A Different Kind of Urb

February 18, 2001
A Different Kind of Urb
A plan for a livable city, the authors argue, involves the curtailing of sprawl.

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First Chapter: 'The Regional City'

By SUZANNAH LESSARD

THE REGIONAL CITY
Planning for the End of Sprawl.
By Peter Calthorpe and William Fulton.
Illustrated. 304 pp. Washington:
Island Press. Cloth, $55. Paper, $35.

n the first half of the 20th century there was a vigorous, deeply felt discussion, led by Lewis Mumford, among others, about the spread of cities, the ways in which irrepressible American growth might be absorbed by our landscape, and how different patterns of development might influence national culture in the future. Robert Fishman, a scholar of urban planning (who contributed a foreword to ''The Regional City''), has called this the ''urban conversation.'' In the second half of the century the conversation died out, in part because of the disastrous failure of urban renewal and high-rise public housing, which discouraged everyone about trying to shape the built world for the better. More recently, there have been local land-use innovations and attempts to cope with the effects of urban sprawl within various professions and in the political arena, but except for a simplistic, snobbish, largely uninformed condemnation of ''suburbia,'' there has been little general conversation about the shape our landscape was taking. Meanwhile, under cover of silence, largely unrestrained growth accelerated, to the point that the consumption of open land by development now grows at rates far greater than the population, even grows in places where the population is actually declining.
Among those interested in the sprawl issue have been people worried about the racial and economic polarization generated by uncontrolled growth; environmentalists concerned about the impact on the natural world; and, more recently, local residents protesting a decline in their quality of life -- as often as not, it's traffic that creates the flashpoint. There are also those for whom the real problem is just the sheer ugliness of so much sprawl, combined with the loss of the rural landscape, and who have worked to create land trusts and other forms of preservation.
The designers, however, did not show up as a significant force until a few years ago. The most prominent innovators from that quarter are the self-named New Urbanists, best known for plans modeled on old-fashioned small towns -- most famously Celebration, Fla. -- which they offer as an alternative to traditional suburban subdivisions because they are compact, provide more diverse forms of housing at different income levels, are more aesthetically pleasing and above all are conducive to community in that they encourage walking and neighborliness. There are problems with this neotraditional approach (some find it Disnified, others think it out of sync with contemporary life), but whether or not it contributes to the civilizing of sprawl in the long run, there can be no question that the New Urbanists have made a major contribution -- first, by engaging the problem of sprawl, which establishment architecture has largely ignored, and second, by reviving the urban conversation in a big way. As the only fully developed alternative on the planning and design table, the New Urbanist product poses the challenge, ''If not this, then what?'' Furthermore, and of even greater benefit, it turns out that design is the issue around which other professional perspectives on sprawl are most naturally drawn in and related to one another.
The architect Peter Calthorpe is a charter member of the New Urbanist group who has worked to control sprawling growth directly in a number of places, and whose principal contribution to New Urbanist thought has been the creation of plans structured by public transportation; transit-oriented development, or T.O.D. as it's known, was the subject of his earlier book ''The Next American Metropolis.'' In ''The Regional City,'' written with William Fulton, a writer who has published extensively in this area, he takes a larger picture of the economic, social and environmental factors involved in design. The two authors are better in some areas than others, but their generalist lens makes the discussion useful for readers who are new to the subject. Readers concerned about the fate of the places where they live will find a context within which to begin to think about the problem in meaningful, effective ways, and those who have been focused on one or another aspect of sprawl will find in this book a satisfying opening out of the subject toward its larger implications. All readers, whether they agree or disagree with the proposals in this book, will emerge seeing the world differently.
The key word in all this is ''regional,'' and there is no one in the conversation who contests the belief that the only realistic way to think about our evolving world is in terms of regions rather than in terms of cities or even in terms of the country as a whole. As Calthorpe and Fulton demonstrate, ecology, traffic, pollution, even social life, are all regional, even though our political jurisdictions do not reflect this reality. And the clinching factor is that the global economy is regional. Only the larger, more diverse entity of the region has the multifaceted strength required to compete in the global market, which is why planners can now say with great force that if one part of a region suffers, the whole suffers and becomes less competitive, and that therefore regional planning and a sense of the overall public interest must become a part of our lives.
This is gospel in the inner circles of the conversation, but Calthorpe and Fulton bring in a new idea, latent in the discussion much of the time but put forward boldly in the book's title. The notion of a ''regional city'' contrasts immediately with the more commonly used term, ''metropolitan region.'' The latter suggests a pattern of growth with a city at its center, whereas a ''regional city'' suggests a pattern that is more like a constellation, with many centers. This is, in fact, what is happening in the landscape of sprawl, as ''centers'' spring up not only on the suburban edges of traditional cities but sometimes way out in the middle of nowhere. The term ''regional city'' accepts something about sprawl that has been long resisted -- that it is, in effect, eclipsing the old cities and the hierarchical, solar-system configuration. It implies a landscape in which the natural areas become interstitial, rather than encompassing, in which undeveloped land is a sanctuary, or a ''community separator'': that is, if the communities are separated at all. This is already what we live with in much of America today.
Calthorpe and Fulton move from describing the various regional factors that must define the struggle with sprawl to the planning principles that emerge to the ways in which public policy intersects with the issue. Next comes a section in which some particular regional cities -- among them Portland, Ore., Salt Lake City and the Twin Cities -- are examined to see how efforts to make them coherent and workable have succeeded or failed. The last section is an analysis of the possibilities in older suburbs and traditional cities.
The text is not altogether jargon-free, and there are passages where the sense of engagement drains away; there is a feeling sometimes of grinding out a gospel. But over all, the book is accessible and well written, animated by a sense of the large relevance of the matter at hand; and there are many color maps and illustrations. One can complain that the approach is still too narrow, in that the authors are susceptible to imagining that design can solve all problems. And one could wish for more depth in the range of references and vision. But the radicalism of accepting sprawl as a fact, and then working toward civilizing it through the understanding that the aesthetics of the built world are connected to all dimensions of life, is enough for now.

Suzannah Lessard, the author of ''The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family,'' is working on a book about sprawl.

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