Getting the Suburbs Right

I think you could rightly describe me as a bit anti-suburbia. I mostly blame the authors of Suburban Nation. Once you see what they show you, you can’t un-see it, particularly when it is everywhere, all around us and still being built at a furious pace.

I remember being quite proud of myself when I figured out that the city and the country are not hostile polarities, but rather a complementary dyad. It was just that stuff in between that I saw as creating all the havoc. I think I was at least partially right. There is much that is not working with what we call the suburbs, but I think I was seeing the problem in the wrong way.

Human settlements, as others have pointed out, are complex systems. They are more like the human body then a machine. Complex systems tend to follow the same general patterns. They are systems made up of components, each working miraculously in coherence with the others to produce a mutually beneficial equilibrium. A human body is composed of many different tissue, cell, and organ types all working together. A human settlement is made up of its own component parts such as its inhabitants, building types, streets, neighborhoods and districts, again all working together in a miraculous harmony that Jane Jacobs has famously compared to an intricate ballet.

When you stop to think about it, it’s really quite amazing. Here we have this complex mélange of systems, each that can go wrong in a myriad of disastrous ways, each with its own ends, objectives and vulnerabilities and yet, for the most part, it works. It works well enough that it is not only able to sustain itself but to actually perpetuate itself and proliferate. All life is really the miraculous story of this emergent coherence and its multi-billion year track record of success.

The mechanisms to maintain coherence are just as varied and complex as the parts themselves. One such mechanism is a series of transitional areas. There is a complex layering of cell types from the interior of the stomach to the exterior of the stomach that separates the corrosive environment appropriate to the stomach from the rest of the viscera.

There is a transition from the exterior skin to the muscle layer to perform a similar role. There are transitional layers all throughout the body each keeping the stuff that is right in one system out of another system where it can become deadly — the blood out the spinal fluid, the spinal fluid out the blood and the poo out of both of them. Crucially, these transitional layers are not just walls. They don’t just separate incompatible environments they also intelligently allow the transfer of stuff back and forth with a complex arrangement of triggers, switches and pathways.

Of course, things still go wrong. My wife’s family happens to suffer from a rare form of tumor growth called meningioma. Meningiomas are benign tumors that form in the series of transitional membranes between the skull and the brain called the meninges. She has had several family members that have had to have surgery performed to remove the tumors, and the side effects of the tumors have been seizures, fatigue, headaches, loss of vision and smell, among other things. It really depends on where they form and what area of the brain they end up impinging on.

Tumors, whether the benign type of the meningioma or the malignant type of various types of cancers, are excellent examples of how a system can fall out of coherence and the destruction they can cause in the process. Tumors grow and impinge on or proliferate through the surrounding areas, causing stress and sometimes failure of the neighboring systems. Tumors grow into the brain, arresting mental functioning, they press into the lungs decreasing the capacity of oxygenation, they constrict the bowels preventing proper waste removal. In the worst cases, the individual stresses lead to overwhelm of connected systems until the meta-system loses its ability to compensate and the entire body fails.

While we may use general terms to describe the problem, the truth is that tumors represent hundreds, if not thousands of unique systemic breakdowns and yet they all happen to follow the same pattern.

It makes a bit more sense when you turn back the evolutionary clock and look at the strategies that served our single-cell predecessors. For a homogenous colony of cells there is a benefit to simple proliferation. The more of you there are, the more there is a chance that there will be those of you that will survive stressors, find new niches to exploit and produce offspring. Our predecessors were doing this successfully for billions of years before they even decided to start cooperating with one another to make multicellular organisms. It’s deeply programmed into all cellular life. Cooperation then, is more the exception than the rule.

Unfortunately, what happens to be a great strategy for single celled organisms is disastrous in a complex organism. The proliferation of any homogenous group of cells in a body is basically a tumor. When it really gets out of control we call it a cancer. Complex organisms have evolved mechanisms such as apoptosis to counteract this, but the tendency to proliferate is a far more primitive adaptive strategy and as such continues to emerge as a problem. The story of Henrietta Lacks is a poignant reminder of this tendency. The cervical HeLa cells have continued to proliferate for decades now, but clearly at the tragic expense of Henrietta Lacks.

As with the human body, human settlements display a pattern of transitional zones (obvious to any one that has ever made a trip from the country to the city or vice versa). These transitional zones are best described with the concept of the rural-urban transect. The city and country perform distinct functions and then there are transitional areas between them that separate and negotiate between the areas. One of these transitional layers is the Sub-urban zone. As seen in the image below, it is one slice in the natural and gradual transition from city to country.

You can see the pattern illustrated in this image of Reims, France. (I chose Reims because its population is close to the population of my own city, Salt Lake — about 200K). You can see the general transition from settlement to country and nature.

With google maps and the aid of street view you can make a slightly more granular analysis.

Every human settlement before WWII would have followed this pattern pretty closely: a town core, a transitional ring of urban and suburban development, and then a rural/natural zone.

It’s important to point out here that the boundaries I’ve drawn here aren’t totally discrete. When you zoom in closer and start dropping down into the street view you really get a sense of the gradual nature of the transect. There is a gradient from T6 to T3; from the Urban Core to the Sub-Urban. Even most of the stuff I’ve classified here as T3, Suburban, could pass as T4 General Urban. You can see that in a selection of images I grabbed from street view.

All of this is happening within a 2.5 miles radius; a complete transition from T6, Urban Core to T2, Rural. By bike you could go from the city center to the countryside in 10 minutes.

You could be in a forest in 20.

So how does this compare to my own city? Here is an aerial view of Salt Lake City at the same zoom level as Reims. A keen eye should already be picking up some obvious differences.

To bring things into focus, here is the transect breakdown of SLC next to Reims.

Fortunately, SLC is bordered by mountains on one side and wetlands on the other, so there is a limit to how far we can develop to the East or the West. This is nice because we still get some fairly convenient access to nature, but without the constraints there is a good bet we would have spread out East to West as well. For comparison, here are two more American cities with a population of around 200k. Des Moines, Iowa and Frisco, Texas.

Without doing a breakdown of the transect you can still get a pretty good sense of what is going on here. If Reims is healthy, its American counterparts look sick. I see the human settlement equivalent of a meningioma. I see the proliferation of a single part beyond what is healthy for the entire system.

Just as with the bodily tumor, the imbalance causes stresses on the proper functioning of its neighboring parts. Viable agricultural lands must compete with sprawl, urban cores are gutted to expedite travel to the periphery, and the entire system is exhausted by the immense resource needs of the growth.

And just as with the human body, when the stress is great enough and the neighboring systems can’t compensate, the entire system collapses. That we are already seeing stressors on the system is clear (see: Case Studies). If we don’t do something to amend the problem, it will only be a matter of time before we see a wider systemic collapse.

This analogy could probably be taken further as far as investigating causes and potential interventions. I’m sure there is an overlap where novel inputs are concerned, particularly novel inputs that introduce surpluses of energy into the system. I’d be willing to bet there are overlaps in the solutions as well. What analogues to apoptosis do we have in human settlements? Regardless, I think the general analogy is helpful in bringing the problem into focus.

In particular, the analogy reveals that solving the problem doesn’t mean getting rid of suburbs any more than curing skin cancer means getting rid of the skin (at least not all of it). The form itself is not unhealthy. The failure is in its disproportionate growth. As a matter of fact, the suburbs have the potential to be the most interesting places in the natural fabric of the transect. To take a quote from the article on the Rural-Urban Transect linked above:

“In nature — the richness is always at those overlapping edges. The rest is close to monoculture.” — Andres Duany

As a cartoonist, this is something that speaks to me at a deep intuitive level. The excitement of telling a story with sequential images is about the organic connection and flow from one image to another to create something richer than any constituent image can do by itself. It’s about exploration, discovery and wonder. It tells a story (or should) and provides something meaningful and sustaining to the reader. Whether or not we are aware of it, the fabric of our human environment works in the same way. Joseph Campbell had this to say about it:

I mean, you can tell what’s informed the society by the size of what the building is, that’s the tallest building in the place. When you approach a medieval town, the cathedral’s the tallest thing in the place. When you approach a 17th century city, it’s the political palace that’s the tallest thing in the place. And when you approach a modern city, it’s office buildings and dwellings that are the tallest things in the place.

And if you go to Salt Lake City, you’ll see the whole thing illustrated right in front of your face. First, the temple was built. The temple was built right in the center of the city. I mean, this was the proper organization, that’s the spiritual center from which all flows in all directions. And then the capitol was built right beside the temple, and it’s bigger than the temple. And now the biggest thing is the office building that takes care of the affairs of both the temple and the political building.

I think this is an idea we ought to take very seriously, and just as a comic book can reveal an inner truth, so can the rhythm of our environments, whether built or natural. They tell us who we are and what we value and aspire to as a community. I imagine a trip from the center of Reims to its periphery and what it must say about its inhabitants and how they connect to the world around them. Having made many trips by bike, foot and car through Salt Lake City, the message is less clear. There are many things to fix and steps to take, but first we ought to get that part clear. What matters to us? Who are we and who do we want to be? If the answers to those questions are not sufficiently represented in the places we build, then it’s time to build something new.

Perhaps we should start with a temple, but that’s a topic for another time.