I did not come to urbanism as a theorist or as an intellectual. I came to urbanism as someone who felt compelled to save a single place; a place it turns out that doesn’t always look like being saved. In 17 months it will be 30 years that I’ve made my home in downtown Springfield. I have witnessed many false dawns, been sold many bottles, cans, and tubes of urban Renaissance snake oil and what I bring to the discussion is lived experience.
In America we give too much respect to lived experience and not enough to theoretical, intellectual understanding. My nephew fought in the Iraq war. I have read a great deal about that part of the world. If he and I were having an argument about policy in the Middle East in the eyes of most “Muricans” he would win any argument by merely prefacing his assertion with “I fought in Iraq and…” He doesn’t know anything about Iraq. Couldn’t tell you the difference between Shi’a and Sunni Islam, wouldn’t know what a Kurd was, has no idea about the CIA’s involvement in placing Saddam Hussein in power, doesn’t know why the United States supported Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war, etc, etc. and he could say: “I fought in Iraq and the people there love it when outsiders kill their children” or “I fought in Iraq and oil had nothing to do with our invasion” or “I fought in Iraq and Saddam was definitely behind September 11th” and many people would give his assertions merit because he drove a truck in Bagdad.
My experiences regarding urbanism were given shape and context by James Howard Kunstler first, then William Whyte and Jane Jacobs, and most recently Chuck Marohn. Chuck is not just the heart and soul of Strongtowns, he is its face, its head, and its brain. As a movement it has morphed and expanded but at its core is the concept of the Growth Ponzi Scheme and the un-sustainability of the post war suburban model of development.
When James Howard Kunstler decries the arrangement of the Target store and the Walmart in the “satellite belt of urban detritus” outside his old hometown it is because the inability “to see one from the other due to the curvature of the Earth” is a spiritual problem, an emotional and psychological problem. Humans need enclosure, we want street walls to protect us, and the curb cut between the Walmart and the Chuck E Cheese is not a noble enough cause for our young men and women to fight and die for in the deserts of a strange continent!
Chuck comes at the same issue mathematically, and not aesthetically. He appreciates the engineering of the curb cut between the Walmart and the Chuck E Cheese. He likes driving to Target to buy Cheese Doodles…or at least (Diet?) Mountain Dew; but the numbers don’t pencil out. The asphalt, the curbing, the water mains, the sewer pipes, and everything else in the horizontal development pattern don’t pay for themselves, that’s all. Chuck doesn’t even go all “Peak Oil” in the Curbside Chat and only hints at the idea of “Limits to Growth”.
I posit that the core of the Strongtowns message is the idea of the traditional, walkable community: a place which minimizes infrastructural expenses relative to productivity such that plowing back a reasonable amount of those gains for maintaining the infrastructure upon which those gains depend is sustainable. Everything else in the Strongtowns message follows from that core message, that core belief.
Full confession; I’m a believer.
But there is an ancillary piece of the Strongtowns message which, to me, is being accepted as corollary to the primary message which demands much greater scrutiny and it is that there is an inverse relationship between governmental regulation and bureaucracy, and Strongtowns’ outcomes. To be clear, of course there is greater difficulty in building a place which minimizes infrastructural expenses relative to productivity such that plowing back a reasonable amount of those gains for maintaining the infrastructure upon which those gains depend is sustainable when regulations demand that you do the opposite. But that isn’t regulation in general, that is the content of the regulation.
Last week’s Strongtowns’ podcast about Detroit between Chuck and Johnny Sanphillippo may have been a “debate” about many things, but arguing the role of government was not one of them. There was consensus that that government is best which governs least, bottom up is better than top down, and that experts should shut up and let the people on the ground make the decisions.
Ok. Sounds good. Maybe.
It’s interesting though. Name a place in the world outside the United States infamous for its bureaucracy, its tedious requirements that every “i” be dotted and every “t” crossed before doing this or that. Hint: “Britain” wants to leave “that place” in part because it wants freedom from that meddling bureaucracy.
Ding, ding, ding, ding! Did you say Europe? Of course you did. And is there an industrialized part of the world more Strong-townsy? Perhaps the least Strong-townsy part of Europe is England, and they want out!
What about here in the United States? What region has the most Strong-townsy, dense, walkable, places? The northeast. What part of the U.S. does Chuck reference as being the most obstructed by governmental red tape? Ditto. Interesting. What place comes next? Portland maybe? A well known bastion of conservative, laissez faire “keep the gubmint outta my Medicare” type of place for sure! Have you heard of the urban growth boundary?
(Springfield then)
(Springfield now)
Name some non-Strong-townsy places: Houston, Atlanta, Las Vegas, Phoenix. Lib-tard havens if ever there were any.
Yes, for me, a socialist ideologue, this could all represent nothing more than confirmation bias; correlation is not causation; post hoc ergo propter hoc;I know you are but what am I.
Perhaps.
There are a lot of moving parts in this thing that we call the pattern of human development. Maybe strong governmental control and regulation are antithetical to a Strongtowns outcome. It is weird though that the regional correlation appears to be the inverse.
I’ve made clear in a number of recent posts that I don’t care about process, it’s about outcomes. To paraphrase myself, if Jane Jacobs had been fighting a grassroots campaign for greater urban access to highways and Robert Moses had used top down bureaucratic arm twisting to impose improved public transit and walkability then Moses would have been right and Jacobs wrong. Europe’s cities were bombed out after WWII and they rebuilt them following traditional patterns of urban development. In the United States many, many places all over the country, Brainerd MN, for example, had established these same patterns of development but chose to destroy what they had to build something different.
In one part of the country though, the oldest part, a very liberal, bureaucratic, top down part of the country, this didn’t occur in so thorough a manner: the northeast. In one other part of the country, a very new, very dynamic part of the country, but also very liberal and very heavily bureaucratic, growth was heavily regulated within an urban boundary and the outcome was very Strong-townsy: Portland.
(Brainerd then and now)
I make no claim that anything here is conclusive, but I do call on Chuck and others in the movement to take a serious look at this. Are regulation and bureaucracy the problem or are bad regulation and bad bureaucracy the problem? If you formulated the Strongtowns’ idea but you came at it from a particularly conservative philosophical bent might it not be that that philosophical prejudice is creating a bias in your viewpoint?
Sure, you could just look for reasons that I’m wrong, ways to confirm your previously held believe, we all do that. Or you could drill down on this a little. Europe, New England, Portland, in many ways they embody the ends you want, not perfection to be sure, but certainly closer to the ideal than zoning free Houston or Wild, Wild, (mid) West “oversight free” Detroit.
Coincidence?
Maybe it deserves some looking in to.
Been thinking a lot about this since you raised it a while back and I’m coming to a perspective that’s more along an “everything in its season” perspective. It’s probably true that many communities have too much and bad regulation and bureaucracy, that we use regulation to solve too many problems. But it’s equally true that in other places or times or spheres, additional regulation (collective action) is required to produce better outcomes. This is, in a way, not surprising from one of the other core (to me) strongtowns messages, from the early days of the Ponzi Scheme: there are no solutions, only responses–meaning that situations change for many reasons and one generations adaptive response (or Fad) no longer holds up. Hopefully we get better and make fewer (unintended) mistakes for our grand children. But not being doctrinaire is certainly likely to help. So I tend to think that right now NE needs fewer or perhaps better regulations of the built environment to help grow our legacy cities populations.
I think that is a strong possibility. I think it could also be the case that, well, “you’re Seth Zeren, you know what you’re doing” and so any regulations really do get in the way of a better project. But not everyone is a Seth Zeren. As was at a ULI thing at Theodore’s and I was talking to the guy from Colvest…and his every idea was awful. He was proud of razing a classic historic South End home to facilitate an easier turn through the Starbucks drive-thru, he wanted more air-walks in the MGM project, he razes church after church around here for new CVS’s…somebody write an f-ing regulation ’cause he has the money, it works in the short term, and now he wants a surface parking lot on the corner of State and Main!
A countercase is East Asia (particularly Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea). There, building regulations are among the laxest in the developed world — yet the outcome is clearly Strong Towns-y. Another issue with European-style planning is similar to the one we see in New York or (especially) San Francisco: too much bureaucracy stifling needed development and inflating the value of existing housing stock. (This is particularly bad in the Netherlands, IIRC.)
I’ve pointed out in the past that a high degree of municipal fragmentation is not necessarily a good thing — in fact, it’s flat-out toxic in the St. Louis area. Meanwhile, excessive regulatory oversight in a desirable area exacerbates upward price pressure, and in a less desirable area tends to act in a manner counter to Strong Towns thinking … but is this not itself a rational response to available stimuli, to suburban environments being perceived to be wealthier and better, and to many more grants and subsidies being available to suburban developments than urban ones?
What works in East Asia seems to be a combination of loose oversight and a vernacular understanding of the Strong Towns ethos. This is present neither in Europe nor in North America.
Our culture, or at the very least my culture here in New England, is so much more closely connected to Europe that the Asian examples, along with African ones, do very little to inform our circumstances. I’m an avid reader of carfree.com but I find it less helpful than it might be (than it used to be)because so much has to do with Nepal.
Love the argument you put forth. Love the topic. Especially love the photo with your daughter.
Let’s try and set up a time to chat about this on a podcast. I’d love to even get you and Johnny on together.
That would be great!
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Great question, but I think the answer is fairly obvious….
The Northeast, Europe – these are places that simply had much more pre-auto built heritage than anywhere else, and comparatively small population growth in recent decades. The Northeast has made all the same mistakes as anywhere else, but they have way more good stuff to begin with and less money and new people than say, Phoenix or Dallas. The same bad, unresponsive top-down systems exist everywhere, especially in the world of transportation and infrastructure.
Where I hold out hope for the Northeast – it has a very high amount of smart people per capita, and I have hope that smart, curious people will eventually figure this all out sooner than others and devise better remedies.
I actually reject that. Take Chuck’s hometown of Brainerd, MN. Brainerd had as much prewar traditional fabric as any town ots size in New England; they tore it down, we didn’t. Omaha had as much or more than my hometown, ditto. We had more towns and cities, but those towns and cities had no more traditional fabric than every other town or city.
Many parts of Europe had less after the destruction of the wars but did not follow the American scheme of auto-centered ness until very recently…and even at that, very meekly.
I do agree that slow growth has helped, but the Midwest also had slow growth…even slower growth…negative growth…but destroyed more of their prewar fabric.
I’m glad you raised that point. As a born and bred Midwesterner (though living in the South now), I have often wondered why it is that the Midwest so gleefully adopted the sprawl model and destroyed some really great cities and towns. Two things come to mind beyond what I said above, and beyond the vastness of the landscape: first, the cities were still fairly new. Imagine a 45 year old civic leader in 1945 in Omaha. Most of the great urbanism had been built in their lifetime or their parents. It just wasn’t very old yet, and obviously a lot was in bad shape in that era. By contrast, a 45 year old in Boston or Providence in 1945 was living with generations of built heritage, going back very likely to great grandparents and before. So I think the newness of buildings and the newness of the culture was an issue. Secondly – and related – the Midwest in that era was still very much composed of people wanting to embrace whatever was looking forward, instead of backward, and had a strong pioneering spirit. Look at the Norman Rockwell painting “The Kansas City Spirit” from 1951. It’s all about the great, exciting modern age. I’m sure a lot of that spirit existed in New England as well, but it was balanced by a strong fondness for tradition and heritage. Even today, I believe that is still the case in the two different regions, but manifested differently.
Very interesting. Exactly what astonishes me about, for example, the circa 1935 photo of Brainerd is how similar it is to Springfield (almost none of our buildings date back to before 1890), but the current picture of Brainerd has EVERY SINGLE BUILDING GONE, the Springfield photo has ONE new building.
Right. The point is every place that was a place in 1945 was 100% “not post war”…a recent post I read about Phoenix talks about how walkable it was…cause everyplace WAS…and now not so much. I think it is as much cultural as anything else. Here we move slow…smart, stupid, in between, but definitely slow!