Fast Company just introduced a new column called “The Master Plan: A Chronicle of New Urbanism and Exurban Decay.” The focus is on our waning interest in suburbs and our renewed interest in cities and urbanism.
What a difference a half-century makes. America’s suburbs are now home to the largest and fastest growing poor population, according to a recent report by the Brookings Institution. The country’s largest metro areas saw their poor populations grow by 25% between 2000 and 2008, faster than either primary cities or rural areas. (The suburban fringes of Los Angeles were expected to take the biggest hit last year.) Part of this has do with math–the suburbs grew three times faster during that span. But faced with aging infrastructure, higher maintenance costs, and growing numbers of poor, this increase could become self-perpetuating, a la the inner cities in the 1960s and 1970s. “Clearly,” the Brookings Report concluded, “the balance of metropolitan poverty has passed a tipping point.”
But it’s not just that our preferences have shifted, it’s that our global economy has shifted. And the suburbs just don’t fit very well into that equation:
The data lends some credence to Christopher Leinberger’s gloomy prediction in The Atlantic two years ago that the exurbs would become “the next slums,” littered with as many as 22 million superfluous McMansions. Last year, creative class demographer Richard Florida postulated (also in The Atlantic) that a new “spatial fix” was underway, punishing low-density suburbs and rewarding high-density neighborhoods. Echoing economists like Harvard’s Ed Glaeser, he declared “the economy is different now. It no longer revolves around simply making and moving things. Instead, it depends on generating and transporting ideas. The places that thrive today are those with the highest velocity of ideas, the highest density of talented and creative people, the highest rate of metabolism. Velocity and density are not words that many people use when describing the suburbs. The economy is driven by key urban areas; a different geography is required.”
Check out the column here.
Image: Cityplace, West Palm Beach via Flickr
