Urbanism Without Cities?
Is urbanism a place or an idea?
I wrote, earlier this year, about my appreciation of the D.C. suburbs and the sense of place I get from them, or have cultivated living in them:
I sometimes write that I’m thankful or grateful to have discovered urbanism, broadly defined. I know others who have this same feeling. What I mean by that is that I think a lot of really deeply human ways of doing things have been lost, and that it’s easy to not really encounter them in daily life, and that urbanism is a way to remember them, encounter them, and once again make them present.
When I say “urbanism,” I mean much more than land use; I really mean creativity, granularity, enterprise, entrepreneurship, human activity at a small scale. Letting people strike out and give something a go. The commerce, society, and land use of a traditional city all arise out of that freedom. In a different form, we see a lot of that in suburbs today. Frankly, much of Washington, D.C. feels less “urbanist,” in my vague meaning, than much of the D.C. suburbs.
The other weekend, we were planning to go into D.C. to meet a friend who lives in the city’s northwest, in a nice neighborhood that feels a bit like a classic small-town Main Street. We had booked a restaurant earlier in the week, which is advisable to do, and we were ready to go when, the day before, I got a text reminder noting that different sizes of parties had different time limits—ours was 90 minutes—and that there was a required fee which (probably) stood in for a tip. I don’t like this. It’s not about the money, or the idea that we should pay service workers better, but I dislike the brazenly transactional nature of it. Plus, the suburbs are cheaper.
I have written, and am writing, elsewhere about restaurants and the frustrations of going out these days, and I swear, every time I try to go into D.C., I say “Okay, we’ll just spend a lot of money on a restaurant and it’ll be okay,” and then when it comes down to it I resist and try to change plans. This time I changed plans completely; my friend took the Metro out to suburban Virginia, where we grabbed delicious Himalayan dumplings from a gas station restaurant on U.S. 50, ate them at an estate winery in the country west of Leesburg, and had dinner at one of a whole bunch of Korean barbecue restaurants in Centreville.
Did we spend a day in the suburbs? Or in the city?
Go back up to that blockquote at the top, which is something I think about all the time. I think, in some sense, that I did spend a day the city, in the sense that the spirit of the city, or the spirit of urbanism, is separable from any particular form.
I say a lot of nice things about the suburbs—and I live out here—but I understand myself to be discerning the urbanist spirit of these places. I’ve made this basic point a lot—here, and here, for example—and I keep coming back to it partly because I’ve never quite expressed it to my satisfaction, and partly because so few people talk about this deeper and more abstract level: the spirit or philosophy of urbanism.
And I see that all over the suburbs, at least here. They’re truly interesting places, diverse places, full of small businesses and hole-in-the-wall restaurants and people doing creative things. You have what is essentially the region’s Chinatown (a segment of Rockville along the main highway), two Koreatowns (Annandale and Centreville), a strip plaza in Falls Church called Eden Center, full of Vietnamese restaurants, businesses, and services; a strip plaza in suburban Arlington known as “Little Bangladesh.” There are international supermarkets with small vendors inside; in the more Latino neighborhoods, you might see someone selling coconuts out of a pickup truck. All of this quite resembles and represents the somewhat rough-and-tumble entrepreneurial spirit of America’s cities in a previous era.
And here’s where this might start to sound almost like a religious belief: when I say the suburbs are more diverse and textured and interesting than the city, I’m not saying the suburbs are superior the city. I’m saying, rather, that the spirit of the city resides in or subsists in the suburbs. That, in a sense, suburbanites in some of these places are urbanites who don’t know it.
I think about this, not with any flippancy, in terms of the Eucharist. The idea that a piece of bread can somehow convey, contain, or become the body of Christ is, of course, a religious belief in a miracle and a mystery. But the idea that form and substance can differ is a very powerful one. It allows you to see or discern a deeper level to things.
So in a similar—non-miraculous—sense, I’ve come to think that a place like Eden Center looks like a strip mall, but really, in some essential sense, is not. Maybe this is just “No True Scotsman”—“No True Strip Mall”—a way of trying to define suburbia so as to argue that I don’t actually like it, per se.
But I don’t mean this cynically or to be clever. I think there really is a way of life that lies underneath the classic urban form and which can appear without it. It’s the heartbeat that animates the body of the city. If you can have urbanism without the urban form—my potentially controversial argument here—then it follows that you could also have the urban form bereft of whatever it is that urbanism is. And I don’t think this latter argument is controversial. How else would you describe a mixed-use development that poorly imitates the city?
I received an interesting comment from someone who sort of disagreed with my overall point, on my recent piece about the allegation of a “war on cars.” After that another commenter and the first commenter got into an argument over square footage leasing prices and to what extent the market bore out the idea that urban places are more desirable than suburban ones.
Here’s the most interesting comment from the thread:
Another commentator here writes, “People voting with their dollars are saying they don’t want to live in strip-mall towns.”
Nonsense! Ever been to Milpitas, CA, or to Houston’s (suburban) Chinatown, or to Buford Highway in Atlanta? Those are genuinely “vibrant” places where a diverse array of people are voting with their wheels. (These days, the best mom-and-pop eateries are in those much-maligned strip malls.) It’s “sprawl” only when you’re looking down on it.
Urbanism (complete with “walkability scores” and twee boutiques) is truly the new monoculture.
PS: I’d love to see a direct face-off between Addison Del Mastro and Joel Kotkin!
Well, here’s the closest thing you’ll probably get to that. It’s a piece, similar to this one, engaging with some of Kotkin’s commentary on suburban restaurants. In it, I mention Dan Reed, a black urbanist in Maryland who has written a lot about the urban transformation of the D.C. suburbs. I also wrote this:
Kotkin sort of pits immigrant entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs of color against urbanism, when rather, these old and imperfect landscapes in which those business owners find success are becoming urban in this deeper sense.
This is what I mean by framing; Kotkin is working around a wedge that increasingly does not exist.
But anyway, I find it interesting that that commenter mentioned Buford Highway in Atlanta. I know about Buford Highway from an episode of the Strong Towns podcast featuring Atlanta attorney and urbanist Marian Liou. Along with a few other neighborhoods in typical suburbs, like the “Little India” corridor in Edison, New Jersey, Buford Highway is a fascinating example of what older suburbs can grow up into as they age, undergo some deterioration in price and physical plant, and attract a new generation of immigrants and entrepreneurs. The adaptations that these new residents and business owners make, and the way they use this land, is fundamentally urban—or at least, not suburban. They are using these landscapes in ways their designers did not intend.
It reminds me of this piece from 2006 in the Washington Post about the Latino community in suburban Manassas, Virginia:
In many Latin American cities and towns, tiny villages and little pueblos, there is a central plaza, a square anchored by a church, government buildings, the statue of a hero. It is the design imprint of Spanish colonial rule, a place where prayer, politics and street commerce all converge.
Manassas has no such place. But it does have the Flea Market Discount Plaza, a tumbledown strip mall three blocks from the city's quaint Old Town neighborhood with two taco trucks and an indoor bazaar selling everything from cowboy boots to velvet jaguar paintings. It also has Eva Muñoz, a round, ruddy-faced sidewalk vendor who hawks hot chocolate, steaming corn on the cob and other cold-weather delights from a cart outside the Antojitos Mary restaurant and pool hall.
Or this piece I wrote about an early suburban community in east Montgomery County, Maryland, which, by the way, a lot of fellow urbanists really liked. A lot of us, if not most of us, understand that the suburbs are where most people live, and that they’re never going to be perfect walkable cities. But many of them are going to be something other than what they were imagined to be when they were built.
What we’re seeing is an urban story unfolding in an unlikely setting. Unlikely vessels for a different animating spirit. So you can say these places are not truly “suburbs,” or you can say they’re maturing into something different. But however you think about it, there’s no question in my mind that—as an urbanist—these are some of the greatest places in the country, and that looking down on them as soulless ticky-tacky is no longer consistent with what they are—however they may look.
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This feels like there is TOO much emphasis on the entrepreneurial aspects of urbanism, and loses the other aspects that make it important; having a neighborhood, and chance encounters, and so on. It’s not enough to have thriving and varied businesses; you also need thriving communities when everyone goes home.
Brightline recently opened their extension to MCO. They have stretch where they go 90mph, another where they go 125mph. This is very, very, very, very fast.
There's a group of foamers who react to every Brighline article that calls this High-Speed-Rail. It doesn't meet the foamers definition. Apparently not following their definition is an egregious sin. At least how they seem to react.
Who cares. It goes fast. It goes at high speeds.
I feel like this sort of thing goes on with urban vs suburban. It's a city with cool stuff. Who cares about the label.
In fact, it gets worse than the train thing. Mr. Del Mastro, you may have seen this. There's a subgroup of urbanists that insist that anything that doesn't look like midtown Manhattan isn't urban. I live downtown. I've had these urbanistas ( a more suitable name ) exclaim that where I live isn't urban.
I get the use of urban vs suburb in for those in the industry, so to speak. But for the rest of us let's call a city and city.