Why Cities?

Martin Harris

 

Martin Harris lives in Brandon, VT. He is an architect, and a property rights and education advocate. 

In all the “blue” states, Vermont included, downtown preservation (with mandatory anti-sprawl, smart-growth regulation and taxpayer subsidy as needed) is an article of faith among the socially and environmentally enlightened. They will tolerate no thought of an alternative. But there is one. It’s based on the obvious technological and economic facts which have made the typical old-style city, high-intensity land use, high population density, difficult to supply with essential utilities and to enable the handling of freight and commodities--as obsolete as the defensive walls which once surrounded its urban-design ancestors.

Some European cities—Tallinn and Carcassonne--have restored their walls to attract tourists, but there’s little they or any typical 19th or 20th century city can do to meet, efficiently, the logistical demands and the communications opportunities which now favor non-urban-center, low-density commercial and industrial development.

The New York Stock Exchange could as well reside in the city of Manhattan, Kansas, as in the Borough of Manhattan, New York, NY. With electronic trading soon to replace the open-outcry auction floor system, there’s no need for its thousands of staffers to suffer the underground commute to Broad and Wall Streets when they could as easily drive to a verdant campus on the perimeter of the Riley County seat. In fact, with electronic trading, the NYSE could become virtual, spread across all 105 of Kansas’ counties, each trader working from his home terminal with no commute at all; think of the energy-conservation.

The idea that urban centers are becoming obsolete (just as their defensive walls did four to five hundred years ago, which explains why there’s no longer a wall at Wall Street) doesn’t set well with important people. Urban planners and academics, activists and politicians, all cling fast to the idea that cities in their present form will always be essential, even if, increasingly, they need outside subsidy to survive and pretend to compete.

The NYSE, for example, has floated the threat of abandoning downtown NYC each time it wants a new tax abatement or other subsidy from local and state government. Each time it’s worked, which explains why you still have to endure the subway ride to get to its 1903 headquarters.

Only ordinary citizens, in their massive post-WWII flight from American cities to the suburbs and beyond (e.g., to Vermont) challenge the concept of cities-forever, and even they do so with their feet and not their voices (except when they’re polled, after which their overwhelmingly Jeffersonian anti-city sentiment is always discounted by the supposed experts).

I’ve written perhaps a score of times over the years on the “why-cities? question,” and each time my thesis, that urban-obsolescence is well under way, irreversible, and to be welcomed rather than resisted has provoked more response than any other subject my columns address. A recent effort in the Addison County Eagle (VT) was no exception: it brought calls ranging from full agreement to full disagreement, and an e-mail from a Weybridge exurbanite (in relation to metropolitan Middlebury, population 8000, that is) suggesting that I “wouldn’t be missed in [downtown] Middlebury.”

He’s quite right, except for my spending (such as it is) which would be missed, which in turns explains why the downtown businessmen felt compelled to run a customer-satisfaction survey recently in Middlebury’s other newspaper, the Independent.

Downtown Middlebury is in economic trouble for the usual reason: all the serious commerce has migrated to the lower-development-density perimeter. Downtown stores are increasingly highly specialized boutiques catering to a fancy-driven, exurban, upper-income customer base.

There used to be many reasons for cities: military, theological, economic. Face-to-face contact with peers was a reason, and still is, but now businessmen and scientists hold their conferences at airport hotels far outside the urban center, because--although my Weybridge critic (a retired academic, judging from his udel.edu e-mail address) decries it as me-ism--convenience and efficiency matter to people who actually work.

 Industry now builds its plants in open country, serious commerce needs space to park customers’ cars and trucks, and the old buildings for such former downtown functions as warehousing and distribution are now tourist hotels and expensive condominiums.

Americans don’t build cities for military or theological reasons: Fort Riley (KS) is well outside Manhattan, not surrounding it. Even Salt Lake City (UT) is today far more economic than evangelical. (And in trouble, economically.) When we build for government purposes, look at national Social Security headquarters in Maryland: it’s miles outside downtown Baltimore (which needs more help than it gets, anyway, since the middle class fled to the suburbs and exurbs following the riots of the ‘60s.)

Planners and psychologists haven’t figured out how to get Americans out of their cars for business, except in a few artificial situations like Michigan’s Detroit Renaissance Center, or Vermont’s Burlington Church Street pedestrian-only conversion, both the products of outside subsidy. Indeed, supposedly “free” (taxpayer-funded) in-town buses run their loops nearly empty, typically, which explains why most are fitted with tinted windows.

We in the architecture/planning industry have our theories but we don’t know for sure why shoppers will willingly walk a few hundred yards from parking to store at a mall but won’t willingly do the same distance downtown. Some cities and larger villages recognize and encourage low-density commerce, as Middlebury did, quite well, when designing and building a campus-style industrial/commercial park on outlying Exchange Street, but quite poorly on Route 7 South, where the town fathers used federal grant money to facilitate just the sort of strip development they now decry.

Those urban centers will keep some economic viability; those which demand that everything be downtown, as it all once was, won’t. Fundamentally, there’s just no compelling reason any more for 21st century people to try to function in a19th century (or earlier) environment, and they’re, we’re, not willing to sacrifice productivity and convenience to do so.

Should we, then, preserve and restore our downtowns, or let them decline in density to the point where they can match the out-of-town grey zones in occupant efficiency (Los Angeles has moved in this direction) by not opposing antique building destruction? Yes, if local voters wish to do the subsidizing; no, if they don’t. There are, of course, national historic landmarks in a few downtowns, deserving of national-taxpayer preservation spending, but most ordinary places like Middlebury don’t have any.

We local taxpayers here shouldn’t be demanding that earners in the Midwest be forced, under ultimate threat of lethal legal force, to chip in for preserving our antique structures, any more than we here should be forced to chip in for comparable efforts in, say, Stillwater (MN) by the St. Croix River.

What will happen in a free-market situation is that some urban centers (like Tallinn and Carcassonne, New Orleans and Savannah) will tax themselves to preserve their antiquities and to profit therefrom, and some won’t. Some places, like Los Angeles, will rebuild themselves by slow and not always architecturally handsome stages into the low-density city of the future envisioned by architect Frank Lloyd Wright in his proposals for a “Broadacre City” urban model.

There will be efforts, like Reston (VA) to build new cities, on the new model, from scratch. All these are to be encouraged. What’s to be discouraged is the willful decision of a few who consider themselves opinion-shapers to force on everyone else their particular vision: no permissible alternative to the high-density urban model which has prevailed for about eight millennia but now seems about to become irrelevant.     *

“The right to be left alone is indeed the beginning of all freedoms.” –William Douglas