The Peirce Report: Shaping A Shared Future

Posted on September 24, 2007 by Alex Marshall

A Generation Ago It Would Have Seemed Absurd To List Charlotte With Atlanta, Miami, Denver, Dallas, Seattle. No Longer. Now, As The Carolinas’ Undisputed Economic Capital, Where Is The Charlotte Region Headed In The 21st Century

Sunday, September 17, 1995
The Charlotte Observer
Written by Peirce, LaRita Barber, Alex Marshall, and Curtis Johnson

This region is a place where people perennially assume a powerful bunch of bank presidents and other men (always men) call the shots. As the big oaks of business and civic leadership have fallen across America, Charlotte has seemed a case of arrested development. The mysterious group of business folks called ”The Vault” (they met at a bank) has long faded in Boston. The once-powerful Citizens Council has turned warm, fuzzy and conciliatory in Dallas. The immodestly named ”Phoenix Forty” has retreated from dominant leadership.

But change in Charlotte? Never, it seemed. The legend has been constantly renewed by the activism of the bank chieftains – remarkable financial buccaneers, ranging America in search of banks, capturing one big fiscal house after another and dragging the prize back uptown – much like the hunters of old returning home with the bounty.

The triumphs of Ed Crutchfield, Hugh McColl Jr. and their colleagues have made a huge difference: Look at all those new bank jobs in the region, at Charlotte’s soaring reputation.

Even so, a leadership revolution is under way in the Charlotte region. The leadership clique, led by the bank CEOs and other corporate chieftains, has not disappeared. But it is less cohesive, and rebellions against it more serious. Residents of Charlotte-Mecklenburg and neighboring counties, from York to Cabarrus, Gaston to Union, err when they glance up at those soaring bank towers and assume power is as centralized as it was.

Consider the rebellions:

Populist conservatives, saying government power is at the root of much evil and highly suspicious of ”uptown power,” have swept to power themselves in recent local elections. Yellow dog Democrats are cowering in confusion. (”We were the party of the people; what’s this revolt from the right all about?”)

Tom Bush, a Mecklenburg County commissioner elected last fall, told us, ”Elected officials used to operate at the beck and call of the big banks and corporations. The business leaders had a close relationship with a powerful Chamber of Commerce that could both help local government and dictate to local government. Now many of us have been elected whom the economic powers in Mecklenburg didn’t know or weren’t interested in. Obviously there’s nervousness on the part of the chamber, the major banks, that they may be losing some of the control they previously had. My attitude’s not to do just uptown’s will, but also what University Park, southeast Charlotte and all the other areas need.”

Years of harmonious approval of major school bonds came to a surprising, discordant end last spring, as Mecklenburg voters defeated a mega-bond issue, more than $300 million, despite its strong support in the corporate community.
A gaggle of organizations has emerged across the multicounty, bi-state Charlotte citistate. The object of each: regional consensus or cooperation. Why? It’s becoming obvious no jurisdiction or power group has the power to carry the day by itself.

Examples: The Carolinas Partnership tries to catalyze economic development on a regional basis, consciously including development interests from the counties. Such groups as the Carolinas Transportation Compact and the Committee of 100 have looked at issues from highways to rails. After years of being trounced by rural and small-town politicos from other N.C regions, a Southern Piedmont Legislative Caucus organized to get a better deal in Raleigh.

A whole array of programs are training potentially more independent future leaders, including the three-year-old Carolinas Leadership Program. New citizen groups are emerging. One, in its infancy, is the Queen City Congress, under which a group of neighborhoods, both affluent and poor, recently signed a ”Declaration of Interdependence.”

There’s a plausible argument that with a rough brush of the arm, big business leadership could neutralize any of those groups. Some of them, the leadership training groups, for example, are largely establishment- financed anyway.

But as more groups and people begin to exercise leadership, commands sent down from executive suites are (1) less likely to get sent, and (2) more likely to be circumvented or ignored.

What’s more, leadership naturally disperses when problems get tougher. The big guys can hardly snap their fingers and provide answers to today’s pressing problems:

How to prepare a work force that can sustain the region’s stunning record of almost full employment?
How to avoid choking on the congestion of the thousands of cars – in other words, how not to become a Houston or Los Angeles?
How to build a society that works for all, across races, neighborhoods, counties?
How to make sure the region has functioning schools, ample parks and that people feel safe from crime?
How to cultivate big-city opportunities and small-town civility in the same region?

Those who doubt the power transfer in the Charlotte region should ask the man himself, NationsBank Chairman Hugh McColl Jr. We did. ”Maybe the baton’s already passed,” McColl said. ”The so-called group that people think controls everything downtown cratered about four or five years ago.”

McColl and First Union Chairman Ed Crutchfield acknowledge there was a strong partnership seeking to guide Charlotte, among themselves and such leaders as former Duke Power Co. Chairman Bill Lee, developer Johnny Harris, retail leader and former mayor John Belk, Observer Publisher Rolfe Neill and the Dickson family, whose Ruddick Corp. owns Harris Teeter supermarkets and other companies.

But today, they say, the group mainly coalesces on charity issues. Business figures such as Crutchfield disclaim almost any contact with the local political structure.

The regional counterparts to Charlotte’s power brokers are well-known – the Cannon family in Cabarrus County, the Close family of York and Lancaster counties, the Broyhills in Catawba and Caldwell, and the Stowes, Carstarphens and other textile titans in Gaston.

This Carolinas culture is wrapped in strong country-city ties. Crutchfield noted many Charlotteans (like McColl and himself) were born in small towns within 100 miles of the city, ”sort of one-horse towns where some old rich guy controls the land and the buildings, and they think that’s what’s happening in Charlotte.” Result: The symbolism of power remains, reinforced by Charlotte’s soaring bank towers, even if it’s less often exercised.

Whether or not McColl and Crutchfield protest too much about their modest power, no one can gainsay the achievements of Charlotte’s recent leaders. By their imagination and will power, they played a catalytic role in catapulting Charlotte from the third tier of cities – the category of a Norfolk, Birmingham or Jacksonville – to a firm place in the constellation of major U.S. regional centers.

A generation ago it would have seemed absurd to list Charlotte with Atlanta, Miami, Denver, Dallas, Seattle. No longer. The big banks, the audacious skyline, the NBA and NFL franchises, the thriving airport, the city’s dynamism have all seen to that. Charlotte is the Carolinas’ undisputed economic capital. Savvy leadership is the obvious reason. As Belk is fond of saying, ”Charlotte is a man-made town.”

But will Charlotte emerge as a trend city, with a fast-moving, urban, cosmopolitan life? We doubt it.

Here’s a city and region that seems to care more for trim, green lawns than urban spice. It holds some excellent shopping centers, but you can look long and hard for an eccentric coffeehouse or used bookstore. Uptown rolls up its sidewalks at 5 p.m. SouthPark is thriving, but urbane it isn’t.

Even among residents, the joke is: ”Charlotte’s a nice place to live, but you wouldn’t want to visit there.” Or the perhaps apocryphal comment we heard, attributed to a Hornets player: ”You can’t do nothing in Charlotte except live.”

Yet with its quieter style, Charlotte has an immense asset – its culture of cooperation and participation. More than in most cities, citizens are expected to take part in civic projects, volunteer on civic boards and committees, even run for office. Not by accident does Charlotte have more Habitat for Humanity houses – nearly 250 – than any other city in America.

In the same spirit, this city is quite open to outsiders. ”If people come in and want to work for the community, Charlotte lets them,” said Belk. ”Some cities are jealous of people coming in and won’t let them help. But we’re different.”

An outsider looks across the Charlotte region and sees a high quotient of what political scientists call ”civic capital.” Community-based organizations proliferate, as do an extraordinary number of churches, at least some of which support important social work. Charlotte boasts a stronger tradition of racial amity than most other Southern cities, including strong early efforts to make school desegregation work, and election of a black mayor ahead of many Southern towns.

The effort to excel continues. The city government is making a heroic try to ”reinvent” itself, to become more responsive to neighborhoods and citizens. Whether or not full city-county merger is approved, the consolidation of multiple Charlotte and Mecklenburg County services stands out as a beacon of common sense among America’s quarrelsome metropolitan regions. Indeed, here’s a region where it’s at least possible to discuss the idea of merged regional government services. For example, the successful police merger in Charlotte-Mecklenburg could be tried in surrounding counties, where the elected sheriff is becoming an anomaly in an increasingly urban age. Think further: Wouldn’t regional fire and emergency medical services make sense, too?

And consider Rock Hill’s strategic planning process, begun in the early ’80s, which has transformed it from a depressed, unemployment-plagued mill town to one of the nation’s most economically vibrant, highly attractive suburban centers. The transformation was accomplished in part, leaders told us, by convincing firms ”that if they were in Rock Hill, they were really in Charlotte.” Yet Rock Hill, with its public art, quality industrial parks, restored downtown and emphasis on neighborhood revival, is anxious not to bleed into Charlotte proper.

Perils exist, and they start with the region’s success. Does Charlotte aspire to be more than a boom town? When an Observer columnist recently asked, ”Would you challenge a bulldozer for anything in Charlotte?” only a tiny proportion of readers offered any examples of physical places to which they felt real attachment.

Can thousands of newcomers be integrated successfully into the region’s civic life? Newcomers are arriving in such numbers that thousands are in danger of being mere ”residents,” not true ”citizens.” A number of newcomers, interviewed in shopping malls by our colleague Alex Marshall, talked of the Charlotte region as if it were a disposable commodity, not a community to which they have reciprocal obligation.

More challenges relate to development. For example: Since the 1960s, the dominant form of construction has been self-contained, single- income-group subdivisions, each with one entrance onto an arterial road and a country-club-type sign proclaiming a Quail Hollow or whatever, hinting strongly of safety, seclusion, exclusivity. Missing, as a rule, are connecting roads to the next development.

Such problems are typical. It’s no accident the Charlotte region’s greatest pockets of congestion turn up in areas most recently developed – exactly the opposite of what one would expect.

The developers’ land-use decisions will increasingly leave the public to suffer serious inconvenience, from long driving times and congestion to worse air quality and a palpable loss of community.

Is it too heretical to suggest, in this land of free enterprise and ferocious distrust of government, that abdicating so much public decision-making, and letting private developers determine a lot of the region’s shape and form, may have been a very bad idea?

The region’s cities and counties should return to the practice, common until the 1940s, of laying out and mapping streets. On a big wall at city hall or the county government office should be a map of how the city will grow over the next half-century. It might take 40 years before a developer paves that street and puts in lots, but when that happens, it will fit into a whole.

People will predictably reiterate that such planning smacks of socialism. Again and again, we heard that this is a region of prickly, independent, ”Don’t Tread on Me” folks. The Scotch-Irish pioneers who settled the banks of the Catawba River brought their deep resentment of aristocrats, government and the authorities, and those sentiments endure.

But even if government is viewed with a jaundiced eye, does it make sense to assume a mill owner, a banker or a subdivision builder knows best? We believe there’s a third route – broader citizen participation, not just in elections but thousands of forums.

The region’s citizens need to take charge. The native intelligence of the people of this region needs a workout. The citizens of the Charlotte citistate must address the most critical challenges of the times, personally, intensively, in all kinds of formats.

Take one problem: the poverty, crime and social chaos that plague some of Charlotte’s older neighborhoods. Rural areas have parallel pockets of deprivation. These problems already besmirch the region’s reputation.

Unattended, they could prove deeply injurious in the future. A number of constructive, neighborhood-based recovery strategies have been proposed, based on self-help, accountability and strategic public investment. But is the whole society – businesses, nonprofits, universities and affluent citizens – ready to provide the political and financial support to get progress rolling and sustain it?

If a growing proportion of the region’s crime problem is rooted in youth crime, for example, are youth being called on to help analyze the problem, work with peers, suggest solutions? Are young people in general being drawn into discussions of the Charlotte citistate’s choices and future?

Is UNC Charlotte, with its huge repository of brainpower, being tapped sufficiently? UNCC and the community colleges are making an effort to contribute to the region’s public dialogue. UNCC has many students engaged in some form of community service. Regardless of the discipline, UNCC officials told us, the university does not hire department heads without being clear that relating to the community will be part of the job.

But the community shouldn’t wait for outreach from the academics. They need to be sought out, challenged, drawn into critical public debates.

One example: North Carolinians are debating subsidies to draw industries. UNCC should be ready, perhaps working with the local press, to do cost analyses on subsidy deals as they’re proposed.

Finally, consider government itself. In the new international economy, regions must be keenly competitive. That means not just wages, but a technically skilled work force, a clean environment, quality health care, arts and professional sports, parks and open space, and, especially, efficient government.

Good or bad, government makes up roughly a fifth of a local economy. If government is inefficient, so is the citistate.

Only informed citizens can hold government accountable. Services must be merged, bureaucracies thinned, performance benchmarks set. Public-private partnerships for more economical and effective local government must be devised across the region’s neighborhood, county and state lines. If not, the discordant cacophony of competing governments will start driving new businesses away.

It won’t do any more just to say, ”No – I don’t like taxes, I don’t like government, I distrust city people or minorities or whoever, so get government off my back, let free enterprise reign and everything will be fine.”

Some of the Charlotte region’s radical populists seem to go that far. We believe these new conservatives should be welcomed into the political debate, since they bring insights and challenge many of government’s encrusted and outmoded ways of operating. But they should not go unchallenged. Because at the end of the day, real solutions to shared problems must be found, or the region will falter.

Thousands of citizens of the ”can-do” Charlotte region, operating across the barriers of political persuasion, class and color, need to think through their problems and challenges and design their own collaborative answers.

The region’s newspapers can enrich the process immeasurably. So can the broadcast media, broadening the debate to thousands of people who might otherwise not be engaged. Churches, Rotaries, chambers of commerce, schools – all should be facilitators and leaders.

Gather these forces and, we believe, there will be no stopping the Charlotte citistate, advancing confidently into the 21st century.

DEAR READERS:

On a Sunday afternoon, soaring over your communities at low helicopter altitude, it hit us. Your region has magic. Historic neighborhoods, a stunning uptown skyline, recreational lakes spreading from the spine of the Catawba River. Your Rock Hills and Gastonias, Davidsons and Kannapolises in stages of renaissance. And a marvelous vast canopy of trees standing guard over your places still unfilled.

We’re two journalist observers invited to delve into your region and offer counsel on its future, as we have done for 10 other cities.

In more than 100 interviews last June with your fellow citizens, your enthusiasm for your high quality of life came through.

Famous or humble, you were also as candid about your problems as you were proud of your prosperity. We try to match your candor, in the series starting today in Perspective, on Page 1D.

We’ve studied metro regions coast to coast. We’ve seen what happens when planning is scorned, sprawl tolerated, historic urban centers abandoned, education dishonored, crime and neighborhood decay left to fester.

Don’t let it happen to you. You don’t need to.

As friends of your region, we propose a bunch of ideas today. For example: walkability and livability for uptown and your historic county seats. Next Sunday we focus on growth guided to corridors and town centers, to protect your environment. A third Sunday we’ll try to show how computer learning can overcome anti-education sentiments left over from your pioneer days. We’ll wind up Oct. 8 addressing the potential for nationally significant breakthroughs in your crime- and poverty-plagued neighborhoods.

Whether you warm to our specific ideas or not, do yourselves one big favor: Try democracy. Too often the Charlotte region looks for direction to bankers and corporate chieftains. Of course, they’re a talented lot. But from clean air to the work force to family stability to crime, they can’t and won’t solve your most basic problems for you.

Create multiple forums – regionwide and locally – to put the decisions about your physical growth, your educational future, your parks, towns and neighborhoods, into the hands of thousands of citizens. Make Everyman and Everywoman an author of your region’s future. Trust yourselves, challenge yourselves. Have fun at it. Build a great 21st-century citistate. Remember, no one else can do it for you.

CHALLENGES TO THE REGION

Accept that the bank CEOs and their friends no longer control the region. Future leadership becomes everyone’s job on the big problems for the region’s future: Quality work force, traffic, crime, equity.
Celebrate Charlotte’s ascension among the ranks of America’s leading cities.
Cultivate and protect the region’s special, open, ”can-do” culture. Work to accumulate more ”civic capital.”
Integrate the thousands of newcomers into the region’s life.
Think about regional services beyond Mecklenburg’s borders.
The public – not developers – should plan streets, roads and neighborhoods.
Recognize the age of the ”citistate” has dawned. Reduce attitudinal splits between Mecklenburg and outlying counties. Focus on a common future.
As the old power brokers die or retire, the region’s leadership must come from its people – city and suburban – working together. Tap citizens, youth, universities. Build trust, and expect the media to help.
Recognize uptown is the region’s signature piece to the world. Make it as welcoming for people as for big buildings.
Support the region’s other uptowns – Concord, Monroe, Rock Hill, Davidson and Gastonia, for example – where the real character of town life is preserved. Use local zoning and other powers to make sure the downtowns become a focus of development.

THE PEIRCE REPORT

This series is based on a simple premise: Charlotte and its sister communities are one region, one economy, one environmental area, one society.

Clearly, Mecklenburg County is the population and income heavyweight. But in no way is it the only guy on the block. The daily lives of people across at least eight counties – Mecklenburg, Union, Cabarrus, Iredell, Catawba, Lincoln, Gaston and York, S.C. – are ever more tightly intertwined. And clear ties are developing to an outer ”ring” of counties – Anson, Stanly, Rowan, Alexander, Burke, Cleveland, and Chester and Lancaster, S.C.

The Charlotte area is becoming a major national and world economic region. It fits well the definition of ”citistate,” which we have developed in our work with other regions (and hope some day to get accepted by Random House or Webster):

A region consisting of one or more historic central cities surrounded by cities and towns which have a shared identification, function as a single zone for trade, commerce and communication, and are characterized by social, economic and environmental interdependence.

The definition doesn’t mention city or county lines. A citistate is organic. The citistate is what the economy does. It’s the ”commute-shed” for workers, the signal area for local newscasts, the geographic base of fans for pro sports teams. It’s the market for top regional hospitals.

No matter what you check – from air pollution to water quality, the arts to crime, shopping, higher education, day care – the interdependence of the Charlotte citistate is underscored.

It’s absurd for this region to do anything but think and plan collaboratively. One hears of a growing split between suburbanites and Charlotte’s old guard. But Rock Hill, for one, is making an asset, not a liability, of strong ties with Charlotte.

Citistates that quarrel will suffer the unhappy fate of families mired in conflict. Those that see opportunity in the variety of their regions, that mobilize people and communities to work together, will be far more resilient – better places to live and work.

UPTOWN: SYMBOL OF THE REGION

When ”Nell” appeared at theaters last winter, the origin of the rural scenes was a mystery to most moviegoers. Not until the credits did they learn those stunning mountain scenes came from Western North Carolina.

But in a theater as far away as Minneapolis, when a city skyline loomed, there were audible whispers: ”That’s Charlotte.”

Charlotte’s skyline has become the region’s signature.

Anchored by the NationsBank and First Union towers, the skyline symbolizes banking clout. It signals Charlotte is now an ”instant recognition” city. Goodbye to confusion with the South’s other ”Ch’s.”

Charlotte needs its uptown to keep emphasizing its newly won status. A depressed or abandoned uptown would be a disaster for the entire Charlotte citistate.

Right now, uptown shows lots of big-project dynamism: the new convention center, the huge Carolinas Stadium, Discovery Place, Spirit Square, the Afro-American Cultural Center and the North Carolina Blumenthal Performing Arts Center.

But what about people? Will uptown be a place for them, too? Will the streets be fun to walk on, with restaurants and galleries and little shops? Will uptown warmly welcome an entire region? Will it stop looking like a stage set for a ghost town after 5 p.m.? Can a human, real city be built?

What’s missing is glaringly obvious. We discovered it one evening, in search of a good meal. Unless you know where the restaurants are hidden, you’re in trouble.

We stood at Trade and Tryon, unthreatened by cars or buses, watching stoplights flash green, then red again, regulating unseen traffic. A few human figures wandered about, reminding us of the hotel concierge’s warning to be wary of street people.

We found Bistro 100, deep in an indoor retail complex, and enjoyed a fine meal. As we paid, we were advised to call a cab, since it wouldn’t be a good idea to walk around at night.

The next evening we found an excellent restaurant, Carpe Diem. Wonder of wonders, it actually had a street entrance on South Tryon.

The chances for a more vibrant uptown rest heavily with NationsBank, through its Transamerica Square project and Chairman Hugh McColl Jr.’s personal, active interest in a major sweep of development through uptown’s entire northern end.

McColl talks both of investment and his personal legacy to Charlotte when he discusses plans for an urban village of offices, townhomes, apartments and stores stretching eventually to the Brookshire Freeway, filling the gaps from Third and Fourth Wards to Earle Village to the new transportation center on East Trade Street. A huge chunk of it would be residential development. That has major promise. Double the 7,500 people living uptown, and just watch the gathering parade of restaurants, as well as places to buy groceries, get hardware and have your suits cleaned.

Developing a strong residential base is key to everything else.

One worries that all this development could be hurried forward without full public participation.

When citizens are involved from the start, they become stakeholders, defenders of the new. Ideas emerge: What about a day-care center at the new transportation stop? What about special arts and music fairs to celebrate Charlotte’s ring cities – a Rock Hill or Gastonia or Monroe day? Will uptown have housing for every income group (the goal successful cities such as Portland, Ore., have set)?

Let’s fast-forward five years. Is this what visitors will see as Charlotte turns the century?

Fifteen thousand uptown workers awaken to the smug reminder that their commute is a pleasant walk. No congestion. No extra car to keep up, no parking fee. A quick breakfast is easy to find, whether it’s coffee and muffins at St. Ruby’s Java Joint II at CityFair, or biscuits and livermush at the New New Big Village on North Tryon.
A second awakening comes later, as dozens of restaurants on Tryon and Church streets fill with people headed to the Performing Arts Center to hear the Carolinas Symphony, formerly the Charlotte Symphony, conducted by Christoph von Dohnanyi, recently lured from the Cleveland Orchestra.
The south end of uptown goes seismic several times a month with suburbanites, Dilworthites riding the trolley up South Boulevard from Dilworth, and conventiongoers heading for concerts in the new Hornets Nest, a basketball arena near the Carolinas Stadium. The older Charlotte Coliseum continues to be booked solid, as well, with tractor pulls, Amway meetings and Ice Capades.
After the concert, the crowd spills into a nearby complex of movies, bars and restaurants developed in the late ’90s. Residential life is also returning to this end of town. The pioneer was developer Jim Gross, who followed his successful Ivey’s project on North Tryon by converting the old Lance factory into condos.
The transportation center works so well that last year nearly half of all commute trips to uptown were by transit. There are buses, van shuttles, even a jitney lane of specially marked cars to make short trips around uptown. Uptown residents use the transit center for van rides to Lake Norman, University City or shopping malls.
Meanwhile, work is getting under way to convert one transit way to the first line of light rail, linking uptown to the airport.
Instead of steering around it, Charlotteans proudly include Earle Village as they show guests around. The public housing project, developed in 1967, was almost completely rebuilt with $41 million from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (just a year before HUD itself was replaced). And NationsBank, despite its earnings hitting a rough patch after it swallowed the Bank of Boston in 1996, kept its promise to hire 100 Earle Village residents.
CityFair bursts with higher education offered by UNC Charlotte and Central Piedmont Community College. They opened a job and training information clearinghouse, which offers a package of interest- and aptitude-testing and computer-based searches for the best matches in jobs.
After years of debate over the old convention center building, the city – over some local retailers’ objections – courageously struck a deal with Nordstrom to buy the facility for $1 and turn it into a department store.

Don’t believe it’s possible? Fifteen years ago, no one would have believed uptown Charlotte would look the way it does now. One thing is certain: The roaring growth of the past decade will slow. Executives such as First Union CEO Ed Crutchfield warn that the region’s financial services job gains won’t be anything like what they were in recent years.

The attractions of the suburbs won’t fade. Crutchfield makes a strong case for the communications ease and less-expensive parking at his bank’s massive, Pentagon-style building in University Research Park.

Still, a diverse, well-planned uptown can strengthen and give focus to an entire region – as the business center and symbol of the citistate, as its entertainment and arts and culture center, and as the area’s lived-in, welcoming heart.

In the chase to outpace Atlanta and Dallas, building a vibrant uptown could be the go-ahead move.

CHARLOTTE THEN. . . AND NOW

1. In an aerial view of The Square on Sept. 27, 1981, North Carolina’s first ”skyscraper” – the 14-story Independence Building – is imploded to make way for new development. 2. The bottom photo is a current view of The Square and uptown, looking south down Tryon Street. The triangular structure in the foreground right is the Independence Center, one of the buildings that replaced the Independence Building. 3. At left is the 60-story NationsBank Corporate Center, which opened in 1992. 4. When fire destroyed Crockett Park (above) in 1985, baseball had been played on the site for a half-century. When it came time to build a new stadium, however, team owner George Shinn took Charlotte’s minor league team south of the border to Fort Mill. 5. Olmstead Park (below) – a development combining single-family homes and apartments – filled the vacancy.

ON CHARLOTTE AND THE REGION

Tom Bush, Mecklenburg commissioner: ”Elected officials used to operate at the beck and call of the big banks and corporations. . . . Now many of us have been elected whom the economic powers in Mecklenburg didn’t know or weren’t interested in.”

Hugh McColl Jr., NationsBank chairman: ”Maybe the baton’s already passed. The so-called group that people think controls everything downtown cratered about four or five years ago.” *

Michael Gallis, Charlotte planner: ”Rock Hill is Richardsonian Romanesque, Monroe is variegated Victorian, Concord is Second Empire, Davidson is Georgian or Palladian. Gastonia is neo-classic.”

John Belk, retail leader and former mayor: ”If people come in and want to work for the community, Charlotte lets them. Some cities are jealous of people coming in and won’t let them help. But we’re different.”

AREA CITIES DISTINCTIVE, CAN CHOOSE TO REMAIN SO

Walk around the downtowns of the cities surrounding Charlotte – Monroe, Rock Hill, Concord, Davidson or Gastonia, for example – and you’ll find something uptown Charlotte lacks.

These cities have character, a sense of history, a sense of place. They have straight streets where 100-year-old buildings perch on sidewalks and storefront windows invite passersby inside. They have fine Victorian homes with wraparound porches. They offer old hardware stores. They have churches and schools as rooted in their places as old oaks.

Charlotte may have the Panthers, flashy attractions and a lot of money. But most buildings look inward, not to the street, once the river of life flowing through every town. Central Charlotte is strangely devoid of the intricate web of homes, stores, offices and churches that used to make up a city.

Charlotte’s special character oozed out during postwar development. Charlotte tore down its past with scarcely a thought. Only traces remain, principally in Fourth Ward, a reconstructed hint at the Charlotte of yesteryear.

But outside Charlotte lie cities with distinct personalities. Michael Gallis, an architect and planner, can even discern separate architectural flavors: ”Rock Hill is Richardsonian Romanesque, Monroe is variegated Victorian, Concord is Second Empire, Davidson is Georgian or Palladian. Gastonia is neo-classic.”

The good news is that while Charlotte (like Atlanta) has been willing to destroy much of its architectural past, the Piedmont’s history lingers in its smaller cities.

That makes for a nice balance. You could go to a football game or ballet uptown; then browse for antiques or lick an ice cream cone in Concord or Davidson.

As Concord, Gastonia and all the smaller cities and towns try to shape their identity over the next half-century, leaders should keep that in mind. Those cities may covet Charlotte-style office buildings, shopping malls or subdivisions. (The Rouse Co. plans a 110-acre mall in Gaston County, which is surely stirring enthusiasm now.)

In our talks with development officials from the counties surrounding Mecklenburg, the sole melody was growth-growth-growth – even when that growth, in several counties, turned out to have been primarily in mobile homes.

In Iredell we were told, ”Growth is stretching us like a rubber band,” but, ”We believe in a man’s unfettered right to do with his property as he pleases.”

This region seems also to have a fetish for bigness – the massive convention center and stadium in Charlotte, the mega-Speedway in Cabarrus County, the soaring, pink-hued Calvary Church on N.C. 51. All are reminiscent of the big-growth boosterism that preoccupies Charlotte proper and sometimes makes it look a tad silly to outsiders.

Our question to the ring cities and counties: If you want quality growth without overwhelming size, why not plan consciously for it? What are the realistic goals that represent appropriate growth, development matched to your history and traditions?

It is vital for each of the ring cities to develop, preserve and enhance their own historic identities. If a town is tempted, say, to clear away an old church or neighborhood to make way for a new office building or subdivision, it should consider what it will lose as well as what it will gain. If an industry wants to move in, does the location fit the county’s own plans? Reality check: There are big obstacles to restoring and developing older downtowns. We noted dozens of vacant storefronts, deserted streets and serious disinvestment in the cities ringing Charlotte.

Downtown Monroe, with its blocks of largely vacant storefronts, was the most tragic, but not alone. Many others suffer from lack of use, despite a booming regional economy. Even Rock Hill, a star of the group, needs more downtown activity.

The public sector – a government the people elect – must insist zoning and taxes and other regulatory powers be exerted more strongly, to make sure downtowns remain centers, the jewels of their counties, and that new development fits and creates a livable, balanced community.

We don’t intend to say growth is bad. Quite the contrary. It’s a necessity for prospering communities. It means jobs, prosperity. But how development is done – whether it relates to established growth centers, supports a city or county plan, or simply devours and exploits the countryside – is a decision many developers would rather keep the public out of.

That’s why each community must ”be its own man,” determine the growth it can absorb, then stand its ground when developers or mega-corporations seek to build on the periphery and let the town center deteriorate.

Growth itself needs to be redefined, from sheer numbers of new houses built or gross dollars spent in stores to a measure that makes a difference for ordinary people: How many adults are fruitfully employed? How are people’s skills being expanded? How many youth are being adequately prepared for 21st century jobs?

One answer is to design or channel growth so it hugs tightly to the existing cores rather than heading for some cornfield 3 or 4 miles from town.

Where possible, extend the old grid of streets and build offices and homes in the so-called ”new urbanist” fashion – close to the street.

If you plan a new office park, make it fit with the core city, as Rock Hill has done.

Do not encourage leapfrog development. Instead, mobilize to fight it. The farther each town sprawls from its center, the more difficult it will be to keep those centers viable.

And don’t expect zoning alone to ensure a healthy city. Planners, with citizens’ help, must craft how new sections of the city will appear and how they will fit together.

Some Charlotte ring cities are taking steps in the right direction. Gaston County’s Belmont has adopted a new code encouraging traditional, small-town development and restricting suburban-style sprawl.

And consider Concord, with its old homes and charming downtown. It looks as though the consultant the city hired a few years ago did well. Fashioning growth around Concord could ultimately make all Cabarrus County more prosperous. We were told one reason Cabarrus residents are talking about controlling growth is that they don’t want to become another Gwinnett, the suburban Atlanta county that lost its charm and identity in helter-skelter growth.

Davidson is considering a new town plan to preserve and encourage its historic core, which centers on Davidson College. But its housing prices have skyrocketed, and even some professors can’t afford to live in town. That points to a pitfall: Growth must be fair. If a city simply prohibits growth, it protects ”haves” at the expense of ”have-nots.” That sows the seeds of a phenomenon familiar to Boulder County, Colo., or Sonoma County, Calif., where the gentry live in town. Those who can’t afford it have nowhere to go.

The way out is to channel development around cities so that old and new co-exist in harmony. This takes planning and discipline.

But remember the sprawling future you avoid. Think of preserving the identity that brought many of you to Gastonia or Rock Hill in the first place. You came, most likely, because it was not just another Charlotte suburb. Maybe you need to form some regional alliances to make sure it doesn’t become one.

Again and again, we heard how much people in the Charlotte region love their towns, how much they want to keep their towns’ identities, to avoid being lost in faceless suburban growth.

The best way not to become Charlotte is to stand one’s ground and tell fast-talking mega-developers to take a walk until they’re willing to respect each place’s unique history, culture and vision of its own future.

ABOUT THE PEIRCE REPORT

If you’re curious how urban writer Neal Peirce’s team came to study Charlotte, you have several people to thank – or, if you wish, blame.

Peirce, 63, is a nationally syndicated writer whose column appears in 50 newspapers, including The Observer. He studies cities; he has written 10 other Peirce Reports, including one in 1993 for The News and Observer of Raleigh.

He’s also a sociable and curious fellow. So when he visited Charlotte more than a year ago for a speech at UNC Charlotte, he spent time talking with folks here about the region.

”There were various people saying, Wouldn’t it be nice to have someone of his stature to come into our community – an outsider, unbiased – to look at where we are?’ ” remembers Bill McCoy, director of UNCC’s Urban Institute.

Bill Spencer, president of the Foundation for the Carolinas, and Mark Heath, president of the Carolinas Partnership, were particularly enthusiastic. Spencer, with the Urban Institute, approached The Observer and several smaller daily newspapers, which agreed to publish the report.

So in June, Peirce’s interview team arrived and began work. They talked for seven days with roughly 100 politicians, executives, neighborhood leaders and everyday people about the Charlotte region, past and future. They toured by car and helicopter. Interviewers were:

Curtis Johnson, 52, Peirce’s writing partner. He chairs the Metropolitan Council of Minneapolis-St. Paul, a planning agency. He has been chief of staff to Minnesota Gov. Arne Carlson and executive director of the Twin Cities Citizens League.
Alex Marshall, 36, city government and urban affairs reporter for The Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk.
LaRita Barber, 32, formerly community services director at the Urban Institute. She is director of internship programs at Queens College.
Peirce, who lives in Washington, was a founder of The National Journal and has been political editor of Congressional Quarterly. His books include ”Citistates” and ‘The Book of America: Inside 50 States Today.”

Funding, raised by the Foundation for the Carolinas, came from: the Carolinas Partnership, the Belk Foundation, the Duke Power Foundation, Foundation for the Carolinas, NationsBank, the Blumenthal Foundation, the Cannon Foundation, First Union National Bank, Southern Bell Telephone Co., Wachovia Bank and Trust Co., Lance Inc., Branch Banking and Trust Co. and First Charter National Bank.

Donors had no say in the reporting and writing and did not see the articles before publication. The writers did not know who the donors were.

The Gaston Gazette, The Herald of Rock Hill, The Concord Tribune, The Enquirer-Journal of Monroe and The Daily Independent of Kannapolis are also publishing the report.

The Peirce Report was edited by editorial writer Mary Newsom. Photos are by Observer photographer Mark B. Sluder, graphics by staff artist Dean Neitman. The pages were designed by Perspective editor Greg Ring; Steve Johnston was copy editor.

A Scary Trip To The Suburbs

Posted on September 24, 2007 by Alex Marshall

SENT WEDNESDAY, MARCH 3, 1999
BY ALEX MARSHALL

My wife and two friends and I were lured out of our secure neighborhood of Ghent recently by the promise of seeing “Rushmore,” the latest Bill Murray movie. The closest theater was Greenbrier Cinema 13, so we climbed into a car and made our way down the interstate to the wilds of Chesapeake.

The cinema we chose is one of the big new movie complexes in Hampton Roads. Its innovation is not only stadium seating on some screens, but to package what is basically an entire amusement park around its 13 auditoriums. You enter this big box behind a strip shopping center and find yourself ushered into a gymnasium-size hall. Its two floors hold not only long rows of elaborate video games, but bumper cars, laser tag, miniature golf, skeeball and more — all amid waterfalls flowing over fake stone.

We wandered around this complex like small town rubes visiting the big city. We were dazed by the lights, floored into dumb silence by this enormous new retail life form. We wandered around docilely, letting the escalators and the hordes carry us to and fro. The place was packed with families and adolescents.

And we had fun. We shot people on the video screen. We planted our feet on a virtual-reality skateboard, and banked around a high-thrills coarse on a screen in front of us. We thought about playing laser tag but the line was too long.

The developers’ innovation was to realize that you could capture a movie goer for more than the allotted two hours. Rather than just shake them out of popcorn money, you could get a family to drop additional bucks for bumper cars or pinball. Instead of wandering around the mall after a movie, they would wander around here. (The mall probably isn’t happy about that.)

It was an example of how the suburbs are still on the cutting edge of emerging urban life forms. Love ’em or hate ’em, the suburbs are still the place that new ways of living, working, shopping and recreating are born, driven by the more unstable combination of roads, subdivisions and virgin or semi-virgin land. Driven by dog-eat-dog competition, Malls turn into Big Box Stores into Movie-Palace Entertainment Complexes. You never know what’s going to pop up next.

Greenbrier 13, for example, sat in front of a Pentagon-sized complex holding some sort of Sentara research or office facility. How strange! A big box office, behind a big box movie palace, behind a long strip shopping center, all three adjacent but not connected except for parking lots.

Other aspects of the Movie Palace startled me. The crowd was roughly half African-American or other minorities. It was a far more diverse crowd than the people who sat at the outdoor cafe tables on Colley Avenue. I had written stories years ago about how the newer suburbs, including Greenbrier, were the most integrated neighborhoods in Hampton Roads. But it was still startling to compare this diverse suburban world with the largely white world of Ghent. My urban neighborhood was more diverse in some ways than Greenbrier, but less so in others, including racially.

Secondly, I contemplated what this entertainment complex meant to the urban fortunes of Hampton Roads. Ideally, I would have preferred all this energy and life to be downtown. If Hampton Roads had grown inward rather than outward over the last few decades, that could have happened.

From a long term perspective, Greenbrier 13 troubled me. It was clearly not built to last. All the fancy lights and equipment were housed in what was basically a giant toolshed. In five or 10 years, developers could move on, leaving an empty tin box to be disposed of.

The placement of the complex had that chaotic, random feel so common to the suburbs. Despite its size, the cinema was actually quite difficult to find. It’s hidden behind the strip shopping center, with no sign out front on Greenbrier parkway.

But whatever its drawbacks, for now it was darn interesting.

We liked the movie Rushmore. Afterward, we made our way back home, leaving the bracing winds of suburban change, heading back to the calm, more predictable harbor, of the city.

A Path Not Taken

Posted on September 24, 2007 by Alex Marshall

BY ALEX MARSHALL
COVER STORY
PORT FOLIO MAGAZINE

Sometimes I like to mull over the choices we have taken as a region and then, in a masochistic mood, try to pick the absolutely worst one, savoring the special flavor of failed dreams and paths not taken.

My personal favorite for all-time blooper is Virginia Beach, Chesapeake and Suffolk opting to split off in the 1960s into mega land-area cities and cut off Norfolk’s expansion. In one fell swoop, we separated rich fro poor, city from suburb, growth from decay, and thus insured that it would be vastly more difficult to tackle common problems and challenges together. We built a political fence through our common garden.

But vying for second place is the decision made 30 years ago not to build a big regional airport out in Chesapeake.

For you see, Norfolk was not doomed to have a tiny airport with terrible service. From 1968 to the early 70s, a debate bubbled across the region. It was clear the old Norfolk airport was outmoded. What should be done?

As Norfolk prepared to expand the old airport off Military Highway, a vocal lobby emerged, saying no, that was the wrong decision. They advocated building a new and larger airport out in Chesapeake or Suffolk that would serve both sides of the water, and position the region to capture more business growth.

It didn’t happen. Despite accumulating voices, Norfolk, recently burned by its suburban neighbors over annexation, stuck to its guns. If needed, we can move the airport later, its leaders said. That didn’t happen. We missed a chance, and it never came again.

This was a crucial decision. With different choices and some luck, we could have had a large regional airport just a short drive from downtown, with direct jet service to New York and other major cities. Our economic development would have been ratcheted up a notch, as we played with the Charlottes and the Clevelands, rather than the Winston-Salems and Lexingtons.

What more, if the region had managed to cooperate to finance and build a big regional airport, the Southside would have been knitted to the Peninsula and the region made one in more than name. Cooperating on an airport might have set the stage for joining together on universities, roads, stadiums, and things like tackling poverty and crime.

Even the very culture of the area might have changed because new ideas and people would have more easily come into our region.

But that didn’t happen. Norfolk expanded its small airport, Newport News eventually expanded Patrick Henry, and the region was stuck with two small airports without a lot of market power.

“It really cast us inexorably in being a second-rate community,” said businessman and community leader Andrew Fine.

“Hindsight is 20-20, but I’d be surprised if anyone didn’t think that wouldn’t have been a better approach,” said George Crawley, a member of the Norfolk Airport Authority and former assistant city manager of Norfolk. “That might have been the piece that solidified us as a region.”

The airport story shows how our fragmentation as a region probably directly hurt our future. Although this is often said, rarely do you see it so clearly as in the tale of a big airport not built.

Somewhere, Hunter Hogan, that wiley, Yoda-like real-estate salesman, is smiling, his grin and voice triumphantly saying “I told you so.”

For it was Hogan that resolutely pushed to build a regional airport outside of Norfolk proper that would serve both the Southside and Peninsula. True, he no doubt would have somehow made a lot of money off of it. Hogan, one of the founders of Goodman-Segar-Hogan, was an excellent businessman. But he also spoke repeatedly about the long-term health of the area.

“Norfolk is being sold short; the whole Tidewater community is being sold short because we are not being far-sighted enough,” Hogan said in 1969. He would keep saying this over the next few years.

The site Hogan and his allies were pushing was on the edge of the Dismal swamp in Chesapeake. {SEE LOCATOR MAP?} Roughly at the apex of a triangle, it would be easy to access to from both sides of the water. It would be close enough from the Norfolk downtown– 12 miles — to be reached easily, but far enough out to handle larger planes and future growth.

Twelve miles from downtown. It’s funny how far that seemed to people at the time. Now, new airports are built more than 30 miles outside town. The new Denver airport is a 45 minute drive from the center city.

Hogan’s plan and site had difficulties.

There were questions even in those environmentally-unaware days about building in or near a swamp. It unquestionably would not be allowed today.

James Crumbley, 77, executive director of the airport at the time and former head of Virginia International Terminals, said he and a group traveled out to the proposed site when it was under consideration.

“We went down there one day, and we broke off a big limb, and you could push it 5 feet into the ground,” Crumbley said. “You would have had to pile all the runways.”

Of course, Hogan insisted that the Dismal Swamp site was just one option. After all, Chesapeake, which is now covered with subdivisions, was then mostly open fields.

Crumbley defends the decision to keep the old airport site. There was no guarantee that we would have captured more traffic with a bigger airport, he says. Coastal cities like Hampton Roads are rarely chosen as hubs because planes cannot draw traffic from all sides, he said.

Roy B. Martin Jr., who was mayor at the time and opposed moving the airport, said finances, location and future usage all pointed away from a new regional airport.

“Who would have built it?” Martin asked in a recent interview. “Where would the money have come from? You weren’t talking $20 million. I think the idea was good, but there was no highways there. The state wasn’t going to help.

“None of the other cities came to the table and said OLet’s go do it.’ I never remember a push to move the airport” by the other cities.

Perhaps, but the record seems to show otherwise. Elected officials and community leaders from all the surrounding cities were reported voicing support for an expanded regional airport. Virginia Beach Councilman Lawrence E. Marshall was quoted in The Virginian-Pilot saying, “We should look beyond 20 years and invest in a tremendously large international airport.” Chesapeake Mayor G. A. Treakle came out in favor of it. Even one of Norfolk senators, Peter K. Babalas, urged then Gov. Linwood Holton to use “benevolent authority to force Southeastern Virginia localities to accept creation of regional airport.”

And sure, a $50 million to $100 million new airport — which was the figures loosely thrown around — would have been difficult to finance. But one of the advocates of a new airport was Edwin MacKethan, a trust officer for Virginian National Bank and more importantly, the guy who helped set up the bond issues for the $200 million Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. If the guy who financed the bridge tunnel was on board, maybe financing a regional airport was not out of the question.

Other groups came out against the old airport. Pilots said it was too close to existing schools, like Azalea Garden and Landsdale Elementary. Landing at the airport required a steep angle of descent that was not optimal. They urged a new airport be built farther out.

Norfolk resisted. A consultant the airport hired recommended expanding on the old site. Airport officials pointed out that both New York’s La Guardia and Washington’s National sat on sites no bigger than Norfolk’s airport. The consultant confidently predicted 4 million passengers annually by 1990.

Present traffic in 1999: Under 3 million — below its traffic in 1984. By comparison, Charlotte went from 5.5 million passengers in 1982 to 22 million passengers in 1996. The Virginian-Pilot, which uneasily arbitrated the debate in its pages, seemed to sense that the region was making the wrong decision, but seemed not to have the nerve to oppose Norfolk.

“Perhaps Tidewater would be better served by a new and larger airport elsewhere. The Port Authority believes otherwise and . . .at this point it would be asking much to demand that the authority back up and start over,” said a 1969 editorial.

It was classic Virginian-Pilot. Squishy. It vaguely supported the status-quo, while leaving you with the feeling that something was being lost.

Another Virginian-Pilot editorial advised:

“Hampton Roads may in time attract a significant amount of long-haul traffic. Meanwhile, Patrick Henry and Norfolk Regional must base their plans on what is probable. It is improbable that either will become a major airport. And simply building a major facility is not the way to enter the big time. Demand must be there. Dullas International Airport, with its sweeping runways and uncluttered setting, is scandalously underused.”

Hindsight is easy, but it’s amusing how wrong this editorial is. In fact, Dullas would eventually be swamped and is now being expanded. And notice the passivity of the editorial voice. It captures much of our faults as a region. It doesn’t say, “If we build a big airport, we can capture much of the long-haul traffic.” It essentially says, “We should only build a big airport if we have captured the long-haul traffic.” Which of course, would never happen without the right runways and facilities.

It seems obvious now that Norfolk chose the wrong path and so hurt the future of itself and the entire region. Norfolk proceeded with its plans even though Piedmont Airlines — the predecessor of USAir — was sniffing around for a hub airport — WHICH EVENTUALLY WENT TO CHARLOTTE. It proceeded even though it knew larger jet planes could not land there, although later technological advances would reverse this. It built it even though it put civilian airplanes too close to military traffic.

Why did it persist on such a wrong-headed path? It’s here we see how one good turn begets another, and how the suburban cities urge to separate themselves from Mother Norfolk would come back to haunt them.

At the time of the airport debate, just a few years had passed since old Princess Anne county had “double-crossed” Norfolk and merged with the town of Virginia Beach to become a separate city. Nansemond and Norfolk counties soon followed suit, becoming Suffolk and Chesapeake.

Can you blame Norfolk for not exactly being eager to relinquish control of one of its few remaining assets — its airport — to a bunch of folks who had just recently told it in effect, “We’ll take your jobs, money and water, and you can have your problems with schools, race and retail flight.”

“I think the argument turned on that the City Council did not want it moved out of Norfolk,” said businessman Edward Power Sr., who was a close associate of Hogan. “It was the old story is that each city wanted to protect its own image, and not share a large asset with another community.”

In effect, the decision not to move the airport really was a continuation of the decision by the suburban areas not to be a part of Norfolk. We can’t have your suburbs, you can’t have our airport.

The new expanded airport opened in January 1973 to much fanfare. The new terminal, sitting on the edge of the Botanical Gardens, was declared one of the prettiest in the country.

Hogan, speaking before it opened, labeled it “A first-class terminal with a fifth-class runway.”

Paying for the $30 million expansion wasn’t difficult. The airlines paid for it through higher landing fees. Of course, by not paying then, we may be paying now. A state study in 1997 concluded Virginians pay 20 percent more than the national average for air travel, and that our fares have risen in recent years while declining slightly in the rest of the nation.

NEW SECTION {capitalize first few words} Twenty-five years pass. Norfolk International is a nice, pleasant airport. It is also a very small one. In national rankings based on number of passengers travelling annually, Norfolk International has slipped from 43rd in 1973, to 53rd in 1982, to 60th today.

Construction is now underway on a $60 million new arrivals terminal, and a $35 million additional parking garage. THIS WILL EXPAND THE NUMBER OF TICKET COUNTERS AND LANDING GATES, AND SO IMPROVE THE AIRPORT’S COMPETITIVENESS. But these are unlikely to radically change the airport’s national position, because it IS STILL HEMMED IN AND LACKS ROOM TO EXPAND RUNWAYS. THE AIRPORT LACKS PARALLEL RUNWAYS, WHICH ARE NECESSARY TO LAND JETS IN HIGH VOLUME.

THE AIRPORT MAY EVENTUALLY BUILD A PARALLEL RUNWAY. BUT BECAUSE VIRGINIA BEACH HAS BUILT ITS INDUSTRIAL PARK UP TO THE EDGE OF THE AIRPORT, THE FUTURE PARALLEL RUNWAY WILL NOT BE THE REQUIRED 800 FEET FROM THE ORIGINAL RUNWAY. BECAUSE OF THIS, THE RUNWAYS WILL NOT BE ABLE TO BE USED FOR SIMULATANEOUS LANDINGS, ONE OFFICIAL SAID. LACK OF COOPERATION BETWEEN THE TWO CITIES ON THIS ISSUE STRANGLED THE AIRPORT’S CAPACITY FOR GROWTH.

Our main airport is still pretty. The rectangular terminal is majestic, and is enhanced by its frame of trees and lush gardens. It is also convenient. You can drive right up to it, and get from car-door to plane without jogging down endless corridors or navigating multiple access lanes.

But the rest of your voyage is likely to be hellish. Odds are, you’ll find yourself crammed into a tiny cylinder of an airplane, transferring to get any destination beyond a stone’s throw away, and being served last and least in everything.

Airline service is lousy all over the country. It’s not just Norfolk that puts up with cramped seating, aging planes, discriminatory pricing and monopolistic airlines. They are largely the product of airline deregulation which some experts are labeling a failure.

But as airlines become semi-monopolies ruling over land-locked fiefdoms, it’s the little guys like Norfolk that suffer most. Stories of air travel out of Norfolk sound like those from a war zone or some natural disaster. No direct flights. Horrible layovers. Horrible prices. No respect.

Virginian-Pilot columnist Dave Addis, who apparently leaves his beloved car sometimes for a plane, hit nerves recently when he pointed out that airline service in Bulgaria was better than that in Norfolk.

Recently I was in the Newark airport, changing planes of course, on my way back to Norfolk from distant Boston. I had to shlep my way to gate 133 in a dim rusty corner of the airport. There, an official ushered us out a door, where we found ourselves on a sidewalk in the rain. We were boarded onto a Greyhound-style bus that then drove us to the tiny plane on the runway that would take us to Norfolk. It was very clear where we were on the status ladder.

Business theorist Ted Goranson, who lives in Virginia Beach, recently missed his plane from New York to Italy for an important meeting. Winds and rain in New York shut out the tiny planes leaving Norfolk, although regular full-size jets were landing fine. Goranson remembers standing in line next to a businessman from Brazil who had just missed his own flight back. He was vigorously scratching the area off his list of potential sites.

More and more, one has to transfer in Washington or Philadelphia even to get to New York City. Direct service is usually in tiny commuter planes.

“Without question, we should have jet service to New York,” said Kenneth R. Scott, current executive director of the airport. “But talk to the airlines, and they all have different reasons for the inability to put jets in.”

And then there are the prices. A trip to Boston without a Saturday stayover, even bought several weeks in advance, recently was costing $700 on USAir.

Ouch.

Of course, all this sets back the economic potential of the area. Having good direct service is simply indispensable for many companies.

We like to talk of how we are the 25th largest metropolitan area, and the only one without a professional sports team. Might it have something to do with us having the 60th largest airport in passenger volume?

Our decision to have two smaller airports — Norfolk International and Patrick Henry in Newport News — mirrors our decision to have lots of other smaller things, say some area observers. Because we can’t cooperate, we end up having four or five convention centers, rather than one or two that would bring in the big guys. The same goes with stadiums and airports.

“We are going to have more mediocre things than anyone else,” said Brad Face of The Face Companies, A MEMBER OF THE AIRPORT EXPANSION ADVISORY COMMITEE, AND PRESIDENT OF THE FUTURE OF HAMPTON ROADS. and a regional business leader. “We are going to have more 10,000 seat arenas than anywhere else in the country. Scope. The Coliseum. ODU. William and Mary. Hampton University. But we don’t have one 25,000 seat stadium. We have two airports. Do we really need them?”

We do have one great big thing. Our port — Virginia International Terminals. What would have been our economic development potential if we had a great airport to go with it?

So what can we learn from all this? The point is to look ahead and see what other major decisions or projects lie ahead that might improve the region’s future.

It is a paradox that as we opt to let the free market rip, as private capital swarms across the globe looking for a home, it is increasingly the public, tax-payer financed decisions of metropolitan regions and their states that determine their competitiveness for that capital. Do we invest in that university or not? Do we build that airport? This even includes decisions like, Do we make the area more liveable by controlling sprawl, or by cooperating on controlling crime and social problems.

A region’s economy depends on its ability to move goods and people quickly and easily to other parts of the country and world. In our modern era, this usually means planes, interstates, ship and rail. Of those, only shipping is really top-notch in Hampton Roads, although freight links for rail are excellent. What if companies in and around Norfolk could easily transfer goods between interstate, air, ship and rail?

But the age of building big airports may be over, even though there has been loose talk of a Superport between here and Richmond. The same goes with interstates. Those transportational networks are largely in place.

The next major transportation revolution may be high-speed rail. As the possibilities and benefits of up to 300 mph travel becomes increasingly real, there is more and more talk of a high-speed network stretching along the East Coast.

Can Hampton Roads get in line for it? Or will we be bypassed? To be a part of it might require money, commitment and cooperation. Already, Charlotte is talking about a link between it and Washington D.C. by high-speed rail.

We’ll see what happens. Will we learn from our past?

Or repeat it?

A Bicycle Can Get You From Here to There

Posted on September 24, 2007 by Alex Marshall

That’s Good For You, Good For Everyone Else.

Wednesday, May 26, 1999
BY ALEX MARSHALL

I’m going to talk about bikes today. So I’m going to speak very slowly, so my colleague Dave, “I’ll get out of my car when they pry my cold dead hands from the steering wheel” Addis, will perhaps understand me.

It’s funny about bicycles. When I suggested a while back accommodating them more on local roads, Addis, who has become the leading supporter of the traffic-jammed, suburban status quo, could only think of Bejing or Bombay. Yellow and brown hordes on rusty bicycles jostling for space on dusty roads with chickens and stray dogs yapping at their heels. Who wants that?

A different image comes to my mind. I think of two of the wealthiest and most civilized cities on earth — Amsterdam and Copenhagen. In my travels there, I remember beautiful women in elegant skirts, and men wearing fine linen suits, bicycling along to work or shopping.

All that biking was good for the natives. In Copenhagen, I remember a grandmotherly women blithely pedaling by me as I, on my rented bicycle and anemic calves, struggled to keep up with her.

I think of Seattle — another wealthy, liveable city — where the buses have bike racks and people put up with the steady drizzle to ride bikes everywhere.

Bikes have about them the aura of the childish, the silly and the inconsequential. They needn’t. For trips of a few miles or less, bikes can be the perfect vehicle. They are easy, casual and convenient. Add a rack and you can carry a bag of groceries or a shopping bag.

We have the perfect terrain for bicycling. We are as flat as Holland, with better weather than Seattle or Copenhagen. But we build everything so reflexively for the car, we rule out other ways of getting around.

In Amsterdam and Copenhagen, something like a third of all trips are by bicycles. Last time I checked, Copenhagen planners were hoping to see this rise to 50 percent.

A lot of people using bicycles transforms cities. To state the obvious, it’s a lot easier to accommodate a rack of 10 bicycles in front of a store than a parking lot for 10 cars.

New Norfolk City Manager Regina Williams got this right away when I spoke to her about it. Every person that rides a bike is one not driving a car, she said. It frees up space on streets, and represents another parking space that does not have to be built. There is no reason downtown Norfolk could not have thousands of commuters, shoppers, students coming into downtown every day by bicycle. Older cities, with their densities and finer grained network of streets, are ideal for bicycles.

In Hampton Roads, Virginia Beach should be the worst place to bike and in a lot of ways is. A city built around high-speed corridors like Virginia Beach Boulevard will always have difficulty accommodating a guy on a bike. Still, the city has done a good job of including separate bike paths on some of its newer streets, like South Independence Boulevard around Green Run. It also has a wonderful route from Fort Story all the way out General Booth Boulevard in the newer suburbs.

Norfolk and Portsmouth are lousy places to bicycle. This is a tragedy because it should be the opposite. Their older, straighter and narrower streets with clear, right-angle intersections are safer and better for bicycles. A cyclist can mix with traffic on a Colley Avenue in Ghent, or around Olde Towne, without dread.

But the same cyclist will eventually come to one of the giant, high-speed highways, like Brambleton Avenue or London Boulevard, that have been ploughed through these cities without much thought. Even crossing one of these roads is difficult, much less biking in them.

A perfect example of this is at the corner of Brambleton Avenue and Botetourt Street on the edge of Freemason in Norfolk. You come across the Hague on the lovely footbridge from Ghent, originally built for streetcars, and are then faced with a raging river of highspeed traffic on Brambleton Avenue. No crosswalk. No stoplight. I have seen a dad with two little children, all on bikes, trying to dart their way across this rushing stream without getting killed. I fear someone will be eventually.

In the short term, Norfolk and other planners need to add cross walks, stop lights and other devises to accommodate bikes. In the longer run, planners need to narrow traffic lanes on major highways like Brambleton or Waterside Drive. Narrower traffic lanes slow down cars, and frees up space for bike lanes and on-street parking. Planners need to think about bikes as naturally as they now think about cars.

This isn’t just being nice. The middle-class rides bikes, and if Norfolk and Portsmouth wants more of them, or to keep the ones they have, they need to make it easier for them to pedal places.

Right now, Norfolk thinks about bikes last, if at all.

Why doesn’t the MacArthur Center Mall have any bike racks in front of it? This is such a natural and obvious thing to do, when parking is both tight and charged for, you have to wonder what was on their minds.

One hopeful sign. The redesigned Church Street in Norfolk includes bike lanes, one planner told me. That’s a great start. If we start including bikes in our thinking, there’s no reason we can’t be the Copenhagen of the East Coast. Automobile Addis might never leave his well-cushioned front-seat, but the rest of us would like to now and then.

Wrestling the Beast called Sprawl

Posted on September 24, 2007 by Alex Marshall

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.

Whither Virginia Beach?

Posted on September 24, 2007 by Alex Marshall

FOR PORT FOLIO MAGAZINE
THURSDAY, JULY 1, 1999
BY ALEX MARSHALL

Virginia Beach. The promised land.

It glistens in the sun, a shimmering mecca of backyards, beaches, prosperity and space. A wide open terrain where schools are good and crime is low, a destination, a place to start a life or fulfill one.

It still has that reputation to many, even as the city enters its 37th year and faces trend lines that dispute much of what I just said.

But looking out over the city’s many square miles, that easy optimistic view still has the ring of truth. You see the old grid of streets and homes on the North End, basking in the ocean air and sun, with their gentle, Nantucket-like charm. You see the prosperous resort, hauling in the bucks even while it nicely segregates its often tacky guests and attractions. You see Bob Dylan boogieing at the amphitheater, and kids bowling and swimming at recreation centers that resemble public country clubs. You see Kempsville, a land easy to make fun of as epitomizing suburban vapidity, but fundamentally a place where Filipinos, African-Americans, whites, Jews and Gentiles can all make a life.

But focus the telescope on different places, and you see a different city and future. In this view, you see simple suburban ranch houses around Green Run, Lynnhaven, Hilltop, Bayside and Princess Anne Plaza, their paint fading, the vinyl siding getting moldy, the homeowners converting to renters, and the property values flat or in decline. You see more people leaving the city then moving into it. You see neighborhoods resembling those of Los Angeles, in that they are purely suburban, yet problem ridden and dangerous. You see places where the mother will not walk half-block to the 7-Eleven by herself after dark for fear of being robbed. You see areas where kids with little adult supervision roam across yards, parking lots and roads like marauding tribes. You see a city that is very much part of a region where incomes lag well behind the national average.

Where is Virginia Beach going? The city is on the cusp, at the point of either heading down hill or working out some new trajectory that will keep it, and perhaps the region, a nice place to live.

For most of its life, the city’s biggest appeal has been what it is not: It was not Norfolk, with its declining schools, racial problems, high crime and sagging tax base. Not Portsmouth or Newport News.

The era of Virginia Beach exceptionalism is ending. It has roughly 440,000 people — roughly equal to Norfolk and Chesapeake put together. About 40 percent of the population of the Southside. There is no way something that big can be vastly different than the average.

Virginia Beach used to be richer and whiter than the rest of the region. It is much less so now.

“It used to be different, from demographic to social to economic,” said one planner. “But because it has matured, it has become more like the regional whole.”

It is still the same old Virginia Beach in one respect: It is a gigantic bedroom community, something city leaders loathe to admit. Of the 213,000 Virginia Beach residents who work, almost 100,000 do so outside city borders, according to stats from the Hampton Roads Planning District Commission.

This is a huge number. It’s even bigger in significance when you realize that these people are mostly traveling to the Naval Base, to downtown, to the shipyards in Portsmouth — jobs that drive the rest of economy. These jobs bring in money from outside that can be then spent on lawyers, doctors, newspapers, department stores, homes and all the other commercial and business activity. Without them, the rest of us are out of luck.

What this means is that Virginia Beach is still largely dependent on events outside its own borders. It’s only independent tax base is the resort, which is a good one, but not enough to support 400,000 people.

Virginia Beach’s future is deeply linked with the rest of the region. Even if the city attempts to “go it alone,” it will have deep implications for its neighbors.

As we approach 2000, I see Virginia Beach juggling a collection of political factions, any of which might manage to grab the wheel of the city and steer for awhile: Anti-tax folks. Pro-sprawlers. Light rail advocates. Regionalists. Go-it-aloners.

Here are a few possible futures for Virginia Beach, my hometown.

“REZONINGS FOR YOUR FRIENDS.”

Dean Block, the resident sage of city hall as well as the director of the city’s office of management and budget, once wrote a history of Virginia Beach that packaged its trajectory into four distinct epochs.

1968 to 1985 was probably the most interesting. This was the era where Virginia Beach grew by several hundred thousand people, often without rhyme or reason. The city’s leadership in that era, Block said, made a deal with voters. “The politicians promised to keep taxes artificially low, if in exchange they would be allowed rezone property for their friends,” Block said.

During this era, the city leaped across Rudee Inlet Bridge, across Holland Road and down to the edge of the municipal center. It left the city with a huge hangover — which voters sought to correct when they elected several anti-growth council members in 1986 that shifted the balance on council.

Starting with that council, the city started playing catch-up — and largely succeeded. Voters approved bond referendums to widen roads, build schools, libraries and recreation centers. The council tastefully renovated the resort strip. The council held the Green Line, and passed the agricultural reserve program, which helps preserve land for farming.

That era, Block said, ended about a few years ago. Now, the city is working out a new trajectory, a path to the future, a path of maturity. Several options exist for this future.

Although Block didn’t say it, one that looms is a return to “rezonings for your friends.” In the past few months, the city staff and council have backed a series of actions that signal the city, armed with Lake Gaston water, may resume fierce outward growth. The council approved the extension of Ferrell Parkway down to Sandbridge, despite environmental objections. City staff considered, and then backed off, from recommending removing the agricultural reserve program from “the transition era,” the land north of Indian River road that many developers are eyeing.

The city has recently elected two council members that are much more friendly to outward residential development, Margaret Eure and Don Weeks. Both recently attended a meeting of rural land owners and developers seeking to develop more property and depose Councilwoman Barbara Henley, whose priority has been protecting farmland.

This could be bad news for the city. More outward growth would eat up farm land, incur more infrastructure costs, make traffic worse by extending sprawl, and push housing values down within the rest of the city. Of course, it would also make a few developers and property owners a lot of money, so we know the vote will be close.

INWARD, NOT OUTWARD.

Contrasting to a return to outward growth is a coalition of sorts, an interesting combination of environmentalists and business leaders, that advocate growing inward. They are also generally the same ones talking about greater regionalism.

Under this path, the city commits money to the light rail system. It not only holds the Green Line, but works for regional growth control. It starts spending its infrastructure dollars where most of the people live, on new sidewalks, parks and other amenities, rather than on new roads and sewers out in Sandbridge and around the courthouse. It starts filling in some of the blank spaces that sit beside perfectly good highways already built. At last estimate, almost 10,000 acres of developed land sat above the city’s Green Line.

Michael Barrett, a city and regional business leader, said growing inward is why the light rail line is such a key question.

“Light rail makes the city look at itself and figure out who it wants to become,” Barrett said. In Barrett’s view, not much opportunity is left for development outward.

“Future development may mean redevelopment,” Barrett said. Light rail would help develop Pembroke, Lynnhaven and the resort into much richer, denser and higher tax-paying areas. He sees “nodes of development” that would pay more taxes and allow for different life styles at the beach.

Such a community, said Jan Eliassen, who recently stepped down from the Planning Commission, would fit with the city’s vision of a place where everyone could live.

“We don’t have as many different communities as the different communities need, from college graduates to empty nesters,” Eliassen said. “The kind of community we ought to design is a place where some of people can walk to work, some can walk to school, some can walk to shopping, and all of them can walk to reliable public transportation.”

The different communities plan would help balance the city’s largely monochromatic lifestyle choice. Some people love Virginia Beach but others hate it.

Andres Duany, the sharp-tongued New Urbanist architect, shocked Virginia Beach leaders a few years back when he called the city “a laboratory of failure for the East Coast.” When people told friends they were moving to Virginia Beach, the immediate response was “Oh, that’s too bad,” Duany said.

The city has never liked admitting this. But for many people, Virginia Beach is the last place on earth they would live. Developing some different types of communities would help change this.

LEAN AND MEAN

The most effective political force in the last half decade in Virginia Beach has been the anti-tax, anti-establishment folk that have pushed for less government, less services and of course, less taxes. This somewhat well organized group, led by former City Councilman Robert Dean and his Citizens Action Coalition, helped kill a bond initiative that would have supported better schools and libraries. They got the council to reverse themselves and kill a tiny new phone tax for a similar purpose.

They are a force to be reckoned with. Although the city’s taxes are some of the lowest in the region, and its services some of the best, they have evidently hit a nerve with their argument to the contrary.

Under their vision, Virginia Beach would become a bare bones, self-service city, where you check your own bags and bus your own tables. No more soccer stadiums, amphitheaters, recreation centers and the like. No more “entertainment.” In their view, Virginia Beach has been buying luxuries before it spent on the basics like schools. The city needs to get its priorities straight.

While there is some truth in this perspective, in my view they would cut flesh as well as fat. They also do not understand that economic success is based on government investment. Things like roads, schools, rail lines and maybe even things like recreation centers and amphitheaters. Dean, for example, voted against the agricultural reserve program, despite his credentials as a long-time environmentalist, because it involved a sales-tax increase.

When I asked Dean whether economic prosperity depended on government investment, he didn’t seem to understand the question.

“Under that scenario, we are breading a whole new type of society that expects government to take care of them from womb to tomb,” Dean said. “You have removed self reliance.”

How is building a road or a train line removing self-reliance?

If he were running the city, Dean said, his priority would be better schools. But he wouldn’t allow for new taxes to fund them. It’s true that more money won’t necessarily improve schools. But at some point, you have to grapple with the fact that public investment in a range of things is necessary to create a prosperous and balanced society.

Dean, for example, excoriated suburbanites who neglected their children in order to be able to afford two nice cars. People should consider living with just one car, he said, like they did back in the 1950s.

Well, would you support the type of public transportation that made living like that possible, I asked him, such as better bus service or the light rail line?

No.

“There is no reason that my gas tax should subsidize people to ride light rail,” Dean said, even though he freely acknowledged that car driving itself was massively subsidized already.

Dean also criticized the new companies the city had brought in, like Geico and Avis, as essentially being low-paying call centers. True enough. But beyond improving education — without new taxes — he had no plan for bringing in better companies. He did advocate eliminating the Economic Development department.

If Dean and his brethren get a majority, I see a not very pleasant future. I see a city that would become a place of haves and haves not, where the wealthy hole up in Bay Colony and Great Neck, send their kids to Norfolk Academy, and leave the increasing chaotic Baysides, Kempsvilles and Lynnhavens to fend for themselves.

EMBRACING THE WHOLE

Virginia Beach’s official vision is its “Community for a Lifetime” statement. It’s a bland, PR-ish statement, full of assertions no one could disagree with. Still, as these things go, it has its merits.

Everyone should be able to live in Virginia Beach, it basically says, for all their lives. It should be a place where one children’s can stick around and get good jobs, and where one’s parents can retire.

“That vision is one of an incredible place — a community where you would want to spend the rest of your life,” said Mayor Meyera Oberndorf in a recent speech. The vision, the mayor said, means making the city safe, prosperous and healthy.

Well, hard to disagree with that.

And “Visionary.” Which means thinking strategically about city growth and priorities, she said. Right on. It means accepting that quality of life costs money in taxes. Double Right on. It means acknowledging you can’t do everything at once.

Right on again.

The problem is, few city leaders, including Oberndorf, acknowledge the steps necessary to complete their vision.

If you want to be a Community for a Lifetime, you need to provide a way for a 70-year-old woman with declining eyesight to get around without a car. Or for a young family to live without two cars. But city leaders have been hostile to light rail, which might do this.

There’s another problem with the city’s vision, as told by the mayor. Oberndorf never mentions the word “Norfolk.”

Why should she, you might ask? Well, perhaps because Virginia Beach’s prosperity depends on it.

What is located in Norfolk? A huge port, with both commercial and military activities. Without it, this whole region would evaporate.

If you depend on something for your life’s blood, shouldn’t you mention it when you are figuring out a vision for your city? Shouldn’t you figure out how to keep it healthy? If you can’t stand to say the word “Norfolk,” at least say the word “port.”

No dice. Virginia Beach is basically embarrassed that it still largely dependent on economic activity outside the city, and doesn’t want to admit it.

Not a good policy.

The mayor’s speech, and the official policy it represents, shows the tension between the city’s desire to be its own master, and the realities of its interconnectedness with everyone else. A coalition has emerged that argue the city should embrace regionalism, but they run up against the city’s long history of seeing little gain from working with anyone else.

If this changed, Virginia Beach might actually to work not only for the health of the port, but to improve the fortunes of Norfolk’s downtown. With a great downtown, a company would be more likely to move to a corporate office park in Virginia Beach.

Look at Portland. All the great new high-tech companies are not moving to the center city. They are moving to the suburban communities out on the fringes, like Beaverton and Hillsboro. But these places have a symbiotic relationship with the Portland downtown.

The great Portland center city makes the area very attractive to workers, which attracts great companies. The companies might locate ON THE LIGHT RAIL LINE in the suburbs, where they can build a low-rise campus-style office park, but their employees enjoy traveling downtown and might even live there.

But here, no dice. Both sides see the other a threat. If we were really smart, we would start rewriting tax laws so taxes from companies would be spread more equitably.

What would the future look like if Virginia Beach realized it had more to gain from regionalism than to fear from it?

Virginia Beach might take the lead in regional growth management because it recognizes that as a mature city, it has an interest in restraining outward sprawl, and pushing development inward. Virginia Beach would help establish a regional vision, where the various regional parts play clear roles. Downtown with its role as regional center, with sports stadium and urban living and cultural resources; the outer suburbs with opportunities for green-lawn living and amenities like soccer stadiums and amphitheaters; the resort, which with light rail would have a symbiotic relationship with downtown; the rural areas, that can provide good vegetables and open vistas to the suburban and urban dwellers.

With almost half the population of the Southside, it’s clear that if Virginia Beach has a lot of weight to throw around.

“I’ve never understood why Virginia Beach wasn’t the leading proponent for regionalism,” said Eliassen. “They would be in the driver’s seat, because they got the votes. I don’t understand what they are afraid of. They are the political gorilla of the region, but they act like the cowardly lion.”

Eliassen is willing to think about what most people won’t even mention: merging the three cities on one side of the water — Chesapeake, Virginia Beach and Norfolk — into one city.

“They are one city in reality, and they ought to be one city politically,” Eliassen said.

GOING IT ALONE

Since its birth, Virginia Beach has insisted that it is a “real city,” not just a bedroom community thank you. It has resented the lack of respect it has gotten from both the region and the rest of the world. When big-name New York Times writer R.W. “Johnny” Apple visited the area recently, he respectfully used the “Hampton Roads” moniker but, in describing the region’s charms, said scarcely a word about Virginia Beach other than a brief mention of its Contemporary Arts Center.

Virginia Beach does not like this. In this scenario, the regionalists fail and Virginia Beach strives to be an independent, self-sufficient city. It drops out of the light rail system. It goes its own way on recycling, jails, schools, social services, housing. At each of these intersections, it goes it alone. It only cooperates on the one thing it needs to keep life going as usual in Virginia Beach: more roads.

This is not such a great vision, either for Virginia Beach or the region. The city of VB will do okay at first, but gradually, the structural inadequacies will start to mount up. Deprived of Virginia Beach’s resources, the region will start to do more poorly, which will eventually pull down Virginia Beach as well. The region will not have a united front on economic development, or a coherent regional strategy on growth, the environment or transportation. Virginia Beach may get its share of the wealthy, but will not get the higher income jobs that lead to a more prosperous city.

The anti-tax folks are big go-it-aloners. Dean talked of cooperating with neighboring cities to get bulk discounts on “computers or textbooks,” but not much cooperation in larger ways.

WHICH WAY?

Some of these paths are mutually exclusive. Some are not.

The present City Council is steering a course between the shoals of the pro-growth councils of the early 1980s, and the no-tax constituents of the present. All this could change. The anti-tax folk, sometimes allied with the powerful Republican party, are banging at the door. Developers and home-builders are pushing to return to rural-area growth.

The future depends on who makes it to the ballot box.

We will see.

A More Benevolent Sprawl

Posted on August 31, 2007 by Alex Marshall

DPZ offers up a social vision that reads like a sales prospectus

Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream — by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck.

Book review by Alex Marshall

It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost 20 years since the husband-and-wife team of Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk first began barn-storming around the country, preaching the saving graces of traditional urbanism and the terrors of suburban sprawl. Duany in particular, with his battery of slides and incisive rhetoric, has tutored civic leagues and town councils on the basics of nineteenth and early twentieth-century city design. Mixing the design principles of the Beaux-Arts school, Camillo Sitte, and Raymond Unwin into a spicy neotraditional vision, Duany talks of ‘terminating vistas,’ the proper relationship of street width to building heights, and the merits of on-street parking. Duany and Plater-Zyberk have trained Americans to think visually, shown people how the form of suburbia, with its tangle of curvy cul-de-sacs and boulevards, differs from that of traditional urban spaces. They helped create an ideal of urbanism–the walkable street, the corner store, the front porch, the row house–and taught people to yearn for it.

The couple’s sermonizing, though, is carefully crafted to lead the congregation to DPZ’s (the firm of Duany Plater-Zyberk) own path to salvation: the Traditional Neighborhood Development, or TND. There are now several dozen of these around the country; in essence, conventional suburban subdivisions draped in the clothing of urbanism. This means gridded streets, front porches, smaller set backs, and so forth. But they remain isolated developments, sitting off main highways, linked by necessity to the local shopping mall and defined by the automobile. They function pretty much like any other subdivision. What the couple is doing, intentionally or not, is providing the country with a rationale for another round of suburban sprawl, only this time labeled ‘New Urban’ or ‘neotraditional.’ More serious measures – like curbing highway spending or regional-growth boundaries – are given lip service or actively criticized.

This sales campaign for a new form of sprawl continues in their latest book, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream. They are joined here by Jeff Speck, a Harvard-trained architect and now director of town planning at DPZ. As befits a work by architects, Suburban Nation is a handsome book. The text is laid out in big type with fat margins. It is an easy read. The 11 chapters take you through the authors’ view of suburban sprawl, of its cures and ills, most of which lead to the door of TNDs. The chapters have names like ‘What Is Sprawl, and Why?,’ ‘The House That Sprawl Built,’ and ‘The American Transportation Mess.’ It is quite an effective piece of propaganda. And, like most effective propaganda, it is deeply misleading.

The false premise of the book is presented in its first few paragraphs. There, the trio describe what they say is the archetypal problem of suburban sprawl: what to do with a vacant 100-acre tract left by a rich guy on the edge of a developing metropolitan area. Will it become another tract suburb, or will it become a neotraditional town, ripe with public space and community? As politicians know, he who frames the question usually wins the argument. But the fate of a 100-acre tract is not sprawl’s essential question. If you start there, you have already lost. Before you get to that 100-acre tract, you must first consider highway construction and regional growth strategies. This misleading paradigm of TNDs versus conventional sprawl is a bright thread woven throughout the book.

Historically, Duany and Plater-Zyberk fit into a long line of sprawl-justifiers, new members of which emerge every 15 or 20 years under the banner of ‘the reinvented suburb.’ In the 1970s and early 1980s, Planned Unit Developments, or PUDs, were the rage. Municipalities around the country approved these assemblages of shopping centers, subdivisions, and commercial parks as antidotes to ‘sprawl.’ In the 1960s, the New Town movement, which produced small cities like Columbia, Maryland, was hailed as a sprawl buster. Jim Rouse, the godfather of Columbia, talked just like Duany when in 1966 he said: ‘Sprawl is inefficient, ugly. Worst 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.’ Today, Columbia’s swooping curves, separated shopping centers, and big enclosed ‘downtown’ mall are seen as the embodiment of suburbia and sprawl. Will the same be said of New Urban subdivisions in 25 years? I think so.

The deceptive logic of Suburban Nation revolves around the false belief that the design of older neighborhoods and cities can simply be transferred to the suburbs without copying the underlying transportation systems necessitated by plans based around the pedestrian. The writers repeatedly do things like compare historic cities, such as Georgetown, Charleston, and Savannah, to various non-descript suburbs in Arizona, California, and Florida. At one point, they compare sprawling Virginia Beach, my hometown, with the Alexandria, Virginia, of the 1700s. This is like comparing an eighteenth-century clipper ship to a twentieth-century container ship.

This isn’t to say we can’t build places comparable in beauty and function to Charleston or Princeton (two towns the writers like to name). But these places have to be built by recognizing, not hiding from, contemporary contexts and choices. That other New Urbanist, Peter Calthorpe, is far more coherent intellectually because he portrays mass transit as a requirement, not just an option, in producing pedestrian-oriented neighborhoods.

The trio do get some things right. They correctly point out that subsidized mortgages and highway spending promoted sprawl. They explain how, in the 1920s, urban design mutated into urban planning, leaving much of the visual and artistic vision of cities behind. But they avoid the implications this analysis holds for their own work. On transportation they say: ‘If we truly want to curtail sprawl, we must acknowledge that automotive mobility is a no-win game, and that the only long-term solutions to traffic are public transit and coordinated land use.’ Exactly. But their own work involves neither. They write: ‘Settlement patterns depend more than anything else upon transportation systems.’ So how does a neotraditional subdivision sitting off a standard suburban highway end up as anything but a conventional suburb?

I’m curious as to whether Speck, the third author, is responsible for the more progressive chapters on transportation and regionalism. In an interview after a lecture at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard in April, Speck said that he wrote the first draft of the book, and that Duany and Plater-Zyberk edited and added to his work. During the presentation, Speck, the youngest member of DPZ, said that he would support a moratorium on suburban growth, although he wasn’t sure if Duany would. Perhaps Speck’s influence is responsible for a guilty rationalizing that creeps into Suburban Nation. At one point they say, ‘Conscientious designers are faced with a difficult choice: To allow sprawl to continue without intervention, or to reshape new growth into the most benevolent form possible.’ Maybe that should be DPZ’s new motto: ‘A more benevolent form of sprawl.’

The authors’ hostility to real sprawl-tackling can be seen with their damning-with-faint-praise treatment of Portland, Oregon. Essential to that city’s success has been its urban-growth boundary. But in Suburban Nation, the authors say that ‘while these boundaries have sometimes proved effective, they are rarely long-term solutions; Even Portland’s lauded boundary faces constant legislative challenge.’ Why does ‘constant legislative challenge’ make something unsuccessful? Actually, Portland’s growth boundary has lasted 25 years, withstanding three statewide referendums called by developers.

Ultimately, the book is dangerous, because it confuses people about the chaotic nature of the American landscape and then holds out false hope for an easy way to buy our way out of it. They write, ‘The choice is ours: either a society of homogenous pieces, isolated from one another in often fortified enclaves, or a society of diverse and memorable neighborhoods, organized into mutually supportive towns, cities, and regions.’ But DPZ’s developments are virtually all ‘homogenous,’ ‘isolated,’ and, to a degree, ‘fortified enclaves.’ Windsor, in Florida, is even a gated community. These subdivisions–oh, excuse me, ‘neighborhoods’–are isolated and isolating, income-exclusive, and antidemocratic in their reliance on homeowners’ associations for control.

Seaside, Florida, the project that kicked off DPZ’s work, is perhaps its sole lasting and honest achievement. This neotraditional ‘town,’ founded in the early 1980s, works precisely because it is unique. It is a resort, so the de-emphasis of the automobile works. People on vacation rarely need to shop for a washing machine or go to the dentist. But it is not a model for solving sprawl. It is an interesting resort community.

Suburban Nation is a child’s tale, told to lull a gullible audience into a dreamy, painless vision of how to solve suburban sprawl; a vision which, not incidentally, requires buying more of what Duany and Plater-Zyberk are selling.

Alex Marshall is the author of How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl and the Roads Not Taken, to be released this fall by The University of Texas Press. He is currently a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University.

Old Cities vs. New Urbanism: The Beat Goes On

Posted on August 2, 2006 by Alex Marshall

AIA Architecture
May 1998
by Alex Marshal

When the faithful, the curious, and the skeptical gathered in Orlando, the debate over Celebration and the design philosophies of New Urbanism and Neotraditionalism twisted and turned for four days. Although there were dozens of speakers, the show stopper for many was the debate Friday night between Andres Duany, FAIA, New Urbanist leader and advocate, and Alex Krieger, FAIA, director of the Urban Design Program at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Held in the Disney Cinema on the grounds of the Disney Institute, Duany and Krieger sat on stage in straight-backed chairs and traded comments and retorts. John Kaliski, AIA, of Santa Monica, Calif., moderated. He had a tough job controlling his eager participants.

The views of the two, and their differences, were clear, though. Krieger championed what might be called Old Urbanism: the health and prosperity of thousands of existing neighborhoods and downtowns, many of which are struggling to retain jobs, residents, and services. Duany championed reinventing the suburbs through New Urbanism. What was the conflict? Simply put, Krieger said encouraging more suburban growth sucked people and resources from the center city. Duany said the suburban expansion was inevitable, and it was better to do it well than to waste energy trying to slow it down. Deciding who was right was left to the audience. More controversial were Duany’s remarks on public housing, as he and other New Urbanists are actively involved in inner-city work.

On February 21, the committees pursued their separate agendas: The Committee on Design headed to Tampa, where they checked out the campus of Florida Southern University, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright; the Regional/Urban Design Committee saw the 19th-century railroad resort Winter Garden; and the Housing PIA toured a number of Orlando’s infill housing projects.

On February 22, all attendees gathered for a final discussion on Celebration and New Urbanism. The questions emerging were: How would it age? Would the rigid design controls keep the project from evolving over time? Would it remain an isolated subdivision? Were its residents connected to or isolated from the metro area of Orlando? Was it a town or a subdevelopment? Writers Todd Bressi, Elizabeth Dunlop, and Nora Greer raised these and other questions and observations. No clear answers emerged, but all agreed the project was worthy of attention.

Alex Marshall is Norfolk (Va.)-based journalist and author of a forthcoming book on the contemporary city.

The AIA: 1735 New York Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20006 / 202-626-7300
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Eurosprawl

Posted on January 27, 1995 by Alex Marshall

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.

Alex Marshall

writer, journalist, speaker

I'm an independent journalist in New York City. My articles, books and talks are on this site.

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