|
We
Are What We Build
The
United States is the richest country in the world. Why
aren't we enjoying our wealth more? Because, says New
Urbanism guru Andres Duany, we've made such a hash of our
man-made environment.
The
United
States
of America enjoys the biggest incomes and highest standard of
living in the world, observes architect and urban
planner Andres Duany. But does the highest “standard
of living” – essentially, having the most stuff –
equate to the best “quality of life?”
Americans
own more cars per capita than anyone else in the world.
But that’s because so many live in places
that rely exclusively upon the automobile for personal
mobility. In the suburbs, it’s impossible to get anywhere without one.
Not only does every adult require a car, costing on
average $6,400 (after tax) to own and operate, so does
every child 16 or older. There simply are no
alternatives: Mass transit does not exist, and suburban
environments, despite the occasional, oddly placed
sidewalk, are utterly hostile to pedestrians. Only in America,
says Duany, do people drive
to the health club so they
can exercise on a walking
machine.
Americans
also own the biggest houses in the world. We invented
the “McMansion.” Our houses have more square
footage, more bathrooms and bigger kitchens than those
of other nations. Now home builders are touting the
master bathroom resort”
– bedroom, bath, walk-in closet plus exercise area.
Fast becoming standard accoutrements in upscale housing are the family
theater, and indoor café complete with its own espresso
machine. Why do Americans want these things? Why are
activities that once occurred in the public realm being
“internalized” to the house? Because, Duany
contends, the public realm we’re creating is so ugly
and stressful.
Do
Americans enjoy life more as a result of owning the biggest houses and
the most cars? Do we have more leisure time
than, say, the Europeans? After subtracting the extra
hours we work to pay for all the stuff, and deducting
the time we spend commuting, schlepping our children
from T-ball to Tae Kwon Do, driving an extra 10
traffic-choked miles to save a few bucks at Wal-Mart….
do we have more hours of leisure? Do we spend more
meaningful time with our family our friends?
No.
We are what we build, Duany told several hundred
attendees last week of the “Building a Better
Richmond” conference organized by the Greater Richmond
Chamber of Commerce. And Americans across the country
have, with great deliberation and forethought, erected a
physical environment that taxes their financial resources
and breeds isolation, stress, physical inactivity,
alienation and depression. Suburbia, says Duany, is
“toxic to our psyche.”
It’s
not the first time that Duany, a leading advocate and
practitioner of the New Urbanism movement, has
spoken in Richmond.
But it is the first time that he had a chance to preach
here the
virtues of the pre-World War II style of neighborhood
development to an audience this large, this
influential and this receptive to his message. As I, and
others, have
argued in Bacon's Rebellion for nearly two years now, the
scattered, low-density pattern of land use and
development that prevails in Virginia
is
seriously dysfunctional. Although there are aspects of the problem that
Duany skips over – particularly Virginia’s
antiquated system of taxation and local government –
he articulates the absurdity of modern suburbia as
vividly as anyone I’ve ever seen.
In
a series of conferences over the past year and a half,
the Richmond Chamber has brought in a succession of
high-profile speakers who have challenged the
comfortable but outmoded certainties that have dominated
public discourse in Richmond over the past three or four
decades.
First,
Carnegie
Mellon
University
professor Richard Florida explained how the prime driver
of economic development in the Knowledge Economy has
shifted from financial capital to human capital. The
most prosperous regions are those whose workforces
include the greatest proportion of who belong to the “creative class,” the artistically,
scientifically and entrepreneurially gifted people who
account disproportionately for innovation and economic
growth. Then came Rebecca Ryan, CEO of Next Generation
Consulting, who prophesied a coming labor shortage later
this decade and
outlined what it would take communities like
Richmond
to
recruit and retrain the next generation of
workers. Most recently, sharing the billing with Duany last week, spoke Tony Nelessen, another
fervid proponent of New Urbanism and critic of suburban sprawl.
It’s
not evident what concrete changes will emerge from the
froth of all this free thinking. But it seems clear that
the civic leadership of the
Richmond
region has moved far beyond the 1990s mantra that
“regionalism” was the solution to all woes. The new
perspectives have percolated up, even, to a handful of local
elected officials, though I have yet to notice that it has
influenced anyone in the General Assembly. Perhaps it
will in time.
Duany
and
Nelessen, who toured the region by helicopter before the
conference, agreed that
Richmond
has
tremendous assets. As Duany put it dryly: “You have a
city of some accomplishment.” Nelessen was more
demonstrative. The Richmond
he
saw between Shockoe Bottom and Windsor Farms is exactly
what people want. All Richmonders have to do is repeat
that pattern of development.
Of
course, that will be no easy task. The
scattered, low-density, auto-centric pattern of
development afflicting our suburbs is deeply
embedded in zoning codes, VDOT regulations,
transportation-funding policies, mortgage markets and
the skill sets of developers and home builders, Duany
said. It will take far-reaching institutional reform,
comparable to the movement that cleaned up U.S.
cities in the late 19th century and ushered in the Golden Age
of
American urban development, to turn things around.
The
situation in which we find ourselves is “aberrant,” Duany
told the Richmonders. “For the first time in American
history, ‘growth’ has a bad name.” People fight
“growth” – or, more exactly, the physical
manifestation of growth in the form of specific
proposals to build more housing, office buildings and
retail space. People perceive that “growth” creates
more demand for schools and roads, hence more
overcrowding, congestion and higher taxes.
The problem, Duany suggested, is that the current system
is unsustainable. “We cannot build and repair
enough highways to keep up. The model is crashing.”
Duany’s
ideal is the classic neighborhood of the early 20th
century, where people enjoyed an array of transportation
options, including walking, driving or taking a trolley
car. (He'll settle today for buses and rail in
place of trolleys.) Neighborhoods contained a
finely grained mix of uses, from mansions to apartment buildings, corner
stores to restaurants, professional offices to civic buildings like schools and post
offices, all within a few minutes’ walking distance.
In such neighborhoods, people could fulfill many of
their needs – not all, but many – simply by walking
where they needed to go.
Today’s
suburbs contain all the same elements as the traditional
neighborhood – places to live, shop and work – but
they are disassembled, separated by zoning laws, and
connected only by cars. The only walking most people do is
hoofing it across vast expanses of parking lot. With all
destinations scattered and separated by great distances,
every trip requires driving a car.
Making
matters worse in the suburbs, according to Duany, is the
“dendritic” system of roads. All traffic starts in dead-end streets in subdivisions, passes
through collector roads, and dumps onto the major
arterials. In contrast to the grid-like street patterns
of traditional neighborhoods, where there are many
possible routes to get from one place to another, there
is only one way to get from Point A to Point B in the
‘burbs. Consequently, thousands of cul de sacs are
virtually devoid of traffic while the arterials are
jammed. “There’s plenty of asphalt out there,”
Duany notes. “It’s just not being used.”
Another
feature of suburbia is the lack of quality public
spaces. Traditional neighborhoods have prominent civic
architecture like churches, offices and government
buildings. They have well-defined parks and public
squares with places to sit and congregate. They have
neighborhood restaurants and bars. Because people walk
places, the streets and sidewalks are busy. Other people
sit on porches facing the street, facilitating social
interaction. “Walking knits society together,” Duany
said. “You meet people face to face. You don’t
compete with them like you do in your car.”
None
of these socially integrating features exist in the suburbs. People drive
home in their cars, pull up the driveway and into a
garage and step inside the house without risking an
encounter with anyone. There’s plenty of “green
space” in the suburbs, but it’s amorphous and
uninviting. The dominant public spaces are shopping
malls, designed to encourage people to spend money, not
to interact with one another. Neighborhoods are rigidly
segregated by property value, hence income and stage of
life, with the
result that on those rare occasions when people do
encounter one another,
they are people of the same age and socio-economic
bracket as themselves. Subdivisions, says Duany, are
“economic monocultures.”
The
lack of public spaces in neighborhoods where kids can
gather and play has a tremendous impact on suburban
culture. Because kids can't anywhere on their own, they
rely upon their parents to transport them everywhere,
creating the "soccer mom" phenomenon. In
addition to all their other obligations -- working,
running errands, keeping up the house -- parents
moonlight as their children's chauffeurs. The juggling
of childrens' schedules, in addition to their own, adds
to parental stress.
There
is nothing inviting about the public space of the
suburbs. There is no civic architecture: no monuments,
no visual focal points. Public buildings tend to be
large, square and, surrounded by expanses of parking
lot, connected to nothing around them. The retail sector is
dominated by Wal-Mart and other “big box” stores.
The high schools are enormous buildings surrounded by
vast flatlands of parking lots. Designed for the
convenience of school administrators, schools are impersonal. Columbine, anyone? Even the churches are
huge – “mega-churches,” Duany calls them – set
amid vast asphalt parking lots and unplugged from
their surroundings.
Suburbia
doesn’t exist because people demand it, Duany insists.
Well, maybe 30 percent of the population would have
nothing else, but most people prefer traditional
neighborhood development. That’s why properties in
traditional neighborhoods command higher prices, on
a comparable square-foot basis, than new housing. The
problem is that Virginia
zoning codes
mandate suburban-style development. It’s so expensive
and time consuming for
developers to obtain exemptions
necessary for a neo-urban design that most don’t bother. Duany
advocates a dual zoning code system. Counties should adopt traditional neighborhood codes to supplement their
suburban-style codes, and allow developers to pick
either one. Unlike many reformers, Duany has no interest
in imposing his vision on anyone. He just asks to level
the playing field and letting the market decide.
It
should be evident to any reader that I regard Duany's
critique of contemporary suburbia as brilliant and his
New Urbanism design principles as inspired. I
desperately want Virginians to wake up and embrace his
vision. But I also acknowledge that reinventing the
neighborhood is only part of the solution. To a
carpenter, every problem looks like a nail; to an urban
planner, every problem looks like a zoning code.
Reforming Virginia's zoning codes along the lines that
Duany advocates is, absolutely, a critical step towards
meaningful reform.
But
it's only the first step, as even Duany is quick to
point out. Pro-sprawl biases are deeply embedded in a
range of U.S. institutions. We need to alter financial
practices that favor the building of new homes over the
rehabbing of old ones, the development of green fields
over the re-development of brownfields. We need to
reform governmental structures designed for the colonial
era of Virginia's history to make them more reflective
of 21st century metropolitan regions. We need to
overhaul property-based tax codes that encourage
beggar-thy-neighborhood development policies at the
local level and subsidize speculators who hold valuable
land, which should be developed, off the market. We
need to thoroughly re-think transportation allocation
formulas that subsidize mobility on the urban periphery
rather than re-development of the core.
Finally,
we need to give creative thought to how we can stimulate
the re-development of the last 50 years worth of cul de sacs,
shopping centers and wooded office "parks" --
Richard Florida calls them "Nerdistans" --
which now account for the majority of our built
environment. How do we fix that?
On
this particular
issue, Duany is a
pessimist. There's so little worth saving, he suggests,
that "sprawl" style development will simply
degrade.
Traditional neighborhoods have gone into
decline, but they maintain within themselves the
potential for revitalization. They can evolve
organically. People can buy buildings, renovate them,
add on to them convert them from single-family to
multi-family dwellings and back again. Developers can
convert old warehouses into loft apartments, or old
stores into live-work units.
But
suburbs lack that flexibility. Their zoning codes limit
changes to land use. And when the codes don't prohibit something,
the homeowner association ordinances do. The sheer
ugliness and dis-utility of the cul-de-sac subdivisions
make them not worth saving. They lack the character and
sense of place that, in other neighborhoods, inspire
people to reinvest in their houses rather than walk away
from them. A suburban shopping center will live or die,
Duany says. There is no middle ground. "You cannot
retrofit suburban sprawl."
Duany
pours his creative energy into either rehabbing old
neighborhoods or building new ones from scratch. That's
my main concern: Virginia has too much invested in the
last 50 years of development just to write it off. We can't
afford to ignore these areas. We must develop strategies
for salvaging them. (In future editions, we will explore
some of the creative work that is being done.)
In
the grand scheme of things, Virginians need to address
their built environment on two levels: the macro and the
micro. The macro encompasses governmental structures and
tax codes. The micro level focuses on the street-level
organization of neighborhoods. The macro issues are so
politically intractable that they'll take decades to implement.
But
Duany's micro prescriptions are so appealing that, I
think, we can accomplish them relatively easily -- in a
matter of years. Albemarle County already has adopted an
optional, neo-urbanist zoning code, and other localities
are looking at them, too. Duany-inspired zoning codes
may not be the whole answer, but they're a big part of
the answer.
For
all his criticism of existing institutions, Duany's message is
immensely heartening. Virginians can re-take
control of their lives by re-taking control over their
built environment. The potential does exist to
convert our unprecedented material wealth into an
unprecedented quality of life.
So, let's get moving!
--
May 24, 2004
|
|