Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [6]
Whether America grows into a placeless collection of subdivisions, strip centers, and office parks, or real towns with real neighborhoods, will depend on whether its citizens understand the difference between those two alternatives, and whether they can argue effectively for healthy growth. Toward that end, we offer this book. It is a summing up of our experiences, as designers and citizens, over the past two decades all across our land.
Since 1979, when we were first asked by Robert Davis to design Seaside, Florida, we have been intimately involved in the creation and revitalization of villages, towns, and cities from Cape Cod to Los Angeles. Everywhere we’ve visited, we have observed and studied urban and suburban life: walked the downtowns, cruised the suburbs, enjoyed meals in homes, given lectures in university theaters, corporate boardrooms, and high school cafeterias. Most of all, we have talked to the residents of these places, and we have listened intently. Almost without exception, the message we have heard, a message of deep concern, has been the same: the American Dream just doesn’t seem to be coming true anymore. Life at the dawn of the millennium isn’t what it should be. It seems that our economic and technological progress has not succeeded in bringing about the good society. A higher standard of living has somehow failed to result in a better quality of life.
And from mayors to average citizens, we have heard expressed a shared belief in a direct causal relationship between the character of the physical environment and the social health of families and the community at large. For all of the household conveniences, cars, and shopping malls, life seems less satisfying to most Americans, particularly in the ubiquitous middle-class suburbs, where a sprawling, repetitive, and forgettable landscape has supplanted the original promise of suburban life with a hollow imitation. In an architectural version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, our main streets and neighborhoods have been replaced by alien substitutes, similar but not the same. Life once spent enjoying the richness of community has increasingly become life spent alone behind the wheel. Lacking a physical framework conducive to public discourse, our family and communal institutions struggle to persist in our increasingly sub-urban surroundings. And suburban growth seems to have also drained much of the vitality from our inner cities, where a carless underclass finds itself with diminishing access to jobs and services.
It doesn’t have to be this way. After many successes, a number of failures, and, most important, prolonged collaboration with residents of every part of this country, we believe more strongly than ever in the power of good design to overcome the ills created by bad design, or, more accurately, by design’s conspicuous absence.
We live today in cities and suburbs whose form and character we did not choose. They were imposed upon us, by federal policy, local zoning laws, and the demands of the automobile. If these influences are reversed—and they can be—an environment designed around the true needs of individuals, conducive to the formation of community and preservation of the landscape, becomes possible. Unsurprisingly, this environment would not look so different from our old American neighborhoods before they were ravaged by sprawl.
Historically, we have rebuilt our nation every fifty to sixty years, so it is not too late. The choice is ours: either a society of homogeneous pieces, isolated from one another in often fortified enclaves, or a society