Suburbs In Disguise

WHAT IS URBAN?
The word “urban” can be either a pejorative or a compliment, depending on who is using it. In newspapers and magazines, being called urban is usually an insult-code for poor, crime-ridden, and deteriorated. In burgeoning suburbs, it’s common to hear talk about areas that are getting “more urban”-and this doesn’t mean the proliferation of quaint cafes or homes close to the street. Rather, the term is used to describe places where minorities are moving in, affluence is declining, or where crime is on the rise.To others, urban simply means “city-like,” that is, the place where things are happening. In an article I wrote for the newsletter “Edge City” (published by Joel Garreau, author of the 1991 book of the same name) on the suburbanization of Europe, the editor insisted I use the word urban to describe the shopping malls and cul-de-sac subdivisions surrounding Copenhagen. As he explained, one of the central tenets of the “edge city” philosophy is that places like Tysons Corner, outside Washington, D.C., are the new commercial, residential, and retail centers of the country. Therefore, they were urban. Garreau’s team was trying to grab the word and make off with it.To designers, architects, and fans of New Urbanism, “urban” means a way of building towns-or more accurately, subdivisions-that are still centered around walkable streets, which were the norm until the automobile pushed them into outmodedness. These are places where you can walk to a store or a restaurant, or between homes, without being dependent on the car-places that are at least somewhat reminiscent of nineteenth-century cities or suburbs.Maybe it’s the lack of an agreed-upon definition for “urban” that explains the slipperiness of New Urbanism. The word means whatever people want it to mean. A.M

 

A grand fraud is being perpetrated in America. Across the country, developers and planners are selling repackaged subdivisions as “new urban” communities. Billed as the modern equivalent of Charleston, Georgetown, and “Our Town” all rolled into one, these are supposed to be places where people of all backgrounds will be magically freed from their chaotic, car-dependent lifestyles to reunite in corner cafes along civic squares and lead healthy public lives.

Also known as neo-traditionalism, New Urbanism is the much-hyped theory that planners can create cohesive communities by building subdivisions-though that word is never used-that resemble traditional towns or big-city neighborhoods. To do that, streets are laid out in grids (some are modified) without cul-de-sacs, garages are tucked into alleys behind homes positioned close to the street and to each other, housing types and prices are varied, and street-level retail turns up in or near residential neighborhoods. At Kentlands, a planned community in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., this strategy is meant to create what the sales brochure calls “the old town charm of Georgetown and Annapolis… in western Gaithersburg.”

It sounds good. But while the virtues of the traditional city or town may be desirable, they cannot be replicated on empty land at the edge of town, where most of these developments are being built. This is not a matter of New Urbanism being right or wrong, but of understanding what is possible and what is not. Cities, even when drawn by a single hand-like Washington or Paris-take shape in the context of larger economic and social forces. Reproducing traditional cities, or saving the ones we have, would require re-creating the conditions that produced them. This may or may not be desirable; in any case, it is a sociological question with real economic consequences, a question that New Urbanism avoids.

New Urbanism is fast becoming the new standard for suburban development. Zoning boards and city councils around the country are demanding that new subdivisions conform to this idea, or at least to some of its superficial aspects. An avalanche of magazine and newspaper articles, books, and television shows preach that New Urbanism will save us from our suburban sins. But these new subdivisions cannot cure the ills of sprawl. They are sprawl.

A WALK AROUND KENTLANDS
Montgomery County, Maryland, is a clean, rich, and antiseptic domain similar to other suburban counties around Washington, D.C. Its boulevards are sweeping, and the newer ones are kept clean of commercial development. Strangely shaped office buildings tower over manicured lawns. A health club visible from Interstate 270 resembles a Las Vegas casino, with cantilevered floors and plenty of neon and spotlights.

Kentlands grows out of this familiar landscape, wedged between Route 28 and Route 124, former country roads that now bristle with subdivisions, shopping centers, and the like. The Darwinian world of hyper-development is visible along the main roads, where clusters of knee-high paper signs on wooden stakes bloom like wildflowers, entreating drivers to steer their cars into newly built subdivisions: “Fountain Hills,” “Quail Overlook,” “Timberbrook Condos,” “New Models!” “King’s View,” “Prices Starting in the low 200s!”

Kentlands itself takes up 350 acres and will eventually accommodate 1,500 families; close to three-quarters of that number are there now. Still in marketing mode, the development is festooned with builder billboards and small signs directing visitors to the “Upper Lake District.”

Kentlands was designed by Miami-area architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, who have been the central architects and missionaries of the New Urbanist movement. Begun in 1988, Kentlands was one of the first neo-traditionalist developments planned by their firm, known as DPZ, after the completion of the much-written-about Seaside in Florida.

Although the designers faced a distinct set of challenges and restraints here, Kentlands’ layout resembles DPZ’s usual style in the way the streets, homes, and community buildings are placed. Gently skewed residential streets are grouped on each side of a central avenue, Tschiffley Square Road. The streets form an “urban grid” only in a very loose sense; Kentlands turns out to be as confusing as any cul-de-sac subdivision. (A clerk at a gas station near Kentlands identified it as “the place with the confusing streets.”) The residential buildings-a mix of town houses, condominiums, and big, squarish homes-sit close to the street. The Rachel Carson Elementary School lies just inside the main gate. A shopping center, Kentlands Square, is on the other side of the development, while a group of lower priced condos, Beacon Square, occupies its own pocket near it.

Gabrielle Stevens, an environmental scientist, took me on a walk around Kentlands on a chilly spring day. She and her husband live in a much-photographed row of houses on a central square near the old Kentlands farmhouse, now a community center. Originally from Nob Hill in San Francisco, one of the best urban neighborhoods in the U.S., they moved here in 1992. They chose Kentlands rather than Washington’s Georgetown, Adams Morgan, or Dupont Circle, which might have offered an East Coast version of their former home, in order to be near their jobs and to avoid the threat of crime in Washington. And Stevens loved the idea of what Kentlands offered-an urban environment in a natural setting.

But that changed as the reality of Kentlands failed to live up to Stevens’ ideal. She was disappointed when she saw trees pulled down around “Inspiration Lake” at the center of Kentlands, and even more so when she learned that the 500-acre parcel of land adjacent to the development, originally owned by the National Geographic Society, had been sold to developers. (It is scheduled to become a subdivision called Lakelands, with construction beginning as soon as next year.) Stevens admits that sales agents never said her home would be the last built or that she wouldn’t have neighbors sharing her walls, but she complains that her narrow row house now seems dark and lacks privacy. The scale and the density of the place are greater than she imagined. From her back patio, she pointed to a line of fences stretching down the alley. “You see, this is getting into the ghetto-clothesline thing.” Stevens’ complaints are essentially suburban. Kentlands does not give her enough of the isolation, privacy, and illusion of being nestled in nature she left the city for. It is too urban for her.

The people who do love Kentlands feel that way because it is still fundamentally suburban, with just a taste of urban qualities. They like their neighborhood because it is protected from the outside world, sealed off from traffic. It is safe and walkable, the neighbors are nice, and the clubhouse pool is right down the street.

David and Sue Goldberg live a few streets over from Stevens, in a big square brick home on a small lot with little front and back yards. It’s about twice the size-and cost-of Stevens’ town house. The Goldbergs moved here two years ago from a six-bedroom home with a pool on 1.5 acres in a semirural subdivision. By comparison, Kentlands is very urban indeed. The Goldbergs find it safe, social, and pedestrian-friendly. “We made more friends here in two months than we did in the other place in 10 years,” David says. “People here want to be social. And it feels very safe. I walk my dog late at night and don’t give it a second thought.”

Sue Goldberg says she and her husband represent a category of homeowners who “have done the big yard thing and are tired of it.” Neither Stevens nor the Goldbergs sought an actual urban environment, nor did anyone else I met in Kentlands. They did not want outsiders in their neighborhood, nor commerce or traffic. The Goldbergs liked Kentlands’ “urbanism,” but only in comparison to living in a semi-wilderness.

Kentlands makes little sense without understanding suburban development in Montgomery County and elsewhere in the U.S. The essence of post-World War II development patterns is the old country road, from which sprout subdivisions and shopping centers. Tracts of housing, and eventually malls and office towers, are laid out as appendages to the main road, which quickly becomes congested and swells from two lanes to four and often eight lanes. This pattern of development did not emerge from the edicts of Le Corbusier or Frank Lloyd Wright; it happens because it suits a transportation system based around the car. Corbu, Wright, and the other anti-urbanists did not cause suburbia. They merely predicted it.

Kentlands does not really change this suburban pattern. Like many other subdivisions, it sits on an amoeba-shaped parcel of former farmland and has only one or two principal entrances. Its average density-a little over four homes to an acre-is only slightly higher than most suburbs. And Kentlands conforms to the suburban pattern of isolation; it holds itself apart from the commercial services along nearby Great Seneca Highway.

Neo-traditional planners claim that these developments are significantly more “environmental”-that they consume less land and have a lighter impact on their site-than conventional suburbs. In fact, Kentlands’ environmental track record is only marginally better than the suburbs that surround it, although its plan responds to the site’s features more than most. Common open space takes up some 50 acres, about a sixth of the site, and is laced with wetlands. Preservation of these areas helps to maintain natural drainage patterns and what remains of the site’s animal and plant species. But to assess the real impact, it helps to look at what was there before. Kentlands was built on what had been part of a wildlife refuge established by the subdivision’s namesake, Otis Beall Kent. (The refuge also extended into the former National Geographic property.)

When planners talk about how New Urbanism contributes to environmental sustainability, they are also referring to the reduced dependence on the car that the density of these developments supposedly makes possible. Just like residents of “real” urban neighborhoods, people in developments like Kentlands are theoretically able to walk to the store, to their friends’ homes, to the community center. Though studies about how much driving is actually taking place have not been conducted, DPZ architect Mike Watkins, who works on-site at Kentlands, offers his own informal example. “Kids walk to school here,” he says. “The state of Maryland spends $400 per year per student on busing; 100 kids walking to school here equals $40,000-which could hire two teachers.” He says high school kids without cars can work at the shopping center, but acknowledges they often need to drive to other activities in the Gaithersburg area. People might walk within their neighborhoods, but the common rhythms of suburbia-the cycle of extensive automobile use and miles of development on the fringe of town-are still in place.

Like many other residential developments, Kentlands maintains a homeowners’ association whose rules control the look of the place, and to some extent the behavior that takes place there. A new home buyer automatically becomes a dues-paying member of the association and agrees to abide by certain restrictions, to which only the association can grant exceptions. This classic tool of suburbia provides a level of control often unavailable to local governments. Kentlands’ group is called the Citizens Assembly, as if the private association were the equivalent of a New England town meeting.

Richard Arkin, chairman of the association and a former planning commission chairman in the neighboring town of Rockville, acknowledges that Kentlands represents “New Suburbanism” more than New Urbanism. It’s still a big improvement, he thinks. “It’s a much more efficient use of land than traditional development,” Arkin says. “But Kentlands has two gaps: It’s not in the city, and it does not have a commercial core at its heart. I think the jury is still out. It’s a work in progress.”

New Urbanism does have some subtlety and grace, mainly because it was conceived and promulgated by architects, not bureaucrats or developers lacking aesthetic vision. But architects have their own myopia. Their focus on building can let them forget, or not realize, the larger forces around their designs, such as the region’s transit system and economy.

Cities are primarily products of transportation systems, not the other way around. The older sections of European cities and places like New York and Boston were scaled to people getting around on horse and by foot. The classic nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century neighborhoods many people love were created by the extension of streetcar lines. Levittown was a product of cars and highways. And the mega-malls and subdivisions that surround Washington grew from the highway system that laces the region. New Urbanists propose building what are essentially streetcar suburbs, without the transportation systems that originally supported those kinds of neighborhoods. This is a fruitless exercise. The result, at best, is a place that looks like Georgetown but functions like any other subdivision built off the Beltway.

SUBURBAN-STYLE DIVERSITY
It’s easy to miss a simple fact about Kentlands: This place is very, very exclusive. New single-family homes start at $220,000, although most cost at least $100,000 more than that, and some run to $1 million. Even in high-cost Washington, this is upscale, and Kentlands has attracted the white upper-middle-class cream of the Washington metro crop. The residents I met were classic Washington professionals: lawyers, consultants, lobbyists, and government officials. While income diversity is a banner of New Urbanism, the reality falls short of the rhetoric. Kentlands mixes houses of varied prices in closer proximity than conventional subdivisions, but this tends to mean a company president living next to a lawyer, not a carpenter or teacher.

Scott and Wanda Elkind, both attorneys, live in a $175,000 third-floor condominium near some row houses and single-family homes. Homes in their half of Kentlands top out at $500,000, rather than the $1 million over on Stevens’ side. Out walking their dogs one afternoon, the Elkinds tell me what life is like at the low end of the market. “We’re on the wrong side of the tracks here, and we feel it,” Scott says. “There is a little bit of looking down the nose from the people in the big houses over there.”

“It was quite a shock at first,” Wanda adds. “People were cold. I wanted to leave. We’re from New York, with old neighborhoods where people visit and are nice to strangers. People here walk on the other side of the street, and when you say hello, they look at you like, ‘Why are you talking to me?’ ”

Still, Kentlands is successful if you use the most concrete indicator: People are willing to pay a premium to live here. At least for now, Kentlands is selling something people want.

“I think what’s different about this place is that we’re a bunch of yuppies who were fooled into paying top dollar,” says Mike Curan, a cardiologist with the Navy. “I paid $226,000 for my town house. In other suburbs around here, I could have gotten the same home for $175,000.” But Curan isn’t unhappy. “The kind of exclusiveness they have set up for the community, whether virtual or real, helps keep it desirable,” he says. “I know this is a $180,000 property. But I think it’s going to hold its value. This place might be the Chevy Chase or Potomac of the future,” he says, referring to two ritzy Washington suburbs. What higher praise is there?

URBANISM VERSUS NEW URBANISM
I live in an urban neighborhood-at least according to how the term is commonly used among architects. Ghent is a streetcar suburb of Norfolk, Virginia, laid out and developed in the late nineteenth century. Although once considered suburban, it is “urban” now because it still has street-level retail and is oriented toward people on foot, rather than in cars. My home is a three-story town house, built at the turn of the century on a 17-foot-wide lot. On the same block is a Tara-like mansion with white columns, owned by a rich doctor, and a multistory apartment building inhabited by a mixture of students and twentysomethings.

At first glance, a block in Ghent is similar to one in Kentlands because of the housing styles and small setbacks. But my neighborhood is different. It is not an appendage to a major highway. Ghent is part of a larger urban fabric, a small section of a larger network of streets and avenues. Except where urban renewal projects cleared things away, there are no “collector streets” or “major arterials” near my home. More important, Ghent has 10,000 homes on 600 acres, according to the 1990 census, or almost 17 homes to an acre. This is roughly four times the ratio at Kentlands. (And Ghent is far less dense than New York’s Greenwich Village or North Boston, which have some 100 homes to an acre.) The large number of people who live here makes the neighborhood work; without them, Colley Avenue, the shopping street a few blocks away, would not have enough walk-in traffic. But they also generate the energy that makes living in an urban neighborhood both a pleasure and a pain.

COMMERCE AND KENTLANDS
The failure of developments like Kentlands to stimulate commerce within their boundaries is where the inherent flaws of New Urbanism surface. The Kentlands Shopping Center, which is built in one corner of the development, is anchored by a Kmart, a supermarket, a discount home and hardware store, and a Crown Books superstore. This is a typical strip mall; the only difference is that the stores have been dressed up with brick facades and white Jeffersonian columns.

This is another example of the deceptive marketing spin surrounding New Urbanism. Dressing up a Kmart with white columns is on a par with pushing brick suburban houses up to the street’s edge and pretending it’s Georgetown, or calling a homeowners’ association a Citizens Assembly. It’s also akin to naming Kentlands’ elementary school after Rachel Carson (whose 1962 book, Silent Spring, helped kindle the American environmental movement) when the development has supplanted farmland, contributing to pollution of the rivers and the outward spiral of destructive sprawl.

The shopping center lies just off Great Seneca Highway, which funnels customers right into its parking lots. This major road, and the interstate highway system it drains, created Kentlands’ retail hub, just as a streetcar line created the shopping street in my nineteenth-century neighborhood. And the highway system made possible the consolidation of many-layered distribution systems into single-point warehouse stores-Circuit City, Kmart, Sam’s Club.

Commerce is an integral part of urban neighborhoods; in that sense, to be truly urban, Kentlands would have had to have been built around Route 28, as my neighborhood was around Colley Avenue. Even there, street-level retail is just barely hanging on. The trendy restaurants, boutiques, and art-house movie theater have survived by carving out markets somewhat safe from the tentacles of the larger suburban economy. I can eat a meal, see a movie, or buy an expensive coffeepot on Colley Avenue. But I can’t buy underwear or a television set there. To do that, I have to drive 10 miles to the mall and the warehouse stores in the middle of the metropolitan sprawl.

“Midtown,” the Main Street-like shopping area that residents could walk to in Kentlands’ original plan, has thus far failed to materialize. No developers bought into the original plan, and several revised projects have been suggested, including a Wal-Mart and a retail-and-movie complex. A charrette conducted by DPZ in March yielded a new plan for a street filled with low-rise buildings featuring ground-floor retail space and housing upstairs. Large parking lots would be tucked in back, so that the stores would essentially face two directions. In concept, it is similar to Mizner Park in Boca Raton, or the Reston Town Center near Washington-quasi-downtowns for suburban developments built in the last 10 years. If Midtown gets off the ground, it may be a good example of how to blend commerce into low-density development. The persistent dilemma is how to make such a shopping center accessible to neighborhood walkers, while also capturing the car traffic from surrounding highways that’s necessary for the businesses to survive.

NAMING NAMES AND MAKING TOUGH CHOICES
New Urbanism is diverting society from dealing with pressing problems. The issues of whether and how to limit new building on farmland, how to expand mass transit to significantly cut down on car use, and how to work towards cleaner air, purer water, and energy savings in cities and the suburbs are concealed by this pretense that American society can build its way out of the problems of suburban sprawl. This is partly a problem of language. New Urbanists like to call themselves town planners, referring to developments like Kentlands as towns or villages. But a subdivision sitting off Route 28 is neither a town nor a village.

Truly promoting urbanism would require banning development on farmland, halting construction of highways and interstates, and creating mass transit lines. Peter Calthorpe, the New Urbanist mentioned most frequently after Duany and Plater-Zyberk, addresses these tough choices in his book The Next American Metropolis (Princeton Architectural Press, 1993). Calthorpe calls his strategy “transit oriented development,” because it stipulates that new and infill developments be designed within walking distance of public transportation, which would lead to compact developments throughout the region, arranged along the transit network. But if New Urbanist developments were really transit oriented places like Kentlands would not be built.

There are signs that the emphasis on transit is growing. In Oregon, the state transportation agency recently approved a regional mass-transit line, with planned development around it, as an alternative to a proposed freeway bypass. This took an enormous amount of work by a Portland citizens’ group, and involved tough political work on virtually every level, from federal to local. But it should produce real urbanism, not an ersatz alternative.

New Urbanism means more than houses. That’s what makes the subject so beguiling, confusing, and emotional. Whether homes have front porches has come to be an argument about how best to obtain friendship, love, community, and an end to the fragmentation that characterizes so much of American life. The decay of our cities and the continuing sprawl into the hinterlands has become a metaphor for America’s general trend toward more and shallower, rather than fewer and deeper. In a recent issue of Harper’s, Jonathan Franzen lamented the decline of the novel’s relevance: “The institution of writing and reading serious novels is like a grand old Middle American city gutted and drained by superhighways. Ringing the depressed inner city of serious work are prosperous clonal suburbs of mass entertainments: techno and legal thrillers, novels of sex and vampires, of murder and mysticism.” To me, Kentlands is a “clonal suburb” of Georgetown.

Kentlands is an improvement over conventional suburbia. But its proponents pretend it is something else altogether. As a model of urbanism, it is deceptive. Kentlands is not “Bye-Bye, Suburban Dream,” as Newsweek hailed New Urbanism; it’s a culmination of that dream. What’s unclear is whether New Urbanism is just this decade’s fashion in suburban design, or a step in the important process of beginning to understand how to achieve some sort of real urbanism.

ALEX MARSHALL is a regular contributor to Metropolis. He is a staff writer on urban affairs for the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot.

To find discussion about Kentlands and other new urbanism topics, go to the Congress of New Urbanism Newsgroup: CNU@LSV.UKY.EDU

 

A More Benevolent Sprawl

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

Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream — by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck.

Book review by Alex Marshall

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

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

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

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

Historically, Duany and Plater-Zyberk fit into a long line of sprawl-justifiers, new members of which emerge every 15 or 20 years under the banner of ‘the reinvented suburb.’ In the 1970s and early 1980s, Planned Unit Developments, or PUDs, were the rage. Municipalities around the country approved these assemblages of shopping centers, subdivisions, and commercial parks as antidotes to ‘sprawl.’ In the 1960s, the New Town movement, which produced small cities like Columbia, Maryland, was hailed as a sprawl buster. Jim Rouse, the godfather of Columbia, talked just like Duany when in 1966 he said: ‘Sprawl is inefficient, ugly. Worst of all it is 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.’ Today, Columbia’s swooping curves, separated shopping centers, and big enclosed ‘downtown’ mall are seen as the embodiment of suburbia and sprawl. Will the same be said of New Urban subdivisions in 25 years? I think so.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.”

Seaside At Twenty

BY ALEX MARSHALL
METROPOLIS MAGAZINE, May 2001

The tip of Florida’s panhandle hangs out over the waters of the Gulf of Mexico like ripe fruit on a low-hanging branch, easy pickings. This skinny, 100-mile strip sits directly below Alabama, almost walling it off from the sea. Located in a different time zone, an hour behind the rest of the state, the panhandle has long been popular with vacationers. Nestled in the bosom of the old Confederacy, families from Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana have flocked to the small beach towns here, giving the coast the moniker of “The Redneck Riviera.” With its aqua-green waters and pure white sand, it probably rivals the real Riviera in natural beauty, if not in movie stars.

In 1981, a developer began a new resort community called Seaside. Located about midway between Panama City Beach and Destin, it was part of a new wave of growth that would hit these sandy shores in the next two decades, turning the coast into a long highway of resort sprawl. The Seaside developer was Robert Davis, who had inherited the 80 acres from his grandfather. Designed by Davis and architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, the resort was a modified version of a small town. So startling was its image that it sparked a national movement called New Urbanism.

As Seaside prepared to celebrate its 20th anniversary, I traveled to this celebrated beach community to see what to make of it. I had written, often critically, about its progeny – the scores of “neo-traditional” subdivisions that now clustered around exit ramps on the outskirts of so many cities – but I’d never seen the mother seed. What was I to make of this very small, but very influential place?

I WAS HALFWAY through Seaside before I realized I was in it. The main state road coming from Panama City, 31A, is lined with condominium towers, resort subdivisions, roadside shops and other detritus. Seaside at first appeared to be just one more cluster of development, done in some vaguely historical style. “Damn, they really got their money out of Steven Brooke,” I thought, gazing out from my rental car. Brooke, a photographer, had taken many of the archetypal images of Seaside that had flashed all over the world, via books and magazines. Often set against a skyline at twilight, his photos had turned Seaside into a latter day Acropolis, a remote outpost of civilization on the Florida coast.

The more humdrum reality of the place was disorienting. I would see a beachfront home, and then on my brain plate would flash the archetypal photo I had seen of the same structure. In his book Seaside (Pelican Publishing 1998), Brooke said his early photographs “intentionally idealized and ennobled Seaside’s simple structures.” He succeeded: the photos were theatrical, not journalistic. Far from a major airport or interstate, located in the deep South away from press and academic centers, Seaside had benefited from its isolation. Most people saw only the photographs.

To see Seaside through a more ordinary lens, it helps to visualize 31A, the coastal highway that runs through it. It’s the spine of Seaside, the central artery, a commercial strip. But it’s clear that Seaside is an appendage to 31A, not the other way around. It’s one more resort development on a highway stuffed with them. Seaside was wealthier than I expected. Homes sell for an average of $700,000 to $800,000, I was told. The company produced newspaper, Seaside Times, recently listed a 2,420 square foot house for $2.25 million. I was also surprised by how few people lived in it. On a winter’s day, I walked the streets for hours, knocking on doors, looking for people. No luck. Management estimated that 90 percent of Seaside’s homeowners live elsewhere. And in winter, even the renters were gone.

The continual question that arises with Seaside, as with so many neo-traditional communities, is what exactly is it? It advertises itself as a small town, yet it’s legally a subdivision, with privately owned streets. Still, outsiders do attend community events and shop at its stores.

Davis, Duany and Plater-Zyberk did something different. Instead of high-rise condos on the beach, which wall off the views like oversized linebackers at buffet-table, they built homes and streets that were a short walk away. Surprisingly, rather than paying for the best view of the beach, people purchased the chance to be part of a self-constructed community. Davis and Duany commodified community. In the past, rich people bought isolation; at Seaside, they bought togetherness.

And it sold. Investing in a lot in Seaside in 1990 was the real estate equivalent of buying Yahoo stock before last year’s bust. But less mentioned by Seaside enthusiasts is that property and land values have doubled, tripled and even quadrupled all along this part of the coast, from Panama City to ritzier Destin. Bill Clinton, the Internet and Alan Greenspan had as much to do with Seaside’s financial success as its design. The wealth of the 1990s, and its lopsided distribution, has created a new class of wealthy families who suddenly could afford a second home on the beach.

Seaside and the neo-traditional movement it has spawned becomes a lot less confusing if they are understood as real-estate ventures, rather than acts of urban design. A developer and two architects created a successful product. They then went around the country, accompanied by professional marketers, selling this product to other landowners and developers.

It certainly worked in Florida. Neo-Seasides are popping up all over, including right next door to Seaside. The big development company Arvida, which owns huge swaths of land around here, is building a neo-traditional community called “Water Color” next door. To the East, Duany and Plater-Zyberk have designed Rosemary Beach, now under construction. These developments lack many of the attributes that make Seaside special: the narrow streets, the formal Beaux-arts street pattern, the walking paths behind the homes. They resemble more conventional subdivisions. Some, like Carillon By The Sea near Panama City Beach, have manned guardhouses at their single entrances. But all these developments have the tall homes with front porches that has become the Seaside style.

But Seaside is difficult to use as a model for conventional subdivisions, where people live year-round. While on vacation, people don’t need dry cleaners, large supermarkets, electronic stores, dentists, CompUSA’s, or any of the other 101 needs of daily life. They don’t drive as many cars. A resort community is akin to a college campus, with specialized requirements. Seaside, despite is prominence, is not really portable.

Seaside might have been something more if it had been part of a larger growth plan. If a state commissioner rather than a private developer had been in charge, you could have laid out “Seasides” every five miles or so, connected by mass transit, and built at the greater density that transit allows. Public authorities could have laid out efficient street systems. In between, a growth management plan could have prohibited development. The developer of Seaside, Robert Davis, immediately embraced this alternate history when we talked one night over dinner at a deserted Italian restaurant down the road. “I can see a point not far from now,” Davis said, “where it would seem completely natural that this entire area would be laid out by the municipal authorities, with minor adjustments as it went along.”

Seaside was clearly an exquisite place in some respects. The streets and tiny walking paths, the requirement that indigenous Florida trees and beach growth be used instead of grass, the care and variety of the wooden houses, made the place something to be admired or respected. It will age well. In addition to the homes, there are non-residential parts of Seaside: an outdoor amphitheater; the Seaside Institute, a non-profit New Urbanist think tank; and a tiny charter school. Most of these were grouped around the pretentiously named “Lyceum,” a grassy commons area. A community chapel is being built here, and Davis said some residents are raising money to build a tiny concert hall.

Still I couldn’t embrace the place emotionally. It was too cute, too controlled, too controlling. In truth, I preferred the beach communities with their simpler houses on unpaved, sandy streets that surrounded Seaside and predated it, like Grayton Beach, just a mile down the road. For all its charm, Seaside was too much about spinning illusions. The postal address was telling. The little business cards said “Seaside, Fl.” But legally Seaside is not a town at all, but part of the town of Santa Rosa Beach, which in turn is part of Walton County. When its few permanent residents participate in public life, they do so as citizens of Santa Rosa Beach.

Perhaps that’s the struggle Seaside best illuminates. Seaside celebrates both public life and a paradoxical escape from it into an exclusive, private realm. At some point, Seaside and the continued debates about its brethren may help us figure out which we value more.

–Alex Marshall is the author of How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl and The Roads Not Taken (University of Texas Press 2000).

Putting Some ‘City’ Back In the Suburbs

The Washington Post – 1996
Sunday, September 1, 1996; Page C01
By Alex Marshall

THEY ARE proliferating in former farm fields and distant suburbs all around Washington, these clusters of brick row houses that look as though they were airlifted out of Georgetown. Some are imposing, New England style Victorians with wrap-around front porches. Others are affixed with steeply angled stoops that suggest kids playing stick ball and neighbors swapping tales. so known as neo-traditionalism, New Urbanism is the architectural and town-planning movement that proposes to cure the ills of contemporary suburban life — from sterile communities to cookie-cutter architecture to disaffected politics — by refashioning subdivisions to resemble traditional small towns or big-city neighborhoods.

In these communities, or so the spiel goes, life will once again resemble the close-knit neighborhoods where some of our grandparents were raised. Families will live close together in homes and apartments that front on streets; they will walk down sidewalks to corner grocery stores and cafes. Young people will once again live next to old, rich next to poor.

It’s an idyllic picture, and one that is immediately appealing to anyone who has spent hours running errands along a crowded, chain store-lined suburban boulevard or lives on a suburban cul-de-sac. It is a concept that has caught the imagination of social thinkers nationwide, moving from the pages of planning journals to the cover of Newsweek, the pages of the Wall Street Journal and to dozens of other mainstream publications.

There’s only one problem: New Urbanism doesn’t work. It’s proponents are selling something they can’t deliver without charging a far higher price, and without making changes far more fundamental than redesigning a few homes. To understand why, it’s necessary to look more carefully at what we today call the suburbs and how they took form.

Cities are products of something. They represent the effect, principally, of transportation systems. The classic 19th and early 20th century neighborhoods that many people love, and which New Urbanism apes, were created by the extension of streetcar lines. Levittown was a product of a new car culture. The mega malls and grab bag of subdivisions that surround Washington are products of the Beltway and the rest of the superhighway system that laces the region.

New Urbanist developments are supposed to reduce the influence of the car. The idea is that people will live in small neighborhoods with houses clustered within walking distance of a town center. They will have narrower streets to encourage more walking and less driving. Kentlands, a much-touted subdivision outside Gaithersburg, was one of the earliest example of this genre. Haymount has been proposed in Virginia’s Caroline County, on the Rappahannock River just outside Fredericksburg. Other less-heralded renditions are sprouting in other areas of Maryland and Virginia, and indeed around major cities all over the country.

The problem is that, while these developments mimic the old 19th century streetcar neighborhoods, they keep the same transportation system that produces conventional suburbs. In other words, current New Urban developments follow the standard pattern for subdivision development. They sit right off a main highway. They often have but a single entrance. They have winding roads that are just slightly less confusing than cul-de-sacs.

They are, in effect, subdivisions masquerading as small towns, except with the homes pushed up to the street and a few front porches thrown on. So what you get, at best, is a neighborhood that looks like a Georgetown, but functions like any other subdivision built off the Beltway.

As a result, it should not surprise us that such places are not changing how people live. A resident will still drive to a Wal-Mart for a toaster or a McDonald’s for a hamburger. Because a subdivision is essentially isolated, these places do not have the diversity of people, the interplay of new neighbors and familiar faces that characterize both a small town or a big city. By and large, they draw a homogenous group of residents because their homes are targeted mostly at upper middle income buyers; diversity remains an illusive goal. And because people don’t actually work within these new towns, they tend not to shop there. As a result, the car remains the same dominant force that it is in traditional suburbs.

Indeed, the Achilles’ heel of New Urbanist developments has been their inability to change the way people shop, and the way retailers locate their stores. A case in point is Kentlands, where residents had initially hoped to have main street-style shopping rather than a traditional suburban strip mall. But at the developers’ insistence, the center was built on the edge of the subdivision with parking lots facing the highway — just like most other suburbs.

Even when developers have gone along with the vision of the New Traditionalists, their creations have not worked commercially. A corner store on a sidewalk, more dependent on walk-in traffic, cannot make a go of it without more of a Manhattan-like density of people around it, or at least much higher than anything New Urbanists are proposing. To be viable, such a store would also have to be one component in a network of traditional streets, not highways and Wal-marts.

To truly change the standard suburban style of living, with its dependence on the car and the heartbeat of the Beltway, you have to make more fundamental changes, and more politically difficult ones, than altering a few front porches or setback rules. You have to mention distasteful words like growth controls, parking restrictions and more investment in mass transit.

Of all these, metropolitan area growth controls are the most important. If Washington somehow managed a coordinated effort to limit development on new land, a task that would require the region to face its political fragmentation, existing communities would begin to revive, both in Washington proper and in surrounding subdivisions. As the density increased, so would ridership on the Metro. Freeways would make less sense. Commercial development would start to aim more at the center than at the fringes. The many scraps of vacant land left over in the last 30 years of development would begin to fill in.

But all this would come at a cost. If you limit new neighborhood construction in undeveloped, open spaces, you will have to raise home prices because the developers are right: It is cheaper to build on undeveloped land in more distant locales. If growth controls were strict enough, you would start changing the economy of cheap goods and cheap prices that is the American hallmark.

As it is, our habit of building huge freeways with relatively unbridled development has allowed for a greater and greater concentration of selling goods in super-sized stores. It’s getting so that stationery, tools, breakfast cereal, computers, stereos and more are bought at huge warehouse stores with rock-bottom prices that sit near a freeway interchange. But the clerk at the Circuit City who sells you a washing machine, not surprisingly, will not know your name. It is a tradeoff. For the most efficient distribution systems in the modern world, for the elimination of all middlemen, we get a life almost devoid of intimate contact between the home and the market.

We can’t have it all. We can’t have cheap homes, cheap goods — a more socially cohesive world comes with a more tightly controlled pattern of growth. New Urbanists have a chance of generating a realistic debate on how we build better, more livable communities. But they have to get their priorities straight. They have to give up the dollars generated by alliances with home builders intent on moving development ever outward. New Urbanism’s contribution to city planning will remain almost purely stylistic, unless it makes more effort to change the basic pattern of suburban development.

Cities of every era have had their drawbacks. Unless we start to rethink what we’re creating, our era will be known for cities that were dynamic, market-oriented and abundant, but which were also lonely, fragmented and disposable.

Alex Marshall is a staff writer for the Virginia Pilot in Norfolk and a regular contributor to Metropolis magazine in New York.

Old Cities vs. New Urbanism: The Beat Goes On

AIA Architecture
May 1998
by Alex Marshal

When the faithful, the curious, and the skeptical gathered in Orlando, the debate over Celebration and the design philosophies of New Urbanism and Neotraditionalism twisted and turned for four days. Although there were dozens of speakers, the show stopper for many was the debate Friday night between Andres Duany, FAIA, New Urbanist leader and advocate, and Alex Krieger, FAIA, director of the Urban Design Program at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Held in the Disney Cinema on the grounds of the Disney Institute, Duany and Krieger sat on stage in straight-backed chairs and traded comments and retorts. John Kaliski, AIA, of Santa Monica, Calif., moderated. He had a tough job controlling his eager participants.

The views of the two, and their differences, were clear, though. Krieger championed what might be called Old Urbanism: the health and prosperity of thousands of existing neighborhoods and downtowns, many of which are struggling to retain jobs, residents, and services. Duany championed reinventing the suburbs through New Urbanism. What was the conflict? Simply put, Krieger said encouraging more suburban growth sucked people and resources from the center city. Duany said the suburban expansion was inevitable, and it was better to do it well than to waste energy trying to slow it down. Deciding who was right was left to the audience. More controversial were Duany’s remarks on public housing, as he and other New Urbanists are actively involved in inner-city work.

On February 21, the committees pursued their separate agendas: The Committee on Design headed to Tampa, where they checked out the campus of Florida Southern University, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright; the Regional/Urban Design Committee saw the 19th-century railroad resort Winter Garden; and the Housing PIA toured a number of Orlando’s infill housing projects.

On February 22, all attendees gathered for a final discussion on Celebration and New Urbanism. The questions emerging were: How would it age? Would the rigid design controls keep the project from evolving over time? Would it remain an isolated subdivision? Were its residents connected to or isolated from the metro area of Orlando? Was it a town or a subdevelopment? Writers Todd Bressi, Elizabeth Dunlop, and Nora Greer raised these and other questions and observations. No clear answers emerged, but all agreed the project was worthy of attention.

Alex Marshall is Norfolk (Va.)-based journalist and author of a forthcoming book on the contemporary city.

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How Urban Should Your City Be?

What “urban” does not mean, to me, is tolerating crime, incivility or trash.

by Alex Marshall
The New York Observer
July – 2001

As the Mayor’s race begins to heat up, perhaps it’s a good time to prompt some discussion about not only crime, schools and jobs, but something both more conceptual and more concrete, such as what kind of city we want to be.

The words “urban” and “suburban” are irritatingly vague, and used as both pejorative and praise. To some, “urban” is still a code word for minorities and crime. To others, it means sophistication and a willingness to embrace rather than avoid, public rather than private, a street-based life. “Suburban” can mean narrow, isolating and sexless, or it can mean families, space and nature.

Some New Yorkers feel that the lines during the Rudy Giuliani years have been blurred: that the city is becoming too suburban (no sex shops, no noise, no nightclubs, no crime), and that the funkier streets of the 70’s, 80’s and early 90’s — when the city was a rougher but arguably more interesting place — are making way for blocks that more closely resemble Garden City, Long Island (where Rudy grew up). It might be good to clarify the terminology, because it’s not always clear what people mean, or if they know themselves.

New Yorkers aren’t the only ones confused, however. Last month, 1,000 “New Urbanists” visited the city for their annual convention. New Urbanism is a movement, probably the leading popular-design philosophy in the country dedicated to making places more citylike. But those who call themselves “New Urbanists” are also not sure what that means.

New Urbanists have produced mostly fake urban places, like Disney’s Celebration in Florida. These places are essentially suburban subdivisions, built in cornfields and dressed up like small towns. Yet some New Urbanists, mostly on the West Coast, have helped accomplish more urban goals, such as building train lines and stopping highways.

Steven Bodzin, the spokesman for the Congress for New Urbanism, said the group chose New York for its convention this year because it was alien territory. The Northeast has few of those cutesy New Urban subdivisions, and the New York architectural establishment derides New Urbanists for liking the traditional architecture of columns, cornices and front porches.

“In the New York architectural world, there is a deep suspicion of New Urbanism,” Mr. Bodzin said. “Our single biggest source of criticism comes out of New York. So we decided to come here.”

Jonathan Rose, member of the prominent Rose development family and a developer himself, was the New York host for the convention. An avuncular man with a bushy beard, Mr. Rose said that New Urbanists can learn from New York, and vice versa.

“What New Urbanism has is a rap,” he said. “It has been extremely good at communicating its vision.”

The group’s travel schedule illustrated either its diversity or its confusion. The conventioneers toured the subway system and Greenwich Village, but also the placid, quasi-suburban Queens neighborhood of Forest Hills Gardens, with its privately owned streets. At the conference itself, held at the Altman building and the adjacent Metropolitan Pavilion on West 18th Street, the group tried to work out its own definitions.

Key indicators popped up. For example, congestion — something New Yorkers struggle with — may be a sign of success rather than failure.

“We’re in New York because it’s a congested city,” G.B. Arrington, a transportation planner from Portland, Ore., told a small group. “Congestion is a sign of vitality. Maybe if your streets aren’t congested, you’re doing something wrong.”

And how about infrastructure? The average person, I suspect, does not realize how directly a city’s infrastructure determines its character. Build more subway lines and you get more city. Build more highways and parking garages, and you get more traffic and quasi-suburban settings.

Jaquelin Robertson, the elder-statesman architect from Cooper & Robertson, did a masterful job taking listeners through the city’s key infrastructure decisions, from the Erie Canal of the 1800’s to Robert Moses in the 1920’s and 30’s, stringing parkways across the region as “a kind of infrastructure emperor.”

“If the Roman Empire was about roads, bridges, aqueducts, Roman laws and Roman legions, then my adopted New York, the Empire City, was about parkways, bridges, aqueducts, New York real estate, Penn Station, Yankee Stadium,” Mr. Robertson said.

As a journalist who has written a book about cities, I have my own views about what constitutes urban — and what I’d like New York to become. To my mind, urban means building the Second Avenue subway line and making fewer accommodations for S.U.V.’s and more for social activities, such as drinking at street fairs or dancing all night. What urban does not mean, to me, is tolerating crime, incivility or trash. I would like a safe, diverse, dynamic and clean city with more trains and fewer cars, with funkier streets and more stoops instead of porches.

Maybe one of the Mayoral candidates will offer his own answer to the question: How urban do you want New York City to be?

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.”

Building New Urbanism: Less Filling, But Not So Tasty

This Article first appeared in Builder Magazine
NOV. 30, 1999
BY ALEX MARSHALL

The old commercials for Lite beer by Miller which were once so popular gained their fame by having ex-jocks and other assorted celebrities stand at a bar, hold up a glass of amber-colored liquid, and repeat the slogan: “Tastes great, less filling.”

The advertising pitch worked for a while, but as any beer lover could tell you, all the “lite” beers were a pretty thin, tepid brew. The designer beers, which actually did taste great, but were also filling, shoved a lot of them out of the marketplace.

Most of New Urbanism, the new subdivision and home-building style that has been the rage in recent years, is a kind of lite-beer form of urbanism. Urbanism Lite. You take out most of the things that make urbanism urban — density, dependence on mass transit, less space for cars — and you leave some front porches, some reworked street systems, some different facades and a few alleys.

The attempt is to eliminate what people don’t like about small town or city living — less privacy and no place to park — and leave in what they do like about it, which are walking to a cafe, or buying a quart of milk without getting in a car.

But you can’t have one without the other. What you get is a slightly different looking subdivision lying off a main road on the edge of town, which functions pretty much like all the other subdivisions that surround it.

New Urbanism is a big tent philosophy and practice: that is, a lot goes on under that label. It is at various times: a theory or theories of urban design; a marketing campaign; a collection of people who love urban places; and a particular way of buildings suburbs that attempt to imitate older towns and city neighborhoods.

Some of the former has some value. But it is the latter that concerns me here. On a practical level, most of what is physically built under the label New Urban are these newer suburbs out on bare land. These are sometimes called TNDs for Traditional Neighborhood Developments. Are these new-fangled subdivisions a cure for, or part of the disease of, urban sprawl?

Let’s look on the big level of sprawl first, that of the metropolitan area. Atlanta is prime example of this. It spills across hundreds of square miles, with the result that many of its residents spend huge portions of their day stuck in a car. It’s not a very nice place to live. Excessive highway building, rather than making traffic better, has made it worse.

New Urbanism will not help much here. Building places like Kentlands outside Washington D.C., or the nearby Reston Town Center, will do nothing to shrink the size of a metropolitan area. They part of the problem. They are yet more subdivisions and shopping malls being built farther “out”, where they help reduce density and enlarge the metropolitan area.

Really limiting sprawl is pretty simple. It means building fewer big highways on the edge of town and investing a lot more in mass transit. It means growth boundaries. It means dramatically raising the price of gasoline so that the taxes cover the costs of both building roads, maintaining them and the associated costs, like policing and air pollution.

These are tough choices. For builders, any of the above would mean drastic changes in the ways of doing business. In Portland, Oregon, which is one of the few cities and states that have moved in this direction, builders find themselves doing more redevelopment work, from adding a room to an existing house, to “tear-downs” to be replaced with newer structures.

The growth boundary around Portland has had the quite unexpected effect of pushing out large corporate developers. There simply isn’t land available in the 1,000 acre chunks that they prefer. So instead, you see the rise of more locally-owned builders and developers, who will take 20 acres here, and 10 acres there to build some homes. Portland, which has a booming economy, produced a huge number of new housing units in recent years, but roughly a third of them was through redevelopment. The rest were generally not huge new subdivisions that you see outside Las Vegas or Houston.

The problem with the practice of New Urbanism, as opposed to some of its talk, is that it has generally shirked from confronting the tough choices that Portland and Oregon residents have faced to a degree. Instead, New Urbanists generally offer Americans a chance to “buy” their way out of the sprawl dilemma, in the form of cute new subdivisions and town centers.

Like a lot of marketing-driven products, this might work for a decade or so, until people catch on. Then it will go the way of Planned Unit Developments, New Towns, and all the other once new-models of suburban sprawl. And Americans will be left with actual problem unresolved and unfaced.

In general, New Urbanists are selling something they can’t deliver without charging a far higher price, and without making changes far more fundamental than redesigning a few homes. To understand why, it’s necessary to look more carefully at what we today call the suburbs and how they took form.

Cities are products of something. They represent the effect, principally, of transportation systems. The classic 19th and early 20th century neighborhoods that many people love, and which New Urbanism apes, were created by the extension of streetcar lines. Levittown was a product of a new car culture. The mega malls and grab bag of subdivisions that surround most cities are products of the limited access freeways, built at public expense. Developers and builders understand this far better than the general public.

But how about on a more individual level. Even if a neo-traditional neighborhood built on the edge of town won’t counteract metropolitan sprawl, will it deliver a better life for the people who live there?

The answer is no again.

Urbanism is a package deal. Once you weed out the stuff people don’t like about it — no place to park, smaller homes, closer neighbors — you also weed out the stuff they like about urbanism, like walkeable streets and nearby grocery stores.

The Achilles’ heel of New Urbanist developments has been their “downtowns,” the classic “main streets” meant to be at the heart of the developments. If they were built, and successful, it would be a significant improvement on suburban life. But the reasons these mini downtowns fail point to the structural flaws in the whole theory of TNDs.

Retail needs an enormous accessible customer base to succeed. Street-level retail in cities get this from enormous density and the therefore enormous quantity of people that walk by their front doors. Suburban retail get this by locating on a main highway where a high volume of traffic goes by their parking lots.

New Urban developments have generally tried to locate their mini-downtowns in the center of their low-density subdivisions. The result is that they have neither enough pedestrian, nor enough auto, traffic to make retail succeed. The “main streets” of virtually all New Urban developments have failed.

An exception is the Disney-produced Celebration in Florida. But it may be the exception that proves the rules. Disney had the enormous financial muscle to build the downtown first, before any homes were built or sold. It also had the marketing muscle to pull in tourists to its shops, even though the downtown lacks immediate access to a main highway. Tourists are making these shops succeed, not residents.

There are other tradeoffs and inadequacies that become apparent when you look at a neo-traditional development closely.

Peter Calthorpe, one the New Urbanists who is honest about the choices involved, has said the minimum density needed to make mass transit work is a gross density of ten units to an acre, with selective density even higher. Most TNDs hover around four units to an acre. The idea that these places can dovetail eventually with mass transit in some distant year is probably not the case, unless you acknowledge a tremendous amount of infill and expensive redevelopment. To really change how people live, you need mass transit in a development at the beginning, not the end.

The street system is another interesting thing to look at. Neo-traditionalists like to advertise that they have gotten away from the cull-de-sac, which has become the symbol of American bad taste, like tail-fins on that old Chevy. New Urbanists promise a more open and easy going grid.

But the “grids” these developments use are usually just as confusing and intimidating to outsiders as the standard pattern of cul-de-sacs and collector streets. These “grids” are usually a collection of loose skewed streets. They are less urban grids really, than descendents of the wavy street patterns used in 19th century cemeteries and later in early suburbs.

Finally, the treatment of the driveway and the garage in the standard New Urban house say a lot about its tradeoffs. The high priority of neo-traditional development is to get a clear, urban looking façade at the front of the house, usually reminiscent of Cape Cod or Georgetown. To get it, the driveway is put either on the side, or in the back off an alley. The same goes for the garage.

The result is that the residents lose their backyards, the classic spot of backyard barbecues and swing sets. So for the sake of the appearance of urbanism, residents sacrifice one of the prime pleasures of suburbanism.

Older towns, like heralded Charleston, Georgetown or Savannah, worked well with alleys and street facades because their residents didn’t have to worry about where to park the car. When these places were built, people walked everywhere, until they got on a train, a streetcar or a ship. Trying to replicate these building types in the context of a freeway and car-dependent environment is a false equation.

For the builder and developer, New Urbanism represents a dilemma of sorts. It can be profitable. Standard New Urban subdivisions offer smaller homes on less land at higher prices. This means higher profits, even though there is higher risk, because the development costs for streets are more, and the potential market is smaller.

But a developer would have to acknowledge that is not really selling what he is usually advertising: a cure to our sprawl-oriented life style. Instead, he is offering more a change of style than substance. And as with any style, there is the risk that people will tire of it and move on.

New Urban developments do offer some improvement on conventional suburbia. They sometimes offer “granny flats,” which give a mother-in-law or lower-waged worker a place to live. That’s a real improvement. I also favor experimenting, whether it be in the suburbs or the inner-city. But we should be honest about what we are selling.

Time will tell where the New Urban debate and practice goes. In the long run, it may lead to better, more real form of urbanism. It may cost more in its political choices, but it may be more satisfying, and most of all, may taste great.