The City, Endlessly Evolving

by Sandy Ikeda
Mon, 9 Jun 2008 at 5:05 PM

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Peter Gordon's blog recently pointed me to another article in the May 31st Economist called "An Age of Transformation," about how suburbs are becoming more like city centers.

The article finds suburbs today "ethnically and demographically mixed … less dormitories than economic powerhouses." It illustrates the transformation with Levittown, or Willingboro as it is now known, on Long Island, one of America's first sprawling housing subdivisions. Once predominantly young, white, and middle-class — the stereotypical American suburb — it is today two-thirds black and aging. But beyond greater ethnic and economic diversity, "suburbs" have become sources of new work. It's a fascinating piece with a number of interesting observations, but the main question it raises for me is how deep this transformation goes.

My answer is I think slightly different from Peter's, which sees the "suburbs" as themselves a complex of more economically developed areas to which people increasingly commute from outwardly expanding "exurbs," low-density bedroom fringes. Expansion ever outward into more dispersed communities of less and less density. To me this is only part of the picture, and not the most important part.

Peter and I have worked together and I have the highest regard for him. While we agree much more than we disagree, my view is that what has emerged and continues to emerge after decades of individual lifestyle choice, historic rates of economic growth, plus tons of government intervention (in the form of subsidized infrastructure and home loans) is the phenomenon of the "edge city," which Joel Garreau describes as having the safety, density, diversity, and economic dynamism of traditional cities but in an entirely new urban form based on the car rather than the pedestrian. I believe public policy after World War II greatly accelerated the trend of so-called "urban sprawl," so that the bland residential suburbs spread out too fast and stayed lifeless too long. This is what new urbanists have been reacting to — a transitory phase in the development of a novel urban forms. But now, after shopping malls followed housing subdivisions, and office towers and jobs followed the malls, the forces of individual preferences, markets, and demographics have finally congealed into a dynamically stable but constantly adjusting new kind of thing.

These new urban forms, however, follow the age-old formula. As long as local authorities foster economic freedom and sharply limit their interventions, jobs and people will locate themselves in increasingly complex, face-to-face, social networks. In this environment, density plus diversity enables entrepreneurial discovery and development. While it's alive, the city is always changing, always on the move. The city as a settlement of dense, intricate linkages will disappear only when civilization does. It's happened before.

So, what's in the new wine bottles — and the bottles certainly are new — is not exactly the old wine, but it's still recognizably wine, growing more interesting with age.

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