Kotkin had another weird piece on Newsweek that I thought deserved a good whack. My responses are in italics.
July 3-10, 2006 issue - Sorry, city sophisticates, but the metropolis of the future may prove far less intensely urban than you hope. For all the focus on trendy downtowns and skyscrapers, the real growth in jobs and population is likely to take place on the periphery. The new urbanism, built around downtown revival and beloved by the celebrated starchitects, will cede pride of place to the "new suburbanism." And not only in the land of free-ranging suburbs, America.
Me:The claim that new urbanism is "built around downtown revival" is a misrepresentation. There are quite a few new urbanist developments in small towns and suburbs (such as Seaside and Celebration). In fact, some pro-urban commentators (Alex Marshall comes to mind) denounce New Urbanists for being willing to build in suburbia.
Very clever of Kotkin to use the term "starchitects" to make New Urbanists seem out of touch with reality. When you can't win the argument, fight with epithets.
In contrast to the powers who fight "sprawl," advocates of the new suburbanism focus on ways to make the periphery work better.
Me: again, see Celebration (and for that matter, other New Urbanist developments like Kentlands and King Farm), all New Urbanist attempts to make the periphery work better.
It's about bringing business and jobs, not just bedrooms, to the outer rings, and reviving main streets in smaller towns and cities, not just in major urban centers. In some senses, the new suburbanism seeks to recover the ideals of early advocates of decentralization such as the early-20th-century British visionary Ebenezer Howard, who proposed dispersing populations into largely self-sustaining "garden cities."
Me: There you go again. We've tried decentralizing jobs for 50 years, and all we've gotten for it are commutes that get longer ... and longer ... and longer. Even though the average commute has increased only slightly, the number of 90-minute commutes has nearly doubled since 1990. (See http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_08/b3921127.htm ) What Kotkin fails to realize is that if the boss moves to northern suburb X and then moves the company along with him, that's great for the boss. And its even great for the other workers who live in northern suburb X. But the workers who live in the southern suburbs are worse off than if they worked downtown, because they have to travel twice as many miles. And the workers who live in the city might as well be dead. The major reason they moved to the city may well have been to be close to work and have a less car-centered life. And instead they have to buy a car and drag themselves to northern suburb X every day. And if they are too poor to afford a car, they have a 90 minute commute on two or three buses if the job is on a bus line, and are out of work if its not.
Correcting the problems of suburbia is an international imperative. Almost everywhere, cities tend toward sprawl, more like much-maligned Los Angeles than like Manhattan, the urbanist's heaven.
Me: Define "tend." In Tokyo, 70% of the commuters get to work through transit, biking or riding - in Stockholm, 69%, in Munich 62%. I don't see a tendency towards sprawl there.
This pattern owes largely to the preference of the middle and working classes for privacy and space—choices ridiculed as boringly bourgeois by urban theorists. "L.A. is the realization of every immigrant's dream—the vassal's dream of his own castle," observed the Italian-born, Los Angeles-based urbanist Edgardo Contini in the 1960s. "Europeans who come here are delighted by our suburbs. Not to live in an apartment! It is a universal aspiration to own your own home." Today, surveys find that 70 to 80 percent of Americans prefer a single-family home and only 15 percent, an apartment in a dense urban area.
Me: Ah, yes, the false dichotomy, between single-family homes (which, in Kotkinland, must always be in suburbs) and apartments (which must always be in the dense urban area). Most people of course prefer owning to renting, given the American dream of getting rich off real estate investments. But another survey asked a different question (this time of Houston voters):Would you personally prefer to live in a suburban setting with larger lots and houses and a longer drive to work and most other places, or in a more central urban setting with smaller homes on smaller lots, and be able to take transit or walk to work and other places?
55 percent preferred the more urban setting. (See http://www.blueprinthouston.org/documents/blueprint_survey_results.doc ). If you ask the question a little differently you get a very different answer!
you get a different result. For example: a survey in Houston asked
These preferences are increasingly universal. In Europe, Canada, Japan and Australia, growth is spilling out of urban centers, even in places that boast extensive mass-transit systems. In London, the center has been losing population since at least the 1960s.
Me: Wrong. Inner London lost population for many decades - but like New York City, it has been regaining population for the past two decades. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_London
In fact, Inner London is doing slightly better than outer London. Inner London's population has increased from 2.5 million to 2.9 million since 1980 (about a 15% increase)- the population of Greater London as a whole increased from 6.8 million to 7.5 million (about 10%). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_London )
As H. G. Wells predicted a century ago, much of southern and central England is a vast suburb of the capital. In Frankfurt, the suburbs now reach out as far as 80 kilometers and in Paris, the center is losing about 1 percent of its population annually as businesses and the middle class move out past the heavily immigrant banlieues. In Japan, too, high prices and congestion have propelled an exodus: between 1970 and 1995, 10 million people settled in suburbs around the main cities of the Kanto Plain, including Tokyo, Yokohama and Kawasaki.
Me: Wrong again. Tokyo is following the same path as London- some depopulation, but increased population in the last couple of Censuses. http://www.chijihon.metro.tokyo.jp/english/PROFILE/OVERVIEW/overview3.htm
And the repopulation of Tokyo and London is a lot more noteworthy than population increases in the USA. The USA has had about 17% growth since 1990 (from 250 million people to 293 million) - so with a tide rising that fast a lot of votes will be lifted. Due to plunging birth rates, Japan's population grew by about 3% (from 123 million to 127 million) and Britian's by about 5% (from 57 million to 60 million).
The impulse of many authorities is to try to stop sprawl and the problems (particularly overdependence on cars and malls) it brings. Planners in cities from Sydney to Portland, Oregon, have imposed "anti-sprawl" strategies that attempt to force people back into dense concentrations. Sydney's strict land-use regime, now under attack from both the political left and right, is helping drive up home prices—and drive young families to less highly regulated Australian cities. In Portland, a similar campaign is pushing development beyond the reach of city planners, across the Columbia River to Washington state.
Me: Sydney's population has increased by about 20% since 1991 (from 3.5 million to 4.2). See http://www.citypopulation.de/Australia-Agglo.html
I don't know my way around Australian census data well enough to focus on "young families" specifically. But given Kotkin's error-filled discussion so far I doubt he knows more than I do. As far as Portland goes, the city of Portland's population grew from 368,000 in 1980 to 533,000 in 2004- not exactly a place where development is being "pushed" to suburbia. Does Mr. Kotkin think Detroit or St. Louis (both of which have lost over 20% of their 1980 population) are more successful?
In contrast, the new suburbanism seeks not to fight market forces, but to address the problems. Many of the brightest ideas can be found in planned communities, often modeled on Howard's garden cities, such as Valencia, California; the Woodlands, outside Houston; Reston, Virginia, or Marne La Vallée outside Paris. They are not mere bedroom communities with malls but boast well-developed business parks, town centers and, in some cases, notably the Woodlands, a large amount of well-preserved, natural open space. Other successful models are being developed in older suburbs. Fullerton, California, and Naperville in Greater Chicago have revived abandoned core districts as centers for entertainment, dining and community events. Naperville has also developed a lovely riverside park that attracts strollers, hikers and bicyclists.
Such patterns of enlightened suburban development could be applied around the world.
Me: The only one of these places that I've been to is Reston. It struck me as a not very well done version of the New Urbanist developments that Kotkin sneers at- a nice little pedestrian-friendly shopping area ringed by a moat of sprawl streets that a pedestrian would be highly unwise to cross. And outside the shopping area its the usual sprawlscape isn't it?
I do think Kotkin actually has a point here. It is important to improve suburbia; but it takes more than just a shopping district to get it right.
Many nations still get it wrong, building anonymous tracts 30 to 50 kilometers from the closest jobs or town center, mainly as bedroom communities for a big city. A leading example of enforced centralization is Seoul, where the average density of more than 14,000 people per square kilometer is three times London's, five times L.A.'s and 10 times that of growing U.S. cities like Houston or Phoenix.
Me: I don't even know what he's saying here. Is Seoul an example of "anonymous tracts 30 or 50 miles out" or an example of "enforced centralization."?
Greater Seoul, in short, is almost hostile to human life, a widening ocean of high-rises with a shrinking number of traditional Korean houses.
Me: If its so hostile to human life, how come 10 million people live there?
Suh Yong-bu, a Korean expert in business demographics, notes that high housing prices and cramped spaces have helped send Korea's birthrate into free-fall, down 30 percent since 1993;
much the same problem is felt in other ultra dense urban societies like Japan and China. "The same patterns can be found throughout Asia," notes demographer Phil Longman, author of the "The Empty Cradle," a study of world population trends. "Once everyone is forced into a small city place, there's literally no room left for kids."
Me: Let's run some numbers (from our friendly US Statistical Abstract, not any fancy shmancy foreign web sites):
Population density Birth rate per 1000
per square mile
South Korea 1277 10.1
Japan 835 9.6
UK 646 10.9
Germany 609 8.5
Italy 511 9.1
China 361 13.0
France 287 12.3
Spain 209 10.1
The above table compares Kotkin's unholy trinity (China, South Korea, Japan) to five affluent European countries.
South Korea, the only nation that really is much denser than the rest, has a birthrate that is higher than two of the European countries, the same as Spain, and only slightly lower than Britian and those of France). Japan is also ahead of two of the five.
China has a somewhat higher birth rate- but then again, China isn't even "ultra dense", so here Kotkin flat-out doesn't know what he is talking about. Maybe birth rates have more to do with affluence than density.
Certainly, the history of the United States bears this out. American cities were much denser 60 years ago; St. Louis, for example, had more than twice its current population in 1950. But were birth rates really lower?
Um, no. The American birth rate plunged from 24 per 1000 in 1950 to 14 per 1000 today (Statistical Abstract, Table 72).
Now it may be that there is a birth rate problem in big, dense cities. But Kotkin sure hasn't made the case.
We now see the beginnings of a battle over the future of the suburbs. In Britain—where suburbs are home to roughly half the population, but the bias of most planners and politicians is still toward the city—there's a growing movement to bring arts, from galleries to symphonies, to smaller villages. The increasingly high cost of city living may help pro-suburban forces from Britain to Japan, where the government also fights sprawl with limits on megamalls and other measures.
Perhaps the ultimate test will come in the fastest-growing major economies, India and China. Mall developers like Aeon Co. Ltd. (the same people now being told to back off in Japan) are rushing to build suburban homes and shopping areas in India, outside Mumbai, and in China outside Shanghai, Guangzhou, Tianjin and Beijing. Many of them are following American, Australian or Canadian models. There's one Chinese development named "Orange County," named after the famous southern California suburb. To hip urbanites, of course, that will sound like a bad joke. To the world's aspiring majority, it sounds like a bright promise.
Me: First of all, how does Kotkin know what the "world's aspiring majority" thinks? Has he polled the hundreds of millions of Chinese and Indians? And doesn't the existence of these suburban developments have something to do with the fact that governments are essentially subsidizing these developments with highways? (See http://www.china.org.cn/english/2004/Jun/99324.htm - Chinese highway system has doubled since 1980; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Highways_Development_Project - India planning major highway expansion).
