M
Mike in TO
Guest
SUV (Standard Urban View) of suburbia
Mon 13 Feb 2006, The Ottawa Citizen, Page A11, Andrew Potter
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Stop bashing the 'burbs: Much of the derision heaped on suburbia these days is mere urban snobbery My family has a cottage on the Ontario side of the Ottawa River, about 60 kilometres west of the nation's capital. When I was growing up, the trip to the cottage was a fun 45-minute drive past the incipient suburb of Kanata and through the gorgeous farmland of the Ottawa Valley.
Today, the drive still takes 45 minutes, as long as you stick to the new highway. If you take our old route, you spend most of the trip winding through suburban developments as the city elbows its way past Kanata and through formerly sleepy rural communities such as Carp and Kinburn.
In fact, ever since the megacity amalgamation a few years ago, our cottage is actually in Ottawa. Like virtually every other urban area of North America, the city is sprawling, with barely a million residents stretched out for 100 kilometres or so along the banks of the river. My older sister has done her part, playing minivan-ed soccer mom to four kids in a town not 20 kilometres from the cottage.
And while I've often wondered about her judgment, it never occurred to me that her chosen lifestyle was actually evil. That is, until recently, when I attended a screening of The End of Suburbia.
A documentary in the spirit of The Corporation or Bowling for Columbine, The End of Suburbia rehearses a number of familiar arguments. To wit: After the Second World War, Detroit auto makers teamed up with the housing industry and Big Oil to convince young couples that the American Dream did not rest in the filth and poverty of the City, but in the pastoral gentility of the Countryside. Egged on by advertising, millions of Americans were sold a bill of goods that provided neither the convenience of the city nor the charm of the country, but only the brain-dead pleasures of mass-market consumerism.
These pioneering young families soon found themselves stranded in cookie-cutter suburban developments, always named after what they had destroyed (Shady Pines, Oak Ridge, Mountain View, and so on). Stranded, that is, until they bought automobiles, which gave them the freedom to commute to work, bumper-to-bumper with their road-raging neighbours.
That's the argument, anyway. We can call this the SUV (Standard Urban View) of suburbia. According to the SUV, the suburban lifestyle is not just esthetically unappealing. Rather, it is responsible for a great deal of our modern woes, including global warming, smog, power blackouts, and, indirectly, Islamic terrorism.
Most of this is just lifestyle snobbery masquerading as social conscience. One of the commentators in the documentary opines that the suburban ideal is a big bait-and-switch, promising the countryside while substituting "industrially produced" lawns instead. Later, James Howard Kunstler, one of the most popular anti-sprawl writers out there, declares that suburbanites are living in "a consensual trance," which is little different from Adbusters editor Kalle Lasn's view that anyone who buys branded products is a brainwashed "Manchurian consumer."
Yet the people who move to the suburbs aren't nearly as stupid or careless or brainwashed as the makers of The End of Suburbia seem to think. They know they're going to get a lawn, a garage and a backyard. They know they will be miles from a store or cafe, and that they'll have to drive everywhere. Most people move to the suburbs with eyes wide open, fully aware of the tradeoffs they are making. They aren't looking for some pastoral idyll, but for more prosaic goods like privacy, space, quiet and parking.
In his recent book The City: A Global History, Joel Kotkin points out that people have been trying to flee the city for, well, as long as there have been cities. He notes, for example, that London's tremendous expansion was well under way by the 18th century, long before the advent of the automobile.
What distinguishes sprawl today and the sprawl of yesteryear is the social status of those in the suburbs. Until quite recently, cities were dirty and dangerous, so the rich took their advantage and escaped to the countryside.
Today, our cities are safe and clean, increasingly populated by the hip, the young, and the childless, while the suburbs are for those unwise enough to have children or vulgar enough to desire a driveway. The essentially status-based nature of the city-sprawl divide is underscored (and aggravated) by the widespread acceptance -- among urbanites, anyway -- of the "cool cities" thesis propounded by people like American sociologist Richard Florida.
According to Mr. Florida, our sustainable economic future rests with dense urban locales populated by gays, bohemians, and other members of the so-called creative class.
Does this mean we can reduce worries over global warming or an impending crisis to mere status-seeking? Not entirely. These are serious problems that require serious attention. But the misguided hyperbole of a film like The End of Suburbia only serves to distract our attention, leading us to focus on a distinction that is more imagined than real.
As Robert Bruegmann, a professor of planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago, pointed out in a recent article in The Guardian, sprawl always seems to be "where other people live, the result of bad choices and poor judgment by other people." Sprawl is like bad taste. No one admits to having it, yet somehow there seems to be a tremendous amount of it around. If we're going to have a serious public debate about the environmental problems we actually face and what steps we might take to deal with them, we first need to get past the agonized vanities of status-obsessed urbanists.
Andrew Potter is a columnist for Maclean's and co-author of The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can't be Jammed.
Mon 13 Feb 2006, The Ottawa Citizen, Page A11, Andrew Potter
------------------------------------------------------------
Stop bashing the 'burbs: Much of the derision heaped on suburbia these days is mere urban snobbery My family has a cottage on the Ontario side of the Ottawa River, about 60 kilometres west of the nation's capital. When I was growing up, the trip to the cottage was a fun 45-minute drive past the incipient suburb of Kanata and through the gorgeous farmland of the Ottawa Valley.
Today, the drive still takes 45 minutes, as long as you stick to the new highway. If you take our old route, you spend most of the trip winding through suburban developments as the city elbows its way past Kanata and through formerly sleepy rural communities such as Carp and Kinburn.
In fact, ever since the megacity amalgamation a few years ago, our cottage is actually in Ottawa. Like virtually every other urban area of North America, the city is sprawling, with barely a million residents stretched out for 100 kilometres or so along the banks of the river. My older sister has done her part, playing minivan-ed soccer mom to four kids in a town not 20 kilometres from the cottage.
And while I've often wondered about her judgment, it never occurred to me that her chosen lifestyle was actually evil. That is, until recently, when I attended a screening of The End of Suburbia.
A documentary in the spirit of The Corporation or Bowling for Columbine, The End of Suburbia rehearses a number of familiar arguments. To wit: After the Second World War, Detroit auto makers teamed up with the housing industry and Big Oil to convince young couples that the American Dream did not rest in the filth and poverty of the City, but in the pastoral gentility of the Countryside. Egged on by advertising, millions of Americans were sold a bill of goods that provided neither the convenience of the city nor the charm of the country, but only the brain-dead pleasures of mass-market consumerism.
These pioneering young families soon found themselves stranded in cookie-cutter suburban developments, always named after what they had destroyed (Shady Pines, Oak Ridge, Mountain View, and so on). Stranded, that is, until they bought automobiles, which gave them the freedom to commute to work, bumper-to-bumper with their road-raging neighbours.
That's the argument, anyway. We can call this the SUV (Standard Urban View) of suburbia. According to the SUV, the suburban lifestyle is not just esthetically unappealing. Rather, it is responsible for a great deal of our modern woes, including global warming, smog, power blackouts, and, indirectly, Islamic terrorism.
Most of this is just lifestyle snobbery masquerading as social conscience. One of the commentators in the documentary opines that the suburban ideal is a big bait-and-switch, promising the countryside while substituting "industrially produced" lawns instead. Later, James Howard Kunstler, one of the most popular anti-sprawl writers out there, declares that suburbanites are living in "a consensual trance," which is little different from Adbusters editor Kalle Lasn's view that anyone who buys branded products is a brainwashed "Manchurian consumer."
Yet the people who move to the suburbs aren't nearly as stupid or careless or brainwashed as the makers of The End of Suburbia seem to think. They know they're going to get a lawn, a garage and a backyard. They know they will be miles from a store or cafe, and that they'll have to drive everywhere. Most people move to the suburbs with eyes wide open, fully aware of the tradeoffs they are making. They aren't looking for some pastoral idyll, but for more prosaic goods like privacy, space, quiet and parking.
In his recent book The City: A Global History, Joel Kotkin points out that people have been trying to flee the city for, well, as long as there have been cities. He notes, for example, that London's tremendous expansion was well under way by the 18th century, long before the advent of the automobile.
What distinguishes sprawl today and the sprawl of yesteryear is the social status of those in the suburbs. Until quite recently, cities were dirty and dangerous, so the rich took their advantage and escaped to the countryside.
Today, our cities are safe and clean, increasingly populated by the hip, the young, and the childless, while the suburbs are for those unwise enough to have children or vulgar enough to desire a driveway. The essentially status-based nature of the city-sprawl divide is underscored (and aggravated) by the widespread acceptance -- among urbanites, anyway -- of the "cool cities" thesis propounded by people like American sociologist Richard Florida.
According to Mr. Florida, our sustainable economic future rests with dense urban locales populated by gays, bohemians, and other members of the so-called creative class.
Does this mean we can reduce worries over global warming or an impending crisis to mere status-seeking? Not entirely. These are serious problems that require serious attention. But the misguided hyperbole of a film like The End of Suburbia only serves to distract our attention, leading us to focus on a distinction that is more imagined than real.
As Robert Bruegmann, a professor of planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago, pointed out in a recent article in The Guardian, sprawl always seems to be "where other people live, the result of bad choices and poor judgment by other people." Sprawl is like bad taste. No one admits to having it, yet somehow there seems to be a tremendous amount of it around. If we're going to have a serious public debate about the environmental problems we actually face and what steps we might take to deal with them, we first need to get past the agonized vanities of status-obsessed urbanists.
Andrew Potter is a columnist for Maclean's and co-author of The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can't be Jammed.
