You are insane. The invention of the car was the greatest thing ever to have happened - it gave people the ability to make independent decisions about where and when to travel and the freedom to pick up and move. The anti-car movement is a regressive leftist front of collectivism.
I suggest you read Ivan Illich's essay on cars. We have become prisoners of the thing that gave us the freedom to pick up and move. In suburbia, where I live, except for in the neighborhood, one can't walk anywhere. The roads are not safe for walking or biking. One cannot walk to the community center 2 miles away or the church 1/2 mile away or the BP "convenience" store 3/4 of a mile away.
I was an early proponent of New Urbanism. The problem is, New Urban communities are way too expensive. Why? Because they are awesome.
Are there no sidewalks? For a few years my town did not require sidewalks in new developments. Horrible idea. They smartened up and now they are required on one side of street. In my older 'hood we have them on both sides. Shoveling snow sucks. Granted bicycles are not supposed to be on them but the kids all use them. What i don't like are the speedsters on there electric bikes.They should stay off the sidewalks. They are banned from the bike trails but it is unenforced.
As a long time reader and lurker around here, I agree with you 100%.
The automobile is one of the greatest inventions of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. It has enabled incredible freedoms unimaginable to any prior generation of humans on the planet.
It's also important to remember that the "communities" of the past were ALL suburban along with the cookie cutter homes of the day.
Of course, there are a few people who yearn for the life of a one gas station town in the middle of nowhere. However, those type of places still exist.
The loss of community in the 21st Century is MUCH more related to the rise of the "smartphone" than anything else. At this point, teenagers sitting in the same classroom would rather text each other across the room than actually speak to one another in a hallway.
That's the difference between "yesteryear" and today. And it's getting worse. And it has nothing whatsoever to do with the "ugly" suburban sprawl.
In the 1980s the Olympics were coming to Atlanta (we lived in the suburbs at that time). Redevelopment started to happen downtown with the growth of condominiums. A lot of empty nesters thought it would be cool and hip to live in town only to find that the streets weren’t safe after dark and they basically became prisoners in their high-rise boxes rising above the downtown expressway with its constant noise and odor. We’re now in a suburban neighborhood on the side of a 6 lane highway in North Texas where the sprawl is extending to the border of Oklahoma. Fortunately, we finally got a traffic light that lets us out of the neighborhood. A good mixed use development makes a lot of sense, but as one of the comments mentioned there is a cost that puts them out of reach for the average person.
Don't blame us for living 40 miles from Minneapolis, blame the 'city clowncils' of America that have outlawed law enforcement and private property while importing non-Christians that want nothing to do with the fundamentals of this country. Oh, and don't forget our beloved federal gummint for printing trillions of dollars and shutting production down causing housing prices, especially in cities, to explode.
Government is always the problem and now so much fraud, especially around elections, has to be cleaned up and I don't think it can be.
Exactly! People vote with their feet, and some cities are emptying out because they simply became unpleasant to live in. The ones that are nicer to live in become crazy expensive. You can't win!
Were the city's emptied out because of cars, or because of Lyndon Johnson's welfare programs, and are obsessive regulations on businesses that drove them out of the cities, (then out of the country)? After 1964, single parent families moved into the cities in droves, and government made it worse by housing projects. This displaced millions of City dwelling stable families, and brought massive crime and dysfunction. I think most reasonable people would have escaped that hell somehow, interstate highways and suburbia or not.
I live on a little farm in the middle of nowhere because of the very ideas you've presented. There are only 30,000 people in the whole county. Never could I be a part of suburbia.
Always a joy to read JHK on urbanism/architecture/development! Nobody else is as vivid, smart and informed as he is, and that’s by a long shot.
Something that he points out here is something that really baffled and bewildered me. I had followed the New Urbanism from its start, full of hope and admiration for it. It was in part a reaction against not just suburban sprawl but also against preening Modernism, and it was viewed as reactionary — even (get this) fascist — by the endlessly progressive, “avant-garde” (ha!) architecture establishment.
I then got swamped by family emergencies for a decade and when I was able to return to my interests discovered that the NU was no longer what it had been. It had become something quite the opposite, in fact. It had been a respectful-of-real-people, mostly-bottom-up, market-respectin’ movement, and had somehow morphed into something extremely NPR and Woke. And then the 15 Minute City thing, which stole some ideas from the NU, came along, making things seem even worse, and giving sensible people (such as most Trumpies) an even bigger target to hate.
The fight became the populist/guns-pickups-and-Sydney-Sweeney crowd vs the topdown globalist controlfreak team, real American suburban sprawl vs Euroweenie and utopian, and in the midst of the fight actual and important quality of life questions were lost track of entirely. GRRR.
I root hard for Trump, admire much of what he and his team have managed to do, and despise the globalist/Ivy crowd with all my heart. But I’d be a much happier chappie if my current team showed a lot more concern for the built environment than they do.
I currently have everything I need within a 10-minute drive, thanks to suburbia. I have never lived anyplace that wasn't suburbia, and I have ZERO interest in living in 'the city.' I do not consider suburbia as a blight on the landscape. From my own experience, what has helped immensely to feel grounded and part of the community is to have lived in the same neighborhood and house for the past 20+ years. Economic mobility is great, but the flip side can be communities where people do not know their next-door neighbors. It's a real tragedy.
I'd argue that the insanity started full throttle when Muh gubmint said that buildings could fall straight down in 11 secs from jet fuel fire ...even ones not struck by a plane...the willful ignorance to accept a lie that flies in the face of physics is a cue to when the collective stupidity turned up to 10. The sheer retardation of over half the electorate to posit a cogent thought that is based in reality is a reminder everyday of how far Humanity has fallen from the founding of "self- governed" free people. Bureaucracy is the Devil.
Today I can't find a thing on which to agree with you. Cities are hell. Suburbs are quiet and peaceful. You need a new tiny home community or something. I'll keep my peaceful sub-urban "sprawl" (though I live in a large airy tidy one). Happy Monday?
Suburbia and its isolating diffusions were made possible by abundant cheap energy, and at various times, cheap money -- though everything ultimately has a cost, as we've been seeing, in a fractured nation, gutted towns, and isolated lives vulnerable to propaganda and endless marketing through insidious portable telescreens.
These gin up unbridled desires, envies, fears, hatreds, suspicions, insecurities, complaints -- and with little in the way of a social corrective from families, churches, close friends--i.e., people calling bullshit--the problems compound and spread. Isolation to the nth power.
A more local and rooted mode of existence, with nodes of energy in towns and cities--the way humanity survived and thrived for millennia--will perhaps come about with a reordering of the energy paradigm (among other things), although not without much pain of change.
I kinda get what you’re saying, especially when it comes to some places, like in much of Southwest FL, where you’ll drive on endlesss highways past strip mall after strip mall, while all the “neighborhoods” are hidden away, behind walled gates and out of human visibility.
Inside those gates are cookie cutter houses, almost indistinguishable from one one another. They may be festooned with the obligatory pond or water accent, but they can seem almost soulless in their highly structured uniformity.
However, in places like New England, (which does also contain many of these cookie cutter neighborhoods maybe sans the gates), you can see town after town brimming with the age old charm and historical heritage preserved.
It’s in that sense I can agree with you, that the things that should have been more highly valued and preserved have given way to convenience, cost, speed, and “modernity” at the expense of beauty and culture and heritage. These are the things we can’t lose sight of at the expense of all the rest.
I just read Geography of Nowhere. One of the best books I ever read. Suburbs with cars wizzing by are no places for kids. Kids can’t do anything unless they get a ride. Sixty years ago in my small city I went wherever I wanted to go on foot or on bicycle.
Nice to see you writing about this topic again. Your pieces on urbanism were what initially drew me to you years ago. I was, and am, generally in agreement with you about the negative qualities of nowhereseville housing developments. But my understanding of the matter has broadened in the intervening years.
What I didn't consider in the past was the racial angle. Suburbia, read differently, is an attempt to escape the disastrous effects of the Civil Rights Act and forced integration. Reliance on the car and the absence of public transit prices certain people out of participation. That's not an accident. Robert Moses intentionally designed the bridges on his parkways low, so that public buses couldn't get through.
That sense is implicitly reflected in some of the comments here, which highlight suburbia's safe and peaceful nature. Ultimately that is more important than access to amenities. While a dense, walkable urban living arrangement is very nice in theory, it's very hard now to find one in practice, because of demographic realities. It may be a bitter pill, but I reckon that the restoration of freedom of association would go a long way to solving the suburbia question.
I used to bike everywhere growing up. In college, it was normal mode of transport. I thought nothing of a 10 mile spin; rode 25 miles a day at one point. But, as life sped up and required distances to travel massively increased, I got out of the habit. But of late, my car broke down and twice was in the shop for 7-10 days (waiting for parts), I dusted off my 'Giant' and put the ol' bod to the test. Except for annoying brisk headwinds, it was great. It was sort of a cure for my attitude of 'hurry up' [for no real reason]. Why'd I ever give this up?
What's weird is that ppl my age laughed at me, 'get a rental' they said. But I don't worship the car gods enough to waste good money. Another gal said, 'don't ya know that only the drunks who had their licenses yanked ride bikes?' Answer, 'bet they're healthier than you are...bwa, ha, ha, ha, ha.!!!' 'Bicycle shamers', who knew?
A great article. At age 70, I embody the entire history. My parents abandoned Philadelphia for a suburban community when I was one year old. I work in what Jim might call an original suburban community that initially had a train stop EVERY MILE They a walkable town core (Radnor, Pa.) which started to sprawl out in the 1920's. Every day I leave work and take almost an hour to drive the 17 miles home on the infamous "Blue Route" (I-476). My dream when I retire in 2 years? To buy a hundred year old brick townhouse 1 block off main Street in a beautiful, but economically depressed town in North Central Pennsylvania (Clearfield) I will be able to WALK to the theatre, business district, and local diner. All within half a mile. And sit, nursing a cup of coffee and lalking about how the world is going down the drain. Because it is.
You are insane. The invention of the car was the greatest thing ever to have happened - it gave people the ability to make independent decisions about where and when to travel and the freedom to pick up and move. The anti-car movement is a regressive leftist front of collectivism.
I suggest you read Ivan Illich's essay on cars. We have become prisoners of the thing that gave us the freedom to pick up and move. In suburbia, where I live, except for in the neighborhood, one can't walk anywhere. The roads are not safe for walking or biking. One cannot walk to the community center 2 miles away or the church 1/2 mile away or the BP "convenience" store 3/4 of a mile away.
I was an early proponent of New Urbanism. The problem is, New Urban communities are way too expensive. Why? Because they are awesome.
"one can't walk anywhere."
Are there no sidewalks? For a few years my town did not require sidewalks in new developments. Horrible idea. They smartened up and now they are required on one side of street. In my older 'hood we have them on both sides. Shoveling snow sucks. Granted bicycles are not supposed to be on them but the kids all use them. What i don't like are the speedsters on there electric bikes.They should stay off the sidewalks. They are banned from the bike trails but it is unenforced.
Electric bikes should not exist on a sidewalk anywhere!
"New Urban" communities are expensive because NIMBY prevails.
Read an oldie but goodie, "The Time Machine" to peek into the future of "New Urban" communities.
As a long time reader and lurker around here, I agree with you 100%.
The automobile is one of the greatest inventions of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. It has enabled incredible freedoms unimaginable to any prior generation of humans on the planet.
It's also important to remember that the "communities" of the past were ALL suburban along with the cookie cutter homes of the day.
Of course, there are a few people who yearn for the life of a one gas station town in the middle of nowhere. However, those type of places still exist.
The loss of community in the 21st Century is MUCH more related to the rise of the "smartphone" than anything else. At this point, teenagers sitting in the same classroom would rather text each other across the room than actually speak to one another in a hallway.
That's the difference between "yesteryear" and today. And it's getting worse. And it has nothing whatsoever to do with the "ugly" suburban sprawl.
In the 1980s the Olympics were coming to Atlanta (we lived in the suburbs at that time). Redevelopment started to happen downtown with the growth of condominiums. A lot of empty nesters thought it would be cool and hip to live in town only to find that the streets weren’t safe after dark and they basically became prisoners in their high-rise boxes rising above the downtown expressway with its constant noise and odor. We’re now in a suburban neighborhood on the side of a 6 lane highway in North Texas where the sprawl is extending to the border of Oklahoma. Fortunately, we finally got a traffic light that lets us out of the neighborhood. A good mixed use development makes a lot of sense, but as one of the comments mentioned there is a cost that puts them out of reach for the average person.
Don't blame us for living 40 miles from Minneapolis, blame the 'city clowncils' of America that have outlawed law enforcement and private property while importing non-Christians that want nothing to do with the fundamentals of this country. Oh, and don't forget our beloved federal gummint for printing trillions of dollars and shutting production down causing housing prices, especially in cities, to explode.
Government is always the problem and now so much fraud, especially around elections, has to be cleaned up and I don't think it can be.
Exactly! People vote with their feet, and some cities are emptying out because they simply became unpleasant to live in. The ones that are nicer to live in become crazy expensive. You can't win!
It can be.....it won't be pretty.
Were the city's emptied out because of cars, or because of Lyndon Johnson's welfare programs, and are obsessive regulations on businesses that drove them out of the cities, (then out of the country)? After 1964, single parent families moved into the cities in droves, and government made it worse by housing projects. This displaced millions of City dwelling stable families, and brought massive crime and dysfunction. I think most reasonable people would have escaped that hell somehow, interstate highways and suburbia or not.
You said, "...left most of those cities ruined."
I say...left most of those cities BECAUSE they were ruined.
Chicken and egg, unless:
Crowded rat cages just cannot be made nice.
I live on a little farm in the middle of nowhere because of the very ideas you've presented. There are only 30,000 people in the whole county. Never could I be a part of suburbia.
Always a joy to read JHK on urbanism/architecture/development! Nobody else is as vivid, smart and informed as he is, and that’s by a long shot.
Something that he points out here is something that really baffled and bewildered me. I had followed the New Urbanism from its start, full of hope and admiration for it. It was in part a reaction against not just suburban sprawl but also against preening Modernism, and it was viewed as reactionary — even (get this) fascist — by the endlessly progressive, “avant-garde” (ha!) architecture establishment.
I then got swamped by family emergencies for a decade and when I was able to return to my interests discovered that the NU was no longer what it had been. It had become something quite the opposite, in fact. It had been a respectful-of-real-people, mostly-bottom-up, market-respectin’ movement, and had somehow morphed into something extremely NPR and Woke. And then the 15 Minute City thing, which stole some ideas from the NU, came along, making things seem even worse, and giving sensible people (such as most Trumpies) an even bigger target to hate.
The fight became the populist/guns-pickups-and-Sydney-Sweeney crowd vs the topdown globalist controlfreak team, real American suburban sprawl vs Euroweenie and utopian, and in the midst of the fight actual and important quality of life questions were lost track of entirely. GRRR.
I root hard for Trump, admire much of what he and his team have managed to do, and despise the globalist/Ivy crowd with all my heart. But I’d be a much happier chappie if my current team showed a lot more concern for the built environment than they do.
MAHA — but for architecture and development!
Stuck in traffic this weekend James? 😉
I currently have everything I need within a 10-minute drive, thanks to suburbia. I have never lived anyplace that wasn't suburbia, and I have ZERO interest in living in 'the city.' I do not consider suburbia as a blight on the landscape. From my own experience, what has helped immensely to feel grounded and part of the community is to have lived in the same neighborhood and house for the past 20+ years. Economic mobility is great, but the flip side can be communities where people do not know their next-door neighbors. It's a real tragedy.
I'd argue that the insanity started full throttle when Muh gubmint said that buildings could fall straight down in 11 secs from jet fuel fire ...even ones not struck by a plane...the willful ignorance to accept a lie that flies in the face of physics is a cue to when the collective stupidity turned up to 10. The sheer retardation of over half the electorate to posit a cogent thought that is based in reality is a reminder everyday of how far Humanity has fallen from the founding of "self- governed" free people. Bureaucracy is the Devil.
Today I can't find a thing on which to agree with you. Cities are hell. Suburbs are quiet and peaceful. You need a new tiny home community or something. I'll keep my peaceful sub-urban "sprawl" (though I live in a large airy tidy one). Happy Monday?
Suburbia and its isolating diffusions were made possible by abundant cheap energy, and at various times, cheap money -- though everything ultimately has a cost, as we've been seeing, in a fractured nation, gutted towns, and isolated lives vulnerable to propaganda and endless marketing through insidious portable telescreens.
These gin up unbridled desires, envies, fears, hatreds, suspicions, insecurities, complaints -- and with little in the way of a social corrective from families, churches, close friends--i.e., people calling bullshit--the problems compound and spread. Isolation to the nth power.
A more local and rooted mode of existence, with nodes of energy in towns and cities--the way humanity survived and thrived for millennia--will perhaps come about with a reordering of the energy paradigm (among other things), although not without much pain of change.
I kinda get what you’re saying, especially when it comes to some places, like in much of Southwest FL, where you’ll drive on endlesss highways past strip mall after strip mall, while all the “neighborhoods” are hidden away, behind walled gates and out of human visibility.
Inside those gates are cookie cutter houses, almost indistinguishable from one one another. They may be festooned with the obligatory pond or water accent, but they can seem almost soulless in their highly structured uniformity.
However, in places like New England, (which does also contain many of these cookie cutter neighborhoods maybe sans the gates), you can see town after town brimming with the age old charm and historical heritage preserved.
It’s in that sense I can agree with you, that the things that should have been more highly valued and preserved have given way to convenience, cost, speed, and “modernity” at the expense of beauty and culture and heritage. These are the things we can’t lose sight of at the expense of all the rest.
I just read Geography of Nowhere. One of the best books I ever read. Suburbs with cars wizzing by are no places for kids. Kids can’t do anything unless they get a ride. Sixty years ago in my small city I went wherever I wanted to go on foot or on bicycle.
YES, SIXTY YEARS AGO.
IT WAS SAFE TO WALK AND BIKE.
40 YEARS AGO PARENTS WERE ESCORTING THEIR CHILDREN ON AND OFF THE SCHOOL BUS SO THEY DIDN'T DISAPPEAR.
Yes. And it was (gasp!) suburban.
Nice to see you writing about this topic again. Your pieces on urbanism were what initially drew me to you years ago. I was, and am, generally in agreement with you about the negative qualities of nowhereseville housing developments. But my understanding of the matter has broadened in the intervening years.
What I didn't consider in the past was the racial angle. Suburbia, read differently, is an attempt to escape the disastrous effects of the Civil Rights Act and forced integration. Reliance on the car and the absence of public transit prices certain people out of participation. That's not an accident. Robert Moses intentionally designed the bridges on his parkways low, so that public buses couldn't get through.
That sense is implicitly reflected in some of the comments here, which highlight suburbia's safe and peaceful nature. Ultimately that is more important than access to amenities. While a dense, walkable urban living arrangement is very nice in theory, it's very hard now to find one in practice, because of demographic realities. It may be a bitter pill, but I reckon that the restoration of freedom of association would go a long way to solving the suburbia question.
I used to bike everywhere growing up. In college, it was normal mode of transport. I thought nothing of a 10 mile spin; rode 25 miles a day at one point. But, as life sped up and required distances to travel massively increased, I got out of the habit. But of late, my car broke down and twice was in the shop for 7-10 days (waiting for parts), I dusted off my 'Giant' and put the ol' bod to the test. Except for annoying brisk headwinds, it was great. It was sort of a cure for my attitude of 'hurry up' [for no real reason]. Why'd I ever give this up?
What's weird is that ppl my age laughed at me, 'get a rental' they said. But I don't worship the car gods enough to waste good money. Another gal said, 'don't ya know that only the drunks who had their licenses yanked ride bikes?' Answer, 'bet they're healthier than you are...bwa, ha, ha, ha, ha.!!!' 'Bicycle shamers', who knew?
A great article. At age 70, I embody the entire history. My parents abandoned Philadelphia for a suburban community when I was one year old. I work in what Jim might call an original suburban community that initially had a train stop EVERY MILE They a walkable town core (Radnor, Pa.) which started to sprawl out in the 1920's. Every day I leave work and take almost an hour to drive the 17 miles home on the infamous "Blue Route" (I-476). My dream when I retire in 2 years? To buy a hundred year old brick townhouse 1 block off main Street in a beautiful, but economically depressed town in North Central Pennsylvania (Clearfield) I will be able to WALK to the theatre, business district, and local diner. All within half a mile. And sit, nursing a cup of coffee and lalking about how the world is going down the drain. Because it is.