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
Frank Gruber, over at the Huffington Post, recently released an article defining a fourth type of urbanism, which he calls “Cityism”. By fourth, he means in addition to New Urbanism, Everyday Urbanism, and Post (Spectacle) Urbanism. First of all, I had never heard of any of the other Urbanisms, except for New Urbanism. But the compulsion to classify — everything — certainly does not surprise me.
Gruber’s Cityism is based on the following characteristics:
- It takes place in existing cities
- It incorporates existing or creates new city streets with a city-like “grain”
- It is based on the concentration of economic activity (fundamental economics of cities)
- It depends on public and private intervention
- It is “green” because of its urban efficiency (existing area and higher density)
As his article states, Cityism is largely consistent with New Urbanism. Except that New Urbanism often takes place outside of the city on green fields. Hence the reason it’s called “New.”
To quickly summarize the other two, Everyday Urbanism champions a messy and disorderly kind of urbanism not defined by any one particular style or dogma. Spectacle Urbanism is really what it sounds like. Think Dubai. A collection of over-the-top buildings that attract international attention but really don’t amount to much of a city.
But that’s not to say that aggressive designs have no place. I’m personally a big fan of over-the-top. However, we shouldn’t overlook the importance of the silent workhorse: “fabric buildings.” Consider the case of Paris. It’s famed urban fabric is less about one-off attention grabbers and more about an urban fabric of consistently well proportioned structures.
To return to Cityism, perhaps the most critical point is the first: “It takes place in existing cities.” The second half of the 20th century was not kind to cities and the result is loads of unused and underdeveloped land. Our primary focus going forward should be on the intensification of existing urban areas and the re-development of low-density developments — particularly in suburban and peripheral areas.
If you take any North American suburb, you’ll find construction so cheap that it’s often not even worth salvaging. They’re ephemeral buildings designed for a 20 year lifespan. What’s valuable are not the buildings, it’s the land.
We should be accommodating growth within existing city boundaries by way of congestion charges, green belts, intensification, and a deliberate urban agenda. By doing so we’ll be automatically more “green” and we’ll be creating more vibrant, safe and economically robust cities.
In Search of a Fourth Urbanism Part 3; Wherein I Name One [Huffington Post]
White House Office of Urban Affairs [White House]
Density Matters [Creative Class]
Image from Flickr by Mr. Mystery