“Urbanism” is not always the right answer

I struggle with the city and town planning buzzword “urbanism,” mostly because it is poorly understood by the general public.  But I also differ in some respects with the way urbanism is practiced by its most ardent believers.  I’ll grant that the word, at least as it is generally used in the field of community planning, describes an important part of what I believe and strive to advocate, including neighborhood characteristics such as walkable streets, an abundance of transportation options, and more compact neighborhood patterns than we typically find in sprawling suburban subdivisions.  But “urbanism” doesn’t come close to describing the true, complete picture of what I believe and advocate when it comes to land use and development.

What I really advocate is green and healthy places, including those in cities, towns, and rural areas. For me, that can include high-, medium-, or rarely but sometimes even low-density places, as well as conservation — and refraining from development altogether on certain land — every bit as much as it frequently includes typically urbanist approaches. Where I differ from many urbanist practitioners is that I do not believe that urban intensification should be our primary pursuit in making and sustaining green and healthy places, although it frequently is, especially when done with contextually sensitive design. Moreover, I believe that some developed places are, in fact, already dense enough, which seems to run counter to the views some of my fellow travelers.

The social media post that woke me up to the fact that I am not in alignment with some of today’s more ardent urbanists was this gem in my Twitter/X feed: “In a sane world, San Francisco would look like Tokyo.” Whoa. I’m sure there are arguments to support that position in theory; but, to me, they have little to do with the type of “sane world” I prefer, which includes beauty, humanity, local identity, human scale and, yes, lovability in placemaking. I know that those are mushy words, difficult to define and even harder to quantify. But that does not make them unimportant. As urbanist architect Steve Mouzon has explained at length, places that are loved are much more likely to be sustained over time than those that aren’t.

Now, I don’t doubt that Tokyo — the world’s second largest metro area, with 41 million people, according to Britannica — is a fascinating place loved by many as a city to visit or live in, but it is a huge change from San Francisco. I certainly wouldn’t substitute it for a beautiful American city that is on just about everyone’s top-ten list of “most popular” American big cities. Yes, San Francisco has expensive living costs, as does just about every beautiful and desirable city, neighborhood, and town.  But it remains one of our country’s most-loved cities. 

The poster’s real point, of course, was rhetorical: that we in the US should adopt a much more libertarian approach to allowing and building dense new urban development, especially housing, in established cities such as San Francisco. I would agree that, yes, even beautiful San Francisco could use some of that, built at appropriate scale in appropriate places. (In my opinion, what is “appropriate” can and should be debated — as painful as that can be — and should vary according to circumstances.)

But let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that the problem of housing unaffordability in America can be solved simply by adding more housing supply without also doing more, such as providing subsidies to those in need. It’s not that simple. 

Consider the Canadian example of Vancouver, a city whose skyline is characterized by a multitude of newish high-rise towers, many of them full of apartments.  By some accounts, Vancouver has added more housing than any other city in North America, tripling its total number of housing units since the 1970s. Nevertheless, it remains one of the continent’s most expensive cities.

That said, I’m in general agreement with a more permissive approach to urban development in certain places. For example, I am a huge fan of “retrofitting” worn-out suburban strip malls, deserted big-box parking lots, and the like into walkable, mixed-use places that can then support good transit service. Among those who have written fantastic books on this subject — with lots of examples — are Professors Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson (see here), urban planner Jason Beske with my architect friend and downtown champion David Dixon (see here), and architect and urban planner Galina Tachieva (see here).

I also strongly support conversion of now-underutilized office buildings to residential apartments; appropriately scaled development on vacant city lots; and the addition of accessory development units (typically small apartments associated with a larger house) and duplexes even in established neighborhoods that are now exclusively single-family. I certainly applaud sensitive, respectful restoration of badly disinvested city districts such as Old North Saint Louis in Missouri, which tragically lost some ninety percent of its population in the late twentieth century but is now beginning to come back.

Sometimes YIMBY, sometimes not

I like to think of myself as sometimes an urbanist, even a pro-development “YIMBY” (Yes in My Backyard) – but sometimes not, depending on the situation. I have supported all sorts of development in and around my own neighborhood, which hosts two large new developments that bring close to 1,500 new apartments on a commercial street only two blocks from my home. One of them — the larger of the two — is fantastic in my opinion, having earned a LEED-ND (LEED for Neighborhood Development) gold certification from the US Green Building Council for its plan. Besides these two, there are also several hundred additional new apartments being constructed within easy walking distance. My only significant disappointment with these new developments is that they will contain very little affordable housing.

(City-wide, Washington has added 36,000 new homes to its inventory since 2019, almost as much as it added in the previous eighteen years. That in itself is impressive, but I wish more of them were subsidized to be affordable.)

I like these new projects near my home, but I do not advocate dense new urban development blindly. As I keep up with current goings-on in the world of community-making, I read social media posts and other writing by more aggressive urbanist advocates who seem to take a sort of “build, baby, build” approach to dense new development. Some of them disdain all zoning, or so it seems, because zoning can get in the way of some types of new development, including new housing that they believe would help alleviate a continuing shortage. I prefer to reform zoning to be more permissive in mixing building uses and encouraging more residential units, including affordable ones, in more neighborhoods. But I also prefer that we do so incrementally in most places.

Many of today’s urbanist advocates also dislike and sometimes campaign against historic preservation, again because it restricts the building of some ambitious projects in designated historic places. I couldn’t disagree more. To me, the conservation of our historic legacy is critical to important human values. We have plenty of places to build without trampling on these special places, including the sites I mentioned above. I will grant that some “NIMBY” (Not in My Backyard) opponents of development grotesquely misappropriate historic preservation arguments in their anti-development advocacy, and it’s maddening when they do. Fake “environmentalists of convenience” have been known to do the same thing. In both cases, they should be called out for that; real environmentalists and preservationists should speak out when such opponents are wrong and say so, as I have done many times.

And, critically, there are fewer urbanist advocates than I wish who argue for integrating city nature (other than perhaps street trees) into urban development, despite the overwhelming evidence of its importance to human and environmental health. It’s a big deal to me and, if it sometimes means setting aside urban parcels for nature rather than development, so be it.

It is also a big deal to me to avoid so called “leapfrog” development that bypasses the outer limits of current suburban development to jump over undeveloped land and to place intense new development on what is now farmland or forests. Even if done well, to me that’s just — at best — a prettier, more orderly form of suburban sprawl that almost always generates more driving, more conventional suburban sprawl nearby, and the disruption of existing watersheds and ecosystems. That definitely separates me from some urbanists and other architects, planners, and developers who do great work when concentrating on sites closer to and within existing cities and towns but stray too often to build on currently untrampled land.

Where possible, I prefer to see rural and wild lands preserved, as Montgomery County, Maryland (photo above) and Lancaster County, Pennsylvania have done with stellar farmland conservation programs; as metropolitan Portland, Oregon has done with its urban growth boundary; and as the province of Ontario has done with a two-million-acre greenbelt around the cities of Toronto and Hamilton. All of these programs are imperfect, of course, and all must be maintained and defended constantly over time. But all have also been successful in reducing suburban sprawl and maintaining important natural resources. These kinds of efforts are very important to my personal view of sustainable metropolitan land use, but they are not considered part of “urbanism” by anyone.

If not urbanism, what is it?

I’ll conclude with a bit about a question I am often asked when I discuss the vocabulary of “good development” informally with friends in the field: “well, if not ‘urbanism’ and not ‘smart growth,’ what exactly do you call it?” Personally, I’m not sure we need an all-encompassing term at all. I don’t need an “ism” to describe approaches to development that I prefer.

Instead, I just say that I work to create and sustain greener, healthier places. That includes some environmental elements, some urban development principles, and some social and cultural elements, among others. But, if you’re looking for across-the-board consistency, you may have come to the wrong place. The right combination of those elements, and others, can vary substantially from place to place and situation to situation. Let’s try to be greener and healthier in our approach to development and conservation, and let the outcomes and descriptions vary with the circumstances.

– Excerpted and adapted from the essay “A very personal take: I’m struggling with the word “urbanism,” and here’s why” on Medium