Intellectuals and the Suburbs

I do plan another post about Lollapalooza and on finishing my Families and Cities series, but right now, I'd like to present a note about intellectuals' views and writings on the suburbs.

Alex Marshall is a journalist who served as a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Having read the first half of his How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken, I think that he has a unique way of quickly summarizing very complex situations. In his remarks about the suburbs and how people have related to them, Marshall compares the writing of James Howard Kunstler--a harsh, modern critic of the suburbs and a big fan of New Urbanism--specifically in his 1993 The Geography of Nowhere, and that of John Keats (not to be confused with the British, Romantic poet) who criticized the suburbs equally as harshly in his 1957 book, The Crack in the Picture Window. Marshall notes how their critiques are very similar despite the vast changes to suburban America in the intervening 36 years.

But what does the similarity of their critiques say about the suburbs themselves, or about people's views on the suburbs, Marshall asks? He comes up with three answers:

1. "Intellectual leaders have always recognized the flaws of suburban growth, and have tried to avert it. But the bulk of America's political and economic leaders" have prevented meaningful reform to prevent sprawl.

2. "The intellectual classes have had a snobbish aversion to granting the middle and working classes what the rich have enjoyed--space, a decent-size home, privacy, and an abundance of consumer goods that the suburbs deliver more cheaply."

3. Intellectuals criticize "the suburbs for something they can never have, which is a sense of place. Fragmentation is the nature of cities built around the car and there is no way to change that."

All three answers, Marshall concludes, are correct, and he moves on to a brief history of the suburbs to understand their nature better. But where do those three answers leave us?

The first answer is not really that interesting. It's the one most readily observed and most easily understood. The third one is more interesting, but I would argue that it is somewhat subject to personal taste or fashion and less important than material interests such as people's livelihoods. While both 1 and 3 are important, I find the second answer to be the most interesting, perhaps because it presents a challenge to urban-oriented planning solutions. How much can planners, even in well-intentioned efforts to promote environmental preservation and social justice, restrict the right of individuals to pursue improvement in their quality of life by selecting lower property costs in exchange for a less tightly-knit community or more reliance on cars?

I think this question is the greatest weakness of such "solution" arguments as those made by Kunstler or David Owen in his Green Metropolis. I hope, nonetheless, that there is a way to put that deficiency of urban-oriented planning to rest (cheaper, more efficient public transit extending to inner-ring suburbs may be part of the solution; economic incentives for infill development is likely to be another part) and that we can lessen our negative environmental effects, improve our standards of social justice, and still allow freedom of choice in where to live for the working and middle classes. Otherwise, the increasing costs of our current approach--i.e., the rising cost of gas, increasing environmental degradation, etc.--may take care of the discrepancy itself, but probably not in a way that we are going to enjoy.