City Lit: Heavy Suburban

Heralded by breathless apostles as an antidote to sprawl, New Urbanism is a burgeoning movement already reshaping American suburbs. It’s also gaining currency as a blueprint for urban revitalization. Blending traditional town and city design, New Urbanism promotes the creation of dense, walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods supported by mass transit. In How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken, Alex Marshall delivers a series of essays that ultimately call it a sham, a type of faux urbanism “so far more of an illness than a cure.”

If you want to score points against New Urbanism, there is no fatter target than Celebration, the movement’s flagship “neo-traditionalist” town just outside Orlando, Florida. Built in the mid 1990s, the 5,000-acre bedroom community is a pretty and very charming reproduction of a 19th century village, right down to the front porches, picket fences, and town square. Its compact layout, which favors the pedestrian over the car, artfully weaves an urban fabric within a design aesthetic that produces something like a modern-day Our Town.

Marshall, a freelance journalist based in New York City, uses Celebration--already the topic of two book-length critiques--as a blistering deconstruction of New Urbanism and its failures. Peeling back the retro veneer, he uncovers “a conventional suburban subdivision pretending to be a small town.” Most residents don’t actually work in Celebration; they get in their cars (hidden in garages behind the houses), hop on the freeway a few minutes away, and drive to their jobs in Orlando. After poking around the so-called downtown, Marshall also learns that Main Street is made up of fancy boutiques and pricey cafes catering mostly to Disney World tourists and curiosity-seekers, without whom the stores could not survive.

This masquerade would be harmless if Celebration weren’t being emulated in hundreds of similar projects currently underway around the country. The formula is a fraud, says Marshall, because 1) nearly all the New Urbanist housing developments are built in the outer suburban rings of a city, not within its core; 2) despite clustered housing, the density is still not high enough to provide the foot traffic necessary to sustain small stores in a retail district; and 3) though the neighborhoods are pedestrian-friendly, cars remain the dominant mode of transportation for work and shopping.

To Marshall, this last point is the key failing of New Urbanism, because the places we live are ultimately shaped by the transportation systems that serve our daily needs. “How we get around determines how we live,” he asserts: Subways lend themselves to dense neighborhoods and friendly walks to the corner store; highways translate into impersonal trips to Wal-Mart. Most New Urbanist towns, including Celebration, don’t rely on any form of mass transit. “What Celebration is trying to do,” writes Marshall, “is re-create an urban neighborhood without creating the transportation network that spawned such neighborhoods. Which is not possible. So what you get is a peculiar thing, an automobile-oriented subdivision dressed up to look like a small pre-car-centered town.”

Looking to contrast a real urban neighborhood against the counterfeit Celebration town, Marshall turns to another much-dissected urban site: Jackson Heights. Unfortunately, it’s one of the book’s weakest sections, little more than a potpourri of observations on the history and changing demographics of a neighborhood. Marshall paints Jackson Heights as a gleaming bastion of urban life for middle-class strivers, thanks to its high density, bustling street life and all the subway lines connecting it to Manhattan. Never mind that most of the residents of this ever-changing immigrant neighborhood will likely move to the suburbs the first chance they get, a reality he disingenuously ignores.