Different Blocks
Can you reverse engineer urbanism?
I write a lot about the trend in new development to at least nod towards classic urbanism. This isn’t as sincere or intellectually grounded as New Urbanism was/is, which genuinely sought to recover the old principles of city-building and reinfuse them into modern planning and development. Rather, a watered-down version of that approach has become trendy, with lots of new developments being mixed use, or billed as “town centers,” or what have you.
However, while these might resemble classic downtowns or Main Streets (albeit it with huge amounts of parking mixed in), my sense is that they don’t replicate the underlying function of a downtown, nor are they able to reverse engineer what it actually is. Function does not follow form.
What got me thinking about this a little more abstractly was a piece from writer Eve Tushnet, which I featured in a recent link roundup. She used a quote from a chat I had with her all the way back in 2021. So I had forgotten I’d said this, until I read her new piece:
He [me] speculated that perhaps “what we think of as good urbanism is just an accident of having been poor.”
What I meant was that it seems like as we’ve gotten richer, we’ve just done things differently. We can afford more personal space and more stuff. The automobile and free trade have changed the scale at which commerce takes place. I wonder if suburbia is largely just the physical form that these preferences and economic developments are likely to take—and that classic urbanism was simply the form that development took in their absence. Maybe urbanism is like peasant food—an erstwhile necessity that gets reinvented as something of interest when it is no longer a necessity.
Now I think town centers are better than the standard strip plaza design. They’re just not doing much more than rearranging the same building blocks that sprawl is built out of. Lots of parking; chain stores; easy highway access. Large rather than local scale.
Real urbanism is made of different building blocks. Enterprises scaled to local communities, and replicated in each settlement. Local social and economic ecosystems. Every little town used to have a grocery store, a hardware store, even frequently a hotel.
So I guess I’m wondering which is the bigger influence in the suburban version of all that (big-box supermarket or Walmart Supercenter, Home Depot, Hampton Inn.) Is it land use, per se? Or is it simply the logic of economies of scale? In other words, “Why should or shouldn’t we build fewer, larger stores with modern construction techniques, and selling large volumes of inventory at low prices?” isn’t entirely a land use question.
And I guess I’m also asking whether we’d still get suburbia without the modern economic world we inhabit—or if we could have entered that world while retaining our old approach to building places.
Europe and Japan suggest it’s possible. Though much modern development in those countries and others is still not what you’d necessarily call classical urbanism. In Croatia, for example, we drove through a lot of modern suburbs outside the old city centers. From an American perspective, it feels less suburban. But it’s not quite what you’d call urban either. One thing other countries have done better is not necessarily to be better at modern development, but to be better at retaining and preserving the urban character of their older cities. Certainly, I think, we could have done that.
Everything in America could be the same, except that this had never happened to most of our cities, and we’d be much better off. (It was not always racially motivated, but it frequently was.)
And “less suburban” isn’t so bad either, is it? And, as it happens, that’s what “town centers” are.
Related Reading:
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So many planners & developers read about town centers having high ROI, but then plan/build crap because they don't understand why it is that some work so well. So we get the drive-to urbanism in every upper middle-class region across the country. "Let's drive to this spot because we can walk around, and maybe eat outside."
I think it goes back to intellectual curiosity. Most lack it. Planning, building, property management is just a means to a paycheck.
"So I guess I’m wondering which is the bigger influence in the suburban version of all that (big-box supermarket or Walmart Supercenter, Home Depot, Hampton Inn.) Is it land use, per se? Or is it simply the logic of economies of scale? In other words, “Why should or shouldn’t we build fewer, larger stores with modern construction techniques, and selling large volumes of inventory at low prices?” isn’t entirely a land use question.
And I guess I’m also asking whether we’d still get suburbia without the modern economic world we inhabit—or if we could have entered that world while retaining our old approach to building places."
I think it's impossible to overstate the influence of transportation technology--specifically, the car--on this kind of thing. The ability of almost everyone to travel 60mph if they want to means that a given store has a much wider radius of potential customers. And the need to provide storage for all those cars means that traditional urban forms will be less-suited for the new economic and social environment. It's really a historic change in how towns function that we are absolutely still incorporating and figuring out.
Personally, I think this has led us to make a lot of mistakes. Cars are useful, but we overuse them to our detriment (and the detriment of the entire planet--the ecological costs of our car addiction is pretty damning). But I don't know how to convince people to be more thoughtful about their car use, especially since we've designed so much of the country around catering to it.