Who's Against the New Urbanism?

As I wrote this morning at the New Haven Review (where I would love to receive comments):

I have been thinking about turning this article I wrote about my street, West Rock Avenue, into a book, and so I have been doing a lot of reading about urbanism, town planning, and architecture. Basically, I am trying to figure out what makes some streets livable and others not. A good deal of the literature -- by people including New Havener Philip Langdon, whose A Better Place to Live has given me a whole new outlook on what makes a space a happy one in which to dwell -- boils down to this: don't depend on cars. People are happier when they can walk to see neighbors, ride their bicycles, and live close enough to their neighbors that they know them.

This small-town mythology is one that I am particularly susceptible to, having grown up in a neighborhood that had many of a small town's virtues. And I find myself, as I read these books, falling prey to an unfortunate smugness, as if growing up on streets laid out on an easily navigated grid, with houses on quarter-acres instead of large lots, is the only way to have a happy childhood.

But that can't be right. For one thing, this mythos runs contrary to another important American mythos, the rural farm. I don't think many of us would want to say that children growing up in the countryside, learning to milk cows by their parents' sides, are unhappy. Nobody thinks that that's an uninspiring or despairing way to grow up. And, to be fair, the writers I'm reading aren't reacting against that way of life, which may be dying out; they are reacting against suburban sprawl, which until recently seemed poised to dominate the American landscape.

But what of that suburban sprawl -- especially those cul-de-sac developments that have proved so popular in late-20th-century construction? Can one have a happy childhood where there are no sidewalks, where it's too dangerous to ride a bicycle, where there are no secret passageways behind garages or corner stores at which to buy candy?

I don't know. On the one hand, I don't want to underestimate children's capacity for self-mystification. I suspect that most children, at least most of those who grow up middle-class, and sheltered from anything too abysmal in the family's home life, look back at their early years with a certain sense of awe and wonder. Those lookalike houses in Del Boca Vista Estates are not lookalike to the children inside them, who know which house has the best video-game system, which kid has the dad who makes the best forts with the dining room table and some blankets, whose parents go out late and don't hire a babysitter (all the better for watching verboten TV channels).

On the other hand, there is empirical evidence that suburban life of this kind can lead to bad things: obesity, too much time in the car, fewer friends, less play. And teenagers -- forget about it. If they can, they flee to the city. Or at least the curious ones do.

But what I don't have are good sympathetic non-fiction books about life in suburban sprawl. For every book critical of that way of life -- Langdon's book, Duany et al.'s Suburban Nation, Ray Oldenburg's The Great Good Place -- there seem to be exactly zero books about why it can be pleasurable to grow up in spaces that are, after all, safe, predictable, and quiet, which are all good things.

I want the other side of the story. Ideas, anyone?

Comments

[SAMouzon]

I grew up in suburbia, and could go on for pages about its deficiencies, but that would just be anecdotal, wouldn't it? If you discount the "sprawl lobby" that is funded by the asphalt companies or the road-builders, then you're right: you find precious little sympathy for sprawl. ESPECIALLY concerning its lovability. Maybe that's a clue.
The bottom line is that sprawl proliferated not because it was well-loved, but because it was the only choice of an industrial-grade land development system that actually outlawed everything else. When the New Urbanism began, all of its proposals were either illegal or otherwise impossible, even though its principles were based on the places in each region that people loved the most.
In the end, we've built so much sprawl that it now constitutes half of American buildings. Let's assume for a moment that 1/3 of Americans loved sprawl. That's dubious, given your noted lack of evidence of sympathy for sprawl. But just being generous, let's assume that 100 million of 300 million Americans love sprawl. But if half (150 million) live in sprawl, then we have huge oversupply of sprawl. To eat up the oversupply, America would have to grow from 300 million to 450 million so that the 1/3 (150 million) who possibly love sprawl could match the sprawl units. That means we'd need to build 150 million units of New Urbanism and not a single new unit of sprawl to meet the market preferences.

[BobLablah]

I hate the new urbanism!

[TrekBear]

I'm opposed to "New Urbanism" when it's don as it is in Austin, TX. It provides cover for massive gentrification, while driving out the historical character of the city!