Matthew Yglesias: Centrally Planned Suburbia
Randal O'Toole: A Libertarian View of Sprawl
Matthew Yglesias: "Libertarians", Sprawl, and Land Use
Kevin Drum: Zoning and Sprawl
Ryan Avent: Zoning and Sprawl
Kevin Drum: Sprawl Revisited
Ryan Avent: Zoning and Sprawl, cont.
Money quote, from Drum:
And now for a second point, even though I said I wouldn't make one: walkability is very difficult to create. It's not enough to build a bunch of houses with shopping nearby. It's not enough to have a few big apartment buildings. And there's no practical way to convert an existing suburb into a high-density area.
Well, yeah. Bringing density to the urban fringe is difficult (though still worth trying: see Retrofitting Suburbia and the recent Reburbia competition), not only because of zoning regulations, but also because of the social logic that underpins them: suburbia is a landscape of privatism and exclusion. Although it's true that the suburbs have become more and more diverse (including increasing poverty), they remain balkanized, as it were, and homogeneous on the neighborhood level. Suburbia is not merely the function of (artificially) cheap land and oil, and zoning is only a manifestation of deeper cultural issues: thus Fishman's thesis of suburbia as a cultural invention, which he traces back to the 18th century English bourgeoisie, who left the city specifically to circumvent public space. In my view, this is what begins to distinguish the suburban condition from genuine urbanity. And, as my thesis argues, before we try to address issues of walkability and density, architects and planners must examine urbanity and offer new solutions for public space in the suburbs.
More on sprawl and high-speed rail: Jason Kambitsis in Wired cautions that increased mobility and shorter travel times between the core and the fringe might encourage sprawl; Yonah Freemark smartly responds (short version: ticket prices will make HSR commuting unrealistic to all but the wealthiest). HSR is obviously not aimed at daily commuters, but rather travelers. For my project, the layering of bus networks, commuter rail, and long-distance high speed rail is the crux of the argument.
I've also noticed very intelligent west coast planners seem to think walkability means the creation of self-contained areas of mixed-use; which is ridiculous. We're not going back to feudalist or renaissance lifestyles, we need to be highly mobile people in this globalized age. Being walkable means dense points connected by transit. If you go to the hill country of Italy you will find very walkable small towns, cities, and villages connected mainly by bus and car, with large expanses of countryside that are pretty inaccessible without car. These walkable towns aren't so because of their pavers or level streets or anything else, but because for reasons of defense and mutual support the structures were clustered together. The regions were quite balkanized for a long time...So there's a lot of tricky thinking about scale that I don't think is being accomplished in these debates.
ReplyDeleteI also think the odd thing I've noticed in rural west coast, versus rural east coast, is not just the greater density of roads in the eastern states, but the monotonous, single use of land.
The challenge with HSR I think is to have the courage to place nodes in low density areas, whether ostensibly urbanized with bare asphalt or not, and let things grow sensibly from there, rather than try and shoehorn mass transit into neighborhoods, however wastefully, are ostensibly thriving.