Car-dependent suburbanisation and the Justice Potter Stewart ruling …

“The Los Angeles freeway system has … changed the way people think about the urban landscape and therefore about the metropolitan area. Earlier models of transportation created a multi-centered way of life served by widespread patterns of movement, but development of the freeway system is the critical stage in the formalisation of that process. Greater Los Angeles is not a series of suburbs in close proximity to one another; it is, rather, their integration into a fluid system of exchanges, of which the freeway system is the most important nexus … In an area of sprawling suburbanisation and hundreds of randomly attached communities, the freeway serves to evoke a sense of clarity and sharpness, to delineate and integrate urban space. It has created a new sense of space.” [D. Brodsly, ‘L.A. Freeway’, 1981, p.23]

“If I lose my car, I lose my livelihood – period. All I do is drive my children to school and my wife to work and then myself to work – each leg is 30 minutes. I do the same again in the evening. If you can’t drive in the Inland Empire you’re finished.” [quoted in E. Luce, ‘Rebirth of the American city’, Financial Times, June 8 2013]

“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.” [Emphasis added.]

—Justice Potter Stewart, concurring opinion in Jacobellis v. Ohio 378 U.S. 184 (1964), regarding possible obscenity in The Lovers.

I’d like to re-engage a bit with the blog and continue with an occasional posting. In particular I want to pick up on where the last entry left off and spend some time over a few entries looking in more detail at the concept of car-dependent suburbanisation as a “spatial fix”. This was a term used by David Harvey to describe and analyse the post-WWII car-dependent urban growth in the US: as we saw, “[t]his arrangement was ‘spatial’ not least because it entailed a massive physical expansion of cities, and it was a ‘fix’ because it revived real growth in the national economy.” [Hackworth, 2007, p.78].

One of the points that I argued in the last post was that the Keynesian “spatial fix” to the Great Depression, manifested particularly in the US by the technologies of car-dependent suburban sprawl and by the federal-level planning of the suburban form through, for example, FHA insurance criteria, mortgage tax subsidies, and freeway construction, provided the spatial context for a new, decentralised suburban politics dominated by a middle-class, property-owning, aspirational (and largely white) electorate that was easily mobilised against explicitly redistributive policy. In the UK, a similar, though less spatially-distinct, process took place as council tenants voted for a Conservative party that enabled them to buy the houses in which they had lived as subsidised tenants.

But it might be a good idea at this point to take a step back and try to be a bit more precise about some of the terminology we are using – or at least, using the illustrated blog format, to try to give you a visual sense of what we are talking about.

What, in particular, do we mean when we talk about “car-dependent suburbanisation”?

Clearly, suburbanisation is a phenomenon that both long pre-dates the car and has been intimately connected with the evolution of transport technology. Let’s start with a couple of longish quotes from Peter Hall, one of the key thinkers in the field – the first from his superb “Cities in Civilization” (1998), summarising many of the key points that have been touched on in earlier blog entries:

“… [G]etting to work is no problem in the village or small town: a five-minute walk to field or workshop would suffice. … Since a large and growing part of all employment was found in or near the city centre, this means that the effective limit of a city’s growth was set by the ability and the inclination to walk: in practice, as a ready rule of thumb, three miles (five kilometres), equal to one hour’s travel on foot. Small wonder that as London doubled prodigiously from one to two million in the first half of the nineteenth century, people crowded ever more closely near to the centre, and human misery enormously increased; … exposure to cholera, most dreaded of Victorian epidemics, was hugely compounded by the phenomenon of population density and the near-inevitable pollution of water sources that resulted.

Transport technology provided the answer, in the form first of steam railways and horse buses and streetcars, then electric trains and subways and motor buses and electric trams, finally the private motor car and its accompanying highway system. It was urban transport technology which first allowed the city to sprout suburbs, as in late nineteenth-century London and New York, and which finally encouraged the suburbs to overwhelm the traditional city, as in mid-twentieth-century Los Angeles. But this was no easy or effortless process: it demanded not only great ingenuity in developing the technologies themselves, but also creativity in devising appropriate organizational and financial frameworks to bring the new systems into existence.”[p.612]

The next quote, focusing on the “dialectical” relationship between the evolution of transport technologies and urban form, is from his paper ‘Squaring the Circle: Can we Resolve the Clarkian Paradox?’ (1994):

“In 1957 the economist [Colin] Clark published a paper, destined to become a classic in the urban literature called ‘Transport: maker and breaker of cities’. In it he argued that – at least since the first industrial revolution, two hundred years ago – the growth of cities had been shaped by the development of their transport facilities. But these in turn were dependent on the evolution of transport technologies. For each successive development of the technology, there was a corresponding kind of city. However, the relationship was more complex than that: it was a mutual one. The transport system shaped the growth of the city, but on the other hand the previous growth of the city shaped and in particular constrained the transport alternatives that were available. So the pattern of activities and land uses in the city, and the transport system, existed in some kind of symbiotic relationship.

But, Clark stressed, the two could get out of step, and indeed very often did so. That was particularly the case because cities change more slowly than the available technologies change”.

I think this is about right: the relationship between evolving urban form and the “choice” of transport technology is highly dynamic over time, a "spatial fix" that is like all complex systems subject to multiple positive feedback loops. In order better to illustrate this point, I think it’s a good idea to use … illustrations! 

In the previous post on the subject of neoliberalism I quoted from A. Whittemore, (2013), “How the Federal Government zoned America: The Federal Housing Administration and Zoning.” He uses the examples of two residential developments in Los Angeles: Leimert Park and Westchester. The first was begun in 1928, just before the onset of the Great Depression and already well into the evolution of LA from a city of “streetcar” suburbs to one of automobile suburbs; the second was developed only a decade later, beginning in 1938 and expanding rapidly to meet the huge demand created by the aircraft manufacturing industry in LA in the early 1940s. 

What follows is taken from Wikipedia and Whittemore’s analysis.

Developed by Walter H. Leimert (for whom it is named) beginning in 1928 and designed by the Olmsted brothers (sons of New York Central Park designer Frederick Law Olmsted), Leimert Park was one of the first comprehensively planned communities in Southern California designed for upper and middle-income families, and was considered a model of urban planning for its time: automobile traffic near schools and churches was minimized, utility wires were buried or hidden from view in alleys, and densely planted trees lined its streets. Walter Leimert envisioned a self-sufficient community, with a town square, theatre and retail shopping. 

The photo shows a section of Leimert Park, still under development in the 1930s. Intimate in scale, with the commercial area in the upper centre of the photograph, multifamily construction along the radiating arterials, and single-family homes protected on interior streets. Navigable by all personal transportation modes, multiuse, and intimate in scale, it remains an excellent embodiment of the vision of its designers and to a great extent also reflects the ideals to which today’s New Urbanists aspire.

The counterpoint to Leimert Park is, in Whittemore’s view, the “perverted neighborhood unit”: Westchester in 1949, only a few miles to the northwest of Leimert Park. Bloated and dominated by vast sections of single-family use, the Los Angeles Daily News wrote: “You only have to visit Westchester to see the advantage of modern community planning over old-fashioned guesswork methods. In most old communities a hodge-podge of single-family, duplexes, apartments, and business properties are all mixed together.” 

Westchester was praised by the planners; described as “low-density and functionally exclusive”, the boulevards are walled off from the residential lots backing up to them from interior streets, and the business district is buffered from the residential areas by parking lots and streets.

Whittemore focuses in his article on the role played by the Federal Housing Administration, formed in the middle of the 1930s in the deepest years of the Depression, and charged with providing Federal Government insurance to residential mortgages that conformed to the building and planning codes that were established by the FHA itself. He therefore stresses the influence that the bureaucratic aspects of zoning and the political/consumer demand driven by the need to access FHA-insured mortgages as key aspects of the evolution of built form between these two neighbourhoods. One could also look at the role played by traffic engineers in insisting on wide and relatively straight roads that would maximise the efficiency of traffic flows as cars evolved rapidly in terms of speed and sheer numbers on the road.

The point I want to make however is that visually the differences in urban form between the two neighbourhoods are indeed very clear, and they occurred within a very short period of time, subject to multiple influences driven by the underlying dynamic of the rapid evolution of car technology. 

The key elements in understanding the differences, I would argue, are the concepts of “mixed use” and “walkability” which have been fundamental to all the main debates on urban form since the middle of the 20^th century. There is no simple binary distinction between, on the one hand, a car-dependent, and on the other a “car-independent” suburb. But, to use Justice Stewart’s famous phrase, “I know it when I see it.”