Room to Grow.

• Author: Staley, Sam
• Position: 'Suburban Nation' examines problems with modern city planning - Critical Essay

What's so bad about the suburbs?

Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk are the husband-and-wife team that pioneered the most influential urban planning movement of the past 20 years, the so-called New Urbanism. From its start in the early 1980s in the Florida Panhandle resort town of Seaside, their design movement has blossomed into a self-styled revolution, one that has won the hearts and minds of thousands of planners, developers, and elected officials. During the Clinton years, both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Housing and Urban Development embraced New Urbanist principles; so have regional planning agencies from Portland to Fort Worth.

In an era when development has become a bad word, the New Urbanism is about more than neighborhood design, as Suburban Nation--the new book by Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and planner Jeff Speck--makes clear. "Americans have been building a national landscape that is largely devoid of places worth caring about," it proclaims. "You are against growth, because you believe that it will make your life worse. And you are correct in that belief."

But the authors aren't really against growth per se. They're just against growth that they didn't design, or that isn't rooted in their principles. At first their rhetoric seems liberating, as they chastise the officials who have prescribed low-density, single-use development through restrictive zoning codes. ("The problem," they write, "is that one cannot easily build Charleston [South Carolina] anymore, because it is against the law.") But the reader quickly learns that for Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck, choice is only good when people choose New Urbanist ideas about growth and planning.

For the authors, the problem with American cities and suburbs is what we might call privatism. Subdivisions lack the public civic centers that were central to traditional neighborhoods, while large, private spaces proliferate. The trio's solution is detailed public regulation, an approach that leaves little room for spontaneity or evolution. "To truly improve quality of life," they write, "the planning codes must define open space with the same degree of precision and concern that they now apply to the design of parking lots." At a minimum, this means dictating the size of yards, the physical position of houses on lots, the type and variety of facades, and site-specific densities.

The result is a paradox: The authors want to take a problem they believe was fundamentally caused by politics, and solve it with...more politics. To them, the problem isn't the rule of experts--it's that the wrong experts have been in charge.

Suburban Nation makes its arguments within an exclusively political and architectural framework, virtually ignoring private real estate markets and the complex interactions between developers and planning boards. For these writers, housing and communities are developed first and foremost according to local codes. Politicians and regulators determine a community's physical design, not developers, builders, or consumers working through the property market.

This account leaves out a great deal. While zoning may prescribe specific densities, it also provides for some flexibility, as with planned unit developments. These are, in effect, negotiated agreements in which planning boards allow companies to develop housing that is largely independent of local codes. Developers often shy away from planned unit developments because of their tremendous up-front political and financial costs: The deliberations are often politically charged, and the projects are scrutinized intensely by both planners and citizens. Nonetheless, people will pay more for a house with features they want, which may include more public open space and less private yard. So if the local housing market is strong--if the potential revenues are higher than the potential political costs--planned unit developments and other alternatives to the standard code may flourish.

This isn't the only thing that Suburban Nation fails to consider. There have been many critiques of the New Urbanism, including dozens of peer-reviewed studies that call many of its basic premises into question. In 1997, for example, University of Southern California economists Peter Gordon and Harry Richardson questioned many of the basic principles underlying "neotraditional" planning in a wide-ranging and frequently cited survey published in the Journal of the American Planning Association, the planning profession's premier scholarly journal. In the same issue of the journal, planner Michael Southworth questioned the viability of neotraditional planning after analyzing two projects that were up and running.

Suburban Nation essentially ignores such critiques, leaving important issues unaddressed and significant questions unanswered. If market forces are important in driving planning and zoning decisions--a point...