Sprawl & Suburbia

There’s a famous—to urbanists—story about Amsterdam in the 1970s. Today, Amsterdam is the poster child, almost the byword, for a quiet, clean European city that makes lots of room for pedestrians and bike riders. When people talk about “Europe” in terms of land use, they often mean, or you imagine, Amsterdam.

To the extent that the average person... See more

One of the greatest lessons from Jacobs is that only someone from outside the industry is capable of smacking a hornet’s nest in a way that brings about transformational change.

Death and Life became the most famous book on urban planning. It is fundamentally about the natural origins and benefits of “the spontaneous order.” Written a third of a century after Euclid normalized centralized planning, Death and Life rejected that precedent, arguing that throughout human history, cities had been built on spontaneity, with... See more

Again, I want to be very clear that these neighborhoods are not some hell on earth, and anyone from the rest of world would be smitten to have the chance to live in them. As I wrote above, if an average African, Asian, or Latin American asked my advice I would tell them to move there. It would be downright weird of me to tell them otherwise, given... See more

Suburbia is not for the most part a naturally occurring settlement pattern, and the suppression of density and traditional urban forms, in most places for coming on a century now, has made it impossible to divine public opinion. Our opinions are shaped by our surroundings and possibilities. In different circumstances, we can be different people. Of... See more

That piece by Patrick Brown cites a whole bunch of data that questions the assumption that urban form necessarily leads to neighborliness. He writes, for example:

Small towns, lauded by Putnam for their high rates of civic engagement, often boast the kind of low-density development and heavy automobile reliance associated with the much-maligned

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Author and activist Jane Jacobs argued that cities thrive when they mingle “everyday diversity of uses and users in its everyday streets.”

This order created uncoordinated systems that worked, without staff, as if by magic. Such was Jacobs’s “Sidewalk Ballet.” With density, she argued, came “eyes on the street,” a community-based security system that required neither barbed wire nor an extensive police presence. With wide sidewalks comes trusted interactions, even with strangers—a... See more