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Virginia Ideas
Out damned auto!
Americans sacrifice all, including their homes, to the car

How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl,
and the Roads Not Taken
Alex Marshall
288 pages, University of Texas Press
$50

by Robert Burke

Where do cities come from, and how do they work? According to Norfolk journalist Alex Marshall, most of us don’t have a clue. That might help explain why our traffic is a mess, why we hate the way our suburbs and cities look and why we spend an increasing amount of time lamenting a loss of "community." Undoing the damage of the past half-century of development begins with understanding, says Marshall, a former reporter for The Virginian-Pilot and author of "How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken." "I believe we are mixed up about our cities, our neighborhoods, and the places where we live," Marshall writes. "We don’t know how to change them, even if we wanted to."

Marshall, a recent Loeb Fellow at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, makes a compelling and well-researched argument that we need a better grasp of how transportation, politics and economics shape human settlements. He draws telling pictures by describing communities including his hometown of Norfolk; Celebration, the Disney-run neotraditional development near Orlando, Fla.; and Silicon Valley, which he calls "the perfect example of the end of place, the contemporary deconstructed city that the forces of the car and the highway produce." Indeed, transportation has always driven the design of communities, he says. It did 200 years ago when grid-patterned streets were the norm and does so today. Our sprawling development is the natural product of a car-based network, he says. "Fragmentation is the nature of cities built around cars, and there’s no way to change that," he writes. His point: If we want communities built differently we must be willing to change the way we get around.

A task like that, he argues, can’t be left up to developers, who have managed to largely usurp governments in designing the places we live. Instead, Marshall says, states should encourage the creation of regional-level governing bodies. Reality makes that unlikely, given the dominance of anti-government rhetoric at the state and federal level. But Marshall takes his shots anyway. The government-is-bad rhetoric of political conservatives, he writes, "is like criticizing the boat that keeps you afloat."

He also takes on what he calls "the ethos and paradigm of American capitalism," the idea that we all benefit when everyone looks out for his or her own best interests. Yet, the opposite is often true, Marshall says. The quiet of the suburbs disappeared as soon as we all tried to move there. Traffic is congested because most of us want to drive to work. A recognition that we might have to choose a collectivist ap-proach — such as making mass transit free to encourage more to use it — is part of creating better communities, he says.

He holds special disdain for the so-called "New Urbanists," whom he accuses of making phony claims that their approach will end sprawl. What they offer, he says, is a developer-led imitation of urban development, which he compares to a fad diet for suggesting "that we can build our way out of sprawl." New Urbanist communities such as the Kentlands development in Maryland, the planned Haymount "traditional town" on the Rappahannock River in Caroline County or Disney’s Celebration are really more of a masquerade than a blend of old and new. None has shown they can create a self-sustaining economic center. And they ignore the link between transportation, economics and design as much as any other suburb.

Marshall acknowledges that even if all his proposals were in place, our cities can still turn out wrong. "Cities can be designed well or badly, just like buildings. But we will at least have more of a chance of good design when we understand that is what we are doing."

The most disheartening passages of Marshall’s book come when he quotes planners from a generation ago. One is Lewis Mumford, who wrote these words in a 1958 essay after Congress had passed the Interstate Highway Act: "The fatal mistake we have been making is to sacrifice every other form of transportation to the private motorcar — and to offer, as the only long-distance alternative, the airplane." Considering that Mumford made those statements nearly 50 years ago, here’s a depressing thought: In 50 years, someone might be quoting Marshall’s book and wondering why all of us, again, didn’t listen. After all, no one listened to Mumford. Despite prescient warnings, we’ve spent billions of dollars building highways that we hate. Those roads, in turn, help create communities we don’t like.

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