Puerto Rico builds a train in the sky

ALEX MARSHALL
Metropolis Magazine
October 2001

The startling truth about San Juan, a metropolitan area of 1.4 million people in Puerto Rico, is that most of it looks like New Jersey. It is a landscape of ugly roadways lined with strip malls, American franchise restaurants, and glass office towers overlooking impenetrable limited-access highways. Sure, there is Old San Juan, the sixteenth-century fortified city with its tiny cobblestone streets. But that citadel of the picturesque, which sits on a point of land in the harbor, is a tiny speck in San Juan’s overall breadth. The bulk of the city was developed after World War II, when tax breaks and other incentive programs brought in industry. And in good postwar fashion, American and Puerto Rican engineers and urban planners heavily promoted the highway as the proper spine for development.

With the construction of the Tren Urbano (Urban Train), San Juan, Puerto Rico, hopes to find a mass transportation solution to its dependency on congested highways.

Two generations later, San Juan has reaped the result. Although its citizens earn substantially less than stateside Americans, they actually own more cars per capita. In fact, Puerto Rico has one of the highest car-ownership rates in the world. Traffic is horrible. Residents tell stories of once ten-minute drives that now take several hours. Buses exist, both public and private, but they are trapped in the same traffic jams as the private cars.

 

Enter the Tren Urbano (Urban Train), a 10.7-mile, $2 billion heavy-rail system scheduled for completion in 2003. Its planners are attempting something extremely difficult: altering a landscape produced by one type of transportation, the highway, by introducing a different type of transportation, an elevated train line. The risk in this type of urban surgery is that the patient will reject the alien transplant. Parts of the line travel through older streetcar suburbs, which have remnants of a traditional urban fabric. But the bulk of the project goes through postwar highway-oriented development, which is the most difficult to adapt to mass transit.

Elmo Ortiz, the urban design manager for the project, is well aware of the challenges it faces. Like most of the staff, Ortiz works in a blockish brick building located off a busy highway. “We have sprawl, sprawl, sprawl,” says Ortiz, whose face is ringed with a corona of white beard and hair. “The transformation of the geography of this place is incredible.”

Tren Urbano has a chance of working, Ortiz says, because it is intended to facilitate the development of a new type of city, not just to transport people: “We are trying to create a new urban form.” He and others envision the conversion of the rail corridor into destinations where people can live, shop, and work around the stations.

“We need to bring development back into the cities, instead of continuing with the sprawl that we have throughout the island,” says Javier Mirand’s, manager of architecture at Tren Urbano. “We need higher-density housing with minimum parking and good access to transit. This is the first time in sixty years that there will be a dependable transit system on the island.”

In this, Puerto Rico is not unlike so many other American cities trying to fight sprawl with new passenger rail systems: Portland, Los Angeles, Baltimore, and even Las Vegas have adopted similar projects in recent years. The greater challenge is that Puerto Rico resembles other Latin American cities in its high levels of crime and general paranoid atmosphere of security. Even convenience stores often buzz in customers. Apartment towers have double-entry security at the parking lot and inside the building. Wrought-iron gates and bars, which at first might appear decorative, encase many suburban homes. Many once accessible public streets have been gated and locked, privatized by their community. “How do you create housing around stations where people want to live in a gated community?” Ortiz ponders out loud, grimacing at the challenge.

Mass transit is difficult in such high-crime, high-fear regions, because people don’t want to associate with strangers. A related problem is race: lower-class Puerto Ricans tend to be dark-skinned, and whiter upper-class citizens may shy from using mass transit if it requires them to encounter poorer commuters.

But as in other countries, Puerto Ricans are now talking about “smart growth,” environmental protection, and different living patterns. “There has been a big shift in environmental consciousness, and that is going to help us redevelop cities and control sprawl,” Mirand’s says.

A specter hanging over the project is the fate of another expensive elevated train line: in 1984 a $1 billion, 21-mile elevated Metrorail line opened in Miami. Isolated by sprawl, it has attracted few riders and is widely considered an enormous white elephant.

Maurice Ferre, mayor of Miami from 1973 to 1985 and a native of Puerto Rico, predicts a better chance for the Tren Urbano because it goes through more work centers, such as the university and Rio Piedras. But San Juan will have to expand its system if it wants long-term success, he says: “Metrorail in Miami is a failure because it is an unfinished system. It’s like taking a table with four legs, and only building one leg and expecting it to stand. Structurally the two are similar, but I think the one in San Juan will be more successful.”

Aníbal Sepúlveda, professor of urban planning at the University of Puerto Rico and author of the book San Juan: An Illustrated History of Its Urban Development, is pessimistic about the project’s chances, even while he hopes for its success. “I have not seen enough effort to plan around the stations,” he says. “It will not come automatically. There is such a low density. At the same time, we are still building highways and making it easier for developers to build tract houses.”

Sepúlveda also questions the appropriateness of an elevated train line. “We chose the most expensive project for the city, but not necessarily the best one,” he says. “It’s too much money. We will not be able to build future lines with the same technology.”

Because it is a heavy-rail system, Tren Urbano can move immense numbers of people cheaply. But it will only be cost-effective if enough people actually use it. Officials project an initial ridership of 100,000 a day, which is predicted to rise to 115,000 by year 2010. At those levels, revenues from the fares would pay about half the operating costs, which is typical for mass transit.

Ironically, the key factor in the project’s favor is San Juan’s horrible and worsening traffic, which may motivate commuters to take the train. With a $2 billion investment, San Juan and Puerto Rico have placed an expensive bet on the table. They may win a city with choices other than highways and sprawl, or lose both money and hope that a sprawl-oriented city and its citizens can ever be changed.

What Makes A Neighborhood Viable?

a roundtable debate – Alex Marshall and Andres Duany
Metropolis
May, 1995

Our article in May about the redevelopment of East Ocean View in Norfolk, Virginia (“When the New Urbanism Meets an Old Neighborhood”), has sparked discussion – verbal, written, and electronic – about similarities writer Alex Marshall sees between urban renewal programs of the 1950s and 1960s and Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater – Zyberk’s plans for the Norfolk neighborhood. At the heart of the debate is a facet of New Urbanism that is disturbing to some critics and could impede the movement in the future: The majority of projects suggest an unwillingness to accommodate existing building stock into its new neighborhoods. New Urbanists call their movement the “architecture of community” – a questionable label when architects appear willing to remove existing communities to build new ones. But for now, the issue is whether this part of East Ocean View is viable enough to save.

ANDRES DUANY: In his article about our redevelopment project, Alex Marshall makes a false analogy between the neighborhoods destroyed by urban renewal in the 1950s and the site in Norfolk. Those martyred neighborhoods described by Jane Jacobs [in The Death and Life of Great American Cities] were poor but in possession of highgrade urban qualities supporting a fine tissue of society, including many homeowners. They were, as we say now, viable.

The 100 acres of East Ocean View were half-abandoned. Indeed, the area’s development had become undesirable so quickly that a good portion of the land had remained unbuilt. Most of the existing housing consists of decrepit Section 8 subsidized rental apartments, of a most degrading type, built in the 1970s by developers with nothing but exploitation in mind. The whole affair contributes to a very high incidence of crime. Their removal in Norfolk is akin to the justified demolitions of Pruitt-Igoe [the award winning St. Louis housing project often cited as a failure of Modern architecture] and other such products that were the object of Jane Jacobs’ attack, not of her defense.The people who lose their rental apartments will be assisted into housing by the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority, which may well be the best-managed public housing in the country. They are certainly not being turned out into oblivion in the manner of the 1960s.

Apart from the apartments, the most controversy was caused by the 18 houses with middle-class resident/owners that are slated to go. Why these? Of the 18, three were on the beachfront, isolating the beach from the rest of the neighborhood. To make the beachfront public by eliminating these houses, the inland houses (the owners of only three of them wished to remain) were caught in the net of equal fairness (or unfairness). Designating these three otherwise acceptable homes for removal permitted the removal of those three that privatized the beach. The development of the neighborhood is designed in such a way that the three homeowners, retired couples who may want to remain for the rest of their lives, won’t be affected until the later phases of development, perhaps a decade away.

Granted, the decision for demolition was made before we were even interviewed for the project. But had we not approved, we would have walked away, as Marshall reported we did in Houston. There was an important condition to be respected: The City Council of Norfolk had voted unanimously for the complete demolition of the site. This was a very protracted, thoroughly public, and very contested process, through which the elected representatives of the people made a difficult decision. I understand this to be the workings of democracy and something to be intrinsically respected. I am surprised that Marshall does not report this.

Apart from the prerogatives of democracy, the stated intention of the Norfolk City Council is one that we support as a general strategy for urban cores: to decant the monocultures of poverty. This small area is responsible for the majority of the crime in East Ocean View, giving the entire bay – front of Norfolk its bad name and causing the middle class to shun it for the suburbs.

Poverty itself does not cause crime, the concentration of poverty causes crime (source: Reuben Greenberg, the brilliant police chief of Charleston, South Carolina). Our task was to design a properly balanced neighborhood which leaves the population with a mixture of the poor,the middle class, and even the wealthy. This is, in fact, the ideal of the New Urbanism, and not the demolition of fine old neighborhoods. Marshall did report accurately my politically incorrect statement to the effect that the inner cities do not need more affordable housing as much as they need housing for the middle class. . To live, our bankrupt cities need tax paying citizens. That’s a fact.

ALEX MARSHALL: The guts of Duany’s defense are that it is okay to tear this neighborhood down because it is troubled and the people are poor and the buildings aren’t pretty. I disagree with this philosophy. I won’t say that a government can never level a neighborhood, but the area’s existing homes would have to be in worse shape than those in East Ocean View, and the people who live in them treated more fairly.

Duany also makes serious errors that undercut his arguments and suggest how little he has paid attention to the neighborhood he is replacing. Here are the most obvious:

None of the homes in this area are Section 8 housing. All the homes, both apartments and single-family houses, were privately built. This part of East Ocean View has no public housing of any kind. The brick apartment buildings Duany is apparently referring to are standard suburban-style apartments built in the 1970s. Being brick, they are probably better than many such apartment complexes that litter the suburbs.

None of the families have been relocated to public housing. At last count, 75 families have been evicted from the neighborhood. The only guarantee the housing authority made was to place residents (who so desired) at the top of the waiting list for public housing – something that complies with federal law governing public housing. The fact is, East Ocean View has no public housing, so it is unlikely present residents would choose to become public housing tenants. By design, the city is using private banks rather than federal money to finance the project, which exempts the city from having to guarantee relocation assistance. Duany says residents “are certainly not being turned out into oblivion.” In fact, this is exactly what is happening to them.

Regarding the Norfolk City Council, Duany defends the urban renewal decision because the political decision was unanimous. The same urban renewal in the 1950s and 1960s, which Duany joins in criticizing, was also approved by duly elected democratic governments. Does this mean it was right, or exempt from criticism? The fact is, the people in the condemned neighborhood had little political voice.

Duany asserts his plan will make the beach more public. In fact, an essential component of the city’s plans is reaping the profits from a series of new half-million dollar houses that will front directly on the beach.

Duany ends by saying he seeks only to “design a properly balanced neighborhood and to leaven the population witha mixture of the poor, the middle class,and even the wealthy.” His apparent capacity at self-deception amazes me. The new neighborhood will not have any poor people in it. The most the city has ever talked about is having homes in the price range of a high-school teacher – firmly middle-class.

Duany’s talk about diversity obscures the anti-urban nature of the project and his design. The new neighborhood, if built as planned, will be less dense and less diverse. By some estimates, up to 1,800 homes were in the East Ocean View neighborhood at the time the clearance project was launched. Duany would reduce the density to a third of that – 400 to 600. This area has blocks full of single family homes and apartments that are quite viable. It also has blank spots and abandoned housing, which would be perfect for redevelopment through a process that does not involve driving people out of their homes. The only reason to tear down the entire neighborhood is because of a cynical belief that no middle or upper-income person would be willing to move into a house next to that of a working-class person.

What if the city had taken the estimated $35 to $40 million the project will cost and subsidized the building of middle-class houses on those vacant lots Duany mentioned? Then the city would have had a chance of creating a genuinely diverse neighborhood, better off than the present one, but one not founded on force and exclusion. I am not against gentrification. Like Duany, I favor restoring a healthier tax base to center-cities. But there is a difference between gentrification – which I think of as a poor neighborhood gradually being infused with wealthier residents – and the clearance of people from their houses so wealthier people can be put there with the help of taxpayers’ money.

Norfolk is doing just what it wanted: tearing down a poor neighborhood and driving its people elsewhere – across city lines, some officials hope. When preparing the project, city officials used a feasibility study that estimates Norfolk would save millions of dollars in police and social costs because up to a third of the project’s displaced residents would leave town. In this noble endeavor, Duany is helping.

I don’t mean to say that Duany or his staff are without talent. His new plan has its beauty. Its planned road system carefully weaves around existing trees and carves out small parks. The mixture of town houses and grand homes with the now – standard front porches will be more interesting than the usual suburban subdivision. But Duany’s new neighborhood will have no history and reveal its lack of roots in its false, cheery appearance. It’s hard to resist concluding that Duany, the New Urbanist, is tearing down a real urban neighborhood to build a fake one.

Teaching New Urbanism

BY ALEX MARSHALL
FOR OCTOBER 1997 ISSUE
METROPOLIS MAGAZINE

Every July for the past few years, architect Andres Duany had taught a three-day workshop at Harvard on New Urbanism, the urban design philosophy he helped mold and promote. A group of architects, developers and other professionals were given the basics of neo-traditional design, while Duany and the New Urban movement got the imprint of Harvard’s esteemed name.

No longer. Before this summer, (1997) Duany fired off a letter saying he could “no longer associate his name with a school that is not fertile ground for urbanism,” said Alex Krieger, an architect and director of the urban designprogram at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.

Why the withdrawal? According to Krieger, Duany spurned the school after the school had spurned his efforts to expand the course to regular students at the Graduate School of Design. As it was, the course had been part of the school’s summer series of professional development courses.

“Andres has tried very hard to convince the world that Harvard is teaching New Urbanism, but that is not happening,” said Krieger, who has worked with Duany on projects dating back to Kentlands in the late 1980s.

“I still consider Andres a friend, but the relationship between Harvard and New Urbanism is strained. . . .They (the New Urbanists) wanted to win us over, or at least use our names, and they have been rebuffed.”

The dustup is an example of the tentative and often uncordial dance between the New Urbanists and the traditional architectural establishment in academia. The New Urbanists are making inroads, but slowly and in the face of much skepticism.

To those ignorant of the term, New Urbanism is the loose design philosophy that advocates reviving many of the building principles of traditional towns and cities. That means everything from pushing homes up to the streets, to mixing, or attempting to mix, businesses in with homes. It also is part of a debate about how to achieve a greater community and public life in this country, and whether design has anything to do with that.

Design professionals in universities are debating whether New Urbanism offers a coherent theory of design, and the validity of New Urbanism’s criticism of the traditional architectural education as overly centered on creating the architect as artist who creates unique, sculptural forms.

So far, New Urbanism is popping up in a few schools around the country, mostly because of a few professors who have embraced its ideals. An exception to this is the architecture school at The University of Miami, led by Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, which has the New Urban theory as its spiritual core.

Beside Miami, schools frequently mentioned by New Urbanists are the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Washington in Seattle and the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Berkeley has long offered a joint degree in architecture and city and regional planning, but has recently begun a small master’s program that combines architecture and New-Urban style town planning. Several of the architects in the office of Peter Calthorpe, a leading New Urbanist, are graduates of the program or school, said Daniel Solomon, a professor at Berkeley.

Solomon said the school was more fertile territory for New Urbanism because it had long integrated urban design with architecture. Since the early 1960s, regional planning and architecture have been housed in Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Design, Solomon said.

At the University of Washington, Douglas Kelbaugh has led efforts to teach New Urbanism. Working with students, Kelbaugh has led about 10 charrettes in the Seattle area working with New Urbanism principles.

“New Urbanism is not a formal component of the education there,” Kelbaugh said. “It’s something I and a couple of other faculty members push.”

At the University of Southern California, Stefanos Polyzoides, one of the founders of the Congress of the New Urbanism, has integrated much of the philosophy into his course.

Other professors and schools mentioned by New Urbanists are Mark Schimmenti at the University of Tennessee and Ellen Dunham-Jones at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The most cohesive and complete program is at the University of Miami, which has about 280 undergraduate students and 50 at the graduate level. There, the idea of architect as city, or at least place, builder is integrated into the curriculum from the beginning.

Plater-Zyberk, dean of the school and New Urbanist leader, said students begin their education with a course in the “history of settlement,” and then work their way down, narrowing the lens, until they arrive at the individual building.

“We do it in reverse,” Plater-Zyberk said. “Instead of starting with the smallest increment and growing, we start with the urban contextual environment first.”

The school was recently awarded funding for the Henry R. Luce Professorship in Family and Community by the foundation named for the founder of Time and Life magazine. The professor, who has yet to be selected, will lead an unusual joint program between the architecture school and the school of medicine. Using resources from both schools, Plater-Zyberk says the program will focus on repairing and rejuvenating East Little Havana, home to many of the new immigrants in the Miami area.

The program in East Little Havana is an example of how New Urbanists are trying to shift architectural education away from the Howard-Roark ideal of architect as lone artist, to someone who uses his or her facility with space to create a better context for both buildings and people.

That’s a big jump, say New Urbanists.

“New Urbanists are challenging some of the core values of the traditional architectural establishment,” said Shelley Poticha, executive director of the Congress of New Urbanism in San Francisco. “That single buildings aren’t the most thing to focus on. That the place and the fabric are important, and that the architecture should contribute to the place.”

Polyzoides, echoing many others, said there aren’t that many jobs for solitary artists, which he said most architectural schools train students to aspire to. The myriad tasks that should be available to architects – from construction manager to laying out the insides of a K-Mart – are not because architects are not trained to be practical managers of space.

“Architecture schools are in deep denial,” Polyzoides said. “They support an architecture system based around star performers. But the chance of becoming a builder like Frank Gehry is equal to the chance of being a teammate of Michael Jordan.”

Polyzoides said he would like to reform the studio system that is the core of most architectural education. Having students design alone and compete with other students re-inforces the hyper-indivualistic and competitive tendencies of architecture. Instead, Polyzoides said he has his students work together to solve tasks like fitting streets and buildings into an oddly shaped parcel of land.

The larger problem, said Solomon and others, is ending the division between planning and architecture. Some universities even house city or regional planning in separate schools.

“The idea of bringing together the architecture school and the planning school is at the crux of New Urbanism,” Poticha said.

Some of the hostility towards New Urbanism comes from New Urbanists attempting to claim credit for all good urban design over the last two decades, said Krieger.

“It’s galling what is attributed to New Urbanism,” Krieger said. “All of a sudden, everything that is being done in Boston, like the gentrification of South Boston, are all examples of New Urbanism. They have co-opted urbanism. Anything having to do with cities in any shape or form is New Urbanism, even though the majority of their product remains out on the periphery.”

“We don’t teach New Urbanism,” said Krieger of Harvard. ” There are courses on good urbanism.”

Krieger suggests half-seriously that perhaps urbanists should “co-opt” the term New Urbanism, since the name seems to be selling well.

“If the name helps people get involved in cities, let’s use it even more,” Krieger said. “That’s the cynical side of me speaking.”

Columbia, Maryland

METROPOLIS MAGAZINE.
BY ALEX MARSHALL
APRIL 7, 1997

Driving around Columbia reminds me of surfing the web. Everything is hidden, not visible except for an icon that says mall or village center, or hotel. But double-click one of these icons – that is, follow the small, waist-high sign that tastefully pokes up off the road – and a hidden reality opens up to you, be it a shopping mall, a housing subdivision, a park, or a school.

Like the web, one can pas quite a few pleasant hours in Columbia, navigating its maze of curvy, curvilinear streets, losing all sense of place and time. Each choice leads to a new set of choices. Destinations are down secondary roads, and in even there are concealed behind rows of trees and sculpted man-made hills.

Residents of Columbia, which sits on 14,000 acres midway between Baltimore and Washington a few miles off I-95, are generally proud of the sleek coat of shrubbery and rules that conceals their community’s vital parts.

Things are hard to find here, said a middle-age man in a T-shirt who stood in his driveway under a basketball goal, next to his teenage-daughter holding a boxed pizza. “There’s a restaurant I still can’t find. First day I was here, I was running of of gas, and I couldn’t find a gas station.”

I heard that story a lot.

Columbia is one of the largest and most ambitious of the several dozen new towns started in the 1960s. The idea was to capture the hordes then leaving the center city, and funnel them into some sort of planned community that would be better than the more laissez-faire sprawl that was bubbling outward. Beside Columbia, the list included nearby Reston in Virginia, Irvine, Ca., Clear Lake City in Houston, and others. Huge sums of private capital made developing an entire region possible, as well as weak local and state governments that ceded their land-use authority to private enterprise. Columbia was based in part on European new towns then being developed. But in Europe, government was the designer and developer. In America, the private developer persuaded municipal governments to turn over the reigns of authority for a chunk of real estate. In exchange, the private developer laid out the streets and parks. And then bet that the profits from selling homes and leasing stores and offices would make it worthwhile.

Columbia was started and developed by Jim Rouse. Still led by The Rouse Company, its design and ongoing development bears the mark of this man who was a player at every step in the ongoing evolution of the prevailing urban-suburban zeitgeist over the past half-century. Victor Gruen just beat him in building the first enclosed shopping mall in the 1950s, but Rouse came up with Faneuil Hall festival marketplace in the 70s, which was cloned all over the country. In the 60s, the new town concept was the cutting edge and Rouse was on it. He was determined to improve the design of suburbia, to build a better, more manageable kind of sprawl, where commerce, religion, schooling, shopping and all the components of 20th century life would take place in a more practical and harmonious fashion. Rouse, who died last year at age 81, was also determined to build a socially better place, where a mix of all races and even incomes would live and work together, avoiding or overcoming the derisive racial battles then ripping apart the nation.

To a large degree, Rouses vision, both socially and otherwise, was realized. As of this year, about 85,000 people, with about 20 percent African-American, live in eight villages grouped loosely around a regional enclosed shopping mall, which is the town center. The ninth and last village is set to begin construction, which when finished, should bring the total population up to the planned 100,000 people. From the hindsight of 30 years, it’s interesting to ask not only whether Rouse got to where he was going, but whether he was going in the right direction. Rouse and many others put a lot of freight on new towns, including that it would be a model for future development, spawn countless imitators and cure the ailing center cities.

Its also fascinating to compare the New Town movement to New Urbanism, the latest town planning movement. Although New Urban proponents would probably shriek in horror at the comparison, the goals and results of both movements are identical in many respects. Both are attempting to create new, self-sufficient places in open countryside, and both are ultimately harmful to the historic cities their developers said and say they love. Both conceptually link back to Ebenezer Howard of the 19th century and the belief in the merits of starting over. Like settlers making their way to the new world, or abandoning the Catholic Church for the Protestant Reformation, these believers in new places love the fresh canvas, and the idea that old problems can be cured by doing something somewhere else.

When Rouse conceived of Columbia in the early 1960s, he was determined, like the New Urbanists, that people would be able to live, work, play and do other stuff at Columbia without leaving its borders. In his mind, this made Columbia a city. He never called or considered it a suburb or suburbia, which he despised. This of course, leads into a discussion about what is a real city, but more about that later.

To pursue his dream Rouse, a millionaire mortgage banker and shopping center developer, walked out about halfway between Washington and Baltimore, and proceeded in 1963 to surreptitiously buy up much of Howard County. This was a start of a lengthy process where by Rouse, after revealing his purchase, eventually persuaded county commissioners to pass in 1965 something called New Town Zoning which established the legalistic framework for Columbia.

Because Rouse could only develop what he could buy, and some landowners refused to sell, Columbia is a rough assortment of land parcels, some contiguous and some not, a few miles west of I-95. Studded throughout the area known as Columbia are chunks of land, now mostly turned into subdivisions, which are not part of Columbia at all. As one woman pointed out, an easy way to tell when you are in Columbia proper is whether the telephone poles are above or below ground. In Columbia, of course, they are neatly stowed below ground. That Columbia is not a definable chunk of land shows the limitations of private development. If a government had laid out Columbia, it could have done so in a practical and neat fashion, much as the municipal government laid out Manhattan in the early 1800s.

Columbia was formed against the backdrop of the 1960s, and as President Lyndon Johnson struggled to get the Voting Rights act passed, and southern governors stood on the steps of schoolhouses and threw down gauntlets, Rouse and his partners wanted to give the country an alternate example of how the races could live and work together. It was an admirable, and daring, dream, given the fact that most real estate leaders overtly segregated their developments under the belief that it helped sales. This dream of racial harmony gives Columbias much of its historical shine.

Rouse’s basic design was to have 100,000 or so people live in nine villages and a town center, in this case a regional shopping mall. Mixed in would be parks, schools, interfaith centers, offices, industry, hotels and other accouterments, like the 17,000 seat, open-air, Merriweather Post Pavilion. The design was largely realized, an amazing thing, because usually the marketplace forces developers to alter their designs over time. Roughly a third of the land was dedicated to what in developers lingo is known as “open space,” which gives Columbia its ambiance of greenness and nature. As we know now, this is probably the most environmentally destructive way to build. It chews up more land, and the greenery left over isn’t suited to real wild life. Instead, it consumes fertilizers which find their way into the water sources. But at the time, it was seen as saving the land, or even improving on it.

The physical design of Columbia is mirrored in its organizational structure. At the top is the Columbia Association, a mammoth homeowners association with a $33 million budget. Like other homeowner associations, it takes care of the open space, runs the recreation centers and, through its village appendages, determines what paint colors are allowed on houses and other aesthetic guidelines. It is controlled by a ten-member council, each of which is elected by the villages and town center property owners. It is, in reality, a private government. To fund the Columbia Association and the village associations, residents pay an extra assessment based on property values. On a $200,000 house, this amounts to $750 a year.

The village system that is at the heart of Columbias physical and organization design has been successful in many respects. If Columbia did not help save the center city, it did construct a more practical and more hassle-free suburbia. True, people don’t walk as much as planned, and major mass transit never materialized, although there is a minimal bus service. You still drive to the supermarket. But the drive to the village shopping center is shorter and less confusing.

“I love Columbia, because I hardly ever have to leave the town,” said a school teacher I interviewed, who lived in a set of lower-priced condominiums. She spoke from the door of her home, which faced a tiny courtyard with three other front doors. These in turn, faced a larger courtyard, all of which was invisible from the street.

“Everything I need is right here. With the village centers, I can go over the Wilde Lakes to get fresh fish. Next door, I can get fresh produce. If I want to buy clothes or do more serious shipping, I can go to the mall. I used to live in Rockville, and it would spend all Saturday morning driving miles from this place to that to get my errands done.”

The design of these village centers vary, but usually their backs face the road and storefronts are relatively concealed. At the Wilde Lake Village center, for example, the entire complex faces inward, like a mini-version of the Pentagon. Even after driving into the parking lot, I could not see the supermarket and collection of small stores around a courtyard that form the nucleus of the center. This design has its charm, in that only people who live in the village know its there. But it also makes it very difficult for the centers to succeed financially. Although I was told it was one of the more successful centers, it was relatively dead. The courtyard was empty. The bagel shop was pretty busy at lunch, but the wine shop next door was devoid of customers. Its manager said they were barely holding on.

This is one of the most interesting trends at Columbia, the beginnings of its own version of urban decay and inner-city abandonment. The plight of the village centers have been made worse by a recent, and quite ironic development. The Rouse company, which Jim Rouse retired from in 1979, opened last year a huge collection of big box stores on land it owned on both sides of Route 175 leading into Columbia. A mammoth Target, a warehouse style supermarket and other stores are open, and more are being built. They were constructed over the protests of many residents, and it has predictably drained the village centers of much of their business. The Rouse company still owns the village centers, so it is hurting itself to a degree. The company has essentially done to itself what the shopping malls in the 50s and 60s did to innercity downtowns. As a consequence, Columbia is now struggling to rejuvenate its older village centers. One, Harpers Choice, is being renovated. In Oakland Mills, the supermarket is set to close, and plans have not been worked out yet on how to replace it.

That these small commercial centers are struggling is significant, because it shows how large a critical mass is needed now to make it commercially. It also shows how difficult a task New Urbanists have set for themselves by attempting to put small commercial centers within New Urban communities, most of which are far smaller than even one village in Columbia. The New Urban development of Kentlands in nearby Gaithersburg, Md., for example, will have 1,500 homes when completed. By comparison, each villages in Columbia has more than 3,000 homes, while Columbia as a whole will have about 33,000 homes when completed.

Accompanying the decline of some of the village centers, and causing it to a degree, has been an increase in crime and the fear of crime. Much of the subsidized housing was built near the village centers, so poorer residents without cars could walk to the store. But this has also increased crime, or at least the fear of it.

“Just from living here, you know you don’t go to a village center at midnight,” said one man in his twenties, from the doorway of his apartment, who also added that everyone in his apartment put clubs on their cars. “I don’t want to walk down to the village center of Harpers Choice, because of the areas you have to walk through between here and there.”

The increase in crime has some racial overtones, because the subsidized housing are usually located near the village centers, and much of the subsidized housing is African-American. Still, Columbia is a racial paradise compared to the rest of the country, and its residents have had better lives because of it.

Columbia is roughly 20-percent African-American, with a fair sprinkling of other minorities. Its also fairly diverse economically, including some subsidized housing, although the overall household income is high. This racial diversity seems to have been achieved through sheer force of will. Rouse said that Columbia was open to everyone, meant it, and pretty soon word got around.

“The grapevine,” was what brought him to Columbia, said Alan Blondell, a burly black man who says he has lived here since 1974, shortly after he graduated from college. Hair speckled with gray, he sits reading the New York Times sports section in a bagel place at Wilde Lakes village center.

Blondell, as with many whites I spoke with, said his children benefited from growing up here.

“I wanted my son to interact with people of various backgrounds. That’s happened. His best friend is someone who is Jewish and white. They still hang out, even though both are in college, because their roots go deep. It’s fascinating to pull out the photos of the birthday parties, and see the same kids, all different colors, over the years, growing up.”

This diversity of ethnicity is accompanied by a homogeneity in Columbias physical appearance. Your neighbor might have a different skin color than you, but not his house, or at least not one you can’t predict. Judging from a few days spent at Columbia its bedrock values are control and concealment. The placement of signs, the location of shopping centers, the paint colors of houses – are carefully controlled in order to keep back the louder expressions of present day civilization, be it the yellow Midas Muffler sign on the 20-foot-pole, or the neighbors who insist that avocado shutters on a lime-green facade is just fine. What you get in Columbia instead is a reality carefully colored beige.

“People either love or hate it here,” said a plump woman behind the real estate booth in the shopping mall. “Some people dont like the big brother thing, that you can’t paint your house chartreuse, stuff like that. These people live in Ellicot City, (a few miles down the road.) There you find strip development, all the things not allowed here. I love it here though. I drive around other places and think, ‘How could they allow that pink door on that white house?'”

Homes too, in Columbia, might be said to be icons, revealing nothing of their inner identity. A visitor on the street sees only a generic assembly of house-like components: lawn, shrubbery, driveway, shutters. Weird paint colors, bird baths on the lawn, and apparently even lavish shrubbery or gardens are prohibited. Practically the only accessory permitted to this minimalist fashion style are basketball goals, which stand out sharply as the only addition to the generic landscape. Although even these, have to be the approved style and form. Even religion has a generic feel to it at Columbia. When developing Columbia, Rouse set aside slots for Interfaith Centers, which would house several religions in one building. It was meant to be progressive, and perhaps it is. But the effect is to submerge even God underneath the code of suburbia. All one sees is a bland, square brick building with a utilitarian sign saying “Interfaith Center.” Barbara Kellner, who is kind of the informal historian at the Columbia Association, tells the story of going to a crafts fair recently and buying a contemporary metal sculpture. She decided to place in her front yard.

“You know, I like to think my taste is pretty good,” she said. “But I had to admit, there wasn’t anything conceptually different in my sculpture and a white plastic bird bath, which is not permitted.”

So did she rip out the sculpture?

“No, I’m going to wait until they tell me to,” said the woman who is employed by the association that enforces such rules. “I can still put it in my backyard if I want.”

Such codes are more possible legally through a private homeowners association. Nevertheless, municipalities are beginning to have similar, if less drastic, rules. In urban areas, the stated rationale is often historic preservation. In more suburban areas, the logic is preserving property values. In each case, this kind of fastidious attention to detail rules out the ebb and flow of neighborhoods over time that make them interesting. Levittown, for example, is such an interesting place now because the homeowners were allowed to morph their houses into other forms with relative impunity. In the older neighborhood I live in, part of its charm comes from the variety of housing types built over the last 100 years. Much of the variety is becoming prohibited now, under the historical zoning that now rules the neighborhood.

Columbia is hardly alone in relying on a homeowner association. Such organizations are becoming standard in new subdivisions being built. The increased reliance on them is disturbing. It represents a larger trend of Americans turning away from government and buying an organization that will do the job government was set up for. It’s comparable to the current health care crisis, really, where American society rejected attempts to have a government-managed health care system and instead opted to have for-profit insurance companies and HMOs deciding who gets what care when.

With homeowner associations, residents have chosen an entity with far more power over their lives than a conventional government. And in a way, that’s what they are paying for. They care less about restrictions on themselves than on the confidence that their neighbors will be restricted. But there’s an inherent dishonesty about Columbia and most of these privately controlled subdivisions. At Columbia, through the homeowners association, Columbia residents have apparently purchased their way out of the messy affairs of democratic governments, for the safer world of a private community. But as Evan McKenzie wrote in his book “Privatopia,” these homeowners associations ultimately rely on a public institution – the courts – to enforce the deed restrictions that creates them. And as McKenzie explains in detail, the legal validity of such deed restrictions is questionable from a historical perspective. In addition, should Columbia fall on hard times financially, it would ultimately fall back on the public body that created its underlining zoning and legal framework in 1965, Howard County.

So judging on its own terms, Columbia is a success. An interracial cast has bought its homes, the company has made a profit, its lawns are green, its office towers high. But how does Columbia rate as a design model, and how does it compare to that latest New Town movement, New Urbanism.

When it was conceived, Columbia consciously built on the theories of Ebenezer Howard, the garden-city prophet of the late 19th century, who advocated saving cities by moving out of them, and building new, cleaner, safer and more orderly communities in the country. This theory now is seen as flawed, because it is apparent that what destroyed American cities was the exodus from them. Policies were needed to keep people in cities, not encourage them to leave. But in the 1960s, encouraging a more orderly exodus into more egalitarian planned communities was seen as a good thing, said Robert Fishman, author of Bourgeois Utopias and professor of history at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey.

“The whole rhetoric of urbanism, throughout the 60s, carried on the idea that the cities were overcrowded, and that the solution was to get people out of the cities,” Fishman said. “No one really comprehended that cities were so vulnerable, and that decentralization would not return them to a proper density, but would create these vast wastelands right in their center.”

Fishman also noted how similar the New Town movement is to New Urbanism, despite the absence of front porches and neo-Georgetown-style row houses in Columbia.

“It’s uncanny how the rhetoric of New Urbanism resembles that of the New Town movement in the 1960s,” Fishman said. “You could publish what Rouse was saying in the 1960s, and substitute Andres Duany’s name, and it would sound the same.”

Which indeed is true. I dug up an old of Business Week from 1966 with an article on New Towns. Jim Rouse sounds like Andres Duany, from his view of architects to his view of suburbia. Said Rouse:

“Sprawl is inefficient, ugly. Worst of all it is inhuman. . . . .There has been too much emphasis on the role of the architect as an artist, not enough on his role as a social servant. . . The suburb is the most controlled environment you can have. A kid can’t do anything without a parent. How many kids in the massive sprawl around the big city can walk or bike to school, to a concert or music lesson, to a stream to fish, or to the movies?” (This last statement is particularly interesting, given the degree of control present at Columbia.)

It seems clear to me that each of these planning movements, from New Towns to PUDs (Planned Unit Developments) to New Urbanism, are so alluring because they offer an easy way to solve our collective societal difficulties. They can be compared to fad diets. Each propose that we build our way out of our collective problems, from too much sprawl to inner-city decay to environmental destruction. Its the equivalent of eating your way to thinness. It doesn’t work. The only way to better center cities and protect the environment is to do the urban equivalent of exercising more and eating less. That means such things as growth control, a big gas tax, investment in mass transit, prohibitions on parking. So far, there is only one metropolitan area willing to diet: Portland, Oregon. With its urban growth boundary, transit system, prohibitions on store size and other rules and efforts, it’s achieving a meaner and leaner urban form, the equivalent of going to the gym three times a week and avoiding McDonalds.

It’s significant that New Urbanism relies just as heavily on these private associations to create their advertised world of small town life. As with Columbia, there is a rejection of the public sphere in favor of what is believed to be a more manageable and safer private one. With New Urbanism, it is especially hypocritical because the design movement is dedicated to improving public, political life. With their own creations, they reject public life in favor of the private sphere.

What’s also similar about New Urbanism and New Towns is how their development attracted the interest of big corporations. Although Disney has attracted a lot of attention for its New Urban community in Florida, Celebration, Columbia was backed financially by Connecticut Life, which put up $25 million. Gulf Oil backed Reston in Virginia, while General Electric, Goodyear and other corporations backed other New Towns around the country.

From this light, what was new about Columbia was not its design, but its financing. It provided the chance for one company to profit from an entire region of people. Virtually every act a person does at Columbia puts or has put profit into the Rouse corporation, from buying their home, to buying groceries, to shopping at the mall. In scope, it’s a breathtaking proposition. It’s doubtless what attracted Disney to build Celebration. Before, Disney would just capture a family’s money a few times a year, when they visited Disney World or saw a flick. Now, they would have the chance to profit off nearly every act of their lives.

But the amounts of capital needed to finance such towns are also breathtaking. The New Town era stopped around 1970 because the lag time between spending and profiting was too long, and the risks are too great. Disney has taken on Celebration, but it’s less than a third the size of Columbia.

As Columbia faces the challenges of growing up, including unplanned sprawl and urban decay, the wider metropolitan area it inhabits faces even bigger ones. The amalgamation of superhighways, luxury malls and well-manicured subdivisions that makes up the Washington-Baltimore metropolitan area is in its totality a nightmarish experience. The beltway is jammed at almost any hour, and the secondary roads are not much better. The irony is that this is some of the richest sprawl in the country, built to the most demanding of specifications. The roads are wide, the setbacks huge, the landscaping and berms ample. All this richness, however, produces a sprawl which is probably worse than your average metropolis.

Columbia has helped produced this sprawl by having 100,000 people live out in the boonies, rather than within a tighter metropolitan orbit. This in turn, has helped to create the demand for the hyper-controlled environments that is Columbia. In a sense, the development of Columbia exists in a symbiotic relationship with the sprawl around it, creating its own demand. Every time someone drives home from work or goes out on a Saturday morning on a traffic jammed freeway, it produces the urge to return or escape back to a controlled environment, where everything is in place.

But although Columbia is not threatening, neither is it exciting. Back in the mid 1960s, Jane Jacobs, author of the seminal Death and Life of Great American Cities, was asked for her reaction to Columbia and the whole New Town movement. Her comment was pithy. It still seems accurate.

“They were really very nice towns if you were docile and had no plans of your own and did not mind spending your life among others with no plans of their own.”

Ouch.

Surprisingly, some Columbia residents concur. Several people, although they praised Columbia, said they planned to move as soon as their kids were grown. One of those was Alan Blondell, the African-American executive.

“Now that my kids are of age, I don’t necessarily want to continue living here. I could see myself moving back to a big city, where there’s a real ethnic diversity and a lot of energy. Columbia does not have the kind of vibrancy from an ethnic viewpoint that a city does.”

Blondell said if the urban neighborhoods where he had grown up had offered a better place to raise a family in decades past, he might have never made the trek out to suburbia.

Said Blondell, “If the city had had good schools, and other stuff that Columbia offered, I might have stayed in the city.”

The Demolition Man

by Alex Marshall
This article first appeared in Metropolis
MAY 1995

Metropolis writer Alex Marshall spoke to Andres Duany about his role in the controversial plan to bulldoze East Ocean View in Norfolk. At the time of the interview, the city had bought few houses and only a small amount of demolition had taken place. Planning officials gave Duany wide latitude in recommencling whether some homes or areas should be saved from demolition. For now, the bulldozers have been idled by a commission that ruled that the housing authority offered a property owner just half of what his property was worth. The authority is appealing, but if the ruling stands, it will drive up the cost of the project to the point that the development would have to proceed in stages, if at all.

METROPOLIS: You seem to be in the position of Baron Haussmann, who built his grand boulevards through the neighborhoods of nineteenth-century Paris. People are saying, “We love your ideas, but we don’t want our houses torn down.” What responsibility do you have to the people who now live in East Ocean View?

DUANY: I think it’s the ancient [question of the needs of the] individual versus the community. You have to find where to draw that line. And it’s very, very difficult to draw it. In this case, that work has been done. The Norfolk city council has made the decision and everybody is out.

METROPOLIS: The residents aren’t actually out yet.

DUANY: Well, the vote has taken place. Now we can see what the best community plan is and see who can stay and who cannot stay.

METROPOLIS: If your design gets built, are you concerned that your kind of urbanism will be less authentic than what exists there now?

DUANY: The neighborhood will still be mixed in income, but exactly the other way. Now it’s 95 percent rental and five percent owner. Under the new plan, it’s going to flip to be 80 percent owner and 20 percent rental. The scale will be healthier. Remember the statement that poverty does not cause crime. Poverty in concentration causes crime.

METROPOLIS: New Urbanism was founded in part as a reaction against urban renewal. Now you are participating in an urban renewal project.

DUANY: There’s a big difference between the neighborhoods that were wiped out in the 1950s, which were little Georgetowns, with darling houses and first-rate urbanism, and this stuff [the homes in East Ocean View], which is extremely exploitative. Even if I were most benevolent and broad-minded, I could save only 10 percent of the buildings. It’s not like [how it used to be done], where there were great places that were just misunderstood and demolished.

METROPOLIS: Do you ever wake up in a cold sweat at night and say, wait a minute, I’m involved in an urban renewal project?

DUANY: Well, I’ve never been involved in the side that causes demolition. I’ve always been on the repair side. I’ve actually resigned from projects because of not wanting to be involved in demolitions. I’ve been to charrettes in which contracts were signed and I just walked out the first day.

METROPOLIS: Where did this happen?

DUANY: In Houston, in an old black neighborhood. Actually, I quit because there was a very nice apartment building and some very nice 1940s housing. It was a total slum. But it was so beautifully designed that I thought it was of architectural value. Basically, at the end of the first day, I said, “Either you trust me to decide what stays and what goes, or you don’t.” And I walked. I was on the airplane the same night. But I’m in a very privileged position, because I have more work than I can handle. Most planners can’t do that. They have to eat.

METROPOLIS: Is it bad for your practice to be involved in a project that forces people out of their homes, even if you are doing so for the sake of better architectural quality?

DUANY: I suppose it is, yes. But it’s easy for me to say, “I didn’t do it.” The whole thing has been made so easy for me. I’ve been protected from this beautifully. Because [the city council made the decision] before I got here.

METROPOLIS: But you do have some misgivings about it?

DUANY: Well, I’d rather it wasn’t the case, I must say. But on the other hand, affordable housing is not what cities need. Because it doesn’t pay taxes. It bankrupts cities. That’s the problem with Philadelphia right now. The whole trick here is to bring the middle class back to the city. The whole challenge is getting middle-class people to come in and live with lower-income people.

METROPOLIS: Is it possible to do some selective demolition and gradually bring the neighborhood up?

DUANY: I think the political reality was “Where do you draw the line?” Because all the people have terrific rights. Basically, [the planners] decided that if we’re unfair, we’re unfair to everybody. And that’s a form of fairness.

Eurosprawl

METROPOLIS MAGAZINE
JANUARY/FEBRUARY ISSUE, 1995
BY ALEX MARSHALL

[Editor’s note: This version of the article “Eurosprawl” is slightly different than what ran in Metropolis Magazine in January 1995.]

The cheese selection was enormous. Giant wheels of Gruyere, tiny pucks of Chevre and every other sized cheese in between were stacked on refrigerated shelves that ran half the width of the store. The wine, separated by region of course, took up one-and-a-half aisles. This nod to French cuisine in this discount supermarket the size of a football field was one of the few indications you were in Lyon, France, and not say, Connecticut.

The supermarket anchors the Auchan mall, a low-slung rectangular concrete box that sits off the A43 freeway heading into Lyon. It’s a typical mall in most respects, surrounded by parking lots and various European mega-stores like Toys R Us and Ikea.

Nicole Depardon, Veronique Tassa and her mother Michelle, ages 35, 33, and 56, come to Auchan about twice a month. On this sunny weekday, the three women sit on a backless bench in the mall’s low-ceilinged central hallway. While the three women chat, the three toddlers with them each sit in the top drawer of a shopping cart, legs dangling, munching French fries.

“We love it here,” says Depardon. “It has everything we need under one roof. The prices are low.”

“And you’ve got free parking,” Veronique Tassa says.

On another mall bench sit Catterine Christine, 21, and Castaldi Bruno, 28. They are munching pizza from cardboard boxes held in their lap. The two behave exactly like the classic inhabitant of an American suburban office park. They not only come to the mall for lunch, but they drive here as well. The two make the 10-km trek in Bruno’s Citroen “almost every day,” they say cheerfully.

“We come here to eat, to look at the shops, it’s relaxing,” Bruno says.

About midway in the mall sits, Jaque Martin, a balding man in his 50s. Martin is at a bar called “L’Absinthe.” It is essentially a mall version of a sidewalk cafe, with customers sitting at small chairs and round cafe tables pushed out into the mall aisle. Matin is reading the morning paper, “Lyon Matin.”

“I come here about once a week to shop, and to relax,” Martin says.

These mall dwellers have the same relationship with the center city of Lyon that most Americans have with theirs – they don’t go there. None of these people frequent the peninsula of ornate buildings laced with expensive shops and museums five miles up the highway, much less live there.

“We never go to the center,” says Depardon. “It’s another world.” “It’s too difficult to park,” says Veronique. “We only go to the center when work requires it,” Bruno says. “Or maybe once in a while to stroll. About two or three times a year.” “I go less and less,” Martin says of the place where he was born and raised. “The traffic is too bad.”

Americans have long idealized European cities. But it’s taken on a new twist since World War II when the form and character of our metropolitan areas began changing so dramatically. Like workers in the field dreaming of the next life, Americans, harried on the freeways or sick of the mall have held a soothing pie-in-the-sky vision of places without the troubles and tribulations of our cities. Europe, most people believe, doesn’t have suburban sprawl, it doesn’t have vacuous shopping centers, it doesn’t have crime- and poverty-ridden inner cities, it doesn’t have the isolation of home, work, play and social life that seems to define American life. Architects and urban-planners have egged the masses on in this veneration. Like a parent lecturing their children about the perfect kid next door, virtually every book on the ills of American suburbia is sprinkled with asides about how Europeans still care about community, still value public spaces, still value lives built around the rhythms of a street built as much for feet as for tires.

Well they don’t. At least not as much as we think.

I must confess that I too, held such a mytholized image. As a reporter for the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk and Virginia Beach, I’ve made a living out of covering one of the biggest stretches of suburban sprawl on the East Coast. I had become an expert on the vagaries of shopping malls and the subcultures of the cul-de-sac. But I lived in one of the few remaining urban neighborhoods in Norfolk not leveled in urban renewal. There, I dreamed of a better way that I believed still existed on the opposite shores of the Atlantic.

What I found was that the Europe we see on the postcards, the shop-lined streets we pay to stroll on, is no longer the real Europe. It is Europe in a box, kept there to remind the natives of their pasts, to look pretty, to reap tourism dollars, while the life of the city goes on outside it. The real Europe is this Auchan mall, its nearby business parks and homes. The economic engines of the city are here, the commercial centers, the principal residential areas.

Viewed from an ocean away, European center cities look great. They have full shopping streets, functioning subways and bus systems, fewer muggers and murderers. And it’s true their problems still do not match those of American cities. Nor has the physical or spiritual distance between the center cities and the suburbs lengthened as much as in the States. But when cities in Europe are examined closely, you find, once you veer from the guidebook recommended streets, neighborhoods falling into disrepair and the city oozing outward in great quantities in a form that can only be called suburban.

The center cities that offer an opposite lifestyle are now isolated pockets of urbanism increasingly inhabited only by a marginal bunch of oddballs who hanker to such an existence or those who have no other choice – artists, a few rich people, students, junkies, immigrants, poor people. The rest of Europe is going for what Americans go for – the biggest house or apartment, as far away from anyone else as possible.

Eurosprawl takes many forms. It can be the unplanned bag of building blocks that ring Italian cities, or the well mapped out hierarchy of apartments, offices, train lines and bike paths in Scandinavia. In can be the La-Defense style mass of plazas and office buildings courtesy of central French planning, or the battalions of tall tower apartment buildings that guard the outposts of virtually every European city. But there are some common themes. Malls are one. They are the lingua franca of European shopping. Mainly it is separating living from shopping, working or virtually anything else – the very definition of suburbia.

As the European middle class discovers the suburbs, their center cities are quietly slipping into an American style decay. Their tax bases are weakening, their crime and unemployment rates rising, their populations shrinking.

Lyon is a good example of the real Europe. The second largest city in France, Lyon is a go-getter, something of an Atlanta or Houston in personality, (if Atlanta or Houston had 2,000 years of history.) It is ambitious and insecure at the same time, always looking for ways to point how it’s better than Paris. The city has drawn into its orbit various European headquarters, including Euronews, (Europe’s answer to CNN,) and Ikea’s European distribution center. The TGV high-speed rail line from Paris to Lyon is now more than a decade old, and the city opened this summer, with great fanfare, a gulled-winged high speed train station at the city’s Satolas airport, designed by Catalan architect Santiago Calatrava. It’s the first combination air and high-speed rail center in Europe.

It’s center city reminded me of a mini-Paris. The historic section is mostly located on a long peninsula of land which has been carved into streets and parks, with rows of Beaux-art style apartments buildings. Seine-like bridges, complete with walkways underneath by the river, stretch across the water to the medieval sections of the city on the left bank. As in Paris, people talk of the right and left banks. One could spend a few weeks in this area, strolling its shopping streets, visiting museums, eating at its fine restaurants, quite content you were seeing Lyon.

But the region’s bustling economic activity virtually all takes place outside the historic city, or outside any area that could be called urban. Many company headquarters and important consulting firms are located in the city’s Part-Dieu, a La-Defense style collection of office buildings and a mall set on a sweeping concrete plaza, surrounded by suburban style boulevards and parking garages, and connected to the metro line. Others are in office parks like Porte Sud, Porte Du Rhone and Porte Des Alpes that are perched around the city’s freeway system. The center city is ringed with shopping malls – “hypermarches.”

Population figures give some ideas of the limits of urbanity. The Lyon metropolitan area has 2.5 million people. A smaller political entity called Greater Lyon has 1.2 million. The city proper has 420,000. Of these, only about 150,000 live in the urban areas of the center city. So of the region’s 2.5 million, less than 10 percent live in the urban core. Of the other 90 percent, only a fraction live in an urban style.

The city’s economic literature notes that the number of small neighborhood stores, defined as those with less than 400 square meters, has dropped from 14,000 in 1973 to 12,700 in 1990. At the same time, the number of stores with large floor areas tripled, to 448 from 147.

“There has been a general decrease in the number of local neighborhood stores,” the literature states, and “a trend towards large and medium-size supermarkets.”

The smaller towns that ring Lyon, once with independent economies, have blended together to form Greater Lyon. Their old town squares, while not abandoned, have been sucked of much of their life. Townspeople live in apartments or private homes outside the old towns and use the surrounding supermarkets and malls.

One evening I cruised through an exclusive suburb named La Terre Des Lievres set into a hillside 7 kilometers from Lyon. The winding streets wound around in a confusing fashion similar to American suburbs, yet different. The winding streets were narrow and lined with trees that formed a canopy overhead. Lots of speed bumps. Hedges hided tasteful split-level homes set into the hillside. It was deathly quiet. Not a soul in sight. A typically suburb. The neighborhood owned and maintained the streets, just like in some locked-gate Florida enclave. I was surprised a security guard didn’t kick me out. Lawyers, engineers and college professors lived there, said the people on whose doors I knocked.

“We like it here,” said a Madame A. Thomasse, a middle-aged woman wearing a crisp white T-shirt, heavy gold earrings and perfume, who stood in the doorway of her brick home. “If we need to go to the center, we have the metro nearby.”

And the hypermarche is right outside the subdivision entrance.

It’s true that European sprawl is not American sprawl. The European suburb remains tied to the center by some form of mass transit. At least a bus line, and often train, subway and bike lanes as well. This means that the overall stain of suburbia on the landscape is less than in the United States. In Lyon, you can travel from the Baroque City Hall to open farm fields in 15 minutes on a good day.

Europeans pay a price for this. In exchange for tighter more cohesive cities, they in general live in smaller, meaner spaces than Americans. They pay more for their washing machines and appliances, because there is less elbow room for a Wal-mart to elbow its way in beside the nearest freeway. Americans, with their uncontrolled development, have bought themselves the biggest living rooms and cheapest appliances in the world. Of course, they have also bought themselves monochromatic cities so dependent on the car that you might as well put yourself on an iceflow to die should you lose your ability to drive.

In looking for the perfect European urban city, I held high hopes for Northern countries like Holland, Denmark or Sweden. These homogenous, progressive, well-planned societies would certainly achieve the urbanity we in America had lost through our unplanned sprawl.

In some respects, the societies worked as advertised. Around Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Copenhagen, I saw how cities and central governments laid down train, tram and bus lines, and only then allowed developers to move in and build houses. The cities or central governments decided the form, density and style of new neighborhoods. Bike paths were everywhere.

But what they achieved by doing this was a more efficient suburb, not anything remotely urban.

In an area called Lyngby outside Copenhagen, the suburban boulevard I drove on had a wide bike lane, plus bus stops and a nearby train line. But it also had gas stations with slab-like roofs and the attached quickie-mart, McDonald’s with the mile-high sign, and box-in-a-lot office buildings. The neighborhoods off this main highways were cloistered groups of homes, protected by speed bumps and few through-streets.

The “Lyngby Storcenter” was a typical mall except that it was capped with a nine-story hotel. Like other malls in Europe, it seemed curiously retrograde in its design, with low, claustrophobic ceilings, stark lighting and unimaginative storefronts.

Shoppers though loved it. They had the familiar comments.

“I like it here,” said Brigitte Hajmark, 26, a cheerful blond holding a package of “Ricola” tea, who was in the mall atrium. “There are a lot of shops, you have everything here. I never go to the center. You can’t park there.”

Meanwhile, center city Copenhagen struggles with an armload of problems. The main one is that the middle class want to live elsewhere. Jens de Nielsun, assistant urban planning director, was candid about the city’s challenges.

“We have the oldest and the poorest housing,” De Nielsun said. “We have the students, the poor and the unemployed. The suburbs have the rich. We have the problems.”

The city has twice the percentage of unemployed as the rest of the metropolitan area, De Nielsun said. Since 1960, the number of jobs in the city have dropped from 460,000 to 310,000. The population had dropped dramatically, in part because of a planned program to de-densify the center city. In 1950, De Nielsun said, 770,000 of the region’s 1.4 million people lived in Copenhagen proper. Today, the city’s population has dropped to 470,000 while the region’s population has risen to 1.7 million. The city’s mix of old to young is exactly opposite the surrounding suburbs. In Copenhagen, 12 percent of the population are children under 16, and 20 percent of the population are over 66. Outside Copenhagen, 20 percent of the population is under 16, and 12 percent over 66 years of age.

“It is very difficult to make this a family oriented place,” Nielsun said. “It may take 50 years.

All these problems aren’t readily apparent when one is walking Copenhagen’s main shopping street. This all-pedestrian street, which snakes from the 19th century brick City Hall to the opera house, is crammed with tourists and overheated luxury shops. The side streets are full of trendy night clubs and Danish design stores. But outside this immediate ring of hipness one comes to long rows of warehouse-like brick apartment buildings. Despite a century of age, these long buildings with small windows and stark facades have acquired only a smattering of charm with time. They still look like what they first were – worker housing. The best are still working class neighborhoods, not trendy, but getting by. Others have plazas where drunks sleep, and are considered dangerous by the Danish.

This is becoming the standard pattern in many European cities. A city will often have an elegant shopping street that tourists visit. Nearby are noted museums, a cathedral. But around these bright lights are marginal neighborhoods that remain invisible to the average visitor.

European policy makers recognize this trend.

“Most of us do not need to be reminded again that our cities are in disarray,” said commissioning editor Suzanne Keatinge, in the introduction to the first issue of European Urban Management, published out of London in 1994. “We do not need more pages about urban blight, poor housing, poor education, inadequate health services, security and transport systems and a thousand-and-one other issues.”

This kind of talk is quite a contrast to the starry eyed wonder that many Americans view European cities. The standard diagnosis within Europe, says Catherine Stevens, executive director of Eurocities in Brussels, (European Association of Metropolitan Cities), is that Europeans cities could become as diseased as American cities if action is not taken.

Frankly, I doubt that. For many reasons European cities are unlikely to drop as hard or as far as American central cities. Super high gas taxes, bigger investment in mass transit, greater historical loyalty to the center, more tourism dollars per square foot and societies kept more united by stronger social systems are a few of the reasons. But they are heading in the same direction. A July 30 Economist article stated that Europe was on the edge of acquiring an American-style “underclass.” It noted that neighborhoods in cities like Frankfurt are now being judged as “dangerous” and places to avoid. The increase in immigrants and the rise in unemployment are polarizing many cities. A 20ish Copenhagener told me he loved the central city now but when he married, he expected to move out because he didn’t want his children going to schools where classes would have so many children from North Africa.

Despite the burden they bring in social services, it seems likely that immigrants are for the moment the last true urbanists, and the likely saviors of city of retaining any role other than that of specialized cultural and ceremonial centers. As in New York and other American cities, immigrants are often the last people who actually inhabit city neighborhoods, shop and work in the stores, and live there with their families.

I saw this in particularly close detail in La Chasse, a working-class neighborhood in Brussels. I had an apartment there, which served as a home base during my travels in Europe. These streets, which had lovely Art Nouveau apartments, were gradually being taken over by North Africans. The neighborhood was a short walk from the headquarters of the European Commission. But most of the Eurocrats chose to live outside Brussels, I was told. In La Chasse, the North Africans were gradually taking over the small grocery stores and cafes. In these places, they drank the good Belgium beer, but also served mint tea out of silver pots. Some of the bars retained a loyal Belgian clientele. But these folk, who worked with their hands in various trades, told me they were in effect the last of a breed. Most of their friends and family who could, they said, were moving to the suburbs.

Of course, the balance of urban to suburban changes from place to place. A key to the more urban metropolitan areas, I believe, is that they retain more manufacturing and dirty-hands type of industry within the central city. Despite its present status of an in-city, the central city of Barcelona is still a living, working city. The city’s lovely Eixample, the soft-cornered grid of largely Art Nouveau buildings laid out in the 19th and early 20th centuries, remains studded with small machine shops and purveyors of industrial goods. Next to a trendy, designer-conscious bar, you’ll find a welding shop. Even the city’s gothic quarter, which in other cities have become solely tourism-based, is a working-class neighborhood with small stores and businesses.

Walking on the western side of the Eixample off the Granvia de les Corts Catalanes, I entered what I thought might be a central courtyard inside a city block. Instead, I found myself in the middle of a printing factory. “Fotolitografia Juan Barguno Fotograbado” was etched in scrolly letters on smoked glass on an inner doorway. The factory was a typical Barcelona enterprise, family owned and in the same spot since 1925. The company had 36 workers, and a press that ran 24 hours a day. As I stood there, small forklifts carried stacks of materials on pallets ready for shipment on heavy trucks. All this was invisible from the street, where one saw only a lovely line of 19th century apartments.

The director, Ramon Barguno Bassols, a 3rd generation family member, though, gave me a reality check. Far from extolling the merits of running a center city factory, he told me they were planning to move out of town as soon as the economy improved. The city restricted the hours he could use his trucks, for example, and make it difficult for him to expand.

“A city is no place for a factory,” Barguno said. “It’s a place for offices, museums and residences. Factories should be in an industrial park.”

And even in Barcelona, it was easy to find people who dreamed of a life outside town, or already lived it.

Jose Maria Raig, 24, a stockbroker, works in a firm on the avenue “Diagonal”, one of Barcelona’s principal thoroughfares. He lives with his parents but when he marries he would like to move to the suburbs.

“I have a brother who lives in a smaller town with his wife and two children,” outside Barcelona, said Maria, who sat behind a desk wearing a short sleeve shirt with no tie. Down the hall, other men stood in a big room and shouted as stock prices flashed on a screen on one wall. “Life is better there. There are supermarkets, sporting centers, movie theaters, everything that before was only in the center. There are even discotecs. People like to live outside the center city. There is less noise, less pollution and bigger apartments. An apartment here can cost $200,000 to $250,000. Further out, you can buy a home for that.”

But it’s true that in Barcelona, I met more average people who lived in the center and intended to stay there.

“It’s a city of the middle class,” said Hermenegild Cabamillo, 34, a wholesale pastry seller, who lived with his wife and two children in an apartment in the Eixample.

“Even if you don’t have a lot of money, you can go to the beach or the park. There is the metro and the bus. You can get around. There isn’t a lot of crime.”

Jaume Moreno, the city’s urban affairs publicist, insisted the populace retained “a Mediterranean lifestyle” which still included habits like daily shopping and the mixing of work, home, commerce and play. Even so, Moreno still acknowledged that Barcelona has lost 150,000 people in the last decade. The Barcelona region now stands at 3 million, the city proper 1.6 million.

Whether the suburbanizing of Europe has reached some sort of plateau is difficult to predict. What seems likely is that cities will be less places to raise families and more places for a limited, rarefied set of population and activities. High commerce, art, intellectual trades will happen in them. Cities will likely always retain their role as the ceremonial centers of their cultures, even if they are no longer economic and living centers. It counts for something that, after decades of consciously trying to de-centralize and de-urbanize their cities, all the urban planners of the cities I visited had decidedly urban visions for their cities and regions.

Michel Ide, director of public spaces in Lyon’s urban planning department, basically dismissed the region’s tall towers, the Part-Dieu office district, the malls, as very large mistakes.

“There will be no more malls,” said Ide, with a wave of his hand. Instead of malls, Lyon is focusing on rejuvenating public spaces. Like Barcelona, Lyon is sprinkling statues and parks in neighborhoods. Again like Barcelona, Lyon deserves credit for spending money not only on the fancy tourist areas but on neighborhoods of tall towers and other unsexy spots where few people visit.

Copenhagen has plans to keep its neighborhood shopping streets, which cut through a variety of areas around the city, still functioning. Rather than prohibit malls, they are trying to funnel them onto or besides traditional shopping streets. It also has a multi-million dollar plan to renovate a seedy, but funky area of the city behind the train station called Vesterbrogade. The historic facades of the buildings will be kept, while the interiors will be gutted and renovated. In the past, the director said, the city would simply demolish such old neighborhoods, and rebuild at much lower densities.

Barcelona has a variety of ambitious, far-reaching plans. Most revolve around making the city more hospitable to families, and keeping jobs and industries sprinkled throughout the city. In its Gothic quarter, the city has selectively blown up blocks of thousand-year old buildings to create new public squares and open up the network of tiny dark streets to sunlight. It is a program that might set a preservationists teeth on edge, but it is an admirable example of an effort to keep a historic section of a city livable and not just a museum. It falls within the definition of “constructive urban surgery” advocated by the early 20th century urban theorist, Patrick Geddes. In the Eixample, the city has begun converting the interior of some block to neighborhood parks, which essentially was the original plan of architect Ildefons Cerda i Sunyer, who laid out the Eixample in 1859. In older industrial areas of the city, close to the Olympic village, the city plans to extend streets to reshape street systems back to Cerda’s original soft-cornered grid. All these plans are ambitious and purely urban in their vision.

But some plans may only accentuate a trend for the center cities to become largely ornamental in nature. Lyon illuminates historic buildings, streets and bridges at night with spotlights. It makes the city a wonderful place to stroll. The city is also requiring owners of historic buildings to paint them various soft shades of color, to give the street line a more harmonious feel. These are all very nice programs but there is a sense that as the center city becomes prettier, it becomes less relevant. I wondered, for example, how someone living in these spotlit buildings like all the light outside his windows.

Urbanism means more than just a style of building; it means a style of living. The notion of urbanity, to me at least, means a greater commingling of people and the ideas, activities and emotions that come with them. It’s implicit in the whole idea of a mixing homes, stores, restaurants, a school and a church in one city block. So far, no one has successfully found a pattern of contemporary development that replaces the street as a common ground for people. The mall is the one attempt. But its private space dedicated to commerce is a long step down from the public realm of the street, as many writers have already commented upon.

Writers like Joel Garreau, of Edge City fame, say suburbs are just an example of cities doing what they always do – forming around the dominant form of transportation. In contemporary times, that’s the car. I agree with Garreau. But even if suburbs are somehow inevitable, that doesn’t diminish their very real drawbacks. Suburbs really do isolate people. A mall is no adequate substitute for a public street, even if people are gathering in the malls. It’s not just nostalgia that has pushed architects like Andres Duany and Peter Calthorpe to fame. People really are searching for someway to make the suburbs human. We may not have found it yet. So far, no on has found a way to replace the public street as a social gathering space. Maybe public squares and meeting places are as necessary to a functioning society as running water and flush toilets. So far, no one has figured out a way to conquer the peculiar economics of suburbia, which, even in Europe, favor the big over the little, the bland over the refined, quantity over quality. The economics of the places produces Wal-marts, McDonalds and IKEA, and not neighborhood hardware store and corner delis. It’s the greatest amount of stuff for the lowest possible price.

European cities are not dead. Even in a worst-case scenario, Europe’s center cities are not going to follow American ones down to the bottom of the behavioral sink of urban ills. But what does seem likely is that a much thinner and more rarefied set of activities will occupy them. The question is how or whether the printing factory should be kept in Barcelona. How or whether should the family that yearns for the cheaper, larger apartment outside town be kept in the center city? Even in Lyon, the center city retained a role as a cultural, social and intellectual capital of the region. Even it is only a pretty place to visit, it gives a nucleus to the region. The tragedy of most American cities is that they cannot fulfill even this limited role. Many central European cities are beginning to occupy a role similar to that of the French quarter in New Orleans. It’s a quaint, much loved district, vibrant on the basis of tourism, inhabited by a few subgroups like gays or yuppies, but otherwise not part of the city’s mainstream economy or life.

In general the health of center cities have become accurate thermometers as to the health of societies as a whole. The pleasures and the pains of urban life revolve around closer proximity to other human beings. A good city brings us corner stores, cafes, art and friendships. A bad city gives us crime, noise and dirt. When people cannot live together under a common social code, when inequities between rich and poor grow, when people rob and murder, the suburbs are more appealing.

Next time you visit Europe walk any classic city, say Copenhagen, Lyon or Barcelona, from the center out. You’ll start in the medieval section, with narrow tiny streets built for the foot. You’ll move into the Renaissance, where the streets widen for carriages and horses. Then you’ll arrive at the 19th and early 20th century, which gives you wide, tree-lined boulevards built for carriages and cars. Then you arrive at the latter half of the 20th century, where the streets. . . fall apart, lose themselves, become patternless. Streets defined cities, and streets, in the urban sense, are no longer being built. Cities may be like cathedrals. They can only be preserved, not expanded. It is possible that the age of streets, and so the age of urbanism, is over.

Alex Marshall examined the suburbs and cities of Western Europe over 10 weeks in the summer of 1994. His research was funded by a fellowship awarded by the German-Marshall Fund of the United States.