Many public officials and planning professionals were first introduced to the principles of New Urbanism through the vehicle of lectures and slide shows documenting the ugliness of suburban sprawl and the intelligence of urban design as practiced in many places in the preautomobile era. Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Peter Calthorpe, and a handful of coconspirators carried these slides to countless audiences all over the country in the early and mid-1990s. As a model of their intentions, they offered Seaside, the residential community in north Florida that was designed by Duany and Plater-Zyberk in the 1980s, complete with sidewalks, front porches, a town square, and a whole array of other reminders of the old-fashioned, pedestrian-friendly American small town.
The first half of the 1990s brought the New Urbanism a reputation and a following far beyond what its founders could have predicted. Not that a whole collection of Seasides emerged on the American landscape—the number of communities built according to the original Duany principles remained tiny. But the march of the New Urbanists through the forest of American public opinion was all but unstoppable. By mid-1995, they had reached the cover of Newsweek. By 1996, The New York Times was calling them “the most important phenomenon to emerge in American architecture in the post–Cold War era.”
Planners in cities and towns began drafting master plans laced with references to “mixed-use development,” “pedestrian friendliness,” “resource efficiency,” and a whole battery of terms that might have come straight out of the New Urbanist charter. The annual summer meetings of the Congress for the New Urbanism quickly grew from single-room bull sessions into big-time extravaganzas, with hundreds of participants, dozens of speakers, and coverage by numerous reporters from America and overseas.
It was an extremely heady but also a dangerous position to be in. On the one hand, the New Urbanists couldn’t be said to have altered the physical landscape of America in any significant way. On the other hand, they had done just well enough to spawn a growing army of imitators.
If there weren’t many Seasides being built in the 1990s, there clearly were lots of little pieces of Seaside turning up in otherwise conventional suburban developments: sidewalks, porches, Victorian street lamps, and other snatches of neotraditional architectural detail. And there were lots of developers who felt that describing a subdivision as neotraditional—or New Urbanist—was a good way to get the houses sold.
The one convincing criticism of Seaside that continued for years was that there was nothing very urban about it. Seaside was (and is) a lovely little traditional town. It was the setting for the movie The Truman Show, much of whose purpose was to tell a story about a reality TV show set in an idyllic community. But it was largely a beachfront resort establishment, with few of its home owners living there year-round. There were no large or even midsize cities anywhere near it. It was a dazzling display of many of the refinements of the early twentieth-century small town. But it did not point the way to urbanizing suburbia, or urbanizing anything, for that matter.
Nor did Kentlands, the next major New Urbanist development, launched in the Maryland suburbs, more than twenty miles from Washington, D.C. Kentlands was no beachfront resort—it was a year-round residence for people who wanted sidewalks, porches, neighborly community, and all the other important accoutrements of New Urbanist thinking. Unlike Seaside, Kentlands was to include a successful retail component. When Kentlands was designed by Duany and Plater-Zyberk in the late 1980s, it had a clever plan for a shopping center that could be pedestrian-friendly and car-friendly at the same time. The stores, even the big-box retail units, would front on a tree-lined boulevard that the residents could use to walk to shopping and back home. The rear of the same stores would face a big parking lot and a busy highway, but nobody inside Kentlands would need to look at that. They could treat the village center as if it were a small-town Main Street in the 1940s.
There was no way to be sure how that plan would have worked, because the recession of the early 1990s came along and bankrupted the original developer, and the bank that took over the project didn’t see it as practical. A shopping center was eventually built just across the road from Kentlands, and the residents could walk to it, but it was everything the New Urbanism abhors: cookie-cutter, strip mall–type retail units separated from the street by acres of parking lot.
Kentlands hasn’t been a failure by any means. As the years went by, it regrouped in an increasingly urbanist direction and attracted a larger pedestrian-friendly retail component. But it is not a transit-oriented development: The way to get there is by car, and only by car. By 2005, the New Urbanists had demonstrated that they could build successful residential projects on greenfield suburban land. But they had not demonstrated that they could comfortably put together all the pieces that genuinely urbanizing suburbia would need: residential, retail, offices, and public transportation. In other words, density.
A more versatile effort turned up a few years later near Portland, Oregon, at Orenco Station, thirty minutes from the center of the city by light-rail train. It’s a third-of-a-mile walk between Orenco’s train station and its downtown, and the two are separated by a long stretch of land with condominiums on one side and an open grass field on the other. Downtown Orenco has what looks like a Victorian Main Street shopping block, with big bay windows in the storefronts and round turrets on top of the buildings. Surrounding this business district are modestly sized English cottages and Craftsman bungalows with the same period look as the shopping street. Behind the houses stands a village green.
Orenco was a developer’s high-stakes gamble on two hundred acres of empty farmland, fifteen miles from downtown Portland. It was designed to be eighteen hundred residential units, twenty-seven thousand square feet of retail, and thirty thousand square feet of office space constructed around an old-fashioned main street, in the densest, most urbanized suburban project built anywhere in the country up to that point.
And it was the best test of the theory that traditional urban design, public transit, and suburban life could coexist in harmony. It is possible—perhaps not easy, but possible—to live in Orenco without a car. Hillsboro, a magnet for high-tech employment in what locals call “Silicon Forest,” is on the same Westside rail line. Intel has a big facility not far from Orenco’s borders.
The developers of Orenco were convinced they had created a path breaking new form of urbanity in the suburbs that would spread like wildfire in the next few years, appealing to empty nesters and a city-seeking younger generation as well. “It is so far beyond what anyone else has done,” one of the developers exulted. “But it is going to be the future of the country.”
When it came to merging the important elements of urbanized suburbia, Orenco jumped off to a flashy start. Within a year, Orenco’s town center had a florist, a dry cleaner, a wine-and-cheese store, an Indian restaurant, a steakhouse, and an Italian café. A stockbroker, a dentist, and an insurance agent had set up shop in second-floor offices above the retail units. But there was very little shopping for everyday residential needs. For that sort of shopping, residents of Orenco had to drive a mile or so down Cornell Road, a four-lane arterial highway that ran in front of the town center and was carrying twenty-five thousand cars a day. After a decade, much of the main-street retail had disappeared. There was an upscale grocery store, but relatively few other shops in the center of town. And despite the presence of the light-rail station a third of a mile from the main street, most residents were still driving to work.
That highlighted what may have been the one flaw in this whole ambitious experiment. Bold as they were, Orenco’s designers didn’t dare build the traditional shopping street right next to the station, as would have been the case in an old-fashioned city or prewar suburb. If they had, Orenco might have had the compact charm of true urbanism. But then the local merchants would have had few customers other than the immediate residents. Placing the downtown one-third of a mile away, next to a multilane highway, created the opportunity to attract driv
e-by traffic as well. But it left the dream of a true urbanized suburb still unfulfilled.
The next decade saw the emergence of a series of New Urbanist communities, among them Celebration, the large-scale project created by the Disney corporation on empty land in central Florida just a few miles from the Disney amusement parks. In a way, Celebration was the most ambitious of the New Urbanist experiments. It was a brand-new town with a goal of ten thousand residents by 2010 (it actually reached about eleven thousand), and main-street shopping that the developer was in a position to subsidize. Celebration became a tourist attraction in its own right; many of the visitors to Disney World and Epcot Center drove a few extra miles to take a look at the built-from-scratch traditional community, its town square and main street, and its mixture of Victorian houses, Colonials, and Craftsman bungalows surrounded by generously sized parks. But like Orenco, Celebration didn’t solve the density problem; it lacked transit connections and struggled to achieve the critical mass to make main-street commercial development viable on its own.
Nearly two decades after its founding, New Urbanism was still trying to create a community that embodied all the elements of its doctrine and seeking to retrofit or urbanize the suburbs in a way that assembled all the pieces of the puzzle. But there was an immense experiment aimed at doing just that. It was being built at Tysons Corner, in the Virginia suburbs ten miles west of Washington, D.C.
TYSONS CORNER has never been anything much to look at. That doesn’t mean simply that it’s unattractive—although it is—but that when you pass through it, along the main commercial strip of Route 7, in northern Virginia’s Fairfax County, you don’t even get the feeling that anything substantial is there. You see a long, loose string of office buildings built in the 1970s and 1980s, scattered over a stretch of two or three miles, few of them close together or in any way congruent with one another. You pass two huge regional shopping malls, both tucked behind vast parking lots and barely visible from the highway. You don’t know for sure when you’ve reached the place, and there’s no way to tell when you’ve left.
The utter placelessness of Tysons Corner is one important truth about it. But there’s an even more important one: It is the twelfth-largest business district in the United States. More than one hundred thousand people work there. Every morning and every evening, forty thousand cars inch down Route 7 and Route 123, overwhelmed arterial roads that lack the capacity to handle the traffic at anything more than a glacial pace.
In the nearly five decades since the modern history of Tysons began, Fairfax County and its leaders have passed through several stages in trying to come to terms with what it is and what it means. First, there was sheer novelty—the presence of glass towers and upscale shopping on what had been farmland only a few years before. Then in the 1980s came an attitude of somewhat jaded acceptance: It’s an eyesore, but it’s a money machine, and besides, there’s nothing we can do to change it now. Only with the start of the new century did planners and a few politicians dare to express a radical idea: A region that can produce the twelfth-biggest business center in the country ought to be able to civilize it and bring in some of the elements of urban living.
It was in the summer of 2001 that Andres Duany came to Fairfax with slides of San Francisco and Paris, and told an audience of suburbanites that he could build something equally appealing for them right there in the Virginia suburbs. Genuine urbanism was within their grasp—if they were willing to go for it. “This is a fantastic opportunity,” he exulted, “to create a truly wonderful place.” It was like Pinocchio being told that if he shaped up, he might eventually become a real live boy.
But when Duany presented his dream of urbanizing Tysons, he wasn’t simply talking about trees or parks or fashionable boulevards. He was talking about a dozen residential towers, tall enough to accommodate twelve thousand people, big crowds on the streets, and heavy-duty public transportation. He was talking about density. He admitted it. “High density is not a punishment if it is built in true urbanism,” Duany insisted that day. “High density is a true delight.”
The audience was not swept away. “What Duany wants to do is put a city here,” one resident complained. “We don’t want a city here.” One of the elected county supervisors, Gerald Connolly, was even more blunt. “I think he is being arrogant,” Connolly said, “and, frankly, ignorant. Any proposal that intense is dead on arrival.” And Connolly was right: Duany’s idea never went anywhere. Touchy as they might have been about the reputation of Tysons Corner, the citizens of Fairfax were not ready for density in 2001.
If you work in local government anywhere, the odds are you have heard the joke that there are two things Americans can’t stand: sprawl and density. I refer to it as a joke, but in fact it comes close to being a literal truth. Millions of Americans who live in places like Fairfax County visit Boston and San Francisco and wish they could re-create some of that urbanity and elegance for themselves. But faced with the reality of what true urban sophistication requires—height, big crowds, and strangers from the city flocking in on trains—they back off. That’s the deadlock of density.
It’s quite plausible to argue that the deadlock will not be broken in our lifetimes: that if the price of containing sprawl is to turn suburbs into cities, it is a price American suburbanites simply will not pay. But it is also plausible to argue that slowly and almost imperceptibly, the deadlock of density is being replaced by a willingness to take a few risks. It is even plausible to make that case in Fairfax County.
Fairfax didn’t welcome Duany, but just five years later, the county board gave its approval to a stunning amount of dense high-rise development—as much as Duany ever proposed. In 2006, the board voted for a plan designed to surround the original 1968 shopping mall with eight towers, some as tall as thirty stories, containing 1,350 condos and apartments, four office buildings, and a three-hundred-room hotel. And that was just on one side of the road. Across Route 123, where the second big mall is located, there was a plan for eight more towers, most of them designed for offices.
The developer of this project, the Macerich Co. of California, pressed all the right New Urbanist buttons. Its computerized graphics envisioned spacious plazas, sculpture gardens, skating rinks, and performance space. Macerich talked about making the intersection of routes 7 and 123 into a new “Central Park,” a “100 percent downtown corner.”
Most intriguing of all, Macerich promised to take the blank acres of asphalt that have characterized Tysons for decades and superimpose a grid that would provide fifty-four additional pedestrian-friendly streets for traffic to move in, generate a huge increase in sidewalk capacity, provide up to fourteen thousand curbside parking spaces, and in the end create something that wouldn’t just possess the density of a city but would actually look like a city.
All of this was to be timed to the extension of a Metro transit line, scheduled to reach Tysons Corner in 2013 or shortly thereafter. The Metro station will be right across from the redesigned mixed-use mall; all the residential towers are supposed to be within easy walking distance of the station—some literally in its shadow.
But there are some excellent reasons to be skeptical. The original transit plan, favored by Macerich as well as by local residents, was to place the subway line underground, leaving all the surface land around the station free for urban amenities. That didn’t happen. The U.S. Department of Transportation and the Virginia congressional delegation said going underground would cost more money, and they didn’t want to pay for it. So rail transit will come to Tysons in the form of a seventy-foot-high elevated track along Route 123, with disembarking passengers required to go down to the street and then climb back up a bridge to get to the plaza and the towers. It’s not exactly the best way to signal the presence of an urban village.
However, the really important part—and the hardest part—is the grid. Developers know how to build thirty-story buildings; they know how to create plazas with skating rinks. But retrofitting seventeen hundred a
cres of suburban asphalt with a network of walkable streets will be an enormous challenge, one that will require huge investments of money and determination from both the developer and the government. The plain truth is that nobody has ever done this before—not on the scale that is being called for at Tysons Corner. And yet if the grid doesn’t happen, Tysons may never be a vibrant city or any kind of city at all. It may just be a collection of tall buildings arranged a little more compactly than the ones that are there now.
In the summer of 2010, Tysons Corner was a jumble of construction activity, but it was all subway. The residential, retail, and office developers had all delayed their plans for the new walkable city, a casualty of the national bank lending crunch and a glut of suburban office space. But the county board had just reaffirmed its support for the entire project, residential towers, gridded streets, and all. The developers insisted they remained committed to it. All seemed convinced that when the transit line opens, New Urbanist development fervor will rise again. Macerich said officially that it would continue to take its time and “would be guided by market demand.” A spokesman for another development company said that “it took forty years to get to this point, and significant changes are going to take another couple of decades.” But Adam Ducker, of the real estate advisory firm RCLCO, remained exultant. “There are lots of places like Tysons Corner,” he told a Washington Post columnist, “but nobody has demonstrated how you can really do this. Nobody has the mix of political, development community, and general population buy-in to make it happen.”
None of this is made easier by the changes in transportation policy virtually guaranteed by the change in political leadership in a county such as Fairfax every several years. There will be many approaches to transportation based on electoral decisions in the long years before any elaborate plan for Tysons Corner is finally realized. But the crucial work has begun. It is hard to imagine any turning back from the overarching idea of an urbanized place in what would seem to be the unlikeliest of suburbs.
The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City Page 23
