Washingtonpost.com
Rule, Suburbia
The Verdict's In. We Love It There
By Joel Kotkin
Sunday, February 6, 2005; Page B01
The battle's over. For half a century, legions of planners,
urbanists, environmentalists and big city editorialists have
waged war against sprawl. Now it's time to call it a day and
declare a victor.
The winner is, yes, sprawl.
The numbers are incontestable and the trends inexorable.
Since 1950, more than 90 percent of metropolitan population growth
in America has taken place in the suburbs. Today, roughly two out
of three people in the nation's metro areas are suburban dwellers.
"The burbs" have become the homeland of American success, with
an increasing share of our national wealth and half the poverty
of the urban core.
We may continue to decry them and make fun of them, in cynical
movies like "American Beauty" or on spoof television shows
like "Desperate Housewives." But we have embraced the suburbs and
made them our home.
For most of us, they represent both our present and our future. Over
the next quarter century, according to a Brookings Institution
study, the nation will add 50 percent to the current stock of
houses, offices and shops, and the great majority of that new
building will take place in lower-density locations, not
traditional inner cities.
Once we acknowledge this reality, we can turn to the task of making
the best of it. The suburbs have given us -- in terms of space,
quality of life, safety and privacy -- much more of what we call
"the American Dream" than cities ever could. What they have failed
to do, often miserably, is to live up to their promise of
becoming self-contained, manageable communities that can both
coexist amiably with the natural environment and offer a sense
of identity. The prospect of a nation crisscrossed by ugly
sprawl corridors like Lee Highway in Virginia or Interstate 10
between Los Angeles and San Bernardino may be too gruesome
to contemplate.
I'm the first to admit that most students at the architecture
school where I teach -- like talented young people
generally -- would rather work in the big city, designing cool
lofts or arresting high-rise towers, museums and concert halls,
than try to create something in the jumble of the suburban
periphery. But the suburbs are where the action's going to be in
the future. The great challenge of the 21st century -- not to
mention the main economic opportunity -- lies in transforming
suburban sprawl into something more efficient, interesting and
humane.
That's because, despite the ardent wishes of urban advocates,
the suburbs are becoming ever more ubiquitous. Instead of
clustering in large, crowded cities, Americans are building
bigger and bigger houses -- twice the size of those in 1950 -- and
doing so increasingly in low-density, low-cost regions such as
Orlando, Fla., San Bernardino-Riverside, Calif., Phoenix and
Las Vegas, where job growth has also been most
robust.
Many in the planning profession and others who bemoan the
"cultural wasteland" of the suburbs will find it hard to
swallow the reality that the suburbs rule. Others will hold on
to the hope that higher oil prices will force more suburbanites
back into dense urban cores. One city enthusiast, writer
James Kunstler, declared on his Weblog last fall that it was
time "to let the gloating begin." But I doubt that it's time
for such new-urbanist glass clinking. Suburbanization proceeded
apace during the steep energy price rises of the 1970s; it has
also accelerated in Europe and Japan, where energy prices are
already sky-high.
Traditional urban America isn't going to die. Instead, city
living, as urban analyst Bill Fulton has put it, will likely
become primarily a "niche lifestyle," preferred mostly by the
young, the childless and the rich.
But just as cities won't prosper if they don't cater to the
niche resident, the suburbs need to evolve from a pale extension
of the city into something more like a self-sustaining archipelago
of villages. This concept has its roots in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries, when visionaries like writer H.G. Wells
saw movement to the periphery -- what he called the
"centrifugal possibilities" -- as a bold alternative to the
horrors of the contemporary industrial city.
This vision was widely embraced by both the right and the
left. Friedrich Engel’s predicted that the overthrow of
capitalism would lead to the end of the large mega-city and
the dispersal of the industrial proletariat into the
countryside, delivering the rural population from "isolation
and stupor" while finally solving the working class's persistent
housing crisis.
For the conservative thinker Thomas Carlyle, the growth of
the industrial city had undermined the traditional ties between
workers, their families, communities and churches. Moving the
working and middle classes to "villages" in the outlying
regions of major cities could restore a more wholesome and
intimate environment.
Perhaps the most influential advocate of suburbia was British
planner Ebenezer Howard. Horrified by the disorder, disease and
crime of the Edwardian industrial metropolis, he advocated the
creation of "garden cities" on the suburban periphery.
These self-contained towns, surrounded by rural areas, would
have their own employment base and neighborhoods of pleasant
cottages. "Town and country must be married," Howard preached,
"and out of this joyous union will spring a new hope, a new
life, a new civilization."
Howard's great vision remains a compelling one, and not only
in America. Today, despite differing cultural patterns and
political systems, virtually every major metropolitan area in
the advanced world is suburbanizing, and usually rapidly. The
urban centers of Tokyo, Sydney, London, Frankfurt and even
that paragon of enforced centralization, Paris, are either
losing population or barely holding steady as both jobs and
people flee to the periphery.
Yet the suburbs have largely failed in creating Howard's
"new civilization." They lack a basic definition of what they
are and the boundaries between them often seem vague at best.
This is sprawl's most lamented and least admirable quality: It
produces vast "slurbs" of undistinguished, unappealing
space.
And yet, build them and people come. It's amazing, given
that suburbs often suffer from a deadening lack of things to
do. And then there's the traffic. This remains their worst
defining feature. In Los Angeles, where I live, the hours
wasted in traffic have doubled since the early 1980s. Fleeing
to the farther fringe, such as San Bernardino-Riverside, is no
escape -- the traffic there is growing worse at an even faster
pace. Suburbanites around the country, from greater Washington
to greater Atlanta to the San Francisco Bay area, all register
similar complaints.
Ironically, this may prove the new imperative for suburbia's
evolution. With transit to downtowns and other suburbs
increasingly dicey, suburbs are being forced to supply an
ever-wider array of basic needs, from cultural infrastructure
to shopping and business services. They cannot lean as heavily
on the central core, even if they wanted to. "In the San
Fernando Valley, we have achieved our own kind of secession,"
attorney David Fleming, a leader of the suburban area's failed
attempt to break away from Los Angeles, quipped to me recently.
"It's called traffic."
The digital revolution has also made it easier for
suburbanites to bypass the city. The home-based workforce has
grown 23 percent over the past decade, according to the U.S.
Census. A lawyer working in Thousand Oaks, an often excruciating
commute from downtown Los Angeles that can take as long as two
hours, can now do his job without braving the freeway except
to appear in court.
The urbanization of suburbia -- the creation of a more
sophisticated, self-sufficient community -- is already
beginning. From the suburbs of Northern Virginia to the
Los Angeles basin, cities are restoring the commercial cores
of what had once been autonomous small towns. Often devastated
by malls and big-box shopping centers, these downtowns once
gave suburban towns a sense of distinctiveness -- something
many now wish to recover. Other places are attempting to
create whole new communities, with their own defined town
centers complete with fine restaurants, smart shops and even
nightclubs.
Over the past decade, for example, Naperville, Ill., has
grown from simply another Chicago suburb into a definable
place, with a well-appointed old town center, a lovely
riverside park and even some striking public architecture. It
is filled with pedestrians from the surrounding area. "Our
downtown is what keeps us together," says Christine Jeffries,
a civic leader in the community of 138,000. "It gives us an
identity."
This new principle of village-building can also be seen in
some newer developments, such as Valencia in Southern
California. With a well-defined town center, paths for
pedestrians and cyclists, a lake and a range of housing types,
Valencia is closer to a traditional village environment than
the prototypical sprawl suburb so common in the region. This
model is being repeated in numerous other places,
particularly fast-growing regions such as southwest Florida,
suburban Atlanta and the outer reaches of Houston.
With this new development has come a relatively new phenomenon,
the construction of large-scale cultural and religious
institutions in the periphery. The suburbs are now host to some
of the nation's largest new cultural centers -- the
Music Center at Strathmore that just opened in north Bethesda,
the Cobb Galleria Centre outside Atlanta and the sparkling
Orange County Performing Arts Center in Southern California -- as
well as a plethora of smaller, community-based arts facilities.
And, at a time when churches in the hearts of many major cities
are closing, new churches, as well as synagogues, mosques
and Hindu temples reflecting suburbia's growing ethnic
diversity, are rising in the outer periphery.
In the coming years, the opportunities to develop suburban
identity will grow as baby boomers look to trade in their tract
houses for something more walkable and compact. Some urban
advocates see them headed for the major downtowns, but high
prices, cramped conditions and distance from family and
friends militate against a return to the city.
Instead, many developers see suburban villages as ideal places
for the swelling ranks of empty nesters. "They don't want to
move to Florida and they want to stay close to the kids," says
Jeff Lee, CEO of a prominent D.C. real estate, architecture
and planning firm. "What they are looking for is a funky
suburban development -- funky but safe."
Village environments might also provide an affordable
housing alternative for people who want to be in the suburbs,
but can't yet swing the much-desired single-family house. It
could also offer a congenial environment for singles and
younger couples without children. According to the last
census, the number of childless couples and singles grew
more than twice as much in the suburbs as it did in the central
cities over the last decade.
This redefinition of suburbia into someplace more diverse,
interesting and multifaceted represents one of the most
revolutionary developments of our times. It provides us
with an opportunity to stop complaining about sprawl and
start learning how to make better the places that most of us
have chosen as home.
Author's e-mail:
Joel Kotkin, an Irvine Senior Fellow at the New America
Foundation, teaches urban and suburban history at the
Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles
and is the author of "The City: A Global History," to be
published by Modern Library in April.
C 2005 The Washington Post Company