more on towns
In relation to Jim’s post on small towns, it’s interesting to look at Roger Scruton’s essay in the Spring issue of City Journal about the architect Léon Krier and his ideas on town planning. One of Krier’s core commitments is the “ten-minute rule,” according to which people should live no more than a ten-minute walk from work, recreation, worship, and so on. Interestingly, in light of Jim’s claim that towns are most fiscally efficient at a population of 10,000, Krier thinks that that’s close to the upper limit of optimal community size. When a town gets larger than that, Krier would like to see a new one being created nearby, with its own center, rather than encouraging suburban expansion. Krier put this idea into practice when he designed Poundbury, a new town on the outskirts of Dorchester in Dorset.
I wrote a post some months ago — not at the moment recoverable from our archives — about the varieties of suburbia, and I mentioned the fact that the place where I live, Wheaton, Illinois, is commonly and rightly called a suburb of Chicago, but also has its own integrity: a downtown area with shops, restaurants, and so on. (It’s a fifteen-minute walk from my house, which I think might be acceptable to Krier.) And this is true of many suburbs that surround the Big City; they offer the features of town life that Jim celebrates and Krier tries to implement, though they do so not as a result of wise planning but through historical accident: most of them came into being at around the same time that Chicago itself did, and developed independent identities long before the Urban Beast extended its four-lane tentacles and embraced them.
But these towns only partially realize Krier’s dream, because many of the people who live in them work in Chicago, usually taking the Metra train in. And almost all of the suburbs are too big, which means that only a portion of their residents get to benefit from the remains of the original small-town structure. Those four-lane tentacles are key here: I live just north (just townwards) of Roosevelt Road, otherwise known as Illinois Highway 38, which runs basically from the Chicago lakefront to the Mississippi River, and it makes a highly effective if informal boundary. Much of Wheaton lies south of Roosevelt Road, but people who live on that side don’t gravitate to the downtown area nearly as much as those of us who live on the north side of the road. People rarely think of walking into town who have to cross a frantically busy multi-lane road to get there; but for those of us who only have to walk tree-lined sidewalks, it’s a much more comfortable prospect. Nearly 60,000 people live in Wheaton, but for how many is it, functionally, a town rather than a suburb? About 10,000, I’d guess.
Alan,
I thought of your earlier post when I read Jim’s, and yours is an important point: there’s a big difference between what we could call “standalone” small towns and those that depend upon a nearby metropole. Sadly, our current economic arrangements mean that small towns without a mother city have a hard time attracting the human capital that’s needed for a thriving community.
— Matt Frost · Jun 7, 03:11 PM · #
Very good point, Matt. Alas.
— Alan Jacobs · Jun 7, 03:26 PM · #
Alan,
I read Jim’s post with interest because I thought he made an interesting case for small towns, while admitting that their very homogeneity is a cause for worry. Unfortunately I think the lack of outsiders is the cause for worry and trumps all the advantages a small community has.
However, and correct me if I’m wrong, Jim’s case for small towns is a case for the virtues of a small community and not a case for a small area, which is what Leon Krier seems to be implying. From what I see of small New Jersey towns, their smallness does not extend to their size — and a car is pretty much a requirement if you want to be able to access the neighboring area at will. It is still possible, after all, to know all your fellow residents, even if your nearest neighbor is a mile away from you, and the neighborhood bar is another couple of miles off.
Whether the small community that Jim likes (and it has its virtues) would prefer the kind of urban arrangement that Kries talks about — a mix of residential and commercial establishments, all relatively close together — is, frankly, uncertain. The values of small communities almost inevitably lead them to try and keep out outsiders (this is true even of rich NJ towns whose residents all profess liberal values) and commercial establishments tend to attract outsiders who are not also residents — and residents, for this very matter, do not want close-by commercial establishments, because they fear crime, or because they fear for their children (and this is neither a good nor a bad thing).
My point, in a nutshell is: that the kind of small town values that Jim was talking about (and loves) are probably incompatible with the kind of urban arrangement that Kries is talking about.
— scritic · Jun 7, 04:08 PM · #
Here’s what I wonder: Could the design flaws we now recognize in a lot of our cities have been avoided? For most of the last century, there were huge economic advantages in taking a couple hundred thousand (or more) workers and sticking them all in the same downtown. We all know the downside — endless suburban sprawl and 45 minute commutes. But DC, to take the easiest example for me, couldn’t have functioned in pre-internet times without that sort of workforce proximity. You really needed to be able to get to those meetings, see those people, be in and around the streets of the city in order for everything to function.
There are problems with the current arrangement now, but I also suspect that we’ve only managed to get to the point where other arrangements are possible through the gains brought by a couple decades of massing workers at city centers.
— Peter Suderman · Jun 7, 04:17 PM · #
Big cities and small communities are certainly not incompatible — think of the various “neighborhoods” in big cities that function as their reasonable equivalents. It doesn’t seem to me that there’s anything inevitable about our suburban sprawl (though the fact that European cities have sprawled, per capita, even more than ours have), but rather are the outcome of very poor zoning decisions (themselves likely the produce of developer interests).
As to the homogeneity issue, my thought has long been that most any community is homogeneous in some respect – sometimes that works itself out in terms of race or ethnicity or class and sometimes in terms of sexuality, artsy-ness, whatever. One of the great canards in the contemporary world is that you can have communities where people come together and “celebrate their diversity,” all with nary a thought that in simple virtue of one’s ability to “celebrate” that “diversity”, you usually construct some pretty robust homogeneous communities. And I suspect that it couldn’t be otherwise.
— Michael Simpson · Jun 7, 04:36 PM · #
The first time one of my comments was quoted in a post here was when I made a passionate (perhaps too passionate) appeal in favor of megapolises. But I’ll repeat it nonetheless.
Large cities, and especially alpha world cities, are gravity centers. They attract and coalesce all of the elements of the world. This is why they are sometimes harsh, but this is why they are always impressive. There is simply nothing in the history of man that compares with the endless opportunities that a megapolis offers. If there is something that shocks me even more (with all respect) than people who move from cities to the suburbs, it’s people who move from cities to the suburbs because they have kids. To me there is nothing like the education that comes from living inside one of the world’s beating hearts.
The ten minute rule and 10K principle are simply ridiculous. For people in a town to live ten minutes from worship implies that everybody worships in the same place. For everyone to live ten minutes from work implies that everyone has similar work, etc. That leaves you with an incredibly sheltered, uniform, dull place.
Paul Graham’s recently linked here essay “Lies We Tell Kids” is flawed in many ways but I believe there’s a lot of truth in his argument that suburbs, as places to raise kids, are in a way one of the more elaborate lies we tell kids, a giant shelter meant to excise or dull the bad things in life that kids may encounter. Even disregarding the fact that this might be a very poor bet (if I was a pedophile, I bet I’d move to the suburbs, where the vulnerable kids are, and where social pressure makes it less likely I’d get caught), this is just not how I see a good life and a good education. I think people, generally, are made better, and kids especially are better educated, by facing different things and bad things, rather than retreating from them. For all its bad aspects, a megapolis offers this priceless opportunity.
Again I’ve let my passion about this get the better of me so I’ll stop ranting now. (In fact, this may be why most debates about urban policy are doomed, because so many of us equate the best urban model with the urban model of our youth.)
— PEG · Jun 9, 08:31 AM · #
Excellent advice, PEG! Now that you’ve convinced me to move from my comfortable but stultifying small city to “one of the world’s beating hearts,” I need to decide between Karachi and Lagos. The cost of living in those places seems best suited to a family of seven.
Your prescription for the good life applies to all big cities, right? Being among the affluent two million or so who get to live in central Paris is totally incidental, right?
— Matt Frost · Jun 9, 10:53 AM · #
PEG, there’s a great case to be made for the virtues of (some) megalopolises, but I don’t think you want to suggest that a good life can only be found there, do you? Different proportions of goods are appropriate for different people, I think.
I don’t think the ten-minute rule is that absurd, especially where I live. For instance, there are five churches, I think, within a ten-minute walk of my house, all of them very different. (No mosques, temples, or synagogues that close, though.) And an incredibly wide range of work environments. And that’s in a kind of suburban environment — which reminds me to reiterate the point I made in my earlier post, that there are many kinds of suburb.
I think Michael Simpson’s comment above is really important here. There are some suburbs that function very much as exploded city neighborhoods, that is, neighborhoods spread out over a larger area. My fifteen-minute walk to Wheaton’s downtown restaurants would be a three-minute walk if I lived in a Chicago neighborhood like Andersonville or Lincoln Square. There’s a set of apartment buildings about two blocks from my house populated wholly by black (including some African refugees) and Hispanic people — in the city they might be just down the block. Eventually the “explosion” reaches the point of dispersal at which you can insulate yourself from difference in the way that PEG, with justification, deplores; it’s interesting to think about where that point is.
— Alan Jacobs · Jun 9, 12:27 PM · #
Matt: thanks for the laugh!
Actually, I enjoy the big cities of emerging countries even more than big developed cities. Paris can get pretty dull compared to sprawling Istanbul, which has universities to shame the Sorbonne, or to 1994 Moscow, where my father took me on his Soviet army surplus jeep, the only kind of vehicle that could withstand the bear-sized potholes at a reasonable speed. The percentage of area in the Paris conurbation which is safe at night is probably higher than in the Lagos conurbation, but if you asked me whether I’d like to be alone at midnight in the center of Clichy-sous-Bois or in the center of Lagos I’d have to pause and think. Big emerging cities also have big emerging bourgeoisies who go to nice places and whose children attend nice schools. I do believe in any sufficiently large city you can build a good life.
Yes, I am one of the few affluent enough to live in central Paris, but my grandparents and their nine children seemed to do fine in Paris’s 12th district (he a university professor, she a homemaker — hardly tycoons), although the great generosity of the French state to large families definitely had something to do with it.
Alan: “there’s a great case to be made for the virtues of (some) megalopolises, but I don’t think you want to suggest that a good life can only be found there, do you?” Not for me, at least (I’m aware of my young age and limited perspective, and that I may sing a very different tune only 10 years from now when I have, inch’Allah, a wife, kids and a job).
But that’s precisely my point: we all have visceral attachments to certain ways of living, and our attitudes about what is desirable in terms of urban policies has more to do with that than with maximizing utility.
From a less impassioned perspective, I think the main appeal of big cities lies in the Long Tail: whatever your peculiar tastes, you will find it within a 30-minute subway ride. More importantly, you will find whatever you need, in a big way.
The French educational system, steeped in the kind of hard left ideals that would make Lenin blush, can be extremely vicious to children who diverge from the average in any way. When one of only three (3!) schools for the gifted in the country opened, it was down the block from where I lived. Meanwhile one of my classmates, who is still my best friend and whose parents lived the dream of the nice suburban house with the clean cut lawn, in a town where the only attractions are a park and a mall, sufferred a three hour commute six days a week for four years (in the ghastly Parisian suburban trains) for the same privilege I enjoyed. Needless to say that has an impact of the wellbeing of a young boy.
I have cousins whose eldest daughter is a really gifted graphic artist, but whose parents similarly traded the (government provided, because she works in the civil service) 7th arrondissement condo for the postcard house with a swing in the backyard. I tried the swing at a family lunch, it’s great, but if she lived in the city she could get the kind of art classes (her parents could afford them, but the city provides them for free) that would allow her to develop her skills and get into one of the city’s numerous excellent art schools. Now she is doing poorly in class, even though she is really bright, and is headed to a two-year secretary school.
These are the kinds of things that give my comments on the issue that unpalatable bilious edge (for which I apologize). But, in my view, the problem is not just that by living in a suburb you might not get to take an Ashtanga Yoga class or see the latest hip band (although those perks are nice, too). It goes deeper than that. And in that respect, big cities offer opportunities that are extremely precious, and that make it worth it, from my perspective, to live in a comparatively smaller apartment and have neighbors who are noisy from time to time.
I have recently gotten engaged, and so the question of how to raise children, and in what environment, has become one of formidable weight and actuality for me, if only in my mind. And from my experience, I can’t help but believe that if I did not raise my children at the heart of a big city, I would rob them of something extremely precious which I was privileged to enjoy. Your mileage may vary, of course (thankfully!), but this is what I believe quite deeply, and so I wanted to share this perspective.
— PEG · Jun 9, 01:52 PM · #
PEG,
You and I probably differ less than I want to admit, and the only difference between us may be a matter of scale. Good luck with everything!
— Matt Frost · Jun 9, 04:13 PM · #
Alan:
I almost always want to comment on your posts, mostly just to associate myself with them, but figure “ditto” is probably not a real useful thing to say.
Whenever I have been involved in building business organizations (definitely not the same as towns and cities), it has always been important to think through the various functions that the organization performs (accounting, hiring, marketing, etc.) in order to figure out what to centralize vs. decentralize in order to try to get maximum efficiency without trading off too much effectiveness. One thing that I’ve observed is that with high-function teams, once an office gets above about 100 – 150 people, you want to spin to a new office to a nearby city, even if you keep certain back-office functions centralized. The esprit-de-corps, ability to understand exactly what everybody else is doing and so on start to fall apart after this size. I’ve informally observed this to be true of other organizations. Famously, militaries tend to have units of right about this size, baboon troops tend to be about this big and so on. It is theorized that there is something about primate brain function that leads to this.
I suppose that it’s possible that whether you want to call them “neighborhoods”, “boroughs”, “towns” or whatever, that devolving certain identity-creating functions to units of around 10,000 people could make sense. I’m sure that city / regional planning is a hugely complex field, and that, even if a valid rule-of-thumb, this would be subject to about a million caveats.
— Jim Manzi · Jun 9, 06:39 PM · #
Matt: I agree — we probably have more in common than either of us realizes. Thank you for your gracious comment.
— PEG · Jun 11, 08:34 AM · #