Elitism of Urban Planning
The Atlantic's recent story "The Next Slum" is the kind of piece that gets people talking, as stories about urban life and the growth of suburbs and exurbs tend to do. We just weighed in on the subject ourselves last week.
But what I found most interesting - and disturbing - about the Atlantic piece was what it left out.
Author Christopher Leinberger, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institute and an urban planning professor, predicts the decline of the exurbs: Today's McMansions turning into tomorrow's tenements. Cities and urban-style living, in the meantime, will become more desirable as people choose communities where they can walk and socialize with their neighbors. As proof, the article cites the popularity of suburban towns that have walkable urban centers, featuring a mix of residential and commercial development.
I've seen those places: Seaside in Florida, or Kentlands, in Gaithersburg, Md. And they are nice, with homes built close to each other, featuring front porches and town squares, a throwback to small towns, a contrast to the isolation of the cul-de-sacs. This whole movement started back in the 1980s and was popularized by Miami architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. It came to be know as New Urbanism and there are developments like it around the county, examples of Leinberger's thesis.
But what he fails to point out is this: New Urbanism's greatest failure has been its inability to provide for mixed-income housing. That was the idea at the start - all this neighborliness and high-density development was supposed to include people of all income levels. That was the dream. But the developments proved to be so popular, and so expensive, that the moderate income houses never did get built on any substantial scale. The only mixed-income living at Kentlands turned out to be the Au pair suites above the garages.
Leinberger also is a real-estate developer. That should tell you something about his view. It's nice to talk about desirable communities and walkable urban centers. But the biggest dilemma for urban planners and developers is not building these traditional-style towns. It's giving everyone a piece of the dream.
Comments:
Posted 02/28/2008 12:19am with
Mary Kane has a point, but so does Chris Leinberger. As someone who has worked in and around the planning profession for nigh on to 30 years (gulp), my main beef with this story is the headline. It says – or means to imply – that urban planning is elitist. GOOD urban planning is not; it attempts to promote equity, diversity, opportunity and environmental quality to make better places to live for everyone. Planners are often thwarted in this effort by politicians and developers who choose not to use their influence to promote community values over profit and expedience.
First, let’s distinguish between “planning” and “design.” Planning takes into account a wide range of factors including social conditions, demographics, environmental impacts, the synergistic effects of a mix of uses, infrastructure, externalities, and on and on. Design is far more limited than that. (Architects often market themselves as “planners.” Don’t fall for it.) Design is very important and should be part of all good planning, but it is only one part of real town planning. If some of the products of good design – Kentlands, Seaside – turn out to appeal to a well-healed clientele, that is because their aesthetics are good and valued by “the market.” But designing and building a Seaside isn’t planning. They’re lovely, and soothing, good for dogs and cats and make nice retirement communities, but they aren’t real. Fact is, those kinds of communities can be planned with more housing choices, alleviating Mary Kane’s worry, and still be very marketable. More important than design, however, is for those projects to first be in the right places. Seaside and Kentlands are not in that they are not close to the kinds of jobs that are held by lower- and middle-income people. That is a lack of planning. (Over the past 50 years, a hallmark of bad – or absence of – planning in the US has been to place millions of moderately-priced homes far from jobs, with all manner of problems attendant.) But let’s give design its props: New Urbanism is showing that good design sells, it appreciates, and is appreciated. The task – properly left to planners, not designers – is to democratize good new urbanism and broaden its application. So Mary Kane is correct in criticizing “designed communities” for their exclusiveness, but she is mis-directing the blame.
Chris Leinberger, who knows all of the above, naturally brings a developer’s perspective with him when he envisions a bright future for downtown housing. (He has successfully developed a MIX of housing types in downtowns.) The way I would support his view is this: high density central city-type development has been around for about 6000 years and is an expression of natural patterns of human interaction. I see no reason why that model should ever become obsolete. Suburbs and “exurbs” (I hate that term) as we know them have been around for maybe 60 years and are the expressions of artificial interaction among automobiles and parking lots. Which model sounds more sustainable – small “s” sustainable?
Joel Kotkin (an urban curmudgeon*, albeit a well-informed one) will be correct to a degree, but he isn’t thinking far-enough ahead. I agree the downtown housing boom has an element of fad to it, based on irrational exuberance of lending institutions. (Sound familiar?) But ultimately, in a resource-stressed world, people will “come home” to a more self-supporting living environment. Cities, I believe, will more resemble Chris Leinberger’s vision than Joel Kotkin’s, simply because they will have to. A good city has always been a more nurturing and satisfying place to live than a good suburb. A city is also a far more efficient investment of public and private resources and therefore provides greater return on investment, evidenced by one and two century old facilities still serving their original functions in US cities. (Not to mention 500 and 1000 year old investments in cities elsewhere.) Sustainability means you don’t ever want to throw it away. History has shown – and is showing – that that is not the case for suburbs. Remember, just because the United States is the only country in the world to throw away its central cities, that was policy, not nature.
Now, please don’t be too hard on we planners. We are condemned to trying to make EVERYBODY happy.
Steven T Branca, AICP
Whangarei, New Zealand
*That’s OK, Joel, so am I, in my own cranky way.