Plan Obsolescence

Urban planning skeptic Peter Gordon on the benefits of sprawl, the war against cars, and the future of American cities.

Adrian Moore & Rick Henderson from the June 1998 issue

(Page 2 of 5)

Gordon: I think the development of neighborhoods by private developers is driven by markets, not by public policy. People are getting the neighborhoods they want. And I trust that competing developers are reading the trade-offs that you and I are willing to make and that those trade-offs include our demand for community. Our demands for community are met in many ways. We can use the automobile [to meet those demands], or we can even use the Internet.

People are getting a sense of community in the neighborhoods we have. We know that 20 percent of all trips by automobile are for work, 20 percent are for shopping, and 60 percent are for things I would call social. The U.S. Department of Transportation uses categories like family/personal business, school, church, visits to relatives, and other social or recreational uses, but you could easily call all these social or "community" trips.

New Urbanism is heavy on intervention, and it's tied into the "civil society," or communitarian, discussion. It dances around defining whether there's a problem with the way we live and says, "There's a problem--automobile use--and we have a solution." I'm not sure we all agree there's a problem. And it's a long shot to say that there's a design fix and we know what that design fix is.

Reason: Conservatives such as Karl Zinsmeister at the American Enterprise Institute have become big boosters of New Urbanism. They argue that the fatal conceit of traditional planning and zoning has led to these soulless suburbs. But aren't the conservatives substituting their own fatal conceit, that everyone wants to live in Small Town, USA?

Gordon: That's the weak link in the New Urbanism. If there were a grain of truth in their view, we would soon see people demanding it, and developers would strive to provide it. Builders are not ideologues.

New Urbanists say there are land use configurations that will lead to lower trip frequency. And if we object to the use of the automobile, then we can develop a land use solution. They have advanced all kinds of street designs, and hypothesized how to lay out homes and neighborhoods more compactly, and say if people can walk to all the places they need to go, presto, there will be less automobile use. The smallest introspection will show that trip frequency isn't fixed.

The New Urbanists certainly haven't done their homework. They certainly don't look at the facts a lot, so I keep going back to the international comparison. We've all traveled, we've all seen suburbanization in other parts in the world. There's clearly a universal demand for and use of automobiles that's reflected in the data.

International studies, like those from the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, are always funny to read, because the authors prejudge everything. At the beginning you have all these conclusions articulated that the automobile is the problem, what are we going to do with the automobile, how can we keep people out of automobiles, and so on. But what's revealing is that the authors lament automobile use in all these places. You have a tough time blaming American policy for automobile use [in other countries], and when you get rid of that explanation, you have to end up saying the reason people drive is consumer preference. Preference is a pretty powerful explanation compared to the one suggested by the New Urbanism.

Not just that, but the New Urbanists claim suburban development, which they call "sprawl," is something that people are using against their better judgment. One of the favorite themes of planners is that people haven't got enough choices, and builders are restricted by zoning codes to give people stuff that they don't really want. That's of course inconsistent with the other story the New Urbanists tell: that planners are beholden to builders. Well, if that's true, and just one of these greedy builders would figure out that people wanted to live in neotraditional settlements, then that greedy builder would overcome political barriers and we'd have the neotraditional developments.

Reason: Aren't there private attempts to create the type of places the New Urbanists want?

Gordon: I don't know of a lot of success stories. A lot of these developments are too new to judge. A lot of attention has been paid to the Disney-built community in Florida [Celebration], but the reviews of it have been mixed. Even that refers more to opinions of reviewers and less to the judgment of the market.

Reason: The New York Times Magazine has suggested it's more like living in a Disney-built theme park than in a real community.

Gordon: But social arrangements that are provided in the marketplace are constantly evolving. We would expect that savvy builders are evolving and experimenting in providing new things. It's a wonderful process.

If the New Urbanists have something to contribute to that evolution, that's wonderful. But instead they want to make a clean break and say that society is marching one way and we know the way it ought to go instead.

Reason: What's good about suburban living?