Tag Archives: terminology

Are evolving suburbs really suburban anymore?

Silicon Valley google map

Leigh Gallagher is in the news with a provocatively titled book, The End of the Suburbs. Gallagher writes about the shifting geography of the American Dream from suburbia to growing cities and walkable places. In a summary for Time, Gallagher writes:

A major change is underway in where and how we are choosing to live. In 2011, for the first time in nearly a hundred years, the rate of urban population growth outpaced suburban growth, reversing a trend that held steady for every decade since the invention of the automobile. In several metropolitan areas, building activity that was once concentrated in the suburban fringe has now shifted to what planners call the “urban core,” while demand for large single-family homes that characterize our modern suburbs is dwindling. This isn’t just a result of the recession. Rather, the housing crisis of recent years has concealed something deeper and more profound happening to what we have come to know as American suburbia. Simply speaking, more and more Americans don’t want to live there anymore.

The American suburb used to evoke a certain way of life, one of tranquil, tree-lined streets, soccer leagues and center hall colonials. Today’s suburb is more likely to evoke endless sprawl, a punishing commute, and McMansions.

A few comments pop into mind:

This isn’t a new idea: Just googling some articles in recent years that I remember off the top of my head:

And I’m sure there are countless others, along with corroborating evidence from declining VMT, growing urban populations, and so on.

‘Suburb’ isn’t a descriptive term: Is Cambridge, MA suburban? Is all within the city limits of Houston, TX urban? The term could refer to the type of built environment, or to the nature of the political jurisdiction in relation to others in the region.

Suburbs are already evolving: Dan Reed highlights urbanizing suburban jurisdictions; Richard Layman describes potential paths for evolution; Josh Dzieza wonders if urbanizing suburbs might take some of the sting out of the culture wars and rhetorical battles between city-dwellers and suburbanites.

Suburban evolution isn’t a new thing: Alexis Madrigal offers a story about searching for the landmarks of Silicon Valley, finding that the center of a new industrial revolution is now a self-storage complex. Part of the myth of Silicon Valley is about a new industry emerging from agricultural landscapes; clean, new industry. But as Madrigal explains, the industry wasn’t that clean, and the pattern isn’t that new:

In our Internet-happy present, it’s easy to forget that up until the mid-1980s, Silicon Valley was an industrial landscape. Hundreds of manufacturers lined the streets of Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, Cupertino, Mountain View, and San Jose. This is the Silicon Valley when AMD, Apple, Applied Materials, Atari, Fairchild, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, National Semiconductor, Varian Associates, Xerox, and hundreds of other companies made their products right here in the Bay.

Now, with most of the production shifted overseas, the land uses have changed accordingly. Nonetheless, production of semiconductors and microchips is not without pollution, and leaking chemicals have littered the Valley with Superfund sites:

In contemporary descriptions of Silicon Valley as it was being built, every writer seems to note the absence of smoke stacks. A miracle! A clean industry! A better industrial capitalism!

The aesthetic was intentional. These factories of the future were designed to look like buildings on a college campus, which is to say, Stanford. The Stanford Industrial Park (later, the Stanford Research Park) set the visual standard from its founding in 1951 onward. There were rules governing which parts of the industrial apparatus could be visible, so as not to detract from the idea that these were locations for scholars, not laborers.

“Companies had to follow strict building codes, which included ‘complete concealment’ of things like smokestacks, generators, transformers, ducts, storage tanks, and air conditioning equipment,” environmental historian Aaron Sachs wrote in 1999.

Other municipalities wanted to encourage similar developments, and as Sachs concludes, “Stanford Industrial Park essentially replicated itself several times over–each time spurring the construction of new expressways and strip malls in neighboring areas.” What began as Stanford dean and Silicon Valley godfather Fred Terman’s dream to build “a community of technical scholars” in pleasant industrial parks became the architectural standard for the entire high-tech manufacturing world.

But the manicured look and feel had consequences. Storage tanks were placed underground, out of sight and out of mind. Until suddenly, in 1981, people in south San Jose living near Fairchild Semiconductor and IBM realized they were drinking water contaminated by the two firms’ manufacturing plants.

Several patterns of note: the influence of codes, unintended consequences, agglomeration economies, and the impacts of growth. And, hidden within the stereotypical suburbia is a more complex, evolved place:

What we see here is not simple suburbia. This is a landscape that industrialists, government regulators, and city planners sacrificed to create the computer industry that we know today. It has as much in common with a coal mine or the Port of Oakland as it does with Levittown or Google’s campus. All of which should lead us to a simple conclusion: the Silicon Valley of today is a post-industrial landscape, like the lofts near downtowns across the country, like Lansing, Michigan, like Williamsburg, like Portland’s Pearl District.

What we see now is a surreal imitation of the suburban industrial parks and commercial spaces of yesteryear. They’re built atop the past’s mistakes, erasing them from our maps and eyes.

The evolution of suburbia isn’t new. And Madrigal’s article is well worth the read.

Who are the ‘urbanists,’ anyway?

CC image from STREETART PHOTAGRAPHIE

Aaron Renn has a provacative post, asking if “urbanism is the new trickle-down economics.” He writes:

Have urbanists used this as a call to arms to put all of their energy into helping those left behind in the knowledge/creative class economy? No. Instead, urban advocates have gone the other direction, locking onto this in a reductionist way to develop a set of policies I call “Starbucks urbanism.” That is, the focus is on an exclusively high end, sanitized version of city life that caters to the needs of the elite with the claim that this will somehow “revitalize” the city if they are attracted there.

First, who are these urbanists? And why are they acting as one ideologically coherent bloc?

What does the word ‘urbanist’ mean, anyway? Merriam-Webster simply calls it “a specialist in urban planning,” but I would broaden the term to simply be people who are interested in cities. Given the diversity of opinions within that population, Renn’s broad brush misses the mark.

Then there’s the ideology. There’s an irony in Renn criticizing the role of urbanism-as-trickle-down and the reductionisim of urban policy, mirroring trickle-down’s reductionism of economic policy. Renn takes no care to distinguish the diversity of opinions on all things urban, instead lumping all urbanists under this label. He doesn’t lump all economists together as if were in favor of trickle-down policies.

This isn’t the the only example; there are plenty of cases where New Urbanism is falsely equated with urbanism (as in – an interest in cities) – and even more that innaccurately describe what New Urbanism is (the N and U are capitalized for a reason). San Francisco’s SPUR publishes a magazine entitled The Urbanist. There is also the distinction on the market orientation of urbanists (‘demand-side urbanists’ – as phrased by David Schliecher and Witold Rybczynski) and a whole host of other factions with interests in the city.

This isn’t to say there isn’t a truth to Renn’s point about ‘Starbucks urbanism’, but the broad brush weakens the argument. Any way you slice it, urbanists are a pretty diverse group. Often argumentative, too.

Exporting useful terminology to the suburbs

In this weekend’s Washington Post, Jonathan O’Connell writes about the increasing urbanism of the suburbs. The Post‘s editors title the piece: “Can city life be exported to the suburbs?” serving as yet another example of how the term ‘suburb’ is increasingly worthless.  The article generally discusses the trend of shopping malls and other greenfield development projects to take on explicitly urban characteristics, whether in terms of form or use.

The article’s main example is the Village at Leesburg, but also draws on other town center developments in the area such as Reston Town Center. Where things fall apart in terms of relying on the ‘suburban’ terminology is in citing Clarendon – an area that would be within the core city’s jurisdiction if not for retrocession.

The Village at Leesburg is about 33 miles from the heart of DC. The layout of the development is a fairly typical autocentric pod, adjacent to a grade-separated freeway interchange and high volume arterials that separate it from cul-de-sac residential developments. Grade it on the basis of the characteristics of the development, and the changes towards a more urban condition might seem merely cosmetic.

O’Connell asks: “But can a city be a city if it’s built in the middle of a cornfield?”  Sure it can, if it actually has the characteristics of an urban place.  A place like Reston takes a much stronger step in the direction of urbanism than the lifestyle center depicted above. However, the thrust of the article isn’t wrong by any means.  As Richard Layman notes, ‘urban’ places need not be in big cities alone. Even the smallest farm town can be urban, if you define urbanism in terms of the characteristics of the built environment.

Part of this seems to be a mindset of pitting ‘urban’ and ‘suburban’ as opposites, despite the fact that they are anything but.  Perhaps the true foil for ‘urban’ is ‘rural,’ but it certainly is not suburban – whatever suburban might mean.

The end of the piece gets at some of the key differences, speaking less in terms of the hype about a place or how cool it might seem, but about the fundamentals of the underlying city. What our current urban places have is character thanks to their age (all else being equal), and an ability to adapt, evolve, and change:

The buildings were erected over decades, when different architects and designers were in vogue. Every owner has his own vision — one wants a bar, another wants an art gallery or a furniture store. Together, they create a chaotic mix that might not be as functional as what is dreamt up in a developer’s marketing office. But a city’s character, Lanier argues, will be a draw for much longer.

The real question is if the surrounding context allows a place like the Village at Leesburg to evolve or not.

‘Suburb:’ an increasingly worthless term

1954 GMC Suburban Ad - CC image from Alden Jewell

Hot of the presses last week at The Atlantic Cities was a piece from Feargus O’Sullivan entitled “Why I Moved Back to the Suburbs.”  Without touching on the reasons for O’Sullivan to make that move, the very premise depends on what you call a suburb.  As it turns out, O’Sullivan’s destination ‘burb isn’t really all that suburban to my view of the term:

 I should point out here that London’s outer districts are quite different from the average American suburb. For a start, they’re often pretty old – areas built no later than the 1930s still abut fields along some stretches of the city’s limits. They also tend to have medium rather than low population density, with decent transport links and broad, walkable sidewalks that mean car ownership is desirable but not essential. What they share with the U.S. however is their sprawl and their reputation for conformity – it’s often said that it was the dullness of suburbs a few miles beyond mine that helped spawnBritain’s Punk movement.

I don’t know that those ‘burbs are all that different from similarly aged American suburbs around the nation’s primary city, either. The further descriptors only serve to emphasize how useless the term ‘suburb’ is – this place has the key qualities of moderately dense development, strong transit links, and a walkable urban design.  If you were to ask someone in the US to identify a place with those characteristics without using the label, I’ll bet the responses would identify outlying urban neighborhoods with good access to the city – or, in other words, places that most would call ‘urban.’

So, to get value out of the word ‘suburb’ it would help to define it in terms of characteristics (similar to this exercise in defining sprawl and using the term for more than just outward patterns of development). O’Sullivan isn’t the only one to fall for this.  Joel Kotkin is notorious for praising the virtues of the suburbs while conjuring visions of Levittowns, while his analysis hinges on the political definition of a suburb (and all of the arbitrary boundaries therein) and ends up lumping Levittowns and McMansions in with Jersey City.  And it isn’t just political boundaries – Cap’n Transit notes that the New York Times has called the Upper West Side suburban in the past.

Cap’n Transit also hits on the need to define these places in terms of the characteristics, rather than just relying on the label:

The problem is that there are several features of suburbs that catch our attention more than whether they are within the city limits. We often essentialize these features and assume that all suburbs are that way. When someone says “suburb” they may actually be referring to just a few of those features, or even a single one.

I don’t know if I agree with Cap’n’s categories, but it does raise the issue of separating broad categories of key characteristics:  There physical factors, relating to density, design, land use, location, the built and natural environments, etc. – and I would posit that the physical factors are mostly the same as those used to define sprawl, just with different positions on the continuum of choices.  There are social and economic factors, covering race/ethnicity, language, income, wealth, jobs, etc.  There are network factors as well, looking at links to the core city, considering modes of transport and the quality of the links.  I suppose there’s also a category for institutional considerations, perhaps including those arbitrary political boundaries and other quirks of governance.

No matter what term you want to use as the sum of those characteristics, at least the characteristics tell a more complete story.  The New Urbanist transect model helps refine the thinking on some of these issues – at least with regard to the physical, built environment.  That said, the transect zone labeled as “sub-urban” (T-3) wouldn’t match the terminology used by others in different contexts.