by Alex Marshall - articles and essays

A More
Benevolent Sprawl

Suburban Nation:
The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream

by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck.
North Point Press, a division of Farrar,
Straus and Giroux
New York

DPZ offers up a social vision that reads like a sales prospectus.

by Alex Marshall

It's hard to believe that it's been almost 20 years since the husband-and-wife team of Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk first began barn-storming around the country, preaching the saving graces of traditional urbanism and the terrors of suburban sprawl. Duany in particular, with his battery of slides and incisive rhetoric, has tutored civic leagues and town councils on the basics of nineteenth and early twentieth-century city design. Mixing the design principles of the Beaux-Arts school, Camillo Sitte, and Raymond Unwin into a spicy neotraditional vision, Duany talks of 'terminating vistas,' the proper relationship of street width to building heights, and the merits of on-street parking. Duany and Plater-Zyberk have trained Americans to think visually, shown people how the form of suburbia, with its tangle of curvy cul-de-sacs and boulevards, differs from that of traditional urban spaces. They helped create an ideal of urbanism‹the walkable street, the corner store, the front porch, the row house‹and taught people to yearn for it.

The couple's sermonizing, though, is carefully crafted to lead the congregation to DPZ's (the firm of Duany Plater-Zyberk) own path to salvation‹the Traditional Neighborhood Development, or TND. There are now several dozen of these around the country; in essence, conventional suburban subdivisions draped in the clothing of urbanism. This means gridded streets, front porches, smaller set backs, and so forth. But they remain isolated developments, sitting off main highways, linked by necessity to the local shopping mall and defined by the automobile. They function pretty much like any other subdivision. What the couple is doing, intentionally or not, is providing the country with a rationale for another round of suburban sprawl, only this time labeled 'New Urban' or 'neotraditional.' More serious measures‹like curbing highway spending or regional-growth boundaries‹are given lip service or actively criticized.

This sales campaign for a new form of sprawl continues in their latest book, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream. They are joined here by Jeff Speck, a Harvard-trained architect and now director of town planning at DPZ. As befits a work by architects, Suburban Nation is a handsome book. The text is laid out in big type with fat margins. It is an easy read. The 11 chapters take you through the authors' view of suburban sprawl, of its cures and ills, most of which lead to the door of TNDs. The chapters have names like 'What Is Sprawl, and Why?,' 'The House That Sprawl Built,' and 'The American Transportation Mess.' It is quite an effective piece of propaganda. And, like most effective propaganda, it is deeply misleading.

The false premise of the book is presented in its first few paragraphs. There, the trio describe what they say is the archetypal problem of suburban sprawl: what to do with a vacant 100-acre tract left by a rich guy on the edge of a developing metropolitan area. Will it become another tract suburb, or will it become a neotraditional town, ripe with public space and community? As politicians know, he who frames the question usually wins the argument. But the fate of a 100-acre tract is not sprawl's essential question. If you start there, you have already lost. Before you get to that 100-acre tract, you must first consider highway construction and regional growth strategies. This misleading paradigm of TNDs versus conventional sprawl is a bright thread woven throughout the book.

Historically, Duany and Plater-Zyberk fit into a long line of sprawl-justifiers, new members of which emerge every 15 or 20 years under the banner of 'the reinvented suburb.' In the 1970s and early 1980s, Planned Unit Developments, or PUDs, were the rage. Municipalities around the country approved these assemblages of shopping centers, subdivisions, and commercial parks as antidotes to 'sprawl.' In the 1960s, the New Town movement, which produced small cities like Columbia, Maryland, was hailed as a sprawl buster. Jim Rouse, the godfather of Columbia, talked just like Duany when in 1966 he said: 'Sprawl is inefficient, ugly. Worst of all it is inhumanŠ There has been too much emphasis on the role of the architect as an artist, not enough on his role as a social servant.' Today, Columbia's swooping curves, separated shopping centers, and big enclosed 'downtown' mall are seen as the embodiment of suburbia and sprawl. Will the same be said of New Urban subdivisions in 25 years? I think so.

The deceptive logic of Suburban Nation revolves around the false belief that the design of older neighborhoods and cities can simply be transferred to the suburbs without copying the underlying transportation systems necessitated by plans based around the pedestrian. The writers repeatedly do things like compare historic cities, such as Georgetown, Charleston, and Savannah, to various non-descript suburbs in Arizona, California, and Florida. At one point, they compare sprawling Virginia Beach, my hometown, with the Alexandria, Virginia, of the 1700s. This is like comparing an eighteenth-century clipper ship to a twentieth-century container ship.

This isn't to say we can't build places comparable in beauty and function to Charleston or Princeton (two towns the writers like to name). But these places have to be built by recognizing, not hiding from, contemporary contexts and choices. That other New Urbanist, Peter Calthorpe, is far more coherent intellectually because he portrays mass transit as a requirement, not just an option, in producing pedestrian-oriented neighborhoods.

The trio do get some things right. They correctly point out that subsidized mortgages and highway spending promoted sprawl. They explain how, in the 1920s, urban design mutated into urban planning, leaving much of the visual and artistic vision of cities behind. But they avoid the implications this analysis holds for their own work. On transportation they say: 'If we truly want to curtail sprawl, we must acknowledge that automotive mobility is a no-win game, and that the only long-term solutions to traffic are public transit and coordinated land use.' Exactly. But their own work involves neither. They write: 'Settlement patterns depend more than anything else upon transportation systems.' So how does a neotraditional subdivision sitting off a standard suburban highway end up as anything but a conventional suburb?

I'm curious as to whether Speck, the third author, is responsible for the more progressive chapters on transportation and regionalism. In an interview after a lecture at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard in April, Speck said that he wrote the first draft of the book, and that Duany and Plater-Zyberk edited and added to his work. During the presentation, Speck, the youngest member of DPZ, said that he would support a moratorium on suburban growth, although he wasn't sure if Duany would. Perhaps Speck's influence is responsible for a guilty rationalizing that creeps into Suburban Nation. At one point they say, 'Conscientious designers are faced with a difficult choice: To allow sprawl to continue without intervention, or to reshape new growth into the most benevolent form possible.' Maybe that should be DPZ's new motto: 'A more benevolent form of sprawl.'

The authors' hostility to real sprawl-tackling can be seen with their damning-with-faint-praise treatment of Portland, Oregon. Essential to that city's success has been its urban-growth boundary. But in Suburban Nation, the authors say that 'while these boundaries have sometimes proved effective, they are rarely long-term solutions; Even Portland's lauded boundary faces constant legislative challenge.' Why does 'constant legislative challenge' make something unsuccessful? Actually, Portland's growth boundary has lasted 25 years, withstanding three statewide referendums called by developers.

Ultimately, the book is dangerous, because it confuses people about the chaotic nature of the American landscape and then holds out false hope for an easy way to buy our way out of it. They write, 'The choice is ours: either a society of homogenous pieces, isolated from one another in often fortified enclaves, or a society of diverse and memorable neighborhoods, organized into mutually supportive towns, cities, and regions.' But DPZ's developments are virtually all 'homogenous,' 'isolated,' and, to a degree, 'fortified enclaves.' Windsor, in Florida, is even a gated community. These subdivisions‹oh, excuse me, 'neighborhoods'‹are isolated and isolating, income-exclusive, and antidemocratic in their reliance on homeowners' associations for control.

Seaside, Florida, the project that kicked off DPZ's work, is perhaps its sole lasting and honest achievement. This neotraditional 'town,' founded in the early 1980s, works precisely because it is unique. It is a resort, so the de-emphasis of the automobile works. People on vacation rarely need to shop for a washing machine or go to the dentist. But it is not a model for solving sprawl. It is an interesting resort community.

Suburban Nation is a child's tale, told to lull a gullible audience into a dreamy, painless vision of how to solve suburban sprawl; a vision which, not incidentally, requires buying more of what Duany and Plater-Zyberk are selling.

Alex Marshall is the author of How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl and the Roads Not Taken, to be released this fall by The University of Texas Press. He is currently a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University.