Ranting to /dev/null

New urban environs

Been meaning to write this post for a while, but somehow haven't felt like it. The main focus is on a new shopping "village" I encountered while on vacation in early June. The catalyst for the actual post is a series of articles forwarded to me by someone in a PR firm that sends on articles to bloggers. In short, I'll be writing about some trends in the construction of urban spaces. If that's the kind of thing you'd like to spend your time reading, here we go.

The "village" I saw on vacation was called "Freshfields Village" . The linked map shows it while it was still under construction, but the basic footprint is exposed.

Here are a few pictures. Note the wide sidewalks and relatively narrow streets:

This street is narrower than it looks as the whole right lane is parking:

Some areas are clearly designed to be accessible only to pedestrians:

There's also a nice green space in the center, upon which a service was held at noon on Memorial Day:

Freshfields, as I shall refer to this thing from now on, is located at the only road headed into two resort islands near Charleston, SC: Seabrook and Kiawah. The traffic circle you can see under construction on the map is the only way to get into either community. To give you an idea the kind of resort communities we're talking about, I'm just going to list the car brands that the village dealership offers: Porsche, Mercedes, Land Rover, Bentley, Maybach, and Infiniti. Umm, yeah. I didn't know there were Bentley or Maybach dealers.

It's obvious from walking around that the entire village is designed to feel like an old-fashioned, down-to-earth, late-19th to mid-20th century town with the requisite square. It's even got a "drug store" which is more like 75% soda fountain. The parking lots surround the village and are generally not visible from any of the storefronts. But unlike a normal town, the number of people who can actually walk to any of the stores is almost zero. The nearest residences on either island are a good two miles away. Which means that walking down in the morning to have a cup of coffee at the local coffeeshop is entirely doable if you don't mind spending 30 minutes walking. And if you want to use their wireless, you've got to carry your laptop. The stores also sell plenty of things which you obviously aren't expected to transport by foot: 12 packs of beverages, frozen meats, canoes, sets of golf clubs, etc.

In short, the environment is almost entirely a replica. We're talking 100% artiface here. To show you just how thinly this is veiled, let me tell you about the grocery store. It's called "Newton Farms", and has a Starbucks inside the thing. The building resembles an agriculture warehouse on the outside, and the rafters are all exposed, giving a sense of very large space when you go in. The produce is all displayed in wooden crates or high-end refrigeration units. The deli sports any number of prepared salads, marinated cuts of meat, immaculately decorated cakes, etc. And every morning, the Piggy Wiggly truck drives up to stock them for the day, Newton Farms being a division of what has got to be one of the lowest-rent supermarkets in the south.

But you know what? The whole experience is really, really pleasant. Yep, it's fake. Yep, the vast majority of the people who work in the supermarket probably can't afford to shop there [in another interesting touch, the vast majority of them are also black]. Yep, you can tell that this is designed to be appealing for the people who drive $150,000 cars to their $5 million homes. Yep, you can tell that the carefully constructed storefronts designed to resemble mixed-use arrangements seen in urban areas nationwide contain nothing of the sort. But hell, I'll take it. It feels a lot nicer than your local strip mall with the parking lot in the center of everything.

Which leads to the aforementioned articles. One is entitled "In Praise of Ordinary Choices", the other "How Sprawl Got a Bad Name", and both are from the current issue of The American Enterprise, which is admittedly a self-consciously pro-business publication. That being said, the current issue, "Attack of the Snobs", is quite insightful, and echoes a lot of the themes described in Nation of Rebels.

In short, the most voiciferous opponents of "sprawl" are almost always those who stand to lose the most from urban growth, sometimes financially, but more often than not simply aesthetically. The author names several prominant anti-Wal-Mart groups as evidence. "Wal-Mart Watch" is a pet project and funded heavily by the SEIU, which has been trying to unionize Wal-Mart for years. The group itself is as blue and blue-blooded as they come. "[Wal-Mart Watch] is run by a clutch of political hacks, including John Kerry's 2004 campaign manager and other Kerry and Democratic National Committee strategists. And the other biggest attack squad, WakeUpWalMart, is steered by the political adviser to Howard Dean's 2004 campaign. So give Wal-Mart credit for creating lots of high-paying jobs for otherwise unemployable individuals."

Others, be they urban planners, historians, sociologists, or political activists, are so opposed to the aesthetics of urban growth that most of them don't appear to have noticed that most people actually like shopping at Wal-Mart, or, more to the point, will voluntarily choose to do so if given the opportunity. And so by opposing any kind of urban growth (Let's be honest hear and recognize that anyone who says they want "smart growth" almost certainly means they want no growth at all) they are effectively denying access to urban amenities that they almost certainly already possess. Center-city dwellers can afford to try and block the construction of a new Wal-Mart or shopping center in a town in which they do not live because they don't need to shop there.

There's another group of people who tend to be against urban growth: those who live on the edges of urban areas. These people are immediately impacted by such growth, so there's some good reasons for their interest. But in a sense, they're doing the same thing. They moved out of the city - a clear plurality if not an actual majority - to have the amenities provided by suburban/rural areas: open spaces, minimal traffic, etc. And now that they've got theirs, they want to make sure that no low-down city slicker is going to come in with their housing development or shopping center or highway and take it away from them. This, it strikes me, is not a particularly good motive either. Especially when a lot of the loudest complainers paid next-to-nothing for their properties that are now located next to half-million dollar homes. Again, the primary motivation is not ideological, or even financial, but purely aesthetic. It's also a means of protecting one's social investments. There's no cache in living in an exclusive or otherwise low-population area if people move there.

Bringing this back to the nominal focal point of the post, it seems to me that many of the objections to more sprawl-like urban growth are cause by either aesthetic snobbery or selfishness. Most people say they don't like sprawl, but most people also spend money in ways that encourage it. This is not a rational exercise, and suggests to me that people like sprawl a lot more than they say they do. The mentality seems to be "I don't want them to build a Wal-Mart in my city, but I'll go there if they do."

The solution, should you decide to come out against sprawl, is not to tweak your spending habits or be stubborn about driving downtown rather than to the mall to better patronize local businesses. That ultimately doesn't matter for one of two reasons: either you already live downtown and consume the urban amenities that are there for your consumption, or you live in a suburb, and your very dwelling establishes you as a proponant of urban growth.

Sprawl isn't other people's fault. It's yours. And you know what? It's not that bad.

Posted by ryan at June 15, 2006 08:40 PM | TrackBack