May 4, 2001:
by Penny Van Horn 

BOOK REVIEW: How Cities Work Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken
by Alex Marshall
University of Texas Press, 216 pp., $50; $24.95 (paper)

Does this ring a bell? “The standard choice today of lacing a metropolitan area with big freeways for purely internal travel means we will have a sprawling, formless environment.” Uh-huh.

Now more than ever, Austin could use accessible writing that addresses the challenges of urban sprawl. Journalist Alex Marshall (Salon.com, The Washington Post, among others) offers a clear-headed approach to the urban issues that so deeply affect Austin and other overgrown cities in his jargon-free new book How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken. He cuts right to the chase by spelling out the basic interaction of the three great controlling forces of urban growth — transportation, economics, and politics. The topics are overwhelming, but Marshall makes them understandable in the context of four case studies that form the backbone of the book.

First up is Celebration, the Disney-controlled development in Florida that is a paragon of New Urbanist design. New Urbanism claims to appropriate the best features of old-fashioned city centers such as those of Savannah, Ga., and Annapolis, Md., while also providing the amenities demanded by car-dependent suburban residents. Celebration sports limited street widths, houses built with porches close to the sidewalk, and a shopping street in its center. But the whole project was bankrolled by Disney, the shopping street is full of tony boutiques that rely on tourist traffic, and the faux-antique houses in Celebration cost three times as much as comparable ones in the neighboring — real — town of Kissimmee. Marshall convincingly portrays Celebration for what it is, one more suburban development dependent on yet another highway off-ramp. Far from offering solutions to sprawl, New Urbanism compounds it. Marshall writes: “The New Urban design philosophy is akin to dressing up a car to look like a horse-drawn carriage, and then saying you have brought back the intimacy and community of carriage life.”

Marshall is similarly critical of the endless suburbia that makes up the Silicon Valley of California. He outlines the history of the valley as it made the transition from fruit farming to microchip production, and probingly questions the logic that has allowed sprawl to take over prime agricultural land that in many places has prime topsoil 40 feet thick … sitting under freeways and strip malls.

Jackson Heights in Queens offers a contrast: a vibrant community that for generations has offered immigrants and their children a place to live and trade — without needing a car. Throughout these case studies and intervening thematic chapters, Marshall analyzes how Americans’ obsession with the car inherently prevents many of the improvements we say we would like made in the fabric of our cities.

Marshall’s most absorbing case study is of Portland, Ore. While he lauds Portland’s success in establishing a strict growth boundary, he also points out that the city benefited from doing so during the early Seventies, when environmental sentiment was cresting and when the region was even more culturally homogenous than it is now. Portland’s growth boundary, along with a ban on construction of downtown parking facilities, has supplied a form of creative pressure that has forced successive waves of real-estate development back into the heart of Portland rather than out into the countryside that surrounds it. This has meant higher density in the city’s core, which makes viable Portland’s showcase mass-transit system and downtown retail center.

Can something like this happen for Austin? Marshall’s analysis shows that any sort of worthwhile urban planning requires the sort of hard choices Austin has seemed incapable of making. “People are living differently in Portland because of the policies they have chosen,” he writes. “Actual shaping of cities requires making choices. More of this, less of that. Some people lose, some people win.” He also argues that government “is the only actor with the size and scope to make foundational changes” in the way our cities grow, and thus encourages a sort of government activism atypical in Texas: “[Portland’s planning policies] are no more activist than building freeways for more malls and subdivisions; they are just activist in a different way.”

If this new sort of activism ever will come to pass for Austin, it seems to be a long way off. But maybe books like this one can get the ball rolling.

( a review of the work of Alex Marshall)

Published: SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 2001
Section: COMMENTARY , page J1
Source: BY JOHN-HENRY DOUCETTE

For a book that isn’t about Norfolk, there’s a lot of Norfolk in ”How Cities Work” by Alex Marshall.

And for a book that isn’t per se a criticism of New Urbanism, a design movement that attempts to incorporate urban ideals into suburban development, it misses no opportunity to knock the movement.

Marshall’s opinions of New Urbanism have been stingingly vocal, and among Hampton Roads planning and city officials his notoriety lives on.

A Virginian-Pilot reporter from 1988 to 1997, Marshall comes from a long line of Norfolkians. His great-grandfather, Albert Grandy, was the first publisher of The Virginian-Pilot.

Marshall was a Loeb Fellow in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University last year, and later moved to New York City. ”How Cities Work” was published last month (University of Texas Press, 288 pp., $50 hardcover; $24.95 paperback).

I recently sat down with Marshall in the basement cafeteria of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City to talk about his book. The following is an excerpt from that conversation.

Q: Did you want to write this book when you were a reporter in Norfolk?

A: Yes. I’d been writing about cities for almost 10 years for the newspaper. I was constantly asking myself: How does this all fit together? Or what is making this all go?

Then, when I started writing for national magazines, I kind of had that same spirit. I guess in the course of these past eight or nine years I came up with some things that had not been said much.

Q: Such as?

A: I went to Europe on a fellowship in 1994, and it made me realize that suburban sprawl is not just a product of American bad taste. I really love traditional urban cities but you sort of have to examine your love.

Q: So. New Urbanism?

A: I started out as a big fan of New Urbanism and I ended up as a big critic. At first it seemed to offer a very coherent solution to urban sprawl. It seemed to say that we could have these really nice cities and places where people walk, where people do not rely on cars so much, if we just design things a little differently.

Q: In the book, you talk about designing the trappings of a city, but there’s no foundation.

A: Right – there’s no there there. A lot of it was going to Europe, which made me realize transportation is really a fundamental driver of development and of the type of development.

And, secondly, just visiting these New Urban places. If you pull away your starry-eyedness, you see these places as essentially charades or mirages. . . . just another isolated subdivision in the middle of a cornfield, not that much different from the isolated subdivision down the street.

Q: I thought your best argument was for transportation. Thing is, the car exists. People like their cars.

A: I’m not sure people realize how significant it was to have built those highways into Norfolk in the 1960s, that they destroyed Norfolk as much as they helped it.

The highway is as much of a knife into it as a helpful artery. Without the highway, arguably, Norfolk would have thrived more because, rather than fleeing into the suburbs, people would have stayed closer to the downtown, which would have kept more of the traditional downtown.

Q: How does Norfolk, which has the big mall and a highway running into the downtown, stay vital?

A: That’s the million-dollar question. It’s very easy to criticize. It’s much more difficult to work with what’s there. I think the mall is a very good thing, even if it’s horribly designed.

You could do a couple of things – though some of these proposals are outlandish. One, get the highway engineers out of downtown Norfolk. The new streets being built downtown are too much like suburban highways. They should be designing traditional city streets.

More radical things? Tear down some highways. Norfolk should have a Tear Down Highways contest. What would Norfolk lose? If they made it more difficult for commuters to reach their jobs at the naval base or medical center, so what? It just means people would move back to Norfolk. Other cities have done it with pretty big results.

More outlandish: Examine reviving the streetcar system. No city in the country I know of has done this, so maybe this means it’s a good idea. Most of the main streets in Norfolk have street line tracks buried under the asphalt.

Q: How important is it to have people live downtown? Or at least close by?

A: I think that’s a good thing. A lot of it is having a vision of what Norfolk should look like. My vision might be a dense, compact city where people can walk, bicycle, take the streetcar, bus or drive to a lot of different places. That has neighborhood business centers that are alternatives to the more standard neighborhood shopping mall model.

Q: Do you see MacArthur Center in that tradition?

A: My view on MacArthur Center is kind of nuanced. I think it’s a good thing it was built. Right now it’s helping downtown. I would have voted for it if I were on City Council.

But it’s fatally flawed in its design, which in the long run will probably hurt both the mall and the city. To repeat an old charge, it’s built like a hermetically sealed box, which limits how much the mall can help the rest of downtown – and which also limits how much the rest of downtown can help the mall.

If Granby Street continues to take off, it’s going to be very difficult for people to casually walk from Granby Street to the mall. It’s not impossible, but difficult. The mall lives and dies by itself too much.

Q: What are some of the good things that have happened downtown?

A: The Collins housing (a relatively new development along Boush Street) is very good but it’s also built too much as a suburban housing complex. The electric bus system is good.

All the cities in Hampton Roads have an unofficial policy of not allowing poor people to live there. It’s immoral, un-Christian and wrong. For all its strengths, the ward system has still not allowed Norfolk to treat all its residents as citizens.

Q: So if all that money spend in the 1950s and 1960s on redevelopment and transportation had been spent on a public transportation system, say, and not slum clearance or a highway that dumps into downtown, Norfolk would be a better city?

A: It would have required stunning 20/20 foresight, but in hindsight, yes. In the book, I talk about money, government and transportation, and all three are connected. On the business side, (people) should look at how they can change the region’s economic vantages. They should look at their key transportation link to the outside world.

Politically, if we can have more of a regional government and more state growth control and more regional land use plan, we would have less sprawl, more prosperous neighborhoods, and a more livable region. That would make us more attractive to businesses.

On the smaller-mode transportation, we should make our neighborhoods more livable and make car travel less of a priority. Using a car is a personal decision, but building highways is a public decision.

(a review of the work of Alex Marshall)

 
From Charleston Neighborhood Post & Courier
By Robert Behre
BOOK REVIEW: How Cities Work, By Alex Marshall

Journalist Alex Marshall shows how to end sprawl; the only question is, do we want to listen?

Are we bothered enough to make the tough decisions needed to change things? Make no mistake – they are tough decisions. Take the automobile (please!). Marshall notes that cities always developed according to the transportation of the day. Older downtowns feel different because they were built for pedestrians and horse-drawn carriages; Wal-Marts and post-World War II subdivisions were built for the car.

Marshall cites three steps needed to change the growth patterns found in most U.S. cities, including larger Charleston: recognition that residents have the right to direct growth.

While not dismissing property rights, Marshall notes that growth stems from public spending on sewer lines, schools and (mostly) transportation. If it’s our money, we should be able to say where it goes.

There needs to be recognition that we need to support other ways of getting around, especially within the city. He notes a trade-off: With more mass transit, bike lanes and sidewalks, you will have the option of not using a car. But to get this option, you have to accept that using a car will be more difficult, a recognition that growth control is not simply a local matter.

A city can tinker with its zoning laws, but today’s growth often leapfrogs past city limits and county lines. Only a regional approach – with the state’s backing – will work.

As the accompanying review by Rosemary Michaud rightly notes, Marshall’s solutions have had few serious takers.

But where she sees this as a lack of vision on Marshall’s part, there is an alternative view: seeing it as underscoring the difficulty of the task. ‘The problem for contemporary Americans is that enhancing social cohesion (and limiting sprawl) may mean giving up some things we really like, like personal mobility, low taxes, and a footloose economic structure,’ Marshall writes. ‘We have not figured out yet that creating wealth is not the same as creating community.’

Perhaps most importantly, Marshall explodes the outdated thinking that cities’ older downtown areas are different than the mid- to late-20th century development that rings them. To him, it’s all one big city. ‘The suburban world of highways, shopping centers, and office parks is now a place of blind market forces and impersonality – exactly what the city represented in the past,’ he says. Older downtowns have become cherished because we realize they’re a past art form that won’t be built anew. The question is where we go from here. We can pursue Marshall’s solutions or simply wait for personal jetpacks or flying cars.

‘Actual shaping of cities requires making choices. More of this, less of that. Some people lose, some people win,’ he writes.

‘What we are starting to see in Portland (Ore.) is a city that recognizes you can have easy suburban growth with big homes on large lots, or a coherent city with a vital mass transit system, but not both.’

Robert Behreis the editor of The Post and Courier Neighborhood Editions and a columnist on preservation.

(a review of the work of Alex Marshall)

The American Prospect
June 18, 2001
BY JOANNA MARETH 

Book Review:
How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Road Not Taken, by Alex Marshall.
University of Texas Press, 243 pages, $ 24.95.

Celebration, Florida, is a picturesque town built from the ground up by the Walt Disney Corporation and planners Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, pioneers of New Urbanism. By some measures, Celebration is a success. It has a thriving downtown retail district and homes that sell for seven times what similarly sized houses in neighboring towns go for. What it doesn’t have, according to Alex Marshall in How Cities Work, is any real claim to urbanism, new or old.

Marshall, a journalist based in Norfolk, Virginia, picks out four places with little in common — California’s Silicon Valley; Jackson Heights, Queens; Portland, Oregon; and Celebration — for his study of the interplay of forces that determine the shape of cities and towns. In each instance, he shows how the public’s decisions and money are the most important variables in creating urban places. It is government, he emphasizes, that ultimately shapes cities by building the transportation systems that form the skeleton of any place. Rails, ports, interstates, and airports support the flow of goods and capital, while sidewalks, subways, and highways determine how people get around once they’ve arrived.

Silicon Valley, to take one example, may look like a hastily strung-together collection of supersize office parks and shopping developments. But governmental entities made zoning decisions, built mass transit, and stretched country roads into six-lane highways and suburban boulevards. Each decision requires trade-offs. Places with good public-transportation systems are rarely easy to navigate by car, as anyone living in a city like Boston can attest.

What Marshall finds in Celebration is a modern-day automobile subdivision that has been pinched and pulled to resemble small-town America, at least as it exists in popular imagination. But like most contemporary suburban developments, Celebration is dependent on the nearby interstate highway. The dynamics of such a place have not made Marshall into an enthusiast for New Urbanism. “Celebration and most New Urban developments,” he writes, “will remain winking ornaments on the more gritty reality of American urban life, make-believe worlds that, like Disney’s theme parks, lure a public and society

away from addressing the challenges such developments advertise with their image.” New Urbanism’s “have your cake and eat it too” approach should not be confused with real urban policy, which requires tough choices and the involvement of not-so-tidy institutions of democracy, as opposed to the top-down plans of well-oiled corporations.

Marshall’s paragon is Portland, where growth decisions are consciously channeled through local and regional governments. The policies are simple: Use growth boundaries to keep downtowns dense, build fewer freeways (or even tear some down), and fund mass transit. The results aren’t perfect. A ballot initiative approved by Oregon voters last November makes growth boundaries more difficult to enforce and may signal a backlash against the state’s strict land-use laws (a development that is too recent to have been included in Marshall’s book). Still, Portland remains one of the few midsize cities that have a thriving downtown and don’t compel their residents to drive everywhere.

Marshall writes: “If Andres Duany or Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk want to design towns, then they should be working for the planning department of some state or county. Their often elegant streets and squares should be drawn on public documents, which should match the transportation system government is designing.” Too bad that in most of the country, government doesn’t get much respect. In the absence of a cohesive national urban policy, the planning and design of communities have fallen under the jurisdiction of other, more energized movements such as environmentalism, historical preservation, and architectural philosophies like New Urbanism.

New Urbanism’s most important legacy may be the discussion it continues to provoke over the shape and design of communities and the fresh thinking it brings into the field of urban planning. In books, seminars, and demonstration communities like Celebration and Seaside, Florida, New Urbanists get people talking about what they mean when they talk about urbanism. And in fact, what people want isn’t new at all: the ability to walk to the store, drive less, get to know the neighbors. With its sidewalks, front porches, and densely built neighborhoods, Celebration provides these touches with corporate efficiency.

The task now is to move beyond Celebration and tackle the thornier question of how far we are willing to go to get the sort of pedestrian scale that is missing from most newer places. Are we really willing to drive less and live closer to our neighbors if it means giving up some mobility — and giving up the ability to stop undesirable elements at the front gates? Marshall’s enthusiasm for urban places and active government is contagious. Still, while historical memory is short, the bulldozer scars from midcentury urban-renewal projects haven’t disappeared. There’s hope that the almighty interstate won’t reign forever, but urban advocates who call for sweeping government intervention would do well to remember that we’ve been down that road before.

Copyright 2001 The American Prospect, Inc. Reprinted with permission.

(a review of the work of Alex Marshall)

BY ALAN EHRENHALT

The 20th century produced a pantheon of brilliant urban thinkers and planners. Some built, some mostly wrote, some did both. Some did better than others at translating their ideas into reality. But one way or another, we are living with the consequences of their vision: Ebenezer Howard’s “garden cities,” Le Corbusier’s “radiant city,” Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Broadacre City” ‘ even Lewis Mumford’s unrealized dream of regional planning ‘ all of them represent the baseline for anyone who wants to create a modern urban revival.

But there’s a dirty little secret that nearly all the legendary members of the urbanist Hall of Fame have in common. They really didn’t like cities very much ‘ at least the ones they lived in and knew about. Wright and Le Corbusier considered the urban industrial metropolis of their time to be dirty, smelly, noisy, crowded and vastly inferior to the skyscraper-and-park cities they could conjure up on their drawing boards. Mumford acquired a reputation as one of the most passionate urbanists of all time, but what he really admired most was the medieval village, where, as he saw it, people could be in touch with nature every moment of the day. The more he saw of mid-century Manhattan, the unhappier he became.

The purpose of this column, however, isn’t to focus on this set of individuals, but rather to celebrate the accomplishments of the one great 20th-century urbanist who really loved cities ‘ loved them for their noise, their energy, their complexity, for the sheer quantity of life they managed to generate.

As you may have guessed, I’m referring to Jane Jacobs. This year marks the 40th anniversary of her masterpiece, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Happily, Jacobs is alive and well, still writing and lecturing from her home in Toronto at age 85. Even more happily, her work has become a readily available classic, still on the shelves in almost every good bookstore in the country.

Nobody, of course, would be foolish enough to claim that Jane Jacobs’ wisdom has become settled doctrine in the world of city planning and urban design. The battles she ignited are still being fought, and not always with success for her side. But to a remarkable extent, she set the agenda in 1961, and it remains about where she set it. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that contemporary urban thought is a series of footnotes to Jane Jacobs.

When she wrote Death and Life, downtown renewal in American cities consisted largely of the destruction of two-story commercial structures, their replacement by large office towers, and the creation of huge windswept plazas in which no one congregated.

Now, at the very least, most of us realize that empty plazas are no urban adornment. But the person who first taught us that was Jane Jacobs, insisting that expert opinion was wrong: that successful cities are built out of street life ‘ people of all sorts, coming and going at all hours, working, playing and gossiping on the same sidewalks, forming the casual relationships upon which trust can grow.

“Life begets life,” Jacobs wrote. Busy streets are safe streets. Empty streets are dangerous. That’s no more than simple common sense now. But it was heretical 40 years ago.

Death and Life was prescient in so many ways that one short column couldn’t possibly acknowledge them all. Jacobs argued for the reclaiming of seedy industrial waterfronts for recreational purposes. “The waterfront itself,” she argued, “is the first wasted asset capable of drawing people at leisure.”

She warned against single-purpose zoning and described mixed-use development as the foremost weapon in rebuilding a city neighborhood. Today that is accepted wisdom not only among New Urbanists but in the planning department of virtually every big American city.

Perhaps even more important ‘ and certainly less heeded ‘ was Jacobs’ corollary warning that financial capital and physical rebuilding will not restore a community whose social life has been depleted. “It is fashionable,” Jacobs wrote, “to suppose that certain touchstones of the good life will create good neighborhoods ‘ schools, parks, clean housing and the like. How easy life would be if this were so!… There is no direct, simple relationship between good housing and good behavior…” and “important as good schools are, they prove totally undependable at rescuing bad neighborhoods.” Billions of wasted dollars and limitless human disappointment could have been averted by a public willingness to face up to those Jacobean truths.

Nobody is right about everything, though, and I would argue ‘ although I doubt she would agree ‘ that she was wrong about at least a couple of things. Based on her experiences as an activist in New York’s Greenwich Village, Jacobs felt that no organized urban neighborhood of fewer than 75,000 people could be large enough to wield meaningful clout in the political structure of a huge city. It seems to me that this was more true of New York in the 1960s than of cities in general. Communities smaller than Jacobs’ prescribed minimum have fought City Hall and won numerous times in the largest cities in the past 40 years.

Moreover, she was utterly disdainful of metropolitan regionalism. She described a region as “an area safely larger than the last one to whose problems we found no solution.” She thought that regional alliances and consolidation of political power were no answer to the difficulties either of cities or of the suburbs sprouting up around them. It seems to me that if regionalism is a difficult and often unpalatable choice, it may be the only realistic one left for quite a few of the struggling metropolitan areas in this country.

But if Jacobs was wrong about a couple of things, she was breathtakingly right about so many ‘ and she was able to express her insights in a casual, ironic, unpretentious way that makes her as much a pleasure to read now as she was in the 1960s, when I first encountered her in college.

And that suggests one more crucial lesson about Jane Jacobs worth paying some attention to: She was an amateur. Jacobs was by training neither a planner nor an architect nor an urban historian nor anything else that might suggest uncommon learning in her field. She was a newspaper reporter from Scranton, Pennsylvania, who moved to New York with her husband and children in the early postwar years, settled into a Greenwich Village apartment, took an interest in Village affairs, read the urban policy literature, traveled around the country to check on other cities, and emerged with a fund of common sense that no formal degree or professional credential could possibly have given her.

It is a silly question to ask who will be the Jane Jacobs of the 21st century. No one will be; she is as original and irreproducible as anyone who has ever written about cities and community. But it may be reasonable to observe that, when and if someone makes literate and persuasive sense out of the next round of urban problems and challenges, it won’t be someone with a long series of titles and degrees surrounding his name. It will be someone with the virtues of an intelligent and curious amateur.

In the decade or so since New Urbanism exploded onto the local policy and planning scene, it has generated millions of words of analysis and prescription detailing how intelligent design can restore the sense of community and rootedness that city life has lost in the past half century. Some of this literature is readable and useful; some of it is not.

But none of it has seemed more sensible and appealing to me than How Cities Work, Alex Marshall’s new book of urban reporting and commentary. Marshall shares with Jane Jacobs one characteristic: He is an amateur: a longtime Virginia newspaper reporter whose methods consist largely of watching, reading, traveling and thinking.

Marshall is both sympathetic to New Urbanism and critical of it. His criticisms are simple and cogent ones. Essentially they boil down to this: Transportation is destiny. Communities are creatures of the transportation systems that grow up around them. American downtowns and Main Streets of the early 20th century were compact and vibrant because people walked there or came in on trains and moved in and out of stations twice a day. It’s fine to be nostalgic for the physical intimacy of the old-time small town or gritty city, but it’s impossible to have it in a society dependent for its mobility on the automobile.

Therefore, Marshall argues, there is something inescapably false about New Urbanist efforts to re-create a small-town America of picket fences, front porches and sidewalk gossip in developments constructed as enclaves along freeways and virtually inaccessible except by car. “Bringing back the street,” he concludes, “is not possible unless we bring back the forms of transportation that made it essential.”

Marshall would actually like to see those old urban forms return to life. He likes the idea of compact downtowns friendly to pedestrians and fed by fast and efficient public transportation. He is merely making the point that if we are to create such a societal change in the coming century, we will need to think through all the trade-offs and sacrifices it will entail. We will have to return to old ways of getting around. We will not be able to revive the neighborhoods of the past simply by redesigning streets and houses.

Reading Alex Marshall and rereading Jane Jacobs in quick succession leaves a similarly bracing feeling: Their books amount to a cold bath of common sense whose implications an urban cheerleader might just as soon avoid, but whose logic is ultimately difficult to escape.

This is not to say that Alex Marshall is the next Jane Jacobs. That would be unfair to both of them. It’s merely a reminder of something we might all stop and ponder. In urban policy, as in most other fields, smart amateurs are worth paying attention to. They have a way of keeping us all in touch with reality.

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Alan Ehrenhalt’s Assessments columns from Governing have been collected in a book entitled Democracy in the Mirror: Politics, Reform, and Reality in Grassroots America. For more information on the book and how to order a copy, click here.