Why are cities still alive? Shouldn’t they be dead by now? I thought there was a relentless, irreversible movement of people out of cities into subdivisions with large houses, substantial lots, and two- and three-car garages and driveways to hold their owners’ multiple vehicles. I thought real Americans didn’t want to live in cities.
So why does downtown Philadelphia, a city of the Industrial Revolution and before, have so many construction cranes? And why are people moving back to cities large and small all across the US? Why, for that matter, are for-sale signs popping up out in the exurbs faster than the losses are piling up at Citigroup and Merrill Lynch? When the markets are turning against you, it’s hard to be a free-market sprawl advocate.
Housing’s hinterlands are seeing other storm clouds as well. Everybody’s talking about global warming, for one thing. Ten years ago it was pretty easy to ignore climate change. Droughts, hurricanes, and melting glaciers and ice caps have changed that situation. Potential solutions have focused primarily on automobile mileage, alternative energy, and building efficiency, but now sprawl is starting to get some well-deserved recognition. It turns out that people who live in cities or towns generate far lower greenhouse gas emissions than those in the far-flung suburbs.
CLIMATE-FRIENDLY SPRAWL?
Joel Kotkin, a social analyst who has staked his career on defending the economic dynamism of the suburbs, took a swing at promoting the climate-friendly aspects of sprawl in a recent op-ed piece in the Washington Post, coauthored by California State University professor Ali Modarres. Unable to come right out and say that sprawl benefits the climate, Kotkin and Modarres ominously warn of so-called “urban heat islands” that raise local temperatures in cities compared to the countryside. “Urban heat islands may not explain global warming, but they do bear profound environmental, social, economic and health consequences that reach beyond city boundaries,” they say. Kotkin and Modarres explain that urban heat islands increase the use of air-conditioning, which takes large amounts of energy.
The authors deserve points for creativity and chutzpah, but they are blowing hot air. Multifamily buildings use much less energy per occupant or square foot than single-family houses, heat island or no. Residents of established cities and towns drive significantly less than their suburban or rural counterparts. It’s well supported that cities simply use a whole lot less energy than sprawl on a per capita basis.
And now oil, the very sustenance of sprawl, is soaring in price. In November, it was poised for the first time to break through the $100 a barrel barrier. A spike in oil prices has happened before, for example during the Iranian Revolution, but this time is different. Cheap oil, which spurred the age of the automobile and the dispersal of the built environment, has finally run out.
Ah, but government planning simply doesn’t work, argues Cato Institute fellow Randal O’Toole in a recent op-ed piece in the Christian Science Monitor. O’Toole, a relentless critic of New Urbanism, has a point. Planning and zoning policies over much of the last six decades have been dreadfully flawed. This would be the planning that has created the sprawl that O’Toole likes.
Planning itself wasn’t wrong — it was the paradigm that was at fault. We need planning that emulates places that people love, rather than relies on abstract theories and bean-counting. Those prized places include downtowns, villages, towns, and even suburbs. There’s a difference between fundamentally sound suburbs, which can be made to be walkable and human-scale, and sprawl, which cannot. Suburbs can be saved just like cities — through the techniques of urbanism. More citizens and leaders are recognizing that urban places both new and old have a lot of offer. Each success of the resurgent placemaking culture reinforces that awareness.
To abandon planning is simply to accept bad planning. We can’t afford that — especially now.
This article is available in the December 2007 issue of New Urban News, along with many more articles not available online. Subscribe or order the individual issue. |