William L.

Hamilton How Suburban Design Is Failing Teen-Agers 217

ions

on teenagers, while William Booth (1998) examines the reverse mifrom cities to the suburbs in South Florida. a of making newer suburbs more like small towns of old. New Urbanism, most y displayed in The Truman Shows (1998) real-life setting of Seaside, Florida, bas become increasingly popntar in the last decade The architectural and publ c space movement encourages a retnrn to small-town living, which revolves around common spaces and a layOut that encourages walking and more socialinteraction. Here Sarah Boxer (1998) and WhirGould (1999) examine the idea of New Urbanism.

HOW SU~URi~AFI DESIGN ~l: IS FALLING ~EEF?-AGERS ~ William L. Hamilton ~ as QUZC~As THE WOR]~ "alienation" can be attached to the idea of youth, the image of isolation can be attacbed to a

picture ofand the urban subnrbs. Is there an unexplored relation) between them? It is a question parents planners alike are raising in the afof the Columbine High School shootings in Littleton, Colo. At a time when the renegade sprawl of snburbs themselves is being intensely scrutithe troubling vision of a nation re-pioneered in vast tracts of disconnected commu~ nities has prodnced uneasy discussion about the psychological disorientation they might house. Created as safe havens from the sociological ills of cities, suburbs now stand accused of creating their own environmental diseases: lack of character and the grounding princilack of diversity or the tolerance it engenders, lack of attachment to shared, civic ideals. Increasingly, the newest, largest submbs are being criticized as landscapes scorched by nnthoughtfi~l, repetitious building, where, it has been suggested, tbe isolations of larger lots and a car-based culture may lead to disassociation from the reality of contact with other people. Designers of the newest American suburbs say they have largely ignored or avoided one volatile segment of the popnlation--teen-agers. In recent conversations, three dozen urban planners, architects, environmental psychologists and sociologists, and experts on adolescent development agreed that specific community planning and places for teen-agers to make their own are missing. "Theyre basically an unseen population until they pierce their noses; said William Morrish, a professor of architectnre and the director of the Design Center for American Urban Landscape at the University of Minnesota. "They have access to computers and weaponr): The sense of alienation that might come from isolation or neglect will have a mnch larger impact than it might have before. And there are no questions craning from the design community about what we can be doing about this. We dont invite them in."

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Virtually every other special interest has been addressed by enlightened suburban designers--the elderly, the disabled, families with young children. But, said Andres Duany, a planner who is a leading proponent of the "new urbanism; a model of suburban design based on principles of traditi6nal towns, "its the teen-agers ~ always bring up as a question ark. Mr. Duany sald that he had only once or twice included teen-agers in the public process of planning a suburban development. "Its a good point,"he said, as though it were an unlikely idea. "I should talk to the kids." Though teen-agers tend to resist advice and choose their own turf as a territorial issue of establishing seK-identity, most experts interviewed say that design could constructively anticipate and accommodate anxieties of adolescence. They agreed that teen-agers need a place to congregate in and to call their own; it is a critical aspect of relieving the awkward loneliness of adolescence. Betwean home and school--spheres compromised by the presence of parents or the pressure of performance--places for teen-agers in the suburbs are as uncommon as sidewalks. "Its a paradoxical situation," said Ray Suarez, host of "Talk of the Nation" on National Public Radio and author of The Old Neighborhood (The Free Press, 1999), a study of suburan mlgrat~on. Parents move there for their children; their children are dying to get out." Like much of the Western United States, Denver is experiencing vertiginous suburban growth. From 1990 to 1996, the metropolitan area expanded by two-thirds, to its current size of 535 square miles. yplcal of the Denver metro area are the new suburbs, wheredowntownis a four-way intersection with three shopping centers and a condo development," said Charles Blosten, community services director for Litfletons city planning division. Highlands Ranch, Denvers largest suburban development, has its own ZIP code, "nothing but rooftops and miles and miles of nothing," he said of the numbing vista of houses. "Its got to affect people: The idea that place has an impact on adolescent development and socialization is accepted by most experts on the suburbs but is only now beginning to be " studied. ~_ culture of impersonality has developed in the suburbs by the way theyre laid out," said Jonathan Barnett, a professor of regional planning at the University of Permsyivania and author of The Fractured Metropolis (HarperCollins, 1996). In the newer suburbs, "the standard of houses is high, but the standard of community isnt; he continued, adding, "Its most peoples impression of modern life." And the people it stands to in,press the most are children. "They are the most vulnerable people growing up there; said Dr. Jose Szapocznik, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and director of the Center for Family Studies at the University of MiamJ. ~s a child youre disabled by not being able to walk anywhere. Nothing is nearby; Mr. Morrlsh said he thought that public transportation to metropolitan downtowns was crucial for high school students. He said that the ability to access "the system"--the world adults create--was a vital form of empowerment. "What to do after school, how to get to the city, to see other people and how to negotiate this without parents;he said, posing the issues. "Teen-agers have to have better access to the public realm and public activity." He recalled a conversation with a group of high school students who met with the Design Center, which invites teen-agers to group meetings when it is commissioned to study neighborhoods. One g~rl sa~d, )kll Ive got is the P~zza " Mr. .... Morrlsh sa~d. ,You g, Hut you go to somebodys house--were tired of both."

William L. Hamilton, How Suburban Design Is Failing Teen-Agers 219 Between home and school, in a landscape drawn by cars and the adults who drive them, s there even a particular place that teen-agers can call their own? Peter Lang, a professor of cture at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and an editor of Suburban Discipline Architectural Press, 1997), a collection of essays, said: "In most suburbs, theres : even a decent park, because everyone has a backyard. But older kids never play in the e crummiest piece of parkY Typically, the students at Columbine High School went to Southwest Plaza, a two-level has video arcades, food courts and stores, supervised by security guards and clgsed ~ 9 P.M. "Like any suburban community, theres not a lot of places to go and hang out; Mr. ~ said of Litfleton. "I tell you this because thats where my daughter goes--the mall." said he thought that places like malls were not adequate gathering spaces for them, like many public suburban venues, commercially and environmen"controlled space." He added, "They are not places for flee expression or hanging out." that suburbs create greater alienation is Dr. Laurence Steinberg, a professor ~ and director of the MacArthur Foundation Research k on Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice. But he said that he thought recent like the incident in Littleton do "wake people up to the notion that there is parental h"We did a study on latchkeyldds. The kids most r to be left unattended for long periods were middle class, in sprawhng professional sub i~ Isolated for long periods of time, theres no counterbalancing force to fantasy." desire for more and cheaper land that has pushed suburbs to rural exurbia may reparts of the day. Mr. Morrish pointed out that in odesto, in the San Joaquin Valley in central California, people commute o area, where they enroll their children in schools. are taking their kids with them; he said, "making the "and visibly at work on restructuring the subbeen "new urbanists" like Mr. Duany. Their solutions to the wheeling development are based on tighter concentrations of houses, businesses and townlike elements--porches, sidewalks and parks--that have lew residential landscape. place there, in new towns like Columbia and Kentiands in Maryd or Celebration, the Disney-built town in Florida, lt is not because of any bravery on the They often foster nostalgic views of families with young children. But like ;, they overlook the inevitability of teen-agers in their design. who with Vincent Scully wrote The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture ry (McGraw-Hill, 1993), spoke of the in~portance to teen-agers of a place that for them, neither hidden and ignored nor exposed and supervised in effect, a view. Mr. Katz discovered that for Celebrations teen-agers, it was a narrow bridge, ! low railings, that goes from downtown to the health dub." He continued: "They find other. They sit on the rafting. Its on the route to dallylife not a back alley; but not the a structure could become a conscious part of a for teen-agers. Dorney, a mother with two teen-age children who lives in Kentlands, Md., a mburb of some 1,800 people, the hallmarks of town life work well

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of

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for both parents and children. Ms. Dorney and her husband, Mark, moved their family from a typical town-Lmuse development. "WL~ wanted to raise our kids in a place that provided more than just a house; she said "Its a diverse cornmuni~/, of age and income," with older people, young couples, families. Ms. Dorney said that she thought the gaze of the town created a sense of extended family and moral weight that were its most important success. "Someone sneaking down the street to have a cigarette--they dont get away with it;she said dont think teen-agers should be left on their own until heyre caught at the small added: ~Andwehaveanotherwa.T~r;. "I " She contmued,"When things. th~,o- .... t -z t~o taro the ~)lg things, the know ,, . , ,. Y howblgthe are. She j,~l~mwlng these gads, other than the bad thin;, Theyre your neighbors, too, Youre always seeing them. You give them another chance,"

America; she says. Like thousands of others, Smith moved to this planned Community 40 miles north of Miami just a few years ago, searching for a safe and secure neighborhood Iike this one, where both modest homes and rambling mansions sit against the manicured landscape of paLm and hibiscus, and gated streets called Wagon Way and Windmill Ranch gently curve around the shallow lagoons and golf links. Weston is a boomtown filling with refugees. But the migrants pouring into this part of Btloward County are rarely those from the Caribbean, Central and South America--the Lm_ migrants to the south who have transformed Miami and Surrounding Dade County into a metropolis proudly called by ~ts business and political leaders "The Gateway to Latin America." Instead, the refugees here are mostly native-born and white, young and old, and they have been streaming up fiom Miami for years nmv, creating a new version of the traditional"white flight" in reaction not to black inner cities, but to immigration. While Miami is unique in many respects, because of both geography and politics, the out-migration of whites is occurring in other high-immigration cities. NewYork and Los Angeles, for example, each lost a million U.S.-born residents in the last decade, as they gained a million immigrants. According to an analysis of the most recent census wLm came to Miami-Dade Counh, ; ....... ,. data, for non-Hispanic almost every immi~ra ~ ~, ~c~CUL years, a wrote left. - ~ nt ~ ~ there "I loved but its a mad ~,e scuown - hernow, . sa~d . Weston, Smzth, who is semi-retired and asked that Miami her occupation not be given. Before move to Smith lived in Miami for two decades, "in a nice neighborhood ~one bad r~^_~ ...... , thats progress, but I like it clean t, "~W~ ~ay things, Oh thats change and and green--and everybody speaking English;in Smith says In discussions about the historic demographic transformations occurring the United States, which is absorbing almost I minion immigrants a year, most of the attention focuses quite naturally on the newcomers: Who are they and where are they from and Lmw do they make their way in America?

William Booth AWhite Migration North from Miami 221 But immigration is a two-way street--and the welcome the immigrants receive from the

s. d

~afive-born is crucial for the continued idea of America as a fabled"melting pot." Of course, whites--and blacks, too--who have remained in Miami-Dade County, to - continue their lives as before or accept, even embrace the Latin tempo of Miami, who
have learned how to pronounce masas de puerco at lunchtime and to fake a respectable merengue dance step, who enjoy the culture, the business opportunities and caffeinated busfie of a metropolis dominated by immigrants. No one could call M ami dull But it is almost as if there are two kinds of native whites--those who can deal with mulficulturalism that has transformed Miami over the past several decades and those who choose not to. Either way, if the country is to successfully transform itself into a completely multikulturai industrialized nation, what these internal migrants say and there are millions of needs to be heard and understood. Those transplants interviewed by The Washington Post, including those who asked that pains to explain that, for the most part, the people like them out of Miami-Dade to Broward are not anti-immigrant xenophobes. In several dozen interviews with a cross-section of these domestic migrants, a picture e non-Hispanic white population in Miami-Dade County that feels and who move from Dade to Broward with

e e

mLx of emotions. Migrants to Broward give many reasons for the move north: Their money buys a bignewer house in Broward; they are fired of the traffic and congestion; they worry about

)vercrowded schools; those with young families often say they a place where their children can play ball in the front yard and ride their bikes dmvn the block. these things, the good and bad, can also be found in booming Broward County. r of the refugees moving north mention immigration and the sense that are no longer, as many transplants describe it, comfortable. PhilPhillips was born and raised near what is today downtown Miami, where his father ~or the Immigration and Naturalization Service during the postwar years, at a time nmigrants to Florida were mostly from Europe. Phillips served in the Navy, taught L Miami High School, and made a living running a small air conditionUntil the rise of Fidel Castro in Cuba, Phillips described the Miami of yesteryear as a more southern town. It had its glitz in the fanciful playground of Iackie Gleaz of Miami Beach, but the county was still filled with open land and farms. I was a very happy place, Phillips remembers with nostalgia. We had our demarget me wrong. But we didnt have the animosity. When pressed, Phillips does tha.t the beaches, resta.urants and nightclubs were often segregated, not only for ~ country clubs. of black-and-white all began to change with the arrival of the Cubans in ~ 1960s. The vast majority of the Cubans came here and worked two and three jobs, g in Weston. A man who worked with his hands all his )ects that. I saw them do it. And in time, they took over, and some people rethat. But thats the way it is. this myth out there that a Cuban will screw an American in a deal, Phillips says. dont think that is so, but thats the feeling the whites have, and its because the two sides

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dont communicate, sometimes they cant cormnunicate, and so they dont understand the other guy. Phillips has seen decades of change, as the demographics of his home town kept skewring toward Hispanics, in fits and starts. After the first big influx of Cubans in the 1960s, there was Cubas MarM boatlift in 1980. Then all through the proxy wars and upheavals in Central America and the Caribbean through the 1980s and 1990s, refugees from Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador and Haiti kept coming to Miami. e re great m mnenca at blaming somebody else for our problems; Phillips said. "But I will tell that for a lot of the people who leave Miami, they might not tell you, but theyre leaving because of the ethnics." Phillips offered his opinions as he sat sipping soup at the counter of a new restaurant here in Weston opened by Tim Robbie, whose family owned the Miami Dolphins for years, before they sold out to Wayne Huizenga, ~vho is "The Man" in Broward County, as much as Jorge Mas Canosa, the power behind the Cuban American National Foundation, was "The Man" in Miami before his death last year. Robbie was raised in Miami. His family, lead by his father loe, was a cMc institution. But Robhie himself recently moved to Weston, too. itnow a lot of our friends down in Miami were disappointed with us; Robhie said. "They asked: How can you do this to us?" " phenomenon might be at Robhie agreed that something the akin to ..... t~ppmg pomt work, whereby one or two families in a social or business network can leave a community and nothing much changes. But at some point, if enough people leave, the balance suddenly tips, and large groups start selling their homes, and over a period of several years, they create mass demographic shifts. Robhie himself said he was comfortable down south in Miami, but concedes that any are not. Anglos are accustomed to bemg m the majority, and down in Dade, theyre not. And that puts some people outside of their comfort zone. People tend to like to stick together." Robbies business partner is Bob Green, who also moved from Miami to Broward. A longtime denizen of funky and fun Coconut Grove, Green describes himself as one of those who never would have thought about moving north to Broward. But then he saw the new business opportunities, and also found hlmseK liking a place like Weston. "It has this midwestern feeling," Green said. "More downhome and friendly." This mass internal migration is the latest version of a classic "push-pull" model of residential segregation, whereby many whites in Miami feel lured north by the offerings of a deve!opment like Weston, but also feel pushed out of Miami--not only by their fatigue with crime or congestion, but the cultural and demographic upheavals caused by three decades of immigration. Peter Schott is a tourism official who is changing jobs and, reluctantly, moving with his wffe, who works for a cruise ship line, to Broward. The couple, both in their thirties and expecting their first child, are looking for a bigger home. Schott says he will miss the exotic, foreign feel of Miami. Miami, Schott says, is a media noche, the name for a Cuban sandwich, while Broward he fears is "white bread and baloney"While he that many of those moving north to Broward may not. "Some people are real frank; he said. "They say they want to be with more people more ike us. If they re white Americans, they want white Americans around them:

William Booth A White Migration North from Miami 223

the

ewhere Cengua,

For non-Hispanic, non-Spanish-speaking whites to survive in Miami, there is no choice to move, or to adapt. "It is our city now; maW Cuban Americans saB and the numbers tell part of the story. ) In the 1990s, some 95,000 white non-Hispanics left Miami-Dade County, decreasing that groups presence by 16 percent, to around 492,000, or about one-fifth of the county

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They either moved away or, in the case of elderly residents, particularly in the Jewish r, died. (The Jewish population in Miami-Dade County has decreased from about decades. The new destination for Jewish retirees and and Palm Beach counties.) As whites left Miami, they poured into Brmvard. Between 1990 and 1997, the white e increased by about 82,000, or 8 percent, to more than a mil~ residents. s follmv an equally large out-migration of whites during the y non-Hispanic whites left ivliami-Dade in the previous decade that Marvin a sociologist at Florida International University, who has fullowed the trend, said in get dmvn to the point belmv which those who are going to leave have left and the ~re committed to stay. I think were close to that with whites." The whites keep leaving. "White migration to Miami-Dade has essentially stopped; said William Frey, a dey of Michigan, who coined the phrase "demographic balkanizadescribe the ongoing trend of ethnic and racial groups to self-segregate--not only . but from city to city, and frmn state to state. ppear almost like mirror images of each other; Frey said of Brmvard and on here and we can only guess ,s One America that Clinton talks about is clearly not in the numbers. SegMany times, native whites on the move explain that Miami now feels to them like "a r feel "overwhelmed" by the presence not just of some Spanishbut so many. ~You order a Coke without ice; said an executive and mother of three who moved to diamiin 1996 and asked that her name not be used. "And you get ice. You say , Starch and government offices, and they cant take a decent mes~pell your name letter by letter and they get it wrong. They keep saying ~ue? Que? (Spanish for What?) You go to the mall, and you watch as the clerks wait ~peakers before you. Its like reverse racism. You realize, my God, this is what ," minority." population feels increasingly beleaguered; said George Wilson, a sociolo, of Miami who is studying the phenomenon. at the micro -level,"Wilson continued. "At the malls, in )f the whites I talk to say they feel challenged by the rapid ethnic and cultural e. A whole population of whites has gone from a clear majority to a dear minority in a .. and a lot of them simply say, To hell with this; and move up the road: g the beleaguered minorityis creating among some a new consciods~ of"white etlmicity; and for those who see Americas future as a relatively harmonious muld on shared ideas of capitalism and freedom, this may not bode well.

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For if whites do not want to share power and place, or ff they feel increasingly shoved aside or overwhelmed in the cities and states with high in,migration, they will continue to vote with their feet, by moving away, creating not a rainbow of citizens, but a more balkan!zeal nation, with jobs, university enrollments, public spending, schools all seen through ethnic or racial prisms, including among whites. Several of those interviewed complain that the politics of Miami-Dade are dominated by th~ issues of the newcomers, particularly the Cuban Americans, who walt for the fall of Fidel Castro; they see in the city hall, where a number of officials were recently indicted and convicted of taking kickbacks after it was discovered that the city was broke, a "banana republic" of ethnic cronyism; they dislike being referred to in Spanish media as "the Americans" by Miamis Hispanic residents and politicians, as if they were the foreigners. And many balk at the dominance of Spanish--on television, in official news conferences, on the radio, in schools and meetings and in their day-to-daylives. The movement of so many whites from Miami-Dade to Broward is viewed by many Hispanics as understandable, even natural, though hardly something to be encouraged, "We had a tremendous exodus of Anglos, especially Anglos who did not feel comfortable with the new demographics of Miaml, who were intimidated by the Spaulsh language and the inflmx of dilferent people," said Eduardo Padron, a Cuban American and president of the Miami-Dade Community College, "It is a natural trend for them to move out. Many of them kept wor!dng in Miami, but they found refuge in Broward." Padron believes the rapidity of demographic changes, and the creation of a Hispanic majority, was "intimidating" for many whites, particularly those who did not speak any Spanish. Some whites interviewed say they know they may seem like "whiners; as one woman put it, but they feel they are not being met halfivay by the newcomers, and this is an especially acute feeling in Miami, where Cuban Americans and other immigrants from Latin America now dominate the political landscape, serving as city and county mayors and council members. Both of Miamis representatives to Congress are Cuban Americans. Recent elections reveal that voters in Miami-Dade select candidates along stark racial and ethnic lines in dessic bloc voting. The 1995 county mayors race, pitting Cuban American Alex Penelas against African American Arthur Teele, Jr., turned almost entirely on demographic lines, wath exat polls showing that the ovenvhelming majority of Cuban Americans voted for Penelas, as most blacks voted for Teele. What did whites do? A lot of them did not vote at all. Over the years, there has been sporadic, organized resistance by whltes in Miami to hold back the changes. One group, calling itself Citizens of Dade United, was successful in passing a referendum in 1980 that declared English the "official language" of county government. But it was overturned in 1993. Enos Schera, who is a co-founder of the group and who is now 71, is still filled with vinegar, and says he refuses to move from Miami--though he says he and his group have received death threats. "Im staying to fight this crazy thing," Schera said. "Im not a bad guy, but I dont want to be overrun. They come here and get all the advantages of being in America and then they insult you right on top of it." He is writing a book about the changes. "That will tell all," he promises. But it seems as if Schera is fighting in retreat. He, and his group, have largely been relegated to the role of stubborn whites whose time is over. Many of the others, like Weston resident Joanne Smith, have already left. "Theres no room for us in the discussion," said Smith. "Its like we were the oppressors."

Sarah Boxer A Remedy for the Rootlessness of Modern Suburban Life? 225

ed to a. h-

Smith says she likes to eat at Cuban restaurants, has Hispanic neighbors in Weston and of the newcomers. She herself is the granddaughter of from Europe. But Smith feels the immigrants should tryharder to understand the of native Americans. "If they can survive coming here on a raft," she says, "they can

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Here at Weston, almost all of the communities are closed with security gates, requiring or be cleared by a guard before entering the enclaves. In addition a private security firm patrols the neighborhoods. One researcher on the topic, Edward Blakely of the University of Southern California that gated communities like Westons are the fastest growing new dearound the country. Blakely deplores the trend, claiming it creates "fortress citizens, creating walls between "us" and "them." But obviousIB many home buyers like the concept, and many of the residents of Weston one of the things they like most about the neighborhood is its sense of community, of and the ability of their children to ride their bicycles on the streets. Yet the gates cannot keep demographic change at bay. Though V,vo of every three resimost of them in their thirties, about one in four are Hispanic. But e are the most assimilated, often second-generation, solidly middle-class Cuban Americans who come north for the same new schools and golf courses as the white migrants, alalmost everyone to continue to live within their comfort zone. But not all. As one three-year resident, who declined to give her name, observed,"I keep more and more Spanish in the grocery store. I dont knowif theylive here or are just g here. But I started to see some Spanish magazines for sale. Maybe I didnt move far enough north."

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ATTACKS ON sLmum~ta are as old as cul-de-sacs. Suburbs have ahvays been derided as bourgeois, consumerist and conformist. But nmv they have become the enemy of family values, too. Thats right. Karl Zinsmeister, the editor of the conservative magazine The American Enterprise, has s~itten that "suburbia is actually a fairly radical sodisappearance of family time, the weakenhag of generationallinks.., the anonymity of community life, the rise of radical feminism, the declkae of civic action, the tyrannical dominance of TV and pop culture over leisure time? What is to be done? A groupof architects and planners who have named themselves .~ spread of faceless, car-centered suburbs by promoting friendly, people-centered towns with corner stores and public greens. They call for some old-fashioned things: walkable neighborhoods with a mix of residences, businesses and public places; straight and narrmv streets; wide sidewalks, and no cul de sacs. They believe houses should be built close enough together and dose enough to the sidewalks to define streets and public squares. Above all, they want strong town centers and dear town boundaries. No one, they believe, should live more than a five-minute walk from

A REhlEDY FOR THE ROOTLESSNESS OF MODERN SUBURBAN LIFE? ~ Sarah Boxer ~

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most of theh: errands. (Otherwise, whats to stop people from getting In their cars and dry, ving?) And like their British counterpart, the Urban Villages Group, the architects favored by the Prince of Wales, they want to preserve old towns and cities through "inffil; building on unused urban lots. "No one can be opposed to those principles," said Alex Krieger, a professor of urban design at Harvard University. They are like "room and apple pie," he said. Yet many newurban towns have been scorned as cutesy, regressive and un-urban. The new urbanists~ or neo -t raditionallsts--shonld instead be called the "new suburbanists," some say, because they are less interested in planning principles than in porches, picket fences and gabled roofs. Seaside, designed in the early 1980s by Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Andres Duany, two of the founders of new urbanism, is the oldest new-urban town. Built on a stretch of the Florida panhandle, Seaside was meant to foster community life and beach access. The houses, a pastiche of historical styles in pastel colors, are set close to one another and connected by straight brick streets and a network of sand walkways cutting through the middle of each block. When the town is finished, it is supposed to have 350 houses and 300 apartments, a school, an open-air market, a town hall, a tennis club, an amphitheater, a post office, and a number of shops, offices and beach pavillions. If youre having trouble picturing it, think of the idyllic town in the movie The Truman Show. That was no movie set. That was Seaside. Since Seaside was built, new urbanism has won a lot of fans and building contracts. There are dozens of new-urban towns and projects built or under construction, including Celebration in Florida, Laguna West in California and Kentlands in Maryland. The Depart.mant of Housing and Urban Development is renovating some of its public housing accordmg to new urbanist principles: more porches, more fences, lower buildings, narrower streets. Jane Jacobs, the author of The Death and Life of GreatAmerican Cities, has praised the movement as "sound" and "promising." And publications from The Sierra Club Yodeler to The American Enterprise have smiled on the new urbanlsts. "But.... ~s the r particular wsmn of urbamzafion an innovative model appropriate to the 1st century, M~chelle Thompson_Fawcett asked m thelourna1 Urban Design lnternaEonal, "or "s it regressive nostalgia?" New urbanism is, by definition, nostalgic. Towns built on a human scale, with strong centers and clear edges, have been around for 5,000 years, said Robert Davis, the developer of S.easide and the chairman of the new-urban Congress. It is only in the last 50 years, with the r~se of modernism, he said, that Americans have forgotten how to build them. The new urbanists want to induce neighborliness with architecture. In this sense they are utopian. Like the modernist master planners of the 1930s, they believe social change can be brought about through architecture and planning. The difference is that most of them hate modernism. While the modermsts "tried to get to the future by destroying the past; Robert Fishman, the author of Bourgeois Utopias, said, the new urbanists "are reviving the past in order to ange the present. That, the new urbamsts think, is why many architecture schools view them with contempt. Most schools of architecture are "so in the grips of the modernist ideology and so defensive of the avant-garde that they see the Congress for the New Urbanism as fundamenlly conservative, sam Darnel Solomon, a founder of the movement Peter Katz, the author

Sarah Boxer A Remedy for the Rootlessness of Modern Suburban Life? 227

The New Urbatiism: Tmvard an Architecture of Community, said that the nations most architects, particularly those in New York, "laugh at the poor souls who live in

an architecture professor at Columbia University, agrees that many cture schools (though he excludes Columbia) have ignored some questions about [ settlement. But what bothers most professors about the new urbanists, he said, is not ue of suburbia or land settlement. It is their design ideas. The new-urbanist charter says nothing explicit about what styles are acceptable. Yet be, new urbanists believe that modernism ruined American cities, nearly all of on building styles from the past. Kentlands in Maryland is full of Celebration, Disneys village in Florida, is full of brand new Victorians Colonials. !Whats upsetting" about new urbanism, said Mr. Frampton, "is that the imagery is so is based on a "sentimental iconography" as if there were something inher, good about Victorians, Georgians dnd Colonials and something inherently bad about there were a lot of modernists in the 1930s who advocated low-rise, he said. Besides, the kind of modernism that the new urbanists see as r is a straw man. No one is advocaring tearing down whole cities to make way for "Mr. Framp"it is not the modern movement but the American bureaucracy that opened the way ,s and suburbanizationY The railroads were deliberately undermined by the an,c, he said, adding, !That was an economic, a capitalist, operation; not an
the root of the problem sufficiently, suggested Alex who has often written about new urbanism for Metropolis magazine. "What new ? do is imitate older communities that existed before the automobile" withrid of the automobile. But if you want to return to these older forms of life, he ~ bring back the transportation system? If you simply change the way houses "its like changing hemlines: o see themselves as radicals, said Mr. Krieger, who was once a supe movement and is now a critic. But, he added, they are "no longer the radical : but conventional wisdom: Developers have begun using the term new urbanism to sell their projects. Thats not. to say the movement hasnt had a good effect, Mr. Krieger said. The Departand Urban Development has dedicated $2.6 billion to "Hope SLx," a haplan to rebuild mid-century public housing according to new urbanist principles. n Gleveland to Helefia, Mont., high-rise projects are being replaced by town porches and fences. "That is the part of the movement that most impresses me," Krieger. The problem, Mr. Marshall noted, is that most new-urban developments are not urban are rich developments on the towns edge."They are sprawl under another name; ~ are as restrictive as any suburban development. Most are privately run by

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making warm and fuzzy dog movies; said Evan McKenzie, the author of Privatopia, a book on housing associations, but "they can take your dog if it makes too much noise." "Its as if the people are saying: Who needs democracy? Its utopia already!" said Mr. McKenzie. People are looking for homeyness and safety, and they dont mind giving up some freedoms for it. In Kentlands, there is a gate in front of each entry into the development, Mr. Krieger said. "Its a decorative gate but it evokes the same associations as a real gate. Its a sub, tle form ofKeep Out. If decorative gates can evoke the same response as real gates, then maybe the look of neighborliness--porches, wide sidewalks and village greens--can evoke real neighborfiness. Or can it? The one big criticism about new-urban towns is that they are fake towns. Given that, its curious that the developer of Seaside agreed to let The Truman Show, a movie about a real man in a false world, be filmed in Seaside. The movie all but said, "~2qis is not really a tmvn but the shefi of a town, an image of a town," Mr. Krieger said. After the filming was over, the painted pllavood storefronts that had been put up for the movie stayed up for months because the developer liked the way theylooked, Mr. Krieger said. After all, looking like a real town is the next best thing to being one.

IN THE S~RUGGLE TO BUILD new towns and rebuild old ones, theres one issue no one wants to talk about m Whitney Gould B much: race. Arid when it does come up, people tend to dance around it or dress it in euphemisms. At a recent meeting here of the Congress for the New Urbanism, though, race had just about everyone buzzing--and the guy who started the buzz, writer James Howard Kunstler, wasnt even on the program. Kunstler, author of an anti-sprawl polemic titled The Geography of Nowhere, popped up from the mostly white audience at a panel on gentrification issues and said blacks should stop blaming their problems on whites. The real chaklenge? "Tell your kids to be nicer to white people; he exhorted. "Turn your baseball hats around, get interested in reading and quit trying to scare everyone: A shouting match ensued. And no wonder. Could Kunstler, a middle-aged white guy and well-known provocateur, not have known how offensive his racial stereotyping would be? Did he really think that if every black person in America behaved like a well-read ambassador from Gentlemans Quarterly or Vogue, lily-white enclaves would suddenly become rainbow communities? And, as my colleague Eugene Kane observed [on these pages last week], werent those shooters at Columbine High in Colorado a couple of white kids? In fairness to the New Urbanists, Kunstler was not representative of the four-day gathering, which was earnest and thoughtful. But whatever his intentions, the bull-in-a-chinashop author in a very crude way did do one useful thing: He brought race front and center among a group of city-builders who have preferred to keep the spotlight more on the phys-

NEW URBANISM NEI!DS TO RACIAL ISSUES IN MIND

Whitney Gould New Urbanism Needs to Keep Racial Issues in Mind 229 aspects of urban revitalization than on the social and economic integration that is cru~ the enduring health of communities. ,ortant, to be sure. Street-friendly architecture, slower streets a rob: of housing, businesses and public spaces all within walking distance: These are the s of New Urbanism (and Old Urbanism, as well). That approach to decan make communities more neighborly, more humanly scaled and less depenit on the car. Milwaukees new master plan for the downtown grows out of those principles. New Urbanist communities that I profiled recently, Middleton Hills west of ~ in Milwaukee, show how attractive such subdivisions can be. Middleton Hills is virtually all white, and CityHomes is overwhelmingly black. ; little evidence that other New Urbanist communities are appreciably more inmost of the new housing being built in downtown Mflwankee is upscale, working-class folks and/or minorities pretty much out of the picture. Indeed, centistics show that 98% of the African-American population in the entire metro area s in the City of Milwaukee, making this the most segregated of 50 large urban areas in

You can argue, I suppose, that some of this segregation is voluntary: people choosing to folks like themseIves. (Never mind that there are whites and people of color who diversity.) You can argue, too, that this is just the market talking: developers going the money is. (Never mind, too, that there is plenty of money to be made in mLxedexperts at a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee conference noted recently, and housing subsidies for years promoted sprawl, with all of its inevitable n and social inequity. And today, as builders and realtors groups push to build smaller, more affordable houses , they run up against zoning rules that mandate huge minimum lot sizes and e houses. Even if the intent is not racist, the effect of such rules is both racially and ecodiscriminatory, shutting out worklng-class minorities and whites alike--and this jobs in the suburbs are going begging. To wrap such exclusionary zoning in the mantle of environmentalism and the fight sprawl strains credulity. After all, developers who cant build in one place will just v does that promote smarter land use? We could change all of this if we had the political vfill to do so. Reforming those onerrules would be a good place to start. Improving transit links to the suburbs also help. And we could create new incentives for builders to include more roodwhether in the city or the suburbs. Lets be prison-like public housing, just some attractive and townhouses that ordinary folks--black and white, young and

None of this would come easily. Such changes inevitably bring up the issue that no one cants to talk about: race. While it may be too much to expect planners and developers to solve inequity, can we not at least hope they wont make those problems ;ad if New Urbanism, the most progressive planning tool in decades, were to become merely an excuse for creating beautifully designed communities as racially alienated as the old ones.

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Chapter 3 READING AND WRITING ABOUT PUBLICAND PRIVATE SPACE

THIS TEXT: READING 1. What is your opinion of suburbs? Is this based on your own experience or what you have seen displayed in popular culture? 2. What are the advantages and disadvantages of living in the suburbs? 3. Are there ways of changing the suburbs to eliminate some of the disadvantages? 4. Do you think the behavior of teenagers is affected by the construction of public space? 5. What assumptions about suburbs are the practitioners of the New Urbanism making? Are those assumptions accurate? 6. Why is the idea of Main Street so attractive to us? Is it built on false assumptions? ~ 7. What ages like living in suburbs the best? The least? 8. In what ways do gender, ethnici~, and race play into our ideas about the suburbs? YOUR TEXT: WRITING 1. Write a short piece about your experience in the suburbs. 2. What would you say the philosophy of suburban life is? Write a paper articulating what you think this philosophy is. 3. What are the defining architectural ideas behind living in the suburbs? How do these ideas affect the way people live? 4. Drive through a suburban community--both old and new. What do you notice about the public spaces and the way houses look? What do those aspects of the suburbs suggest about life there? 5. Write a shor t piece about the positive nature of the suburbs. Are there any cultural texts that would aid in your examination? 6. If you have grown up in the suburbs, think about your relationship to the suburbs at dif_ ferent times in your life. Is there a point at which you remember changing your ideas about where you live? 7. If you do not live in the suburbs, think about when you realized that there were places .different from where you lived. Think about what you thought about these places growmg up and what you think about them now.

CLASSROOM ACTIVITIES 1. Look around your classroom. How do you know its a classroom? Of course, there are the chalkboard and the desks, but what other qualities does this room have that makes it a classroom? How is it designed? Does it facilitate learning, alertness, and discussion? 2. Walk outside the classroom. What elements identify the walk as a college campus? What emotions does the walk evoke? Could it be improved? 3. What does the public space outside the classroom building say? Does it identify the campus as any particular type of school--private, public, urban, rural, suburban? What would a potential student read into this particular space? Would they be inclined to come to school or not because of this reading? Why or why not?

Essayldeas 231

What particular place makes you feel the most comfortable? Least? Frightened? WMt is it about the spaces themseIves that evoke these emotions? Are they human driven or architecturally or design driven? Can you think of a space that has bad or good memories driven mostly by the space itselt? Design the perfect classroom. What would it look like? What would it have in it? Where would everyone sit? What tools would everyone have? How would being in this classroom change your learning experience? Design the perfect building at college. What would it look like? What would it have in it? DEAS uilding as analogy you of something besides a buildin 1) its physical construction; 2) the emotional response it encourages; 3) its purpose; 4) its structure? In what way are these disparate elements alike? Different? What does the z in general say about commonalties of texts generally?

Emotional response around a building or a public area such as a mall or your schools common area. What ) you "feel"? What about the place makes you feel such an emotion? Are these effects intended or unintended?
versus artistic dominates this particular building or space--its artistic aspects or commercial ones? the two work together?

/ [avorlto place you feel close to and figure out why you feel that way. Is there a place? How would you describe the d~cor? The architecture? Do you feel your attachment to this place--or places like it--is unique?
space "work"? you think it succeeds on its own terms? What are its "terms"--what criteria is it trying to fulfill? Does is succeed? Why or why not? person from the space )ffice or a dorm room or car, or some place that "belongs" to someone. What can this person from the space? How did you arrive at your judgments? Are there

ELEMENT spaces. What makes them similar? What are their differences? What do their differences or similarities say about this type of space?

Silverman, Jonathan. ~lhe world is a text : writing, reading, and flfinldng about culture and its contexts / Jonalhmt Silk.mama, Dean Rader.-- 2nd ed. Includes bibliographical references and index~ 1. English language--Rhetoric. 2. Culture--Problems, exercises, etc. 3. Readers--Cugure. 4. Critical thinldng. 5. College readers. 6. Report writing. 7. SemJotlcs. I. Rader. Dean. II. Title. PE1408.$48785 2006 808.0427-~1c22 2005013269

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