Abstract
At first glance—or at least at my first glance—these two books seemed an odd pairing: one, a history of the rise, decline, and revival of a city of 50,000, focusing on its downtown; the other, a partly theoretical interpretation of the prospects of the outer suburbs, using examples drawn from three large metropolitan areas. There was obvious complementarity—small versus large, city versus suburb, local narrative versus general theory—but the commonality escaped me. Then, on closer look, a shared element became apparent.
Both books are concerned with the ways in which built environments can be remade, and in this regard, they are both original. Rebuilding and revitalization has long been a preoccupation, verging on an obsession, of researchers and politicians who are interested in America’s major inner cities, many of which have experienced decades of decline. However, few scholars have paid attention to this issue in smaller urban centers, or indeed in the outer suburbs, even though “intensification” has become the new mantra there. It is on the issue of changes to the existing built environment that the authors of these two books have something to say. What is their message and in particular what do they have to say that might interest planning historians?
Their general message would surely be depressing to a planner or indeed a local politician. The authors agree that prospects for redevelopment depend primarily on events beyond local control. To be sure, their emphases are slightly different. Following a number of writers, including the geographer David Harvey, Phelps speaks about how postwar suburbs functioned as a “spatial fix” for increasingly global flows of capital. Listoken and colleagues recognize the importance of these movements of capital, especially in terms of the manner in which they helped to erode manufacturing employment, but they also discuss the importance of political decisions made in Washington, DC, and indeed Trenton, NJ, regarding urban and housing policy. These authors are hardly the first to point out the importance of nonlocal decisions, but by demonstrating the effects, carefully, if reluctantly, these two books underline the point that planning historians need to take full account of the wider field of economic and political forces within which local agents act. Visions and plans—whether they be for newly planned suburban centers or for downtown redevelopment—may look good, but whether they are carried through, and with what effect, are what matters.
This conclusion is most dramatically illustrated by the large casualties of deindustrialization and globalization, such as the city of Detroit. But it is the smaller centers that are most reliant on larger agents and forces because with rare exceptions, they have little visibility or clout. New Brunswick, New Jersey, is not an extreme example because it has long benefitted from the steadying presence of a university, Rutgers. But for that reason its modest vulnerability makes it the more plausible carrier of the authors’ message.
In New Brunswick, New Jersey, three senior Rutgers academics trace the history of the city, concentrating on the postwar years of decline and eventual revitalization. All three are associated with the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, James Hughes as dean, Dorothea Berkhout as associate dean, and David Listoken is codirector of the Center for Urban Policy Research. None are historians, and this shows in their handling, especially, of materials pertaining to the city’s earlier years of settlement and development. They rely on secondary sources and published statistics, enlivened by images from old postcards. The latter—delightful and up to a point effective—are used rather uncritically as clear windows on the past. The strength of the book is its treatment of the modern period. Here, the authors draw on research that they and other colleagues have undertaken, including surveys and oral history interviews with the range of community leaders whose names and brief biographies are listed in the appendix. On this basis, they do an excellent job of setting the city in its regional and national context, tracing the mix of federal programs that helped to shape its modest sprawl, together with subsequent attempts at civic revival.
The book has some of the character of a local history. It is published as part of Rutgers University Press’s “Rivergate Regionals,” a series devoted to New Jersey and surrounding area. Its purpose is primarily to understand, and show, what happened locally, not to test propositions about the nature of urban change or to offer advice to civic leaders and planners elsewhere. A second appendix includes a year-by-year time line of major events in the city’s redevelopment since 1968, which will be of interest chiefly to those local residents who would like to know exactly what happened when. And those postcards, reproduced in color on glossy paper, do tend to give the volume a celebratory, rather than a more sharply analytical, feel. But individually and collectively the authors are inclined, and well equipped, to consider larger issues, especially those pertaining to the local impact and contribution of federal and state programs. For New Brunswick, the most important of these seems to have been President Carter’s Urban Development Action Grants, authorized in 1977 to leverage private funds, and New Jersey’s Urban Transit Hub Tax Credit, introduced during the financial meltdown of 2007–2008. Such programs they document in detail, sketching the evolution of policies at the national and state level before tracing their impact at the local. Their concluding assessment of successes and failures leads to a discussion of the factors that have contributed to the city’s recent revitalization.
They enumerate eleven causes. It is not clear whether they mean to suggest a ranking here, which would of course be difficult and somewhat arbitrary, but it is surely no coincidence that the first factor listed—the importance of which they discuss at length—was “the decision by a major corporation (Johnson and Johnson) to stay in its hometown and commit extensive financial and human capital to the redevelopment [of the city]” (p. 219). Several other factors pertain to investments in or by the public institutions. Apart from Rutgers, with its decision to expand downtown, these include two local hospitals, the local parking authority, and the county seat of government. Another factor pertains to the city’s “compact size,” a nod to geographical influences which as a geographer I must applaud. The remaining items on their list refer to personal, nonprofit or institutional initiatives which could fall under the general rubric of planned interventions. The most important of these—and second on their list—was a revitalization strategy carried out by the American City Corporation (ACC), which had been founded in 1968 by James Rouse, best known as the creator of Columbia, MD. Planning historians, especially, will be interested to learn more about the role of the ACC in New Brunswick. But the significance of this and other planning (or replanning) initiatives is appropriately framed by the eleventh factor listed: “fortuitous timing regarding program funding cycles” (p. 219). In the end, then, New Brunswick got lucky in several ways, some of the most important of which do not offer an easy recipe for other cities, small or large.
It is a relief to read an informed, well-written, and well-documented account of what is by any standards a modest city. For some years now, urbanists have been arguing that we should pay more attention to what Jennifer Robinson has called “ordinary cities”—those that are not global centers of power or trade, not exceptional places that attract the attention of national politicians, and not past or potential models for urban theory. 1 Places like New Brunswick, in size if not in its particular mix of employers, are far more common than readers of academic books and journals might suppose. I live in one (Hamilton, Ontario). For all that, except for those who want to know more about James Rouse, it is unlikely that many potential readers will set aside the latest study of New York or Chicago in order to learn New Brunswick’s story. Those who do will find that Listoken, Berkhout, and Hughes have done the place justice.
The story—or stories, for there are three—that Nicholas Phelps tells are also outside the mainstream, although less so now than in the recent past. For decades, along with reporters, advertisers, the entertainment industry, and federal politicians, urban scholars paid far more attention to cities than to suburbs. “New York” meant Manhattan, not Queens; Chicago’s famed neighborhoods, the subject of many a monograph, were assumed to end at the city limits. No more. A generation, and perhaps it is now two generations, of scholars have been telling us about suburbs. Urban and planning historians have had plenty to say about the diversity of those places and about how they were planned, built, financed, and settled by successive generations who sought the American dream. Social scientists, blessed with more data, have shown us the extent to which newer generations of suburbs have maintained that diversity or indeed created newer types. Increasingly, they have also enquired into the effects of what is now called sprawl on the health of their residents, upon the regional environment, on the congestion that accompanies car-dependent growth and upon the costs of providing and maintaining infrastructure of all sorts. Accordingly, planning professionals now speak with one voice about the virtues of densification or intensification. Given that many suburban residents do not share this vision, and indeed resist it, the question is how to accomplish the redevelopment of suburban areas. A number of writers have addressed some of the nuts of bolts of this challenge, addressing matters of design, for example, and of citizen participation. But Nicholas Phelps, an urbanist at the Bartlett School in London, is perhaps the first to consider how well outer suburban areas are equipped to manage the whole process. Sequel to Suburbia is in part about replanning, then, but above all about the larger problems of governance. In a term that he uses at one point, his aim is to illuminate the “local politics of retrofit” (p. 47).
Phelps is interested in the outer suburbs, those that have been developed since the 1970s. Although he pays attention to the ways in which these areas were developed, his focus is on how they have changed and, even more, upon how they might evolve in the near future. In this respect, he is one of the few scholars to take seriously the fact—obvious enough when stated but so often ignored—that suburbs soon acquire histories and indeed eventually cease to be suburban in any of the usual meanings of the word. That is why, refreshingly, his use of “postsuburban” in the book’s subtitle refers not to an argument about how our metropolitan areas have transcended the distinction between city and suburb but to the question of what has been happening, and might yet happen, to those places that were once unambiguously suburban.
Phelps develops his argument in two sections. The first is concerned with some general considerations—some might call them theoretical in nature—having to do with the fate and prospects of the outer suburbs. Trained as a geographer, he emphasizes that the local course of events in any suburb depends not only on its specific character—density, land use patterns, form of government, and so forth—but also on its geographical setting. He develops this argument initially through a discussion of the importance of the regional context and then with reference to the physical character of the city and the inner suburbs to which the outer fringe has been added. The edges of Los Angeles (LA) may look rather like those of Baltimore or Cincinnati, but their fate is affected by the places that they have been fitted into. Rounding out this section, Phelps identifies the characteristic political tensions that arise when civic leaders and developers try to make changes in the fringe. He emphasizes three in particular: growth versus the environment, private profits versus public goods, and local versus regional scales of governance.
In the second section of the book, Phelps peers into the future. He looks for clues by examining how the tensions of redevelopment have been worked out in three places: Kendall Downtown (Miami-Dade County), Tysons Corner (Fairfax, VA), and Schaumburg (Cook County, IL). In varying degrees, each has been documented and discussed by previous writers, and Phelps draws on published research, official reports, and interviews with a range of politicians, planners, consultants, and civic organizations. He chose these three places to represent varying scales of possible redevelopment, ranging from 0.5 square miles (Kendall) to 19 square miles (Schaumburg), and also contrasting modes of governance, both incorporated (Schaumburg) and not. That said, he cannot and does not claim that these are typical, nor even that they represent the full range of possibilities. Most obviously, they do not speak to the character of recent suburban growth around small and midsized cities, such as New Brunswick and Hamilton, Ontario, especially those that lie beyond the reach of major metropolitan centers. At most, then, they illustrate possibilities.
It must be said that on this evidence, the possibilities are not encouraging. On his own admission, Phelps tries to be optimistic about the likelihood that civic leaders will be able to negotiate their way into a future where outer suburbs became denser, better provided with transit and at least some affordable housing, and in a word more urban. But he finds it an uphill struggle. Schaumberg, with its “sprawl upon sprawl” (p. 163) is especially unpromising territory, but he suggests that even Tysons Corner, which has recently offered a hopeful glimpse of a future with investments in public transit, looks a lot less impressive when placed in its regional context. In the conclusion, he discusses the prospects that suburban governments will act in ways that help create what he calls an “inclusive and progressive” metropolitan area (p. 177). By this, he means the inclusion of higher density development that would be affordable to a wide range of people. This is a high bar and certainly, he says, it cannot be carried through by architects, planners, and the minority of suburban politicians who might be described as progressive. It will require broad political engagement, mass endorsement, and a buy in from developers and investors.
The root of the problem is that current arrangements are “deeply entrenched” (p. 175). By this, he alludes to the mix of interest groups that typically drive public debates and policy concerning land use change: the landowners and developers, the lenders and homeowners, and the politicians who must pay attention to one or other, or some combination, of these. These are the key actors whom Harvey Molotch spoke about in the 1970s when he developed his “growth machine” model of urban politics. 2 As Phelps points out (p. 46), this model has worked best—or at least taken its purest, simplest form—in fringe areas that are being newly developed because the number of players is quite limited. The model becomes more complicated in places like downtown New Brunswick, or in outer suburbs that are trying to gain density, because there are now a myriad of property owners with psychic as well as financial stakes in the matter. Complicated does not necessarily mean fundamentally different. Phelps (p. 50) quotes John Logan and Harvey Molotch on the subject of the sorts of coalitions that carry through redevelopment projects that progressive planners might approve: “It could just be the same old growth but with a decorative skin. Higher density has always been a scheme for growing rents….” As a result, what Phelps calls “Mark II politics,” in which the “tensions” of urban redevelopment are successfully negotiated, is “barely in evidence” (p. 11).
A pessimist with a longer historical perspective might conclude that Mark II will in fact never arrive. A quarter century before Molotch framed his influential argument, William Form articulated a similar portrait of the actors and interests involved in land use change. 3 Urban and planning historians who have documented urban development and redevelopment in still earlier decades have inevitably paid attention to the same mix of players. The balance of forces has changed and fluctuated over time, notably with the rise of institutionalized planning, but the business of urban development and redevelopment has always been, well, a business. It is difficult to see what can change the calculus. Even if the majority of Americans came to think of the suburbs, in their present form, as dysfunctional places—and that is a very big if—there are still millions of suburban home owners who will resist higher densities and affordable housing in their backyard.
If New Brunswick has a message for postsuburban America, it may be that things have to get pretty bad before enough people can agree that something must be done. In part, this is a question of calculation. As land prices fall, investors see potential: They do not have much to lose. In part, it is also a question of politics and policy. When a place deteriorates, it attracts the attention of governments who may develop a policy response. But, as New Brunswick’s experience suggests, albeit on a modest scale, until matters reach something close to crisis, it is difficult to motivate the actors involved. There are various crises that could emerge from the continuation of car-dependent sprawl, but it is the immediate, local, and fiscal rather than the long term, global, and environmental that are most likely to generate an effective response. Some thought that the subprime crisis had provided a necessary shock, but it seems that this call was premature. So what will it take to bring about the change that Phelps imagines? No one knows, but that, surely, is the moment when good plans will matter most.