Where Goes the Neighborhood?

Wearied by the concrete jungles of suburban sprawl, some Americans are longing for neighborhoods like we used to live in

by Tom Breuer, The Valley Scene, June 2002

James Howard Kunstler has a pretty interesting theory about why EuroDisney flopped in France while its counterparts in America continue to be wildly popular.

In Home From Nowhere, Kunstler's follow-up to his pull-no-punches The Geography of Nowhere -- his original jeremiad on the diminishing returns of our nation's growing suburban infrastructure -- Kunstler says it all has to do with the way America organizes its public spaces.

Accustomed to sprawling commercial districts, disconnected residential areas and characterless work environments -- an unattractive, sprawling landscape which, he says, is geared wholly toward the needs of the car rather than the needs of people -- for most Americans, Disney World's plastic, faux neighborhoods, with their "quaint" park benches and street lamps, represent a soothing slice of nostalgia.

In Europe, where public spaces are still attractive, connected, easy to get to, geared more toward the pedestrian, and, perhaps most importantly, feel like real neighborhoods, the Disney magic falls flat.

"The public realm in America became so atrocious in the postwar decades that the Disney Corp. was able to create an artificial substitute for it and successfully sell it as a commodity," writes Kunstler. "That's what Disney World is really about. In France, where the public realm possesses a pretty high standard of design quality and is carefully maintained as well, there is much less need for artificial substitutes, so few people feel compelled to go to EuroDisney."

While Kunstler is extremely pessimistic about the prospects for many of America's living spaces (see interview with the author on the following page), his rather forceful criticisms do resonate with many who have found more malaise than kinship in today's suburban neighborhoods.

While environmentalists tend to see suburban sprawl as an unsustainable form of growth that continually gobbles up a limited amount of land, critics like Kunstler see another form of devastation: to cities' aesthetics, their sense of community, and the city centers which have been abandoned for the promise of big houses and big discounts outside of town.

But while suburbia and sprawl development have become the dominant forms of growth in America, including -- to the dismay of many local downtown proponents -- in Northeast Wisconsin, slowly a small chorus of voices tied into what has been dubbed the New Urbanism is starting to raise objections.

In a nutshell, the New Urbanism is about building neighborhoods the way we did before World War II, with mixed-use zoning (so people have easy access to employment and shopping), streets that are safe and welcoming for pedestrians, architecture that is attractive and inviting (with front doors, porches and windows facing the street), and neighborhood centers with formal civic spaces and squares.

In short, New Urbanists say, towns and cities should be a lot more like the older infrastructure in our cities, which to some degree still exists in our downtowns and older neighborhoods, and a lot less like the isolated residential, commercial and office conclaves that characterize suburbia. They should be neighborhoods, where people can meet, go to a corner store, get to work without relying on long, wearying commutes, and where kids and the elderly can have a full stake in public life without having to beg for rides.

While the Congress for the New Urbanism charter talks high-mindedly about encouraging architecture and landscape design that celebrates local history, climate, ecology and building practice; about fostering universally accessible public places and community institutions; and about creating neighborhoods diverse in use and population, much of the real appeal of these ideas can be summed up in what the congress calls the "Popsicle test": An 8-year-old in the neighborhood should be able to walk to a store to buy a Popsicle, without having to deal with fast-moving cars.

While some might see such a criterion as naive, starry-eyed nostalgia that hearkens to a world that's gone and all but forgotten, in some areas such concepts are actually on the way back, thanks to New Urbanist principles.

In Hartford, Wis., a Milwaukee-area suburb, some of the ideals of the New Urbanism have taken root. The town of 11,077 has adopted the motto "work where you live, live where you work" and has taken steps to make that motto work.

"We don't want people going to work in Milwaukee and then buy groceries on their way home to Hartford to sleep," said Hartford city planner and community development director John Spielmann in a December story in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "We want to attract and keep residents who have a stake in their community."

The city does this in part by ensuring a healthy mix of affordable and higher cost housing. It allows construction on smaller lots than do typical suburbs, helping encourage abundant and diversified housing. This is not only more egalitarian, but better allows people to maintain residence close to their jobs.

Some New Urbanist principles are also evident in downtown Appleton's current Streetscape renovation.

A greater focus has been put on pedestrians. And certain design elements, like the mouse-eared bumpouts at intersections that make walkers more visible and slow down traffic, are intended to make it easier going.

"The word they use in the technical books is 'calming,'" said Lee Parker, one of the founders 12 years ago of Appleton Downtown Inc., and a long-time downtown advocate. "It's a traffic calming effort, and I would parallel that with the little boy being able to walk to the store to get his ice cream cone. ... Why is the lighting going to be as stunning as it is? Why does it matter that there will be no shadows on the Avenue? Because it's an invitation for all of us to come back down and meet each other."

While not a disciple of New Urbanism per se, Parker echoes many of the concepts that have become part and parcel of the movement. Among these is the need for people to interact with each other -- and for environments that make that possible. Or, as Parker says, for a downtown where "the mom with the stroller doesn't have to run like hell to get across the street."

"We've got to get back to that," said Parker. "We have to, because where else are we going to go? There's so much technology, so much concrete. We need more grass, we need more flowers, we need more gentleness.

"For me it is not nostalgia. I don't spend a lot of time being nostalgic. I guess I'd say it again, people need people more than they need things, and one of these days this culture is going to figure that out."

Unfortunately, the sorts of neighborhoods that would seem to foster the kind of togetherness Parker rhapsodizes about have not just fallen out of fashion; to a large extent they've been made illegal.

Many areas prohibit mixed-use neighborhoods that allow easy, walkable access to shopping, and also mandate large lots that promote sprawling residential development.

Kunstler himself has advocated getting rid of such zoning laws, which he says would go a long way toward creating the kinds of neighborhoods people care about.

Indeed, one can perform an easy experiment by strolling through one's downtown or older residential areas, and then trying to do the same thing in the suburban residential and commercial districts. Which feels more like a neighborhood, which feels more welcoming, which is more attractive, and which best fosters a sense of community? The answer is easy.

Granted, many would say the world has changed, along with our built environment, and there's little we can do. But go to the Congress for the New Urbanism Web site (www.cnu.org), and you'll be able to look at newer developments and neighborhoods that have been patterned after the old, pre-World War II, pre-car-dominant, pre-suburban sprawl model. It's striking how much more they look like traditional neighborhoods, how much more attractive they are, and how much more welcoming they feel compared to what is currently on the outskirts of most of our nation's cities.

While some berate downtown redevelopment schemes like Appleton's Streetscape for their naivete and hopeless nostalgia, if Kunstler and critics like him are right, its pedestrian-friendly, traditional concepts may in fact be the wave of the future.

Indeed, as Disney World proves, the traditional neighborhood is what people want, whether they know it or not.

"Main Street USA is America's obsolete model for development," writes Kunstler. "We stopped assembling towns this way after 1945. The pattern of Main Street is pretty simple: mixed use, mixed income, apartments and offices over the stores, moderate density, scaled to pedestrians, vehicles permitted but not allowed to dominate, buildings detailed with care, and built to last. ... Altogether it was a pretty good development pattern. It produced places that people loved deeply. That is the reason Main Street persists in our cultural memory."

The Limits of Sprawl

An interview with James Howard Kunstler

You mentioned Appleton in your new book, The City in Mind. Can you elaborate on your assessment of the city or our region as a whole?

Appleton did what every other town in America did -- it decanted all the primary business from its downtown and put it in an asteroid belt of architectural garbage outside of town.

This had many nasty unforeseen consequences. The overall result is that it left Appleton in the condition of being just another ruined American place that is no longer worth caring about. When we have enough of them, we'll have a nation that is not worth defending. You also have to consider that the alternative universe of muffler shops, fried food shacks, car dealers, and big box stores has poor prospects for the future. So the further effect is that you will soon have two ruined Appletons.

Most critiques of suburban sprawl center on its sustainability from an environmental perspective (i.e. the impossibility of maintaining current rates of outward growth indefinitely). Do you think there's a parallel here with regard to its effects on the culture as a whole?

What authorities call "growth" in our nation is a very narrow range of statistical criteria, mostly about money-making. This is obviously insufficient. The evidence that we see starkly on the ground with our own eyes is a devastated public realm.

Have you ever sat through a planning board battle over the permit for a new Wal-Mart? Many citizens will get up and declare that the American Dream is all about their right to save money on discount merchandise. So the Wal-Mart gets built, all the local merchants go out of business, the town loses a whole group of middle-class people who used to support local institutions, and now you have to apply to the state of Wisconsin for a recreation grant to run Little League because the guy who owned the appliance store is no longer there to buy uniforms, etc., etc. This is the consequence of those clamoring "consumers" (notice they're not citizens) who insisted on their right to save nine bucks on a hair dryer.

We have now gotten so beaten up by the diminishing returns of foolish choices like this that there is almost nothing left of our communities. Here's the good news: It's going to head back in the other direction. We're going to have to live much more locally in the future.

Here's some bad news: We are entering a period of austerity and hardship, in large part because we squandered our national wealth building the throwaway infrastructure of suburbia.

Even some who might agree with your dour assessment of suburbia will throw up their hands and say, in effect, the genie is out of the bottle. To what extent can suburban environments improve themselves and become what you might term real communities?

In my opinion, suburban environments have very poor prospects, in part because we will simply not have the wealth to retrofit them that we had when we built them in the first place. Some of the pieces are unretrofittable, namely the cul-de-sac housing pods. I believe that they will be the slums of the future. The New Urbanists have admirable methods for turning dead malls into mixed-use town centers, and a few have been done, but I'm sorry to say that I don't believe that many of these places will achieve that positive outcome.

The destiny of most suburban fabric is to become first slum, then salvage and then ruins. It will take a hundred years or more to clear the crap away. First, though, there is going to be a fantastic orgy of devaluation, default, foreclosure, repossession, bankruptcy -- a huge fight over the table scraps of the 20th century.

People may not like pessimists, but I find phony optimism much more distasteful. The truth is, we are going to pay a steep price for the bad decisions we made over the past half century. Life is tragic. History won't shed a tear for us. We'll have to be brave and carry on in the face of all this difficulty, and try not to become a menace to ourselves and other people.

How can city centers, large and small, be reinvigorated? Are there effective models in the U.S. for doing this?

The coming hardships -- which will include chronic oil market disruptions -- will compel Americans to live differently. We will have to recondense our lives into walkable communities. Working on the non-car-oriented scale will help a lot. Once you get people back to that scale, many good things happen automatically, including the restoration of public space.

By the way, it should go without saying that we desperately need a passenger rail system. Amtrak in its current form would embarrass the Bulgarians. It amazes me that we gave $14 billion to the airlines last October without requiring them to invest part of it in passenger rail, to convert themselves into multimodal transportation companies, not just airlines. The total lack of debate on this at the time shows where our heads are at.

In the larger sense, we face the project of severely downscaling virtually all American activities. We will have to restore local and regional networks of commercial relations (exactly what the Wal Marts destroyed) in all their rich layers. We're going to have to do agriculture differently, more locally, more carefully, perhaps more labor intensively. Education, too, faces the need for massive downscaling and redistribution of facilities. I'm inclined to believe that smaller cities and small towns will make out better than the big cities in the near term. Places like Detroit and St. Louis, etc., are pretty far gone. Anyway, I doubt the big cities of the coming century will be like the industrial metropoli of the previous era in character. They will shrink.

Giant factories are things of the past. There will be more parity between big city and small town in terms of potential economic activity. I hasten to add that I believe the Sun Belt will suffer disproportionately in the coming era of hardship and austerity -- just as it benefited disproportionately during the cheap oil fiesta of the past 50 years.

To what extent do you think people understand the problems you raise, to what extent might they understand them on an unconscious level, and to what extent are they ignored?

Not at all. Nada. Zip. I think the American people are sleepwalking into the future. I believe we are completely clueless, tuned out, nodded out in a narcotic rapture of infotainment.

The few moments we're actually awake, we're complacent, smug, prideful, chauvinistic, and since the attacks of 9/11 we've added a patina of victimhood to our national psychology. We are very poorly prepared for the realities to come.

Because of this, I believe we will have a lot of internal strife in the U.S. as life becomes more austere, as the DiTech home equity loans are foreclosed and the foreign oil markets start to wobble. Americans will not understand why "normality" failed. There will be a tendency toward blame and recrimination. There may be strife between groups and regions. I can imagine Americans voting for political extremists who promise to bring back the good old days of the 1990s. If we woke up and decided to be intelligent, we could begin the huge project of downscaling America, but I don't think it's going to happen that way.

Do you see a significant government role in fostering certain types of communities (as in Wisconsin's Smart Growth legislation), or is it more important to change people's minds?

So far, the excellent ideas of smart growth have met a furious opposition from those parts of our culture in charge of land development and building (and their enablers in banking and finance). That's because the dirty secret of our economy is that it is now almost entirely based on the creation of additional suburban sprawl and its furnishings and accessories.

The public debate has been futile and often lacking in coherence. You have weird sideshows going on, for instance the efforts of "environmentalists" to "cure" the catastrophe of suburbia by militating for "green space" -- which ends up being delivered in the form of meaningless bark-mulch and juniper shrub installations. Meanwhile, government at every level has begun to suffer a massive destitution due to the costs of our various wars on terrorism at home and abroad.

These outlays are only going to increase as a proportion of our expenditures. Government will struggle to just maintain the pavements on our limited-access highways. Don't expect much from them. What we are witnessing is the Law of Perverse Outcomes colliding with the stark reality of diminishing returns from over-investments in complexity. Bottom line: People don't get what they expect, but they get what they deserve. Prepare for austerity. Prepare to be a good neighbor. Prepare to live locally. Be hopeful, but get real.

Kunstler is the author of The Geography of Nowhere, Home From Nowhere and the recently released The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition. He maintains a Web site at www.kunstler.com.

© 2002 Scene Publications

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