by Alex Marshall - articles and essays

Martha Murphree looks to my book to tackle the urban problems of Houston - Martha Murphree, Hon. AIA, trying to tackle the urban problems of Houston, looks at my book as a starting point for the discussions of the RUDAT steering committe. She writes a review of her findings: "What makes a great city? What determines the shape of a city? The turn of this century has evoked plenty of comment on those questions -- from dull, dry statistical report to fiery polemic. As is my wont when troubled by a problem, I started reading some of that comment -- most recently How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken by Alex Marshall. It's a book worth reading. Marshall is neither an architect nor a planner but a journalist who grew up and still lives in Norfolk, Virginia. His purpose in writing was to critique New Urbanism, which he says is "more destructive than not in its effect on city planning." He really gives Celebration, Florida, Andres Duany, and developers in general a working over." Click on link for full article.

Marshall Points To Western City For Guidance - "Marshall's paragon is Portland, where growth decisions are consciously channeled through local and regional governments. The policies are simple: Use growth boundaries to keep downtowns dense, build fewer freeways (or even tear some down), and fund mass transit. The results aren't perfect. A ballot initiative approved by Oregon voters last November makes growth boundaries more difficult to enforce and may signal a backlash against the state's strict land-use laws (a development that is too recent to have been included in Marshall's book). Still, Portland remains one of the few midsize cities that have a thriving downtown and don't compel their residents to drive everywhere." Click on link for full article.

The Austin Chronicle Reviews Alex Marshall - "Does this ring a bell? "The standard choice today of lacing a metropolitan area with big freeways for purely internal travel means we will have a sprawling, formless environment." Uh-huh. Now more than ever, Austin could use accessible writing that addresses the challenges of urban sprawl. Journalist Alex Marshall (Salon.com, The Washington Post, among others) offers a clear-headed approach to the urban issues that so deeply affect Austin and other overgrown cities in his jargon-free new book How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken. He cuts right to the chase by spelling out the basic interaction of the three great controlling forces of urban growth -- transportation, economics, and politics. The topics are overwhelming, but Marshall makes them understandable in the context of four case studies that form the backbone of the book." Click on link for full article.

Journalist's answer on suburban sprawl may not be palatable - "Are we bothered enough to make the tough decisions needed to change things? Make no mistake - they are tough decisions. Take the automobile (please!). Marshall notes that cities always developed according to the transportation of the day. Older downtowns feel different because they were built for pedestrians and horse-drawn carriages; Wal-Marts and post-World War II subdivisions were built for the car. Marshall cites three steps needed to change the growth patterns found in most U.S. cities, including larger Charleston: recognition that residents have the right to direct growth. While not dismissing property rights, Marshall notes that growth stems from public spending on sewer lines, schools and (mostly) transportation. If it's our money, we should be able to say where it goes." Click on link for full article.

Can you be an Urbanist and still like cities? - BY ALAN EHRENHALT - "The 20th century produced a pantheon of brilliant urban thinkers and planners. ...We are living with the consequences of their vision: Ebenezer Howard’s "garden cities," Le Corbusier’s "radiant city," Frank Lloyd Wright’s "Broadacre City" ; even Lewis Mumford’s unrealized dream of regional planning ; all of them represent the baseline for anyone who wants to create a modern urban revival. But there’s a dirty little secret that nearly all the legendary members of the urbanist Hall of Fame have in common. They really didn’t like cities very much. ...The purpose of this column, however, isn’t to focus on this set of individuals, but rather to celebrate the accomplishments of the one great 20th-century urbanist who really loved cities... As you may have guessed, I’m referring to Jane Jacobs.... It is a silly question to ask who will be the Jane Jacobs of the 21st century. No one will be; she is as original and irreproducible as anyone who has ever written about cities and community. But it may be reasonable to observe that, when and if someone makes literate and persuasive sense out of the next round of urban problems and challenges, it won’t be someone with a long series of titles and degrees surrounding his name. It will be someone with the virtues of an intelligent and curious amateur.... In the decade or so since New Urbanism exploded onto the local policy and planning scene, it has generated millions of words of analysis and prescription detailing how intelligent design can restore the sense of community and rootedness that city life has lost in the past half century. But none of it has seemed more sensible and appealing to me than How Cities Work, Alex Marshall’s new book of urban reporting and commentary. Marshall shares with Jane Jacobs one characteristic: He is an amateur: a longtime Virginia newspaper reporter whose methods consist largely of watching, reading, traveling and thinking." Click on link for full article.

Keeping The Urban, Losing The Sprawl - "For a book that isn't about Norfolk, there's a lot of Norfolk in ``How Cities Work'' by Alex Marshall.. And for a book that isn't per se a criticism of New Urbanism, a design movement that attempts to incorporate urban ideals into suburban development, it misses no opportunity to knock the movement. Marshall's opinions of New Urbanism have been stingingly vocal, and among Hampton Roads planning and city officials his notoriety lives on. I recently sat down with Marshall in the basement cafeteria of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City to talk about his book. The following is an excerpt from that conversation.... : 'I started out as a big fan of New Urbanism and I ended up as a big critic. At first it seemed to offer a very coherent solution to urban sprawl. It seemed to say that we could have these really nice cities and places where people walk, where people do not rely on cars so much, if we just design things a little differently.... A lot of it was going to Europe, which made me realize transportation is really a fundamental driver of development and of the type of development. And, secondly, just visiting these New Urban places. If you pull away your starry-eyedness, you see these places as essentially charades or mirages. . . . just another isolated subdivision in the middle of a cornfield, not that much different from the isolated subdivision down the street.' " Click on link for full article.

What readers have had to say on Amazon.com:

The Roads Too Taken - March 4, 2001 -Reviewer: J Kevin Doyle - from Ashville, NC USA.
"This is a fine read, with humor and deep feeling, showing the plight of the modern city and therefore the modern soul. Marshall argues convincingly that the unmittigated promotion of the automobile has robbed us of both community and even the convenience it was ostensibly designed to promote, turning our cities into isolated cul-de-sacs and sad little strip malls, with the "city" itself often either blighted or turned into a theme park for tourists. This loss of place, he argues, is not ammended by most of the "new urbanism" that's in vogue, which he claims is simply the same old suburb dressed up in a sentimental veneer. Neither is simply building more roads a viable solution. Marshall looks to government, in its best sense (as a public institution), as the beginning to working with this dilema. The easy answer of a market driven laizze-faire approach is no answer at all. Instead he argues that we need to first understand how cities function and how good design can be both practical and pleasing. Individuals shouldn't be the ones driving growth around their own short term benefit- communities should be looking towards the long term good. We all need to get involved, and make some tough choices. I was taken on an interesting ride by this book, with intimate, street level looks at some of the most soulful and souless communities around- Copanhagen, Silicon Valley, Jackson Heights among others. I speak of soul here, because even though the book is crisp and articulate, I could sense that the author had a real relationship with these places and invites us to deepen our own, looking at the quality of our lives, and how that relates to the cities, towns, and burbs we live in. Not only an important book, but also an enjoyable one."

The Emporer Wears No Clothes - January 13, 2001 - Reviewer: RBulis from West Coast.
"Finally a voice in the wilderness that effectively unmasks the whole New Urbanism / Traditional Neighborhood Development (TND) "movement" for what it truly is: just another developer-driven ploy to sell real estate at maximum profit and minimum responsibility for the impact such development has on the entire region and its growth patterns. NU/TND is nothing more than suburban sprawl in new dress, and it fails to acknowledge the true "engine" of growth in contemporary American society, the auto-centric lifestyle so many of us cling to. Marshall's book is the first to come out and declare that the emporer ( in this case leading advocate of NU: Architect Andres Duany and his wife, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk ) is naked. Continuing the socio-economic stratification of suburbia while dressing up the architecture with cute porches set close to the street ( so we can observe our neighbors gliding by in their new gargantuan SUV's I suppose) and creating little "town-centers" with a Starbucks (of course) and perhaps a Baskin-Robbins/Subway combination will not solve the problems of urban sprawl. These developments are only studied as far as the first intersection with the regional transportation grid, and then the streams of vehicles pouring out become a problem the rest of us must contend with as they compete for a traffic lane on ever-clogging freeways. As long as we continue to allow the profit-driven development community to set the design agenda, we will continue suffering the morass we now attempt to navigate. Marshall examines the true Urban/Suburban transportation infrastructure and guides our thinking towards more effective solutions than those put forward by the NU/TND camp. This is not a book for those seeking quick easy solutions to long-term problems, but it's highly readable and Marshall brings a fresh-perspective to the discussion."