Bourgeois Dystopias (Page 3)

Now most Americans need cars to reach work and the marketplace. On weekdays congested streets replace the town square as a public space. According to a Chicago suburbanite Hayden quotes, "The only way you can see other people from Schaumburg is through their car windows, as they drive home from work."

Today frustration with sprawl and suburban overdevelopment is widespread, and environmental groups, smart-growth movements and citizens' campaigns are fighting to protect the landscape. In recent years contemporary architects and planners have produced a new menu of design solutions, including New Urbanist and neotraditional villages such as Seaside, Florida; digital smart houses designed to promote virtual communities in self-contained, private space; and sustainable "green" houses built with recycled materials and powered by renewable energy sources. But Hayden is skeptical. "Better architecture cannot, in itself, change the larger patterns of social and economic exploitation developed by growth machines which profit from round after round of fringe development."

Instead, Hayden advocates what I would call a deep urban political ecology, based on a public commitment to restore and preserve the nation's rich supply of residential and commercial buildings, and a federally sponsored project to improve the quality of metropolitan life. She has concrete (if controversial) proposals for curbing sprawl, such as capping mortgage subsidies (which currently cost over $100 billion annually, nearly half of which goes to families with incomes over $100,000), imposing design review for new construction, implementing regional planning for edge nodes and subsidizing renovation of older buildings.

She also has good company, in a generation of innovative scholars and legislators who recognize that solving the suburban crisis means reckoning with the damage caused by politically divisive municipal borders. Former Minnesota State Senator Myron Orfield and Harvard Law Professors Gerald Frug and David Barron are exploring possibilities for regional legislatures and metropolitan governing structures that will change the terms of home rule, enabling municipalities to collectively address problems that transcend the city limits. The city line--shifting boundaries that divided American metropolitan areas into thousands of municipalities, urban and suburban, separate and unequal--has been a powerful but largely unrecognized source of inequality. Today most townships work within a vast political mosaic to administer their own policies and programs, from schooling to social services, housing to policing, and are reluctant to share public goods or plan collectively with neighboring communities. "Home rule" provisions, which protect the autonomy, freedom and choice of local governments, are sacrosanct.

But home rule doesn't work for cities or suburbs. The trouble is not simply that wealthy suburbs horde resources, leaving poor municipalities and central cities unequipped to protect or educate their constituents. According to Frug and Barron, who have been interviewing mayors and city administrators throughout the Boston metropolitan area, local officials are discovering that they are usually powerless to address issues such as traffic, pollution, transportation and unwanted growth--difficulties that most Americans endure daily and are beginning to regard as political concerns. The fragmentation of metropolitan regions exacerbates these problems, since even successful efforts to block new developments typically push them to neighboring towns, and congestion spills over. The ideal of local autonomy, in which small communities determine the quality of their own environment, is a fantasy that has become a trap, blocking the development of regional governments that could better manage regional problems.

Today there is bipartisan dissatisfaction with the status quo of congestion, pollution, failing school systems and sprawl. We need a bold, imaginative policy agenda to address these issues. But the American political imagination has failed to generate a meaningful response. Dolores Hayden's new books are a provocation to engage the problem of the city line, lest it become a defining feature of the twenty-first century as well.

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