Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [1]
Around that time, I had recently published my first book and was considering moving to Rotterdam to work with Rem Koolhaas on what was to become S,M,L,XL. That offer never materialized and I started architecture school at Harvard, where my professors’ attitudes toward Duany Plater-Zyberk ranged from amused to hostile. Unswayed, I wrote a letter to Andres and Lizz, offering to ghostwrite a book that would bring their message to a larger audience. They never wrote back.
Four years of continued pestering led to no progress on that topic, but it did get me hired by Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company after graduation. Once firmly ensconced in Miami, I kept asking about the book, but there were always too many other things to get done. My challenge was to convince Andres and Lizz that a book, far from being a distraction, could make our jobs easier.
I had always been amazed by Andres’s and Lizz’s patience with the Sisyphean task of convincing American communities to make traditional town planning legal again. It seemed that we repeated the same experience every month: we would show up in a city or town; meet with every willing citizen and public official; explain over and over, often encountering great resistance, why streets were too wide, trees were too scarce, and diverse land uses were kept too far apart. More often than not, we would get somewhere—never as far as we wanted, but after weeks of meetings and months of drawing, we would reach a compromise that led to skinnier streets, more trees, and a healthier mix of uses. Then, the next month, we would arrive in another community, begin the process again, and be met by the same resistance, as if we had never accomplished anything. Weren’t you people listening? I would silently curse. Then I would remember that we were no longer in Madison; this time we were in Santa Fe and no, the conversation was just starting. All over again.
The desire to short-circuit this Groundhog Day situation finally drove Andres and Lizz, in 1998, to let me write a first draft. Andres’s “Town versus Sprawl” lecture became the heart of the book, supplemented by another lecture he had developed in 1992, “The Story of City Planning,” a fast, loose, and mostly true yarn about the glorious past and ignominious present of the planning profession. A final chapter, “What Is to Be Done,” grew out of a characteristically insightful paper by Lizz. These three sources were augmented by roughly five years spent reading the publications now listed in the bibliography, most of which could be found in the formidable DPZ office library.
The greatest struggle, from a literary perspective, was translating Andres’s distinctive voice into print. Direct transcriptions of his lectures, which seemed so clear and compelling in person, produced something other than English. I consider this voice to be an essential aspect of the book’s popularity, just as the New Urbanism movement can credit much of its ascendancy to Andres’s charisma and sense of humor. Most of the jokes in the book are his, not mine—at least the good ones.
I think it is safe to say that Andres and Lizz, who are not known for lacking confidence, were nonetheless surprised by the early and continued success of the book. It is often difficult to fathom the merit of one’s own ideas. Furthermore, my coauthors had grown accustomed to the cynical gaze of the design world, until recently one of the most out-of-touch and disoriented intellectual communities in existence. Andres and Lizz had seen their efforts and their projects attacked for, among other things, their very populism and accessibility. No wonder, then, that what academia found to be too “real-world,” the real world was ready to hear and embrace.
As the following two essays relate, much has changed in the decade since Suburban Nation was published. In professional and policy circles, its arguments have mostly won the day. Even the most intellectually isolationist