METROPOLIS MAGAZINE
JANUARY/FEBRUARY ISSUE, 1995
BY ALEX MARSHALL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the hypermarche is right outside the subdivision entrance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shoppers though loved it. They had the familiar comments.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

European policy makers recognize this trend.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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