Vice President Al Gore's "livability agenda" for reducing commuting times, easing traffic gridlock and preserving open land may be vague, but it certainly has sparked a furor over suburban sprawl. In the by-now familiar process of vilification that passes for political discourse, sprawl has become the whipping boy for a variety of ills, including the destruction of nature, the decline of inner cities, the predominance of consumerism and the loss of civic consciousness. There have even been suggestions that the Littleton massacre was caused by suburban anomie.
Sprawl is nothing new; cities have always reached into the surrounding countryside. Philadelphia, the city in which I live, encompasses more than 130 square miles; the five boroughs of New York spread over more than 300 square miles. But this is not the kind of sprawl that critics have in mind. Rather, it is the new metropolitan landscape of planned communities, office parks and regional malls, linked by expressways, that enrages them. This is not the way things were supposed to be, we are told. Sprawl is a blight on the landscape, a mindless aberration, a deviant urban gene.
Yet simply demonizing the suburbs--and idealizing the traditional city--will not do. For one thing, sprawl was hardly mindless; the industrial American city, with its tenements and downtown factories, was a nasty place. In a country as large as the U.S., a horizontal form of urbanism was probably inevitable. Moreover, since considerably more than half of Americans presently live in the suburbs--or in the sprawling cities of the West and South that are suburban in all but name--it is unlikely that any legislation that drastically undercuts this way of life will attract political support.
But whether or not Mr. Gore ends up being remembered as the man who reinvented sprawl, there is little doubt about who pointed the way to the suburbs. In 1868, Frederick Law Olmsted began laying out America's first large planned suburban community, outside Chicago. Olmsted, with Calvert Vaux, is widely celebrated as the designer of Manhattan's Central Park, Brooklyn's Prospect Park, Franklin Park in Boston and such notable landscapes as the grounds of the U.S. Capitol and the Niagara Falls reservation. But Olmsted was also a city planner. With Vaux, he laid out parkways in Brooklyn and Buffalo, N.Y. He devised an ambitious plan for the Bronx that included a forward-thinking mass-transit system. He also oversaw one of the country's first regional plans, for Staten Island, whose suburban role he anticipated. In Olmsted's view, the future of American cities definitely included suburbs: "No great town can long exist without great suburbs," he wrote.
Olmsted's Chicago suburb, Riverside, spread over 1,600 acres of Illinois prairie. The design included features that presaged the master-planned communities of 100 years later: generous half-acre lots, houses set well back from the road, profuse naturalistic landscaping, deed restrictions, an architectural review board and a large area of common recreational land--not a golf course, but a riverside park. Olmsted, who lived most of his adult life in the suburbs, laid out the roads in gentle curves without sharp corners, "to suggest and imply leisure, contemplativeness and happy tranquility."
One thing was absent in Riverside: a town center. Olmsted assumed that Chicago, nine miles away, would continue to provide suburban dwellers with employment, shopping and the "essential, intellectual, artistic, and social privileges which specially pertain to a metropolitan condition of society." To that end he proposed augmenting the railroad link to the city by a landscaped approach road, a sort of suburban boulevard lined with houses, that would provide a pleasure drive, bridle paths and pedestrian walks as well as traffic lanes. In other suburban plans--Tarrytown Heights, N.Y., and Druid Hills in Atlanta--he likewise emphasized the link to the city, whether by railroad or streetcar.
Olmsted called Riverside a suburban village, but he was not a romantic. The suburb was not to be a retreat; suburbanites were to enjoy all the refinements of town life. At the same time, as his lifelong commitment to creating city parks demonstrates, he believed that some of the advantages of the countryside--fresh air, open space, trees--could be introduced to the city. "There is a place for everything," he once said.
Much has changed since Riverside. The automobile and decentralizing communication technologies have accelerated and greatly expanded horizontal metropolitan growth. As suburbs grew, they attracted many of the elements of the city--shopping, employment, entertainment--often compromising their "happy tranquility." Meanwhile, as cities lost industrial jobs, city life coarsened. Downtowns lost much their central role; suburbs and cities drifted apart. It has been a messy divorce. Suburbs have withdrawn into a cocoon of smug autonomy; advocates of urban reform treat the suburbs as the enemy.
In this atmosphere, Olmsted's inclusive metropolitan vision is worth revisiting. Instead of attacking the straw man of suburban sprawl, we would do better to look for ways that make better suburbs and better cities, as their future is inextricably linked.
The jobs are in the suburbs, but much of the labor force is in the city. New transportation links are required between the two. Politicians need to break down the legislative barriers that currently hamper regional cooperation in areas such as transportation, environmental control, housing and policing. The renewal of many downtowns underlines the continued importance--economic as well as cultural--of vital, high-density city centers. At the same time, as Olmsted foresaw, the desire of the majority of Americans for homeownership and suburban life continues unabated. No amount of name-calling will change that.
Witold Rybczynski is a professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and author, most recently, of "A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the Nineteenth Century" (Scribner, 1999).
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