Written for the Conference: “Critics Talk About Smart Growth”
May 10-11, 2000
at The Pocantico Conference Center of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund
Sponsored by The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in cooperation with
The Institute for Urban Design of New York City.

By Alex Marshall

In 1957, John Keats wrote the satirical portrayal of life in the suburbs, The Crack in The Picture Window. It tells the history of the then burgeoning suburbs by telling the history of “John and Mary Drone,” who take up residence in a series of awful developments around Washington D.C. In its scathing, vitriolic language, it was a rifle shot across the bow of the battleship of suburbia that was proceeding at full pace. Keats wrote in part:

“For literally nothing down . . . you too, . . . can find a box of your own in one of the fresh-air slums we’re building around the edge of America’s cities. . . inhabited by people whose age, income, number of children, problems, habits, conversation, dress, possessions and perhaps even blood type are also precisely like yours. . . [They are] developments conceived in error, nurtured by greed, corroding everything they touch. They destroy established cities and trade patterns, pose dangerous problems for the areas they invade, and actually drive mad myriads of housewives shut up in them.”

In 1993, almost 40 years later, James Howard Kunstler wrote The Geography of Nowhere. In its scathing, vitriolic language, it was, well, a rifle shot across the bow of the battleship of suburbia that was proceeding at full tilt. Kunstler speaks of: “the jive-plastic commuter tract home wastelands, the Potemkin village shopping plazas with their vast parking lagoons, the Lego-block hotel complexes, the gourmet mansardic’ junk-food joints, the Orwellian office parks’ featuring buildings sheathed in the same reflective glass as the sunglasses worn by chain-gang guards, . . .”

When we examine the writings on suburbia, what’s striking is how similar the criticism of it has been in style and substance for the last half century, or even longer. Since the burbs first began to be a home to the middle-class, they have been criticized as soulless, vapid places that depreciate the finer things in life and turn their residents into mindless robots of shopping and lawn maintenance. It would not difficult to find a missive similar to Keats and Kunstler in the latest round of Smart Growth dialogue in the year 2000.

Comparing Keats to Kunstler is so interesting, because the bulk of what Kunstler is criticizing hadn’t even been built yet when Keats was writing. As Kunstler says, “Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built in the last fifty years” and that includes most of suburbia. I wonder what Kunstler thinks of the subdivisions that Keats criticized, now shaded by trees and their roads worn by use?

To put it simply, we have been whining about sprawl and the suburbs for a long time. Given the apparent ineffectuality of “our” criticism, (we critics of sprawl,) we should define more precisely what we are criticizing, why we are criticizing it, and to what end.

The Gentle Roots of Sprawl

Robert Fishman, quoting Lewis Mumford, described the suburbs in his classic study, Bourgeois Utopias, as “a collective effort to live a private life.”

As Fishman and Delores Hayden of Yale have shown, early forms of suburbs appeared two centuries ago in England and the United States. Fishman describes how the successful banker or merchant uprooted his family from the din of central London to a neo-manor house with turrets on a cul-de-sac on the edge of town. He would take his carriage into town, leaving his wife and children secure in the harmony and God-filled nature and away from the godless realm of man. Given this history, we can say that the suburbs seem to have been a steady counterpoint to the turmoil of modernity, first in a light patter, and then a pounding drumbeat.

The suburbs for their first century and a half were imitations of the sheltered domains of the landed gentry before the industrial revolution. Said Mumford:

“From the beginning, the privileges and delights of suburbanism were reserved largely for the upper class; so that the suburb might almost be described as the collective urban form of the country house – the house in a park – as the suburban way of live is so largely a derivative of the relaxed, playful, goods-consuming aristocratic life that developed of the rough, bellicose, strenuous existence of the feudal stronghold. . . To be your own unique self; to build your unique house, amid a unique landscape; to live in this Domain of Arnheim a self-centered life, in which private fantasy and caprice would have license to express themselves openly, in short, to withdraw like a monk and live like a prince – this was the purpose of the original creators of the suburb.”

Whatever their assets or deficiencies aesthetically, the suburbs basically worked until they switched from being a luxury good to a staple. Sprawl was invented when the suburbs, with the deployment of the car and the highway, became an object of mass consumption. The suburbs only delivered the goods when a few people were buying them. When everyone tried to buy a house in the garden, you got a house in the middle of sprawl.

When everyone attempts to live like a prince, things get complicated. Suburbia for everyone meant its benefits – isolation, refuge, and proximity to the center – went to no one. Mumford showed his great vision by recognizing this dynamic at the beginning of the massive investment in highways in the 1950s that produced the bulk of sprawl, rather than today, a half century afterward.

“Thus the ultimate effect of the suburban escape in our time is, ironically, a low-grade uniform environment from which escape is impossible,” Mumford said in The City in History published in 1961. “Thus, in overcoming the difficulties of the overcrowded and over-extended city, the suburb proved to be both a temporary and a costly solution. As soon as the suburban pattern became universal, the virtues it at first boasted began to disappear.”

Mumford, in his brilliant essay “The Highway and The City” published in 1958, berated Congress for spending so much money on a one-dimensional transportation decision. He urged it to spread the money out over a variety of transportation systems, and so get a more nuanced environment. But he, the most respected writer on cities of his day, is here an accurate, and unheeded, Cassandra. He writes:

“For the current American way of life is founded not just on motor transportation but on the religion of the motorcar, and the sacrifices that people are prepared to make for this religion stand outside the realm of rational criticism. Perhaps the only thing that could bring Americans to their senses would be a clear demonstration of the fact that their highway program will, eventually, wipe out the very area of freedom that the private motorcar promise to retain for them. . . . That sense of freedom and power remains a fact today only in low-density areas, in the open country; the popularity of this method of escape has ruined the promise it once held forth. In using the car to flee from the metropolis the motorist finds that he has merely transferred congestion to the highway and thereby doubled it. When he reaches his destination, in a distant suburb, he finds that the countryside he sought has disappeared: beyond him, thanks to the motorway, lies only anther suburb, just as dull as his own.”

What we see in the last 50 years of criticism of the suburbs is a consistent inability to confront the meaning of such criticism. The suburbs might be awful, but don’t make us stop building them, or the highways that lead to their creation. Like a fat man told to push himself away from the ice-cream counter and onto the exercise bicycle, we have not been willing to do it. Instead, we bitch and moan and order up another scoop of Chocolate-Crunch Rocky-Road Double-Fudge Chip Swirl, please. We try different styles of suburbia, we try New Towns and New Urbanism. We try ordering up more berms, more shrubbery, or more front porches. We try everything, save for a few brave cities and states like Portland and Oregon, except saying enough.

Embracing or Spurning Sprawl and The Suburb

Rather than stopping the outward sprawl, there is a curious phenomena of redefining what the suburbs are, as people seek to avoid the label of living in them – or designing them. Like at times the labels of “Feminist,” “Liberal” or “New Age,” increasingly no one wants to be called a suburbanite. Even its designers disavow their creations. Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Jim Rouse, Andres Duany � they all helped create new forms of suburbia, even while they adamantly denied doing just that.

Rouse, designer of the planned, ultra-suburban “New Town” of Columbia built outside Washington D.C. in the late 1960s, declared passionately that the suburbs were the worst form of development. He was not building suburbs, he said, but “a city.” He spearheaded the “New Town” movement, which saw places like Reston, Columbia and even Irvine, Ca. as antidotes to sprawl, not more of it.

In Business Week in 1966, Rouse spoke in words that Duany, the neo-traditionalist, would use a generation later almost verbatim. Rouse said that “Sprawl is inefficient, ugly. Worse 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?”

Driving today around the planned community of Columbia, with its swooping curves, separated shopping centers and a big enclosed shopping mall as the “downtown,” Columbia is the embodiment of the suburban ideal and form. Will the same be said of New Urban subdivisions like Kentlands and Celebration in 25 years? The New Urbanists shun the label “suburban” and call their creations dug out of farm fields “urban.” That these places, located miles from the center city, low in density, completely isolated, limited in their affordability, dependent upon the car, composed almost entirely of homeowners and with few if any businesses, could be called urban is the height of absurdity. Even worse is the idea that they will help solve sprawl. They are sprawl.

Given the ubiquity of sprawl, it’s tempting to conclude that it isn’t really a problem. After all, the suburbs have bought us the largest and the cheapest homes in the developed world. Only in the United States can a middle-class family afford a 3,000-foot home with four or five bedrooms. In the past, only the aristocracy could afford such space. That’s the principal achievement of sprawl. Mammoth amounts of personal space to the middle 50 percent of Americans in income. Not spoken of is that the bottom 25 percent live in worse conditions than in Europe or Japan, both in terms of income and is terms of housing, health care and general environment. Sprawl may be a part of the American decision to have a less equitable society overall. We embrace the private realm of suburbia, while rejecting the public realm of national health care, comprehensive family leave and child care, and other examples of more communal systems.

The downside of sprawl is the loss of things public. We have lost physical community, because car-centered culture is more individual and less group oriented. We have lost something hard to define, which I will call “Place.” We have lost easy access to nature and open space. We have lost the ability to bicycle on a country road without traffic. We have lost coherence. We have lost diversity and flexibility of our transportation systems, one which would have treated old, young, and poorer people more gently. We have harmed our environment. These losses can be quantified, but many still go back to feelings and perceptions that are subjective. It is simply not as fun living in a place that stretches across hundreds of square miles, where the country side is inaccessible, where simple errands require braving traffic, where the alternative to driving is personal isolation.

When I was young, my dad used to advise me on the dynamics of buying a pizza. A 16-inch pizza, he would tell me soberly, was almost twice as big as a 12 inch pizza, even though it was only four-inches bigger and only a dollar or two more. To put it lightly, the pizza pie of our metropolitan areas, all bubbly with car dealerships, subdivisions and highways, has grown enormously in the last half century. Places like Los Angeles and Atlanta are coming close to the title of that Deyan Sudjic book a few years ago, The 100 Mile City.

Making Real Choices

Given our confused relationship with sprawl and suburbia, how can we proceed with greater clarity in the future? I propose a few simple rules to keep in mind.

1.Transportation Matters.

Allow me to say something provocative, which is: It is conceptually very easy to control or even stop sprawl. Simply stop building or widening roads on the periphery of metropolitan areas. Even without throwing in a moratorium on extending water and sewer connections, low-density development would dry up in a decade or so without the benefit of new freeway off-ramps, or new suburban boulevards cutting through virgin farmland, or the latest widening of a traffic-congested road that now gives a little breathing space into the commute.

If a region could control nothing else, controlling the transportation systems would still be an adequate tool to shape development. Land use laws, like zoning, are secondary to the effects of a transportation system. Suburban development depends on public roads and highways. And no one has denied that the public has a right to control public expenditures.

If one accepts this, then one accepts that controlling or limiting sprawl is a political challenge, not a design, engineering or aesthetic one. The simplest way to control sprawl would be to shift 50 percent of highway funding on a state and national level into trains, subways, streetcars, buses, bicycle paths and sidewalks. Sure this is difficult, but that gets back to politics.

Transportation decisions are the important ones. Growth boundaries are great tools, but in the long run they are just as important in saying where transportation dollars will be spent, as where private development can occur. I’ve sometimes wondered if all the fights over zoning are an elaborate ruse to cover up the real decisions being made by the various state departments of transportation. They are the real designers of cities today.

We might also arrive at more realistic decisions about growth if we use the term “subsidy” more carefully. Often, suburban growth said to be “subsidized” by government, as if there were some forms of growth that were not subsidized. In reality, government “subsidizes” all forms of growth because it makes the principal transportation decisions and pays for them. The construction of subway lines in New York city, with government help, “subsidized” the manufacture of Queens and Brooklyn and the upper West Side. In the 19th century, the federal government massively fueled the construction of railroads by giving away federal land. Government usually build place through transportation choices. Rather than debate subsidies, it might be more helpful to debate what kind of cities and places we want, and whether we are willing to pay for them.

2. Good Design Will Not Solve Sprawl.

When the word “design” is used in public debate over sprawl, it often refers to design on the level of the house, street or neighborhood. Andres Duany, the leader of the neo-traditionalists school, advocates a neat set of streetwidths, set-back rules and house types that will be a counterpoint to the wide boulevards, big front yards, and garage-door fronted houses of conventional suburbia.

But this emphasis on design is misplaced, unless we start talking of design on the level of the metropolitan area or state. The overall urbanism of a city is defined through much larger systems than the design of individual streets or even neighborhoods.

To give an example: Haussmann in Paris in the 1850s did a good job re-constructing Paris. It was a better-designed city than say Manchester. But both were urban in very similar ways. The transportation systems and economic context created their urbanity. The same holds true in the 20th century. Columbia, Md is a better designed suburb than that standard Washington subdivision shaken out of the box. But both are equally suburban. The residents of Columbia might have a better aesthetic experience, but the rhythms of their lives revolve around their car and differ little from those of their neighbors in more standard subdivisions.

We can widen this concept of design to include “codes,” “zoning,” and all the usual suspects in the Who-Dunnit list of sprawl. In many of the efforts to redirect city planning, there has been a misplaced emphasis on codes and zoning, as if they caused our cities to be laid out a particular way.

This is a seductive argument at first. Usually, zoning and codes require the standard suburban form of separated uses, lots of parking, wider streets and so-forth. But in reality, zoning and codes no more produce sprawl than a posted speed limit causes cars to drive fast. Codes and zoning are more akin to a mechanism that tidies up around the edges of a system, then a recipe book that determines the outcome. The essential dynamic of the suburbs, which is separation of uses, and the inner cities, which is mixed-use, is determined by their transportation systems.

The codes, from zoning to parking and setback rules and street widths, can screw up a good urban place, but they cannot produce an urban place by themselves. Let’s imagine, for example, that the standard suburban rules requiring so many parking spaces for so many square feet of retail or office space were imported to Manhattan. This is an absurd example, but useful to make a point. What would happen if this were done? It would screw Manhattan thoroughly up, wrecking the fabric of the city and degrading the urbanism. But, and here’s the important point, if I eliminated such requirements in Long Island I would not produce New York City or even a interesting facsimile of it. I would simply be left in a suburban environment with no place to park. Unless I put in a mass transit system at the same time.

3. Political and Public Decisions, not Private Ones.

Sprawl is occurring in every developed country in the world. The roots of sprawl lie in the dynamic of the car and the state-sponsored investments to facilitate its use, not just in American bad taste. In Copenhagen, you can drive outside the city and find shopping malls, gas stations with attached quickie-marts, and the usual accoutrements of the suburbs. Even if in cuter, Danish form. The urban planners complain about the suburbs having “all the money,” and the central city having “all the problems.”

Sound familiar?

But Europeans have done a better job at controlling sprawl, because they accept something obvious. That sprawl is created because of a mismatch between the private desires of individuals, and their public desires. We all want the nice house right outside the city, even if none of us want sprawl. Which means in economic terms, “a market failure,” thus requiring government oversight and direction.

The political challenge has been so difficult because it puts Americans into conflict with an essential thesis of the American dream and laissez-faire capitalism. The American dream, going back to the images of unwashed masses arriving to our shore, is built on the concept that individuals pursuing their own interest not only makes things better for them, it makes things better for everyone. You do what you want, I do what I want, within a marginal set of rules of fair play, and we all end up better off. Adam Smith’s invisible hand lifts all boats. It’s magical. Only it doesn’t work with sprawl. As Alex Krieger of Harvard says, “Most sprawl is caused by people fleeing sprawl.” That’s a statement worth savoring awhile.

In fact, everyone seeking their own self-interest often pushes down, and sometimes sinks, all boats. Environmental destruction is one example; traffic jams and runs on banks are another. Still another example is the increase in violent crime caused by the proliferation of guns. One person with a gun is arguably safer; but many people with a gun are all collectively less safe. But we resist this simple truth because its collectivist orientation is so contrary to our American myth and ethos of individualism.

The causes and the cures of sprawl are controlled by political decisions. Eric Monkkonen, in his book America Becomes Urban, says we should not fall into the fallacy of thinking that the form of cities and places is an unstoppable byproduct of innovations in technology. He uses the example of Los Angeles, which people say was shaped by the automobile. This, he says, is like saying “chunks of hot metal cause death by bleeding” instead of “thousands of Americans deliberately kill one another each year.”

With Los Angeles, Monkkonen says, it was the “political aggression” of the city that enabled it to extend street-car lines, build roads and take in new territory after the turn of the century. “The [technological] determinists forget that political action was the necessary prior step for technological change. . . Of far greater historical and contemporary importance than the shaping power of transportation technology have been the enormous political, social, and economic efforts by governments — local, state, and federal — to promote them and make them functional. In fact, very little urban history has unfolded in the purely rational way that the technological determinist model implies.” When automobiles were first invented in the late 19th century, they were little more than interesting toys, Monkkonen said. It was not until local and state governments committed to paving the then generally unpaved roads that the automobile was able to spread from the hobbyist to the general public. And good roads, Monkkonen reminds us, “are purely political creations.”

Smart Growth 

In seeking to control sprawl, the regional and national decisions are the important ones. The roots of sprawl are in the pattern of U.S. spending on transportation at a national level, combined with regional and state decisions and spending on transportation, growth and general infrastructure. The Smart Growth movement can help us affect these decisions if it keeps its rigor.

In March at the Smart Growth conference at M.I.T. sponsored by The Lincoln Land Institute, Chris Nelson of the Georgia Institute of Technology proposed a series of rules by which we evaluate “Smart Growth” proposals, policies and developments. They were helpful for imposing some criteria to judge whether or not growth is indeed “Smart.” A very good thing for journalists would be to use this framework when new development is proposed, and it is attempted to be labeled “Smart Growth.”

Nelson’s criteria included: Does it conform to a regional framework? Does it prevent expansion of the urban fringe? Include transit? Channel development into already disturbed areas? Have a net average density of six to seven units an acre?

We should battle the real tigers of sprawl rather than the paper ones. Should we choose not to, then we should stop our whining, and accept the world we have created. For truly, we have chosen it.

Alex Marshall, an independent journalist, is a Loeb Fellow at Harvard through June 2000. His first book: How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl and The Roads Not Taken is being published by The University of Texas Press and will be on shelves this fall. A former staff-writer for The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Marshall’s work has been published in Metropolis, The New York Times Magazine, Architecture, The Washington Post, Salon, George, Planning and other publications.