May 20, 2009 Categories: Reviews
The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream
2008. Island Press. 207 pp. $25.95
Several qualities set The Option of Urbanism apart from other books in the field: length (brief), tone (good-natured), and vision (wide-angle). Leinberger sets a high standard: if only every advocacy book included a chapter on the unintended consequences of what it was advocating!
It’s also an ideal book for those who want the big picture into which the impending end of sprawl and burgeoning of walkable neighborhoods fits, and for those who like things explained clearly, such as why much present-day construction is shoddier than that of a century ago despite increased wealth and improved materials, and why most present-day developments look so much alike. It’s not for those seeking detailed instructions on how to design walkable urban spaces.
Leinberger divides the built environment into two parts: walkable urbanism, which consists of almost everything built in human history until the end of World War II; and drivable sub-urbanism, which consists of almost everything built since 1945. (His choice of neutral invented terms is deliberate.) The pendulum has swung far in the direction of drivable sub-urbanism and is now swinging back, in part because drivable sub-urbanism has a tendency to undermine itself and not quite deliver on its promise of freedom and flexibility. The reason is simple: when you add another ring of suburbs you subtract wanted green space from the inhabitants of the previous ring and add to unwanted traffic congestion. By contrast, the logic of walkable urbanism isn’t so constrained: more density and more activities almost always adds to the ideal rather than subtracting from it. (The author even makes the audacious suggestion that walkable urbanism may give NIMBY groups “a reason to modify their generally negative approach.”) {133}
To advocates of walkability, the book’s message is, in effect, stop whining and start doing. Consumers are now demanding considerably more walkable urbanism than is being built, but it nevertheless faces serious obstacles. Market forces alone will not automatically get the job done nor will they get the job done in the best way. Local laws (mainly zoning) need to be revamped; federal subsidies for highways need to be slashed and/or spent on transit; the same incurious financiers who nearly derailed the world economy by packaging good loans and bad together need to be re-educated; and government must harvest some of the price premium being paid for walkability to insure that housing affordable to poor people and to key workers gets built as well.
Leinberger lists three known unintended consequences of the increased popularity of walkable urbanism, and expects more to be discovered as time goes on. They are: not enough affordable housing; too much large-lot single-family housing; and the difficulty of independent stores hanging on as chains move in to walkable areas. His take on the last is uncharacteristically obtuse: “The issue is not whether an establishment is locally owned or a chain; it is whether the retailer addresses the sidewalk in a pedestrian-friendly manner, modifies its offerings to the local tastes, and brings more people to the streets.” {148} Even if one’s urbanistic goal is thus narrowly defined, a locally owned establishment may go out of business — leaving a gap in the fabric — but it will not disappear because of an executive whim in a distant city.
The author combines insider knowledge with the ability to make it comprehensible to outsiders. Don’t miss “The Nineteen Standard Real Estate Product Types” as of 2006. {51} As he tells it, one result of the savings & loan debacle of the early 1990s was that Wall Street got into real estate and commoditized it into standard commodities. (Those who have read William Cronon’s historical masterpiece Nature’s Metropolis will recall that a similar process in the 1850s led to standards for grain that turned farmers from craft workers to mass producers of a product that could be retailed for a known price regardless of where and how grown.) Any product that’s “nonconforming,” i.e. not one of the nineteen, will either get no financing from the big boys or pay through the nose for it.
But over time new standard products can be brought forth. He notes how “lifestyle centers” — which began as bogus Main Streets with retail only, surrounded by giant parking lots — are starting to add second stories with residences and offices. {108-9}
Leinberger draws freely on popular culture, including the Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the 1957 episode of the “Lucille Ball Show” where Lucy and Ricky move to the suburbs, and the movie “Back to the Future.” Happily, he does not draw on the bottomless well of snobbery and contempt that has animated generations of critics of suburbia and sprawl. He has no personal issue with the roughly one-third of consumers who still prefer to live where they have to drive to everything, although he acknowledges that climate change and oil dependence may require governments to take a stronger hand in encouraging walkable developments.
The book is optimistic in tone without understating the difficulties. At one point Leinberger compares walkable urbanism to the failed campaign to make the US go metric; that attempted change was far smaller in magnitude than moving away from drivable sub-urbanism. For one thing, “Drivable sub-urban development is simple: it is single-product-focused, all parking is inexpensively at grade, there are few conflicts between uses, everyone knows how to do it by now, financing is nearly automatic, and it is legally mandated.” Walkable urbanism requires design, coordination, financial, and management skills, most of which are not widely available yet.
In his conclusion, Leinberger enumerates five steps that need to be taken: changing zoning and land-use regulations to allow walkable urbanism; educating the financial community; ending subsidies for drivable sub-urbanism; “investing in the appropriate infrastructure, particularly rail-based transit” (which could also be described as adding subsidies for walkable urbanism); and “intensively managing walkable urban districts to ensure that the needed complexity actually happens on the ground.” {151} He makes no criticisms of the New Urbanist movement, but unlike some of its proponents he does not call for outlawing drivable sub-urbanism, and his last step pointedly acknowledges that following certain design rules may not produce walkable urbanism by itself — conscious management may be necessary.
And for policy wonks he flags several times the crucial importance of how the 2009 transportation bill is written: “Only minimal new highway construction on the fringes should be undertaken …. transportation funding should shift to fixing the transportation infrastructure we already have and diversifying transportation investments that support walkable urbanism — transit, bicycling, and walking.” More federal funds should be flexible, and metropolitan areas should have more power over their use, and state Departments of Transportation less.
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