost half of workers would rather quit than return to daily commutes.
Okay, but what about (stay with me) communes?
The problem with communes is that too many charismatic leaders got hold of the idea in the seventies and, unable to resist the siren call of power and attention, turned them into cults. It’s hard to reclaim the branding of communes post-Jim Jones. But intentional communities are still out there, most operating without splashy news-making murder-suicide events.
Intentional communities are built upon a foundation of intentions. Values that members hold in higher regard than personal pursuits. The 15-year-old commune Serenbe is just south of Atlanta, and residents focus on wellbeing, the arts, and agriculture. It is, by most metrics, a successful example of a deconstructed suburb, if prohibitively affluent (rent starts at over $2,000/month, starter homes approach $500,000). Urban villages, with their mixed-use properties, could be the inoculation sprawling residential areas need to fight the malaise of suburbia.
It’s a mixed-use approach to living: food, healthcare, school, and work are a golf-cart ride away, instead of across town or down a commuter-clogged freeway. Just a thoughtful approach to living could crack the cycle of sprawl and despair we’re destined to be caught inside until 2050 when we’ll have razed every wild space unlucky enough to not have protected status.
For 10,000 years, people lived sustainable, rich lives in cities and villages. A hundred years after America’s cities gave a great exhale and created Levittown, Park Forest, West End, Lincoln Heights in the first wave of manufactured communities, and the erosion of the cultural diversity and community feels impossible to staunch, let alone reverse.
Suburbia happened almost without us paying attention. Now, we’re caught in a riptide of commutes, cubicles, and 40-hour workweeks. Changing the way we think about our time on the planet, believing we deserve more time at home, sun on our faces, and purposeful work could be the chrysalis for changing the engineering of our neighborhoods.
This blog came from research across the following articles, some cited within the post itself:
[1] Bowen, Douglas J. “Los Angeles For Rail and For Real.” Railway Age (2014): 34–39. Print.
[2] Forsyth, Ann, and Katherine Crewe. “New Visions for Suburbia: Reassessing Aesthetics and Place-making in Modernism, Imageability and New Urbanism.” Journal of Urban Design 14.4 (2009): 415–38. Print.
[3] Hyde, Rory. “Case Studies: The Future of Suburbia?” Architecture Australia (2021): 16–20. Print.
[4] Kahn, Matthew E. “The Environmental Impact of Suburbanization.” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 19.4 (2000): 569–86. Print.
[5] Ringvall, Kate. The Sustainability of Suburban Design: The Impact of ‘green’ Marketing on Environmental Achievement. A Case Study of New Suburbs in Perth. Diss. Curtin U, 2013. Perth: School of Built Environments, 2013. 3–328. Print.
[6] Rome, Adam W. “Building on the Land.” Journal of Urban History 20.3 (1994): 407–34. Print.
[7] Sellar, Simon. “Recalibrating New Suburbia.” Architecture Australia (2021): 60–65. Print.
[8] Vaughan, Laura, Sam Griffiths, Mordechai (Muki) Haklay, and Catherine (Kate) Jones. “Do the Suburbs Exist? Discovering Complexity and Specificity in Suburban Built Form.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34.4 (2009): 475–88. Print.
[9] Wales, N. and Mead, E. “Barriers to Sustainable Suburbs.” Sustainable Development and Planning II, 2: 1061–1069. Print.