Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design (43 page)

The success made Mayor Bacon, who spearheaded the scheme, something of a hero in Smyrna. On the day of our walk through the Market Village, passersby kept slapping him on the back and thanking him. Village Sushi, a restaurant on the strip, even named a dish after him: the Max Bacon Sushi Roll.

Yet the aesthetic appeal of the Market Village obscures a deep flaw in the Smyrna redesign. This became apparent when I visited the mayor’s ninety-one-year-old mother, Dot, a frail, elegant woman who lived in an old yellow cottage behind the new city hall. Unable to walk very far, Dot had to beg rides from her neighbors to buy food and staples. There was no place to buy groceries in the Market Village, and the nearest supermarket was more than a mile away. Here she was, living steps from her son’s new downtown, and Dot was stranded. To support the grocery store Dot Bacon needed, the Market Village would need a heck of a lot more people. (It usually takes eight hundred dwellings to support a small corner store, for example, and Smyrna’s new downtown features just a few dozen homes.) There was land to build on near the impressive new community center and library, but Sizemore told me that the people of Smyrna had refused to consider adding buildings that might obscure the view of these impressive edifices from the five-lane Atlanta Road. In a common replaying of the focusing illusion, they chose the salience of form over function. They chose a design that felt like a village but did not actually perform like one.

This is the lesson for all retrofits: the system is ultimately more important than the package it comes in, and the greatest hurdle for sprawl repair may be challenging the way each of us views the city.

Backlash and Reality

This has become painfully clear in the last decade, where efforts to tackle the problems of sprawl in a more systematic way have begun to draw shrill outrage from some conservative urbanists and libertarians, some of whom have found a voice in the Tea Party movement. Tea Party activists have taken to storming otherwise humdrum city and regional planning meetings across the United States whenever they catch wind of plans to introduce rail transit or transit-friendly zoning or regional growth boundaries. In Tampa, Florida, for example, Tea Party activists defeated a tax measure that would fund light-rail and road improvements in Hillsborough County.
Hillsborough County Conservative Examiner
columnist Warren Pledger issued this phantasmagorical warning: by paying for light-rail, “tax payers will be purchasing the cattle cars that sneaky government officials hope to utilize in the forced transportation of proletariat workers traveling between their apartment buildings and the government owned factories seven days a week.”

Such imaginative interpretations are actually pretty standard among Tea Party urbanists. In city after city, opponents to New Urbanism and “smart growth” claim that local planners are part of an international conspiracy to force everyone to abandon their cars, give up their private property rights, and live in United Nations–mandated “habitation zones.” In the 2010 midterm elections, Colorado Republican gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes accused his Democratic opponent of using a Paris-style bicycle-share program to convert Denver into a “United Nations Community.”
*

In this debate, the city emerges not merely as a system for living, but as a symbol, an expression of political values. The backlash is grounded in a deep-seated mistrust of government and a fear of losing property rights and freedoms. These anti-planning tendencies are quite natural in a nation that holds its sense of liberty close, but they are not based in a clear view of reality. For one thing, they ignore the fact that their tax dollars are already being used to massively subsidize the sprawl model. They also forget that the purely libertarian city simply does not exist. The vast majority of cities in the developed world have been shaped by rules that might already be considered totalitarian for the level of control they exert. Ironically, the dispersed city that Tea Partiers defend so passionately is, itself, a product of centralized control and legislation. That city is grounded at least partly in the ideas of the high modern European socialist Le Corbusier, evangelist of strict controls and segregation of land use, road geometry, and city life.

Tachieva, for her part, wishes she could reassure every one of sprawl repair’s libertarian opponents. Even if the sprawl-repair movement is wildly successful, she says, there will be plenty of auto-oriented suburbia around for those who prefer, and can afford, that way of living.

“Anyone who wants to can keep their big house, live wherever they want, go to malls, and commute for four hours if they like,” Tachieva says. “We just want the chance to fix a few little spots here and there. We want to create some space so that the hundred million people who are coming to American cities will have some choice about where to live and how to live.”

I think that opponents of the retrofit movement also misunderstand the fundamental relationship between urban form and individual freedom. Every urban dweller’s freedom to live, move, and experience the city as he chooses is inherently conditioned by what every landowner does with his or her property. If a developer builds an auto-dependent neighborhood for ten thousand people at the far end of my city, that system will soon infringe on my own right to enjoy safe and navigable roads. Its drivers will crowd the public right-of-way road until the point of gridlock, and then they will demand that it be widened. They will suck up my tax dollars with their demands for dispersed water, sewage, and electricity systems. If they forbid their neighbors from building new density on their own land, then new settlers will have to move even farther down the road, propagating the system of dispersal that—through geometry and sheet distance—has forced millions of people into one way of moving and living, regardless of their preferences.

Cities have always expressed a tension between individual property rights and common benefits. But the Tea Party urbanists take a dangerously narrow view of liberty. Surely a city of true freedom would provide maximum choice about where and how to live. Some visionary citizens understand that achieving such freedom means paying not less but
more
taxes, if they result, say, in a wider palette of mobility options. (In 2008, for example, two-thirds of Los Angeles County residents agreed to a new half-cent sales tax that will raise $40 billion for transportation projects over thirty years, including new subway, bus, and light-rail networks, bike lanes, and, yes, freeway improvements. The transit investments are reinventing the city whose name is synonymous with sprawl, pouring new pedestrian life onto boulevards around transit stops and responding to a new generation of Angelinos who prefer iPhones and souped-up bicycles to cars.) Local code retrofits are even more transparently empowering because they provide citizens with the tools first to visualize the life they want beyond their front doors and then to shape the city that will offer that life. The new codes actually give people in growth centers
more
freedom to build up their own land than they had before.

Thankfully, the code warriors are gaining ground. More than three hundred cities in Canada and the United States have now adopted some kind of form-based code (or bylaws, as typically known in Canada) for at least some neighborhoods. In 2010 Miami, Florida, became the first major city to toss out its entire zoning book in favor of a homegrown form-based code.

Mableton found its own local code because citizens like Meyer took hundreds of hours to plan, to draw, to argue, and to dream their town’s future. They came to understand that the town is not just a picture, and not just an idea, but a system for living they could shape together. They were not guided by the state or by large developers, but their plan will harness the energy of development when the economy picks up. And when sprawl’s most devoted citizens grow old or run out of gas money, Meyer hopes her village will be waiting for them, too.

13. Save Your City, Save Yourself

Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.

—Jane Jacobs

Sometimes the forces that shape our cities can seem overwhelming. It is easy to feel small in the face of the monumental power of the real estate industry, the tyranny of zoning codes, the inertia of bureaucracies, and the sheer durability of things that have already been built. It is tempting to believe that the job of fixing cities is the untouchable terrain of distant authorities whom the state has deemed responsible. It is a terrible mistake to give in to this temptation.

Who has the right to shape the city? The French philosopher Henri Lefebvre once offered a straightforward answer. This right is not something that can be bequeathed by the state. It is not an accident of ethnicity or nationality or birthplace. It is earned through the act of habitation. If you live out your life in the shared urban landscape, then you have a natural right to participate in shaping its future. Lefebvre invented a new name for his naturally enfranchised city shaper, who was both citizen and denizen of the city: the
citadin.

Lefebvre was talking about more than design. He was calling for a total restructuring of social, political, and economic relations so that
citadins
could wrest power over their common urban future back from the state. Whether you support his revolution or not, it is impossible to deny the truth in his message: We are all
citadins.
We are all, through the very geography of our lives, natural stewards and owners of the city. Those who acknowledge it claim immense power.

I have learned this from people who have stopped waiting for mayors or planners or engineers to remake their streets and neighborhoods. Some, like the neighbors who tore down their fences on N Street in Davis, just want to build a community that makes more sense for them than the one that planners handed them. Some are driven by a wish to reclaim an almost intangible sense of belonging. Others want safer spaces for their kids. Some are trying to save the planet. Some want more freedom to live and move as they please. They rarely use the language of neuroscience or behavioral economics or even architecture, but they are proving that the happy city revolution can start right at the front door, and that every one of us has the power to alter our city. Some of them find that in changing their cities, they also change themselves.

Freedom Rider

On a spring morning in 2009 a bespectacled twelve-year-old named Adam Kaddo Marino announced to his mother, Janette, that it was National Bike to Work Day.

“School is my work,” Adam told his mother. “So I should get to bike to school, right?”

The pair left their home in Saratoga Springs, New York, on their bicycles, and they followed the city’s main drag, Broadway, north until it was swallowed by a hardwood forest. They biked on a slick rock trail through the trees. The light of the rising sun streamed through the canopy, which was bursting with new growth. It was a glorious ride, much better than sitting in the back of a diesel school bus. They emerged from the forest near the back of Maple Avenue Middle School and locked Adam’s bike up just as the buses were pulling in. Adam felt great.

That was the end of the fun. First the parking attendant warned Adam’s mother that she had made a big mistake. Then the vice principal laid into her. Then Principal Stuart Byrne came out to explain that biking and walking to school had been banned by the school district since 1994. Byrne confiscated Adam’s bicycle. (“I would be a nervous wreck every day if kids were riding to school,” he later told
The Saratogian
, noting the modern-day dangers of traffic and lurking child abusers. “If anything happened, it would weigh on me for the rest of my life.”) What had been a ritual for generations of children in Saratoga Springs was now deemed too risky. Adam’s bicycle was locked in the school boiler room.

“As time went on, my blood started to boil,” Janette Kaddo Marino told me later. “Here we were, trying to encourage freedom, and I was reprimanded by my child’s principal! Shouldn’t I have the right to take my child to school any way I can?”

It’s easy to see why the school district made the rule. Maple Avenue Middle School is a gigantic amalgamated institution plunked down north of town on its namesake avenue, which looks more like a rural highway than an urban boulevard. Although Maple Avenue does have a painted bike lane—part of a nationally designated bike highway—at the time there were no sidewalks, and the road was engineered for speed, right down to the geometry of the school entrance, where the street corners looked more like curves on a racetrack. Saratoga Springs had designed danger right into the school experience.

But this story does not end like so many others in the country of fear. Adam had too much at stake. Born with partial achromatopsia, a congenital vision disorder, Adam knew he might never see well enough to get a driver’s license, but he could walk and cycle at slower speeds with ease. The family had moved to Saratoga Springs specifically because they thought it was the kind of place where Adam could be free to ride his bike. That was one thing. Adam was also bugged by the sheer idiocy of the ban on walking and biking.

“I’m a safe rider. I wear a helmet. I use hand signals when I am turning. My mom taught me all that stuff long ago. Why would they have a rule saying I can’t bike or walk to school? It just didn’t make sense to me,” Adam recalled.

His mother warned him that defying the school district would not be easy. He would be in the spotlight. She said he didn’t have to take on this fight. “But I said I’m totally game. We had to change the school so kids in the future could decide for themselves how to get there. We couldn’t back down.”

Adam fought against the architecture of fear. After the school relinquished Adam’s bike, he insisted on riding to school whenever he felt like it. His mom rode with him. They would whiz by the long line of vehicles full of chauffeur-parents and kids on Maple Avenue, and Adam would wave when he saw the faces of his fellow students pressed against the window of the school bus or their parents’ cars. They kept riding even after the day the following autumn when the police were called to school to give Janette hell. They kept riding, and Janette kept harassing the school district until the story started hitting newspapers, TV news, and finally the
Drudge Report
.