What will America look like in 2050? Will it be urban, suburban or a mix of both?
Fast Company recently asked this this question and had Joel Kotkin — a (sub)urban historian — and Christopher Leinberger — a developer, consultant and proponent of walkable urbanism — duke it out. The key topics were demographics, housing supply & demand, transport, and density.
While there are compelling arguments for both sides, it’s important to note that decentralized single-use suburban zoning was, in the grand scheme of things, a recent (post-war) phenomenon and a heavily subsidized one at that. The America of today is not the same place:
“In his 2008 book The Option of Urbanism, Leinberger makes a remarkable assertion (one he repeated Wednesday night): by the end of the 1950s, the Big Three auto companies and the industries they spawned or converged with–oil, steel, mining, finance, insurance, repairs, highways, and the construction of a vast suburbia navigable only by car–were responsible for as much as a third of US GDP. Before Richard Florida (a bête noire of Kotkin’s) presented a a similar thesis in The Great Reset, Leinberger suggested suburbia was the urban product of a manufacturing-oriented America–an America that’s long gone.”
Image: Flickr
