Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [49]
7
THE VICTIMS OF SPRAWL
CUL-DE-SAC KIDS; SOCCER MOMS; BORED TEENAGERS;
STRANDED ELDERLY; WEARY COMMUTERS;
BANKRUPT MUNICIPALITIES; THE IMMOBILE POOR
Surplus wealth enables people to persist in building wasteful, inadequate communities and then compensate for the communities’ failings by buying private vehicles and driving all over the metropolitan area in search of what ought to be available close to home.
—PHILIP LANGDON, A BETTER PLACE TO LIVE (1994)
Aside from the real estate developer, who else is victimized by suburban sprawl? To some degree, almost everyone is. Most obvious are the 80 million Americans who are either too young, too old, or too poor to drive. But it doesn’t stop there. Upon investigation, it is difficult to identify a segment of the population that does not suffer in some way from the lifestyle imposed by contemporary suburban development.
Out of reach: clustered baseball fields that few children can access without parental transport
CUL-DE-SAC KIDS
Perhaps most worrisome is the situation facing the children of suburbia. In one of the great ironies of our era, the cul-de-sac suburbs, originally conceived as youth’s great playground, are proving to be less than ideal for America’s young.
That suburban life may be bad for children comes as a surprise. After all, most families move to the suburbs precisely because they think it will be “good for the children.” What do they mean by that? Better suburban schools—a phenomenon peculiar to the United States—are good for children. Big, safe, grassy fields to play on are also good for them. What is not so good for children, however, is the complete loss of autonomy they suffer in suburbia. In this environment where all activities are segregated and distances are measured on the odometer, a child’s personal mobility extends no farther than the edge of the subdivision. Even the local softball field often exists beyond the child’s independent reach.
The result is a new phenomenon: the “cul-de-sac kid,” the child who lives as a prisoner of a thoroughly safe and unchallenging environment. While this state of affairs may be acceptable, even desirable, through about age five, what of the next ten or twelve years? Dependent always on some adult to drive them around, children and adolescents are unable to practice at becoming adults. They cannot run so simple a household errand as picking up a carton of milk. They cannot bicycle to the toy store and spend their money on their own. They cannot drop in on their mother at work. Most cannot walk to school. Even pickup baseball games are a thing of the past, with parents now required to arrange car-pooling with nearmilitary precision, to transport the children at the appointed times. Children are frozen in a form of infancy, utterly dependent on others, bereft of the ability to introduce variety into their own lives, robbed of the opportunity to make choices and exercise judgment. Typical suburban parents give their children an allowance, in order to empower them and encourage independence. “Feel free to spend it any way you like,” they say. The child then says, “Thanks, Mom. When can you drive me to the mall?”
SOCCER MOMS
Another word for dependent is burden, and that term better describes these parents’ perception of the children who rely upon them for mobility. Mothers often derail their careers so that their children can experience a life beyond the backyard. The role of journalist, banker, or marketing director is exchanged for that of chauffeur, with the vague hope that their career will resume when the last child turns sixteen; thus the term soccer mom—a distinctly suburban euphemism. The plight of the suburban housewife was powerfully conveyed in a letter we received in 1990 from a woman living outside of Tulsa:
Dear Architects:
I am a mother of four children who are not able to leave the yard because of our city’s design. Ever since we have moved here I have felt like a caged animal only