I am in a constant struggle to keep up with my magazines. I read, and I read, but they keep coming in the front door faster than I can move them to the recycle basket. So, I just read, today, an article in the March 2008 issue of The Atlantic. The article was entitled "The Next Slum?" It was written by Christopher B. Leinberger who, according to the blurb at the end of the article, was "a visiting fellow at the Brooking Institution, a professor of urban planning at the University of Michigan, and a real-estate developer." There is a reference to Mr. Leinberger's latest book, The Option of Urbanism, published by Island Press in November 2007. If you like the article, you might want to think about getting the book.
The basic thesis of Mr. Leinberger's article is expressed in this paragraph: "For 60 years, American have pushed steadily into the suburbs, transforming the landscape and (until recently) leaving cities behind. But today the pendulum is swinging back toward urban living, and there are many reasons to believe this swing will continue. As it does, many low-density suburbs and McMansion subdivisions, including some that are lovely and affluent today, may become what inner cities became in the 1960s and '70s - slums characterized by poverty, crime, and decay."
The article makes sense to me, in part because I have an example of the phenomenon Leinberger describes in my own family. One of my sisters recently moved to a condo in the downtown area of one of Seattle's suburbs. Leinberger may be exaggerating this trend, partly because he may be making some doubtful assumptions about how many people really like urban living. (He does have some survey data to support his contentions, though.) But I think he may be right about the general trend to slowing suburban growth, and renewed growth in urban centers. (I might also note that some of his statements are consistent with Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1962), which I recently read. Jacobs's book is a classic critique of urban planning. It's available in a Modern Library edition.)
This growth wouldn't necessarily be in the old urban centers. Leinberger mentions Reston, Virginia, White Plains, New York, and Lakewood, Colorado. A few years ago, Joel Garreau, who writes for the Washington Post, published a book called Edge Cities, about the growth of these suburban centers. What Leinberger is now adumbrating may be an extension, or an intensification, of the edge city phenomenon. Here's a link to Leinberger's article:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/subprime/2
Leinberger himself doesn't refer to energy costs as a motivator for the movement he describes, as he is focusing on the subprime lending crisis as an accelerator. I don't think it takes a lot of imagination, however, to see how "lifestyle centers" would be made more attractive by higher charges at the gas pump.
Glenn A Knight
In my study
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2 comments:
Interesting article and post Glenn. My wife and I use a measure called "Atlantic article" to describe some books - ie, enough ideas for an Atlantic article, not enough for a book. I suspect this topic might be one of those. Since it *is* an Atlantic article, everything's fine.
Thinking about communities I've seen, the raw economics may not be the main factor in whether that community is a slum. Note that only a community is a slum - we've seen eyesores in some communities which were run down, but they did not, on their own dis-merits, make that community a slum. In fact, the feeling that something is an eyesore, is below standards, is an indicator that the community has a sort of cohesion that makes it not a slum.
Transience is a problem, I think, ie rapid change. The article noted a "community" of 10,000 houses recently built - unless those people had time to grow up together, kids go to school, make friends, become adults etc, such a community is like an ornamental planting - unlikely to last thru a winter or absent the constant care of a gardener.
I don't think it's absolute wealth that matters. Rather the jerking around of patterns of behaviour, so that links across families aren't formed or retained. So given that, perhaps the subprime bubble&bust is indeed a more significant factor than a gradual increase in cost of transportation.
I was in Keno City, Yukon a couple of months ago. Definitely not a slum, but has many abandonned buildings. Pop 800 in its heydey (silver mining, United Keno Hill mines etc), pop 20 now - a mining museum (excellent), variety store, and - most interesting for our present topic - an excellent small library. It looked to me like the residents had all pooled their own personal book collections, into a large one-room building that had an honour checkout system. Those people have community. I imagine they also might operate somewhat by "extended family" rules not money exchange rules - not entirely but in some transactions.
With recent rise in silver prices, there is renewed mining activity in the vicinity. However, those mines operate on a camp basis, bringing in a crew for few weeks, rotating out. Not much scope for growth of a community with that work format.
Very interesting post, Ken.
As I mentioned in my original post, I recently read Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It is definitely about cities, although there's plenty of insights applicable to smaller communities as well.
One of Jacobs's points that Leinberger echoes is that, in a lively city neighborhood, the sidewalks are busy and, therefore, safe. The "therefore" is not trivial.
One of the major distinctions between a city and a community - a small town, a village, a neighborhood, is that a city, by definition, exposes residents to lots of strangers, and, by implication, exposes lots of strangers to the residents. Such encounters can end badly - see Jared Diamond's comments on stranger-meetings in Papua New Guinea.
A smaller place, right down to your little mining hamlet, depends in large part upon mutual acquaintanceships. People don't get out of line because they know everyone else, and everyone knows them. A city has to find a way to accommodate strangers, and busy sidewalks is one of those ways. Tourists don't get mugged on busy sidewalks, and strangers don't stick up the locals in busy places. Crime, like fungus, thrives in dark, lonely places. (Hence, Jacobs's scorn for the naive belief that parks will improve a neighborhood: Unused parks can be really dangerous.)
Suburbs, especially large developments, don't provide security either way: As you point out, a square mile full of strangers is not a community, while, at the same time, suburbs don't specialize in keeping the sidewalks busy or having lots of "eyes on the street."
This reminds me of Ray Bradbury's short story "The Pedestrian," and tales about strangers (and sometimes residents) being rousted by the cops just for walking around some neighborhoods.
It also reminds me that Jacobs points out that slums are not so much high-density areas, as low density areas because no one wants to stay there. Therefore, they have high turnover, and community ties can't develop. The best way to unslum a place, according to Jacobs, is to get the residents to want to stay there, after they have enough money to move out.
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