Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [62]
THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT AS A MODEL
While bemoaning the current confusion surrounding the American landscape, we take some solace from the words of Winston Churchill: “The American people can be counted on to do the right thing, after they have exhausted all the alternatives.” Indeed, this country has shown an uncanny affinity for self-correction, and it seems reasonable to expect that this ability will eventually make itself felt in the design of the built environment. Still in question is how long this will take, but there are reasons to be hopeful.
In 1962, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, sparking the environmental movement. Less than two decades later, the Environmental Protection Agency had become the largest regulatory body in the United States government. Environmental consultants now take a prominent place at the table in planning sessions, equal in stature to traffic engineers and fire chiefs. A typical large project in Florida has to secure approval from six overlapping agencies on the subject of wetlands alone. While such drawn-out processes can be a nightmare, we are encouraged by the speed with which America has placed the environmental movement near the top of its political agenda.
The natural habitat: after only twenty years, near the top of the political agenda
While environmentalists had to overcome centuries of misunderstanding of the natural world, the urbanists’ task is not so daunting. After an aberrant period of only fifty years, America should not find it particularly difficult to return to its tradition of community-making. Many Americans still live in real neighborhoods, and even more remember them vividly from childhood. Here, unlike environmentalism, no sacrifices are necessary—no shorter showers, no sorting through rubbish—only a willingness to lead a more varied and convenient life, in the kind of urban environment that has successfully housed the human species without interruption for thousands of years.
The human habitat: also in dire need of protection
Environmentalists are beginning to understand the compatibility of these two agendas. Now that they have achieved some significant victories in the protection of flora and fauna, they are extending their purview a bit higher up the food chain, to the protection and projection of the traditional human habitat: the neighborhood. Environmentalists have already begun to mount an attack against sprawl, as they recognize the dangers posed to farms and forests by low-density, automobile-oriented growth. The Sierra Club has launched an official anti-sprawl campaign, producing such publications as Sprawl Costs Us All: How uncontrolled sprawl increases your property taxes and threatens your quality of life. As The New York Times put it, “Sprawl, in sum, is the new language of environmentalism.” 3 Of course, environmentalists have always been concerned with the survival of the human species, but only lately have they recognized that the neighborhood itself is a part of the ecosystem, an organic outgrowth of human needs. If all the energy and goodwill of the environmental movement can now be applied within the urban boundary, the results will be dramatic.
9
THE INNER CITY
THINKING OF THE CITY IN TERMS OF ITS SUBURBAN COMPETITION;
CATEGORIES IN WHICH THE SUBURBS TYPICALLY OUTPERFORM
THE CITY: THE AMENITY PACKAGE, CIVIC DECORUM, PHYSICAL
HEALTH, RETAIL MANAGEMENT, MARKETING, INVESTMENT
SECURITY, AND THE PERMITTING PROCESS
Anybody who travels back and forth across the Atlantic has to be impressed with the differences between European cities and ours, which make it appear as if World War Two actually took place in Detroit and Washington rather than Berlin and Rotterdam.
—JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER, HOME
FROM NOWHERE (1996)
In turning from the region