Born This (Urbanist) Way

Did the suburban revolution take a part of ourselves away from us?

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Sometimes something absolutely strikes you.

Back in the summer, I saw this tweet from Luca Gattoni-Celli, who runs a Northern Virginia housing advocacy group:

And I haven’t stopped thinking about it.

On one level, it’s sort of obvious—it seems like every kid has one of those little play mats depicting a town or city, loves Thomas the Tank Engine, and has a Lego table or Erector Set or Lincoln Logs or some such.

But on another level—whoa.

Is this just an incomplete, selective collection of kids’ traits—maybe Luca’s kids’ traits? Or is it…deep? When I read this, I felt the same feeling that I felt when I thought I had seen a Eucharistic miracle back when I was an altar boy. I hadn’t—I had in fact mistaken lipstick on the chalice for blood—but if you know that feeling, you know it. And I’m going to go with deep here.

I do have an example to back it up: this message that a subscriber sent me and which, with her permission, I published in this space. I’m going to reproduce most of it here, but scroll to the last paragraph, and note how something like Luca’s insight also struck her.

What stood out to me most was your observation, one I rarely see made, that young child-ed couples’ lives could be made unimaginably easier by having the option to forgo the car entirely. My sister-in-law and her husband, who are in their early 30s, just had their first child a year ago, and the ordeal of strapping this baby into the carseat has been a hellish endeavor for all involved, even though their son is remarkably behaved and adaptable.

I’ve actually just noticed this discrepancy as I wrote that now: their family life is, some inevitable sleep interruptions notwithstanding, generally peaceful, except where the car is concerned. I remember her specifically saying, when the baby was probably 4-5 months old, that if they can successfully get “out to Target” as a family without incident, it feels like an unparalleled triumph.

As I think about this more, the only times they seem to have truly struggled with their son—as in sustained bouts of crying and distress—involve getting him into the car. He recently took two flights and was said to be entirely comfortable and calm on the airplane. But that carseat struggle, as you so aptly put it, wears everyone down, the baby included. I’ve never seen urbanism presented as, “Life free from this.”

I’ve begun to think about the land-use changes of the 20th century, taken together—mass car ownership, Interstate Highways, urban freeways, and “urban renewal,” suburbs, strip plazas, and box stores—as a revolution. But, not to belabor the religious terminology, I think another appropriate word would be schism. That’s the term used to refer to a split within the church, most famously the Catholic-Orthodox split in 1054, known as the Great Schism.

I think of what happened to this country in the 20th century as a sort of schism with ourselves, a period of revolutionary change that separated us from our heritage, that broke our continuity with how we had built and inhabited our places. That somehow made us imagine that the last 70 years of city-building and place-making were more of a status quo than the last 5,000.

But enough of the Catholic stuff. What about the kids?

What struck me about Luca’s tweet was that it seemed like another angle on a thread I’ve pulling on for awhile, which, in turn, I credit Strong Towns for: this idea that what we today call “urbanism” isn’t really an ideology or an economic strategy or something that somebody—a planner or policy wonk or businessman—sat down and came up with. It’s more of a description of a whole way of making places, that was basically the same everywhere up until the middle of the 20th century.

Charles Marohn, the founder of Strong Towns, describes cities as “human habitat”—as natural as an anthill—and argues that we have coevolved with our traditional built environments. Many of the design features of traditional urbanism are, in his telling, the human implementation of something deep within us, below the level of consciousness.

I recalled one of his talks in my piece on King Farm, a really expertly done New Urbanist mixed-use housing development in Rockville, Maryland:

Think about how people tend to stick to edges. Think about how nervous a cat looks in an empty, bare room. I went to a talk by Charles Marohn in Greenbelt, Maryland, and he talked about “thigmotaxis”: the biological tendency towards wall-hugging. In a low, spooky voice, he added something like, “Even specimens in petri dishes stick to the edges.”

In other words, classical urbanism is something very deep: a physical expression of something built into us.

In other words, what we call “urbanism” is really not a single definable thing, per se. It’s our attempt, looking back at pre-revolutionary places, to describe what they were or reverse-engineer them. The land use of these old places is only one element of what they are. Frankly, if I can be spooky myself, I don’t think we really do know quite what they are.

But maybe the kids do.

Maybe children “see” something that we post-revolutionary adults do not, because the children are really expressing the fact that we are very deeply wired for urbanism. In other words, we have to be trained to shy away from urbanism, broadly and properly understood. And the revolution in land use that we underwent in the 20th century has in many ways done that for us, because it means that many people never see a real, functioning city in day-to-day life.

Now, I can hear some people saying, people like cars and houses and privacy. That’s all there is to it. Was air conditioning a “revolution”? Stop telling people how to live!

But here’s the thing: when we permit people to do urbanism, even in America, they do it! The New Urbanists had to fight very hard with zoning boards and other skeptics to be permitted to build a few small housing developments that resembled pre-revolutionary places. Immigrants from countries with a stronger tradition of public space and small-scale commerce recreate that in America, even in deteriorating suburban landscapes. Our old towns and cities—remember that “historic district” is a euphemism for “not destroyed by urban renewal”—are some of the most desirable places to live in the country.

All the evidence suggests that typical American car-dependent suburbia is not the affirmative preference of the majority of Americans. And yet we’re not allowed to fully test that claim, because we’re not allowed to build in a pre-revolutionary manner in most of the country. And even if we were, the decades during which traditional urbanism has been out of practice mean that the continuity of building and placemaking knowledge has also been broken.

The origins of New Urbanism are quite striking in this regard. I wrote, in a magazine piece on the deterioration of knowledge, about this:

The first generation of New Urbanists visited pre-World War II towns, neighborhoods, and cities, observing and recording the fine details of curbs, streets, setbacks, and more. So much of the country’s existing fabric was built according to traditional methods and design standards, yet that working body of knowledge, that “information ecosystem,” was more or less extinct by the 1980s, buried under a regulatory avalanche of single-use zoning and car-oriented planning. The ideas of the streetscape, the interplay between private and public spaces, the street as a “public room,” no longer animated planning or architecture. While it had once been possible to build with beauty almost unselfconsciously, relying on that body of knowledge, it is now considered a sort of boutique concern.

New Urbanists essentially had to treat existing American settlements as specimens, and use them to reverse engineer that old understanding of town-building. What are now known as “form-based codes” were attempts to codify this previously widely known body of town-building and place-making knowledge.

It is easier to tear down than to build. And, I might add, there is no sentiment more philosophically and genuinely conservative than that.

But back to that tweet at the top. I would like to think it is true. I believe it is true. And so the perceptions and intuitions of many children are, perhaps, not untrained naïveté, but an echo of who we were, who we were made to be, and who we might be again.

Social card image credit Flickr/Sonny Abesamis, CC BY 2.0 DEED

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Related Reading:

Urbanism Without Cities?

The Old Normal

An Embryonic City

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