Reforming Suburbia: The Planned Communities of Irvine, Columbia, and the Woodlands

Ann Forsyth

2005. University of California Press. 379 pp. $65 hardcover, $34.95 paper, $15.95 eBook at ebooks.com

“We don’t understand our new urban areas very well,” wrote UIC’s Robert Bruegmann in Sprawl: A Compact History, in part because “many of the individuals who are best equipped to describe them — historians, social scientists, planners, urban theorists — have been so quick to condemn that they have never looked carefully.”

Ann Forsyth, now teaching planning at Cornell, is one of the people who looks carefully, and who’s sufficiently undazzled by current fashions to treat them as ideas and practices to be evaluated, rather than holy writ. Her book ReForming Suburbia: The Planned Communities of Irvine, Columbia, and the Woodlands, is three years old but unfortunately it hasn’t spawned a lot of imitators yet.

Irvine, Columbia, and the Woodlands were the largest and most successful of many new towns attempted in the 1960s and 1970s, and they were born of many of the same ideals that animate today’s New Urbanist projects. How do they measure up? What can they tell us about the ability of private greenfield projects to turn development around?

Forsyth is nothing if not thorough in tackling these questions. At one point, she formulates six different definitions of density in order to compare the New Towns with New Urbanist creations. Her thoroughness isn’t new, but where she points it is. Irvine, Columbia, and The Woodlands, she concludes, "really do what most proponents of smart growth and new urbanism think should be done in urban development and, in this, have distinguished themselves from generic sprawl over a period of decades. Where they have weaknesses, so do the current proposals for a new generation of best practices . . . . They have done better at such tasks as developing systems for incorporating natural processes into suburban development and creating a new suburban aesthetic than they have at providing housing for very-low-income population and real alternatives to the car. They show how providing transportation options does not necessarily lead to people using those options as an alternative to the automobile. They demonstrate that urban designs emphasizing open space, recreation, habitat, and water quality are not always consistent with those emphasizing energy conservation." {271}

In a better world this last point might be obvious: more green spaces = less concentrated population = less feasible mass transit. This doesn’t mean that either green space or mass transit is a bad idea; they’re good ideas that don’t harmonize easily. There may be a design solution lurking here at somewhat higher densities: public light rail or bus as part of a Burnham-like boulevard system, with mid-rise apartment buildings, should allow both ideas to flourish.

Individual villages within these three large developments have about the same density of population as do current New Urbanist developments like Kentlands. On the larger development-wide scale, neither the New Towns nor the New Urbanists meet the density standard that Newman and Kenworthy suggested in Sustainable Cities would be needed to support mass transit. {256} And across the board, the New Towns were larger and more ambitious than more recent efforts.

Forsyth is also good on the many difficulties (which few of us have occasion to contemplate) faced even by very wealthy developers who want to change US cities by building something different. The Irvine family, James H. Rouse, and George Mitchell made their fortunes in industrial agriculture, shopping malls, and oil and gas development, respectively — all enterprises that require “patient money” willing to wait years and decades before seeing any profit. But even patient money must eventually be replenished or it becomes mere philanthropy. Hence, a new town has to be similar enough to old towns that people will want to buy and move in. (Rouse specifically wanted to make so much money with Columbia that its success would inspire more. This ambition was not fulfilled.) And as the new town grows and develops it acquires inhabitants with their own ideas, which often run against increased density or attached housing. “The complexity of new community development is a warning about the difficulty of change, particularly in situations with less coordinated, persevering, wealthy, or influential proponents.” {290}

It does make one wonder. If big greenfield projects are very hard to steer far from convention, perhaps the notion that we have to build big to make a difference may be radically false. It may be that comparatively small-scale infill projects have a chance to make an outsize difference. The buck has to start somewhere.

#