I live in the suburbs now. I used to have a place in the NYC area. What I miss about urban living is that you have a real neighborhood community. You can always find people to talk to at the local bistro after work. You can walk to your bodega, pharmacy and cleaner. You don’t need a car.
The irony is, you really live in an outdoor environment… walking and climbing in the weather. Sloshing through icy streets. But you wear formal business clothes. In the suburbs, you live in an indoor environment… in your car and in air conditioned buildings. But you wear outdoor clothes.
I definitely vibe with the "playing an instrument" argument, tho I'm not sure I fully agree. I think, unlike learning a new skill, what makes urbanism hard is the switching costs.
When cars first came out, they made everywhere more accessible. Then we tried to accommodate them and not only blunted their utility, we made everywhere less pleasant. Then we made that reality less intolerable with big box stores. But now, with big box stores, it's hard for most people to imagine how to live without one, and without cars. If you do individually, you have to either pay thru the nose, eat your veggies (in time or sweat), or most likely, both. If society tries to make things slightly more urbanist with bus lanes or high rises, the now vast majority of people who are drivers first see it as eating veggies. These perspectives aren't wrong, but living in a place where the car is an accessory and Costco is unnecessary because each trip to the store is less frictionless wouldn't be eating your vegetables. But getting to that point is.
Mind you, some may still prefer to live in a bucolic, quiet street with a large expanse behind them - it IS a beautiful idea, easy to host, tho expensive for the city and the person to maintain. But convenient on the day to day? I don't believe so - when your kids have soccer or choir, driving them from an isolated castle to a parking lot with a venue inside it isn't convenient compared to having them walk. Planning out fortnightly Costco trips isn't convenient. Is sitting in traffic more convenient than sitting on a train? If it's shorter in duration, maybe. So in today's world it likely is, but not in yesterday's or hopefully tomorrow's. Is LA more convenient than Chicago, DC or NYC?
Other than biking (which is sort of a response to the lack of urbanism), so much of urbanism is just so much easier than driving around everywhere. The hardest part of it is that it doesn't really exist for the average income.
This is a good point. In fact I have a piece way back in my archive on this that you reminded me of! (I think I called it "The Transition is the Hard Part.") That's the point you get stuck at - how do you get people to tolerate that transitional period where yeah traffic might get worse and there's construction noise, etc. etc., but on the other side things are better?
One last related thought - if I plug in the closest hospital ok Google, it claims 26m by bus, 10m by car or Uber. The bus trip includes a 5m walk from the bus stop. The car trip does not include the equivalent walk from the parking garage, the Uber trip doesn't include the substantial (min 5m, usually more like 15m) wait time. Cars may be the fastest (especially for an emergency room visit), but they're not really by that much.
I think folks look at that and reflexively think "Cars and Ubers are such a better option, transit is bad" but the reality is that the transit is probably more convenient than the Uber, and not far behind the car. I think Urbanism is, in many cases, much easier than learning to play piano.
I try to avoid the notion that suburbanites are in thrall to false consciousness or something, but there is a sort of "try it, you'll like it!" thing going on here. I wonder how many people who would never take the bus and think it sucks have never once ridden it and would be like, huh, this is...okay?
Urbanism is simply building beautiful walkable neighborhoods. Even flyover-red-state Americans think Rodeo Drive and "Main Street USA" are kind of cool, but nobody at any level has an accepted shorthand vocabulary to describe how or why.
It's only "eating your vegetables" in the sense that America is terrible at undertaking infrastructure projects of any sort which can't simply be outsourced wholesale to a corporation and plopped down on greenfield somewhere - and we do badly with plenty of those, as well. Sprawl is totally hands-off from the point of view of government, you just expand the local county road to six lanes and let developers buy the adjacent land, handle all the utility hookups and curb cuts, and build whatever they want on it. Maybe with some kind of minimum parking rules.
Beautiful walkable neighborhoods by contrast require a particular vision of how you want the place to look at various stages of the project. Architectural and aesthetic calls (about building heights, and the relationship with the street at a minimum) need to be made and enforced, which is controversial on both political wings (recall the frenzied reaction to Trump's order promoting Federal architecture in DC). Substantial planning is required and the local government needs to be closely involved, in a consistent way, over many years to ensure that a) the plan still makes sense, and b) everyone is sticking to it. None of this is looked upon favorably by developer capital which wants things modular, fast, easy, on the cheap, and at the most gigantic possible scale.
It's organizationally and politically a very tall order and even many European countries routinely fail to achieve it, where new developments are concerned: central Paris gives way to banlieue tower blocks then SFH sprawl straight from Southern California, the outskirts of Madrid look strikingly like the outskirts of Vegas. The Dutch manage it, as does the UK (generally), likely due to critical space constraints from the outset - in the latter case due to city-girdling "green belts" blocking sprawl, particularly around London.
"Nobody at any level has an accepted shorthand vocabulary to describe how or why." This is 100% true and is something I think about a lot.
I think the idea that sprawl is easy and beautiful city planning is hard is sort of true, but sprawl is enforced by any number of regulations - it's a meticulously imposed order, it just doesn't look that way. What I wonder is how the heck we made such beautiful or at least pleasant traditional towns and cities with so much less planning back in the 18th and 19th centuries? Or did we just forget all the efforts and processes that went into that?
I wonder how much of that was that those towns were so much dramatically smaller in population than most of today's small suburbs - those small towns were walkable with walkable main streets but also had everyone owning at least an acre of land, type of thing? I don't know if what I said is a fact, just guessing. I know that for the big cities - NYC, Chicago, Boston - a lot of it was top-down planning that almost anyone would feel is pretty unsavory these days. Those same top-down planners are why, for example, Ebbetts field was replaced by Shea Stadium. So I think such a thing may actually be harder to do at scale in today's world.
But then again, democracies managed to make Tokyo that way by making it easier to open small businesses but still having regulations to mix busy corridors seamlessly with quiet neighborhoods. So there's a way to do so, and the world's best example is in a very democratic way.
I’ve been chewing for a while on how the wealth produced by the Industrial Revolution and by the US’s wealth and newness in particular has caused us to be a “junk food nation,” in that all the things we are programmed to have strong pleasure responses to precisely because they are so hard to achieve are now so incredibly easy to get that we gorge ourselves. Not just sugar and fat, but mobility, privacy, interpersonal connections (i.e. social media) you can surely think of more.
And the specific structure of corporate capitalism makes it easier and easier, and more and more profitable, to give us too much of we want.
Strong Towns is very much “Sprawl is junk food for city budgets.”
Yeah. I don't mean "sprawl is junk food" as an aesthetic or lifestyle critique really. It's a potentially very deep observation about psychology. Very few urbanists seem to think about this element of it.
I was thinking re your previous piece that maybe the "sprawl is corn syrup" is a valid metaphor? Something surface appealing but often kinda ugh if you are deeply introspective about it. Also something artificially forced upon us for reasons that kinda sound sensible but fall apart under deeper interrogation.
Right, and like corn syrup *does* have meaningful applications, it's more that it's made unnaturally cheap and then that distorts the places in which it's used, magnifying the problems.
Conversely, walking and biking in American cities is like eating raw vegetables with no seasoning, or otherwise cooked badly. So half baked that nobody thinks it's viable. Like trying to eat a raw potato. If that's all you knew, you would never eat potatoes.
Eating your vegetables is not a bad analogy. Especially when you look at how vegetables used to be eaten, how they were prepared and the seasonality of them. We’ve lost the living memory of those tastes and techniques and they taste weird now. We look at fermentation revivalists like they’re weird hippies from another planet, and stick to our “fresh” industrially produced salads and cans of everything and figure that’s as good as it gets. It takes time and conscious effort to adjust your palate and when you have the canned peas… it’s just too easy.
I live in the suburbs now. I used to have a place in the NYC area. What I miss about urban living is that you have a real neighborhood community. You can always find people to talk to at the local bistro after work. You can walk to your bodega, pharmacy and cleaner. You don’t need a car.
The irony is, you really live in an outdoor environment… walking and climbing in the weather. Sloshing through icy streets. But you wear formal business clothes. In the suburbs, you live in an indoor environment… in your car and in air conditioned buildings. But you wear outdoor clothes.
I definitely vibe with the "playing an instrument" argument, tho I'm not sure I fully agree. I think, unlike learning a new skill, what makes urbanism hard is the switching costs.
When cars first came out, they made everywhere more accessible. Then we tried to accommodate them and not only blunted their utility, we made everywhere less pleasant. Then we made that reality less intolerable with big box stores. But now, with big box stores, it's hard for most people to imagine how to live without one, and without cars. If you do individually, you have to either pay thru the nose, eat your veggies (in time or sweat), or most likely, both. If society tries to make things slightly more urbanist with bus lanes or high rises, the now vast majority of people who are drivers first see it as eating veggies. These perspectives aren't wrong, but living in a place where the car is an accessory and Costco is unnecessary because each trip to the store is less frictionless wouldn't be eating your vegetables. But getting to that point is.
Mind you, some may still prefer to live in a bucolic, quiet street with a large expanse behind them - it IS a beautiful idea, easy to host, tho expensive for the city and the person to maintain. But convenient on the day to day? I don't believe so - when your kids have soccer or choir, driving them from an isolated castle to a parking lot with a venue inside it isn't convenient compared to having them walk. Planning out fortnightly Costco trips isn't convenient. Is sitting in traffic more convenient than sitting on a train? If it's shorter in duration, maybe. So in today's world it likely is, but not in yesterday's or hopefully tomorrow's. Is LA more convenient than Chicago, DC or NYC?
Other than biking (which is sort of a response to the lack of urbanism), so much of urbanism is just so much easier than driving around everywhere. The hardest part of it is that it doesn't really exist for the average income.
This is a good point. In fact I have a piece way back in my archive on this that you reminded me of! (I think I called it "The Transition is the Hard Part.") That's the point you get stuck at - how do you get people to tolerate that transitional period where yeah traffic might get worse and there's construction noise, etc. etc., but on the other side things are better?
One last related thought - if I plug in the closest hospital ok Google, it claims 26m by bus, 10m by car or Uber. The bus trip includes a 5m walk from the bus stop. The car trip does not include the equivalent walk from the parking garage, the Uber trip doesn't include the substantial (min 5m, usually more like 15m) wait time. Cars may be the fastest (especially for an emergency room visit), but they're not really by that much.
I think folks look at that and reflexively think "Cars and Ubers are such a better option, transit is bad" but the reality is that the transit is probably more convenient than the Uber, and not far behind the car. I think Urbanism is, in many cases, much easier than learning to play piano.
I try to avoid the notion that suburbanites are in thrall to false consciousness or something, but there is a sort of "try it, you'll like it!" thing going on here. I wonder how many people who would never take the bus and think it sucks have never once ridden it and would be like, huh, this is...okay?
Urbanism is simply building beautiful walkable neighborhoods. Even flyover-red-state Americans think Rodeo Drive and "Main Street USA" are kind of cool, but nobody at any level has an accepted shorthand vocabulary to describe how or why.
It's only "eating your vegetables" in the sense that America is terrible at undertaking infrastructure projects of any sort which can't simply be outsourced wholesale to a corporation and plopped down on greenfield somewhere - and we do badly with plenty of those, as well. Sprawl is totally hands-off from the point of view of government, you just expand the local county road to six lanes and let developers buy the adjacent land, handle all the utility hookups and curb cuts, and build whatever they want on it. Maybe with some kind of minimum parking rules.
Beautiful walkable neighborhoods by contrast require a particular vision of how you want the place to look at various stages of the project. Architectural and aesthetic calls (about building heights, and the relationship with the street at a minimum) need to be made and enforced, which is controversial on both political wings (recall the frenzied reaction to Trump's order promoting Federal architecture in DC). Substantial planning is required and the local government needs to be closely involved, in a consistent way, over many years to ensure that a) the plan still makes sense, and b) everyone is sticking to it. None of this is looked upon favorably by developer capital which wants things modular, fast, easy, on the cheap, and at the most gigantic possible scale.
It's organizationally and politically a very tall order and even many European countries routinely fail to achieve it, where new developments are concerned: central Paris gives way to banlieue tower blocks then SFH sprawl straight from Southern California, the outskirts of Madrid look strikingly like the outskirts of Vegas. The Dutch manage it, as does the UK (generally), likely due to critical space constraints from the outset - in the latter case due to city-girdling "green belts" blocking sprawl, particularly around London.
"Nobody at any level has an accepted shorthand vocabulary to describe how or why." This is 100% true and is something I think about a lot.
I think the idea that sprawl is easy and beautiful city planning is hard is sort of true, but sprawl is enforced by any number of regulations - it's a meticulously imposed order, it just doesn't look that way. What I wonder is how the heck we made such beautiful or at least pleasant traditional towns and cities with so much less planning back in the 18th and 19th centuries? Or did we just forget all the efforts and processes that went into that?
I wonder how much of that was that those towns were so much dramatically smaller in population than most of today's small suburbs - those small towns were walkable with walkable main streets but also had everyone owning at least an acre of land, type of thing? I don't know if what I said is a fact, just guessing. I know that for the big cities - NYC, Chicago, Boston - a lot of it was top-down planning that almost anyone would feel is pretty unsavory these days. Those same top-down planners are why, for example, Ebbetts field was replaced by Shea Stadium. So I think such a thing may actually be harder to do at scale in today's world.
But then again, democracies managed to make Tokyo that way by making it easier to open small businesses but still having regulations to mix busy corridors seamlessly with quiet neighborhoods. So there's a way to do so, and the world's best example is in a very democratic way.
I’ve been chewing for a while on how the wealth produced by the Industrial Revolution and by the US’s wealth and newness in particular has caused us to be a “junk food nation,” in that all the things we are programmed to have strong pleasure responses to precisely because they are so hard to achieve are now so incredibly easy to get that we gorge ourselves. Not just sugar and fat, but mobility, privacy, interpersonal connections (i.e. social media) you can surely think of more.
And the specific structure of corporate capitalism makes it easier and easier, and more and more profitable, to give us too much of we want.
Strong Towns is very much “Sprawl is junk food for city budgets.”
It’s a great paradigm to use.
Yeah. I don't mean "sprawl is junk food" as an aesthetic or lifestyle critique really. It's a potentially very deep observation about psychology. Very few urbanists seem to think about this element of it.
I was thinking re your previous piece that maybe the "sprawl is corn syrup" is a valid metaphor? Something surface appealing but often kinda ugh if you are deeply introspective about it. Also something artificially forced upon us for reasons that kinda sound sensible but fall apart under deeper interrogation.
Ah, I really like that. B/c like I said I mean it as an idea and not as a negative characterization.
Right, and like corn syrup *does* have meaningful applications, it's more that it's made unnaturally cheap and then that distorts the places in which it's used, magnifying the problems.
If it's eating vegetables, it's eating delicious vegetables, because urban living is enjoyable!
Conversely, walking and biking in American cities is like eating raw vegetables with no seasoning, or otherwise cooked badly. So half baked that nobody thinks it's viable. Like trying to eat a raw potato. If that's all you knew, you would never eat potatoes.
Eating your vegetables is not a bad analogy. Especially when you look at how vegetables used to be eaten, how they were prepared and the seasonality of them. We’ve lost the living memory of those tastes and techniques and they taste weird now. We look at fermentation revivalists like they’re weird hippies from another planet, and stick to our “fresh” industrially produced salads and cans of everything and figure that’s as good as it gets. It takes time and conscious effort to adjust your palate and when you have the canned peas… it’s just too easy.
Thinking about it more than I did. Good comment.