Want to Change the Way Our World is Built? You Won't Do it by Fighting a Culture War.
A couple months ago I went to buy a set of used patio furniture, way out in the exurbs of my city. I live near downtown, so I drove... and drove... and drove. Passing scattered cows and horses, I turned into a new subdivision with a lavishly landscaped entrance gate complete with faux-Mediterranean bell tower.
If you were to custom-design a neighborhood with the sole goal that I, personally, would find distasteful, you couldn't do much better than this one. "Snout houses" (dominated by large garage doors) predominated, uniformly beige and grey with few windows and little architectural detail, fronted by small, tidy, treeless front lawns. Combine that with the remote location, the gated entrance, and the complete dependence on driving to get to anything, and this is not somewhere you could pay me to live. It doesn't fit a single one of my preferences or priorities.
These were the thoughts occupying my mind as I turned the corner onto a residential street. And I was confronted immediately by about a million happy kids.
Okay, maybe not a million. Maybe fifteen. But plenty. Kids on bikes. Kids on trikes. Kids jumping in a sprinkler. Kids playing basketball in the cul-de-sac. Adults chatting with each other in lawn chairs while grilling in front of open garage-doors. Lots of seasonal decorations. This was as lively a street as you would find downtown on a Saturday afternoon, and it was more or less a commercial for the suburban American dream come to life.
It's worth letting yourself be humbled, if you're someone like me who obsesses over urban design, by the limited direct importance to most people's lives of the stuff we talk about. I cut my teeth years ago on aesthetic critiques of U.S. suburbia, most notably James Howard Kunstler's influential 1993 polemic The Geography of Nowhere. As a city kid who always took a strong interest in places and how they work, I knew by my early teenage years that I thought suburbia was soulless, sterile, bland, conformist, cookie-cutter, isolating, stultifying—pick your pejorative. I knew I felt this way long before I had any well-formed opinions about the fiscal, ecological, political or social implications of the suburban development pattern. Before any of that, I had a well-formed snobbery: Who would want to live THERE?!
Clearly, lots of people do. And I suspect for every one of my negative adjectives, they have a positive one they could throw back at me. Warm. Friendly. Safe. Neighborly. Peaceful. Quiet. Relaxing. Uncrowded. Unhurried.
It turns out that most people like the place they live (more than 8 in 10, per one recent survey). The things that comprise the emotional substance of our lives and enable our happiness are connections with family and friends; good work that allows us material comfort and security; physical and mental health and access to support systems for both. Your ability to obtain those things might be influenced by the urban design of the place you live, but that influence is far, far down the list from a host of other circumstances that are individual to you.
You can live the good life in a lot of places, and research bears out that the similarities in our lives dwarf the differences. In a recent article for The American Conservative titled "Listen to the Suburbanites", Sam Abrams observes that the level of participation in civic organizations is comparable in urban and suburban areas, the use of third places ("a coffee shop, bar, restaurant, park, or other public place that one visits regularly") is about equally widespread, and self-reported rates of loneliness are roughly the same. Stereotypes that suburbia lacks diversity and cosmopolitanism are also outdated, as is evidenced by the thriving, often immigrant-led entrepreneur communities in many such places.
Environmental determinism is dubious at the level of statistics, and completely falls apart at the individual level: living in a place designed to be "vibrant" doesn't cause you to live the good life any more than living in a place that's sterile and uninviting on the surface prevents you from doing so.
If we can live the good life in all sorts of places, what sort of world should we build for ourselves?
The trap that many people fall into at this point is one of an unhelpful, naive agnosticism: they conclude that because there's no accounting for tastes, there can be no basis (other than snobbery) for suggesting that one pattern of development, or style of home or neighborhood, is preferable to any other. If people like it, it's good. No need to ask further questions. Let the market speak. Give the people what they want.
But in fact, there is another crucial question to ask: Regardless of whether individuals can live the good life in one sort of place, does it scale up? Can we, collectively, live the good life if we build miles upon miles of such places?
In other words, the question we really need to be asking is, "What are the consequences of our development pattern?"
Image via Avi Waxman on Unsplash.
In the case of the automobile-centric form of growth that took over North America after World War II, there are clear answers that have little to do with cultural or lifestyle preferences. They are empirical, quantifiable, and lead us in a more productive direction than fixating on the supposed quality-of-life defects of one place or another.
Auto-centric development is a fiscal disaster. It is a pattern of development that produces greater liabilities and less wealth than traditional, walkable neighborhoods. It has a tremendous financial burn rate and results in places that tend not to hold their value over time. As a result, local governments across North America are grappling with the specter of insolvency.
There are also clear ecological reasons to be alarmed by the spread of automobile-centric development. It results in far more paving over of the earth, far more emissions of particulate pollution and greenhouse gases, and a fragmented landscape with large swaths of non-place.
Motor vehicles are a tremendous cause of accidental death each year, killing as many people in the United States as do firearms. A growing share of those people are pedestrians and cyclists. Building places that require high-speed travel to function results in despotic conditions for Americans who choose to or have to walk.
In those aspects, we are living a failing experiment, and the costs are all around us. But the reasons it's failing are not because people don't like it. And the fact that many people do like it doesn't mean it's not failing. I can like all sorts of things that I also recognize I must enjoy in moderation.
Strong Towns founder and president Chuck Marohn makes the analogy to a person deciding whether they prefer hamburger or lobster. From Chapter 7 of the book Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity:
Let me state the obvious: Every personal preference comes at a price point…. If the government were willing to subsidize lobster to be cheaper than hamburger, I’d continuously dine on lobster. More to the point, I’d express a strong personal preference for lobster. The longer this subsidy went on, the more entitled my expectations for lobster would become.
This observation is not an indictment of people who enjoy lobster. But no one in their right mind would suggest that a supply of abundant, cheap lobster must be made available to restaurants at great public expense because many people enjoy it, or that such a policy would represent the free market at work. And we can all recognize that it would be completely insane if whether people ought to enjoy the taste of lobster were a hotly debated issue in our society, while the desirability of these lobster subsidies went largely undiscussed.
A Strong Towns approach to reforming the suburban experiment is about making the true costs of our growth model visible to all of us, and borne by the people who incur those costs instead of being disguised, ignored, and ultimately passed on to the next generation.
You Can Still Be an Evangelist for Great Places
While we're at it, I really do believe we can still build wonderful places, places that are not only enjoyable but ennobling to live: that is, that make it easy to be our best selves. In my experience, this has a lot to do with the features of place—human scale, walkability, a fine-grained mix of types of people and activities—that you might call "urbanism.” But this, again, does not mean that anyone else, by failing to be an "urbanist" or live in such a place, is failing to be their best self. Such generalizations easily fall apart when it comes to individuals.
Not all places are equally fine human habitat, but we can adapt our lives to all sorts of environments nonetheless. Humans are resourceful that way. Suburbanites hang out on lawn chairs in their garages and driveways, and "third place" businesses even in drab strip malls devise ingenious ways to create pleasant environments for lingering or outdoor dining. The residents of poor neighborhoods with neglected public spaces may repurpose old tires as playground equipment, establish a garden in a vacant lot, play chess on the sidewalk and music on the corner, or practice many other often-ingenious forms of DIY urbanism to create well-loved spaces out of very little.
I tend to think we can do a lot better, as far as the base design of our habitat is concerned, than subdivisions like the one I visited at the start of this piece. But not everyone is going to love my particular solutions, and the world is better for having a diversity of small experiments.
All of this is easier to achieve if we can talk about it without condescension.
Driving from my dismal exurban hotel to the walkable downtown of a Florida beach town led me to a resolution: Start seeking out the kind of lodging that accentuates the best reasons for visiting a place, and hopefully discourage the kind of development that’s contributing to its demise.