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Recent Editorials |
Bogart on the Anachronistic City and Transitional Sprawlby Sandy Ikeda
In my post on Robert Bruegmann's book "Sprawl," I quoted him as saying that contemporary urbanists' (mostly negative) judgments on sprawl "were still based on assumptions codified in the late 1960s when American suburbs were booming and city centers seemed to be in grave danger of collapsing." William T. Bogart's "Don't Call It Sprawl," which I've been reading, makes a similar point: What has been described as urban sprawl is perhaps best understood as a time of transition from the monocentric metropolitan areas of the early twentieth century to the interrelated trading place metropolitan areas of the twenty-first century. In other words, urban sprawl represents the chaotic time of transition from one equilibrium metropolitan structure to another.In an article entitled "Urban Interventionism and Local Knowledge," published in 2004, I argued that smart-growth and new-urbanist policies, their statements to the contrary notwithstanding, derive "from a vision of the city as fundamentally static as well as a failure to understand [Jane] Jacobs's vision of the city as a spontaneous order." So, guided by this static vision, many metropolitan and regional governments over the past 30 years or so have essentially been reacting to inchoate developments in urban living long before they've had a chance to reach maturity. I believe this reflects a deeper distrust of the goals and ignorance of the ingenuity of ordinary people. Interventionist urban policy, like all interventions really, aim at a target that keeps moving unpredictably. I think it's encouraging to see that this point, which I thought was original with me at the time (but probably wasn't), expressed by two respected scholars. I hope this understanding of the dynamics and evolution of cities, and the realization that it's futile to try to shape them according to a particular image, will continue to deepen and spread. *** A good rule of thumb is that office buildings have a physical life expectancy of about eighty years and an economic life expectancy of about sixty years. Houses are built with an expectation that they will have a life of about forty years. There are exceptions, of course, but these rules help explain what we see. The urban area that we live in reflects a weighted average of the new construction of the past. Thus much of the construction is technologically obsolete, from the office building that is insufficiently wired to accommodate computer networks to the house that reflects the demographics and preferences of the 1950s instead of the 2000s. A city is largely an anachronism, a relic left over from another time.Now I read the final sentence of this paragraph to mean, not that the idea of the city is an anachronism, but that the built environment that constitutes it tends to retard progress. But in any case, this "obsolescence" of urban dwellings is in some sense vital to entrepreneurship because, as Jacobs made clear, "new ideas need old buildings." As far as the polycentric city is concerned, certainly, cities are "edgier" than they've ever been, owing to (1) the age-old aspirations of ordinary people for more and better living space, (2) the incredible wealth that post-World War II capitalism has created, (3) technical advances in communication and transport, and (4) sprawl-promoting (direct and indirect) government subsidies, so that city centers may no longer play their traditional role as engines of commerce and cultural change as much as in the past. That city, the traditional city, may indeed become a relic one day. But the living city — the city of density, diversity, development, and discovery taking forms no one today can foresee — will not.
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