Letters From Here

The suburb has a claim to being one of the most successful and least loved inventions of the modern era. Many intellectuals, being city people at heart, find the suburb a hard place to love.

So writes city historian Graeme Davison of Monash University, in Australia, in a recent issue of the Journal of Urban History. Davison goes on to chronicle a brief though rather complete rise and fall of the suburban lifestyle. Concentrating on England, but drawing support from the United States and Australia, Davison tracks suburbia from its ideological roots in the Victorian era to its harsh detractors in the present.

I part ways with many urbanists in that I don’t hate suburbs. In fact, I think we need to start with a basic acknowledgment of the fact that most people like owning single family homes and like living in the suburbs. I might live in the city and not own a car, but that doesn’t mean other people necessarily do. Did subsidies and public policy contribute to sprawl? Of course, as we’ve recently been examining here. But I do believe there’s a legitimate consumer preference for the suburbs.

Christopher Leinberger, a professor at the George Washington University School of Business. Using the Washington, D.C., area as a model, Leinberger finds tremendous pent-up demand for more housing in denser, mixed-use, Walkable Urban Places — or WalkUPs, as he dubs them.

So far, that’s nothing that the average home hunter couldn’t have figured out by noting that a Dupont Circle two-bedroom costs more than whole house in Woodbridge, Va., right? Except here’s the rub: These WalkUPs don’t have to be urban at all. They can be waaay out in cul-de-sac country — and most of them are. “Only 42 percent of the WalkUPs are in the District of Columbia,” finds Leinberger. “A surprising 58 percent are in the suburbs.”

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But as much as these urban simulacra might be an improvement over the sprawl they’re  jury-rigged into, you don’t have to be Jane Jacobs to see that many are not what we’ve always thought of us “urban.” If anything, they reflect suburban ideals contorted (sometimes painfully) into vaguely urbanish form, a Frankenstein of supermarkets, outdoor dining, parking lots and mock-cobblestone sidewalks.

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Daniel Malouff, editor of the blog BeyondDC, sees these WalkUPs as more like “starter cities” for suburbanites. “A place like Reston can introduce people who have grown up with suburbia to the idea of urbanism,” he says.

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Does density and walkability alone make something urban? Though these outer-ring WalkUPs display many of the technical metrics of a city, most have an unmistakable suburban flavor. “When you go to Tysons Corner and you don’t mistake it for a real downtown, there are two reasons,” says Nathan Norris, director of implementation for the planning firm Placemakers. “One is the nature of the blocks — they’re what we call super-suburban blocks,” meaning they’re many times larger than your average city block, which has a perimeter of around 1,800 feet. Why does that matter? “Because humans, we bore easily,” says Norris. “If I have to walk too far without seeing something different, I’m going to be bored. A bit part of urbanity is not boring the humans.”

Which leads to the second problem: transparency. Many city codes dictate that as much as 75 percent of buildings’ ground floors must be non-tinted, non-mirrored windows. Parts of these suburban WalkUPs have that — especially the mall-like sections — but many do not, leaving long stretches of shrubbery-adorned blank walls facing the sidewalks (and the parking lots). “No windows has the effect of killing street life,” says Norris. Creating an urban place is about more than simply adding mixed-use density and places to stroll.

They’re also often exceedingly tidy, sometimes because they’re controlled by a single developer who manages a private maintenance crew and sets rules about behavior. And WalkUPs that are built from scratch usually have few mom-and-pop stores, thanks to high rents and contracts offered to tenants promising no competition.

For all of these reasons, many of these far-flung suburban WalkUPs resemble a suburban version of a city. You can see the identity crisis at work: The WalkUP in Reston “is ringed by parking garages,” says Malouff. “There are buses that go there, but they’re not used very widely. People drive to get there.”

Strip-mall owners are dusting off projects that were shelved during the economic downturn, thanks partly to the expansion of discount chains like Wal-Mart, Target and Family Dollar.

This long piece about Detroit and its environs is worth the read, but I’ll single out three passages I enjoyed. The first is about ruins, and particularly that former theater that’s been turned into a parking garage: 

You’ve probably seen it in a movie or television commercial. It is arguably this ruined city’s most breathtaking ruin, beloved by photographers, journalists, and academics for the easy irony of Ford automobiles parking in a ruined theater on the site of the garage where Henry Ford built his first automobile.

What’s more interesting, I think, is how this building represents a sort of unintentional preservation. The thing about ruins is at least they’re still there. At least this is not just another surface lot. And with so much of the rest of the historical city lost to development and demolition, there is the deeper irony that fifteen miles away Henry Ford moved so many historical buildings brick-by-brick from elsewhere around the country and “preserved” them as decontextualized structures in a counterfeit community.

That highlighted bit was, obviously, my favorite moment, but I like the broader point, too.

Okay so then the second bit is this, later in the essay, pivoting to Detroit’s suburbs:

Today Detroit’s suburbs are where all the action is. One of the reasons people around here get so mad when journalists and photographers parachute in and represent Detroit as a shithole is because there are millions of people here living in safe, well-kept neighborhoods in dozens of thriving suburban communities.

Many early Detroit suburbs (including the Grosse Pointe communities, Ferndale, Royal Oak, and Birmingham) have walkable downtowns filled with the kinds of businesses that people value in actual cities around the world. “Downtown” Southfield has more workers and office space than downtown Detroit. With big-city amenities come big city problems: the suburban traffic situation is a nightmare, the parking situation sucks, and there are people everywhere.

And of course, most suburban open spaces long ago gave way to subdivisions, strip malls, and parking lots for shopping malls and big-box stores.

I particularly like this point:

With all their recent development and growth, it can be easy to forget that these suburbs of Detroit have their own histories. But there was a time before sprawl when these small, historic communities and their citizens provided the lumber for Detroit’s homes, the food for its tables.

Traveling between these communities on superhighways, seeing their endless acres of subdivisions and the businesses built in the latter half of the 20th century along buzzing thoroughfares, I found myself shocked to find that places like Farmington and Northville had nice little historic downtowns. I never saw them through the sprawl.

So that’s useful.

Here’s how the piece wraps up, also useful:

It seems we are capable of interacting with history only through limited means.

The first way is through the tangible: through actual artifacts. When we hold an antique or view an antiquity with our own eyes in a museum, we understand that we are interacting with the same object in the same way as one of our predecessors.

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But the second (and perhaps more important) way we interact with history is through the intangible; through our imaginations and the inspiration of others’ memories, their spoken or written words and artistic and photographic records. “History is about places of the mind,” says historian David Starkey.

Appreciating history through architecture still requires imagination. When we visit the Roman forum, we like to tell ourselves that we are “walking in the footsteps of Julius Caesar,” but that’s bullshit. And we know it.

Those bricks and columns have been toppled and rebuilt and been broken again before being screwed together by dozens of archaeologists thousands of years after Caesar was stabbed. And we know there are the footsteps of ten million German tourists between ours and those of any bald epileptic in a toga.

Still.

Metropolitan growth is both urban and suburban. These maps show by how much each metro’s urban growth outpaced suburban growth (or negative growth, in Cleveland’s case), or vice versa.

Previously.

Confusing.