A More
Benevolent Sprawl

by Alex Marshall

It's hard to believe that it's been almost 20 years since the husband-and-wife team of Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk first began barn-storming around the country, preaching the saving graces of traditional urbanism and the terrors of suburban sprawl. Duany in particular, with his battery of slides and incisive rhetoric, has tutored civic leagues and town councils on the basics of nineteenth and early twentieth-century city de-sign. Mixing the design principles of the Beaux-Arts school, Camillo Sitte, and Raymond Unwin into a spicy neotraditional vision, Duany talks of "terminating vistas," the proper relationship of street width to building heights, and the merits of on-street parking. Duany and Plater-Zyberk have trained Americans to think visually, shown people how the form of suburbia, with its tangle of curvy cul-de-sacs and boulevards, differs from that of traditional urban spaces. They helped create an ideal of urbanism--the walkable street, the corner store, the front porch, the row house--and taught people to yearn for it.

The couple's sermonizing, though, is carefully crafted to lead the congregation to DPZ's (the firm of Duany Plater-Zyberk) own path to salvation--the Traditional Neighborhood Development, or TND. There are now several dozen of these around the country; in essence, conventional suburban subdivisions draped in the clothing of urbanism. This means gridded streets, front porches, smaller set backs, and so forth. But they remain isolated de-velopments, sitting off main highways, linked by necessity to the local shopping mall and defined by the automobile. They function pretty much like any other subdivision. What the couple is doing, intentionally or not, is providing the country with a rationale for another round of suburban sprawl, only this time labeled "New Urban" or "neotraditional." More serious measures--like curbing highway spending or regional-growth boundaries--are given lip service or actively criticized.

This sales campaign for a new form of sprawl continues in their latest book, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream. They are joined here by Jeff Speck, a Harvard-trained architect and now director of town planning at DPZ. As befits a work by architects, Suburban Nation is a handsome book. The text is laid out in big type with fat margins. It is an easy read. The 11 chapters take you through the authors' view of suburban sprawl, of its cures and ills, most of which lead to the door of TNDs. The chapters have names like "What Is Sprawl, and Why?," "The House That Sprawl Built," and "The American Transportation Mess." It is quite an effective piece of propaganda. And, like most effective propaganda, it is deeply misleading.

The false premise of the book is presented in its first few paragraphs. There, the trio describe what they say is the archetypal problem of suburban sprawl: what to do with a vacant 100-acre tract left by a rich guy on the edge of a developing metropolitan area. Will it become another tract suburb, or will it become a neotraditional town, ripe with public space and community? As politicians know, he who frames the question usually wins the argument. But the fate of a 100-acre tract is not sprawl's es-sential question. If you start there, you have al-ready lost. Before you get to that 100-acre tract, you must first consider highway construction and regional growth strategies. This misleading paradigm of TNDs versus conventional sprawl is a bright thread woven throughout the book.

Historically, Duany and Plater-Zyberk fit into a long line of sprawl-justifiers, new members of which emerge every 15 or 20 years under the banner of "the reinvented suburb." In the 1970s and early 1980s, Planned Unit Developments, or PUDs, were the rage. Municipalities around the country approved these assemblages of shopping centers, subdivisions, and commercial parks as antidotes to "sprawl." In the 1960s, the New Town movement, which produced small cities like Columbia, Mary-land, was hailed as a sprawl buster. Jim Rouse, the godfather of Columbia, talked just like Duany when in 1966 he said: "Sprawl is inefficient, ugly. Worst of all it is inhuman... There has been too much emphasis on the role of the architect as an artist, not enough on his role as a social servant." Today, Columbia's swooping curves, separated shopping centers, and big enclosed "downtown" mall are seen as the embodiment of suburbia and sprawl. Will the same be said of New Urban subdivisions in 25 years? I think so.

The deceptive logic of Suburban Nation revolves around the false belief that the design of older neighborhoods and cities can simply be transferred to the suburbs without copying the underlying transportation systems necessitated by plans based around the pedestrian. The writers repeatedly do things like compare historic cities, such as George-town, Charleston, and Savannah, to various non-descript suburbs in Arizona, California, and Florida. At one point, they compare sprawling Virginia Beach, my hometown, with the Alexandria, Vir-ginia, of the 1700s. This is like comparing an eighteenth-century clipper ship to a twentieth-century container ship.

This isn't to say we can't build places comparable in beauty and function to Charleston or Princeton (two towns the writers like to name). But these places have to be built by recognizing, not hiding from, contemporary contexts and choices. That other New Urbanist, Peter Calthorpe, is far more coherent intellectually because he portrays mass transit as a requirement, not just an option, in producing pedestrian-oriented neighborhoods.

The trio do get some things right. They correctly point out that subsidized mortgages and highway spending promoted sprawl. They explain how, in the 1920s, urban design mutated into urban planning, leaving much of the visual and artistic vision of cities behind. But they avoid the implications this analysis holds for their own work. On transportation they say: "If we truly want to curtail sprawl, we must acknowledge that automotive mobility is a no-win game, and that the only long-term solutions to traffic are public transit and coordinated land use." Exactly. But their own work involves neither. They write: "Settlement patterns depend more than anything else upon transportation systems." So how does a neotraditional subdivision sitting off a standard suburban highway end up as anything but a conventional suburb?

I'm curious as to whether Speck, the third author, is responsible for the more progressive chapters on transportation and regionalism. In an interview after a lecture at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard in April, Speck said that he wrote the first draft of the book, and that Duany and Plater-Zyberk edited and added to his work. During the presentation, Speck, the youngest member of DPZ, said that he would support a moratorium on suburban growth, although he wasn't sure if Duany would. Perhaps Speck's influence is responsible for a guilty rationalizing that creeps into Suburban Nation. At one point they say, "Conscientious designers are faced with a difficult choice: To allow sprawl to continue without intervention, or to reshape new growth into the most benevolent form possible." Maybe that should be DPZ's new motto: "A more benevolent form of sprawl."

The authors' hostility to real sprawl-tackling can be seen with their damning-with-faint-praise treatment of Portland, Oregon. Essential to that city's success has been its urban-growth boundary. But in Suburban Nation, the authors say that "while these boundaries have sometimes proved effective, they are rarely long-term solutions... Even Portland's lauded boundary faces constant legislative challenge." Why does "constant legislative challenge" make something unsuccessful? Actually, Portland's growth boundary has lasted 25 years, withstanding three statewide referendums called by developers.

Ultimately, the book is dangerous, because it confuses people about the chaotic nature of the American landscape and then holds out false hope for an easy way to buy our way out of it. They write, "The choice is ours: either a society of homogenous pieces, isolated from one another in often fortified enclaves, or a society of diverse and memorable neighborhoods, organized into mutually supportive towns, cities, and regions." But DPZ's developments are virtually all "homogenous," "isolated," and, to a degree, "fortified enclaves." Windsor, in Florida, is even a gated community. These subdivisions--oh, excuse me, "neighborhoods"--are isolated and isolating, income-exclusive, and antidemocratic in their reliance on homeowners' associations for control.

Seaside, Florida, the project that kicked off DPZ's work, is perhaps its sole lasting and honest achievement. This neotraditional "town," founded in the early 1980s, works precisely because it is unique. It is a resort, so the de-emphasis of the automobile works. People on vacation rarely need to shop for a washing machine or go to the dentist. But it is not a model for solving sprawl. It is an interesting resort community.

Suburban Nation is a child's tale, told to lull a gullible audience into a dreamy, painless vision of how to solve suburban sprawl; a vision which, not incidentally, requires buying more of what Duany and Plater-Zyberk are selling.

Alex Marshall is the author of How Cities Work: Sub-urbs, Sprawl and the Roads Not Taken, to be released this fall by The University of Texas Press. He is currently a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University.

As the baseball flies, it's just five miles from Candle-stick Point to China Basin. But in making that move the San Francisco Giants have gone from 40 seasons of purgatory to something resembling baseball heaven. They have traded a cold, windy, remote location for a vastly more comfortable one, a cavernous multipurpose stadium for cozier quarters deftly shaped for baseball alone. In Pacific Bell Park, the city that likes to refer to itself as "the City" finally has a ballpark that lives up to its self-image.

The stadium's urban aspects and baseball flavor are laudable, but its economic blueprint is even better. Pac Bell Park embodies not just retro de-sign, but also old-fashioned capitalist financing. It was built with about $300 million in private money and only $15 million in taxpayer funds (not counting infrastructure costs). The last time a major-league venue did anything similar was in 1962, when Dodger Stadium opened, and the last time before that was the debut of Yankee Stadium in 1923. This iconoclastic idea of having users and sponsors pay, rather than the general public, was spurred by San Francisco voters rejecting four public-financing measures. It's unlikely to happen, but it would be nice if this arrangement could become a sports-financing standard, just as the angular, asymmetrical brick-and-steel design of Baltimore's Camden Yards has become the physical paradigm for at least eight other stadiums since 1992.

In April, three of these ballparks opened within a week of each other, and all were the work of HOK Sport of Kansas City (as was Camden Yards and five of its emulators). This year's crop also includes Co-merica Park in Detroit and Enron Field in Houston, but Pac Bell seems the most interesting, largely due to its small site and urban bayfront location. Comerica and Enron are closer to their cities' down-towns, but those places are not San Francisco, and nothing beats waterfront property. Paradoxically, retro ballparks are usually in or at the edges of downtowns, yet none of the classic ballparks that they echo could have ever afforded such expensive property. They were built in grittier, blue-collar neighborhoods, and Pac Bell is located similarly.

It occupies a warehouse zone at the outer edge of the South of Market (SoMa) district, a site so funky that when it was cleared, thousands of rats scurried to find new lodgings. But SoMa is gentrifying rapidly--the expanded Moscone Convention Center and Mario Botta's San Francisco Museum of Modern Art are five blocks away. The South Beach marina lies just beyond left field, and new upscale housing, trendy restaurants, and dot-com enterprises are filling the nearby warehouses and outlet stores.

The stadium is served by freeways, light rail running on the newly landscaped Embarcadero-King Street route, several bus lines, commuter rail, fer-ries, and a BART subway station a mile away. Boosters call Pac Bell the first new "multimodal" ballpark. This overstates the case, since Camden Yards is equally well served by many transport modes. Still, on a three-game visit, I arrived at or left the park six different ways, only once by car.

Pac Bell treats its setting deferentially. The stadium provides a mandated public promenade on the waterside and presents a low arcaded profile to China Basin. Along the city streets--Third and King--it becomes a taller brown brick structure with large green-mullioned windows and simple pyramid-roofed clock towers. Above the brickwork rises the steel-framed underside of the upper deck, a clue that the building is a stadium and not an institution of some kind, as well as a subtle invocation of the adjoining Lefty O'Doul Bridge. These main facades are dignified and conscientiously proportioned, although they do little to express the striking character of Pac Bell's inner architecture, its potential for excitement.

The asymmetrical field layout is one of the most interesting in baseball. Foul territory is very small, and the bullpens are on the field. While left field is conventional, right field reflects the tight trapezoidal shape of the site itself, with a 307-foot foul line (18 feet less than the normal minimum standard) that quickly increases to a whopping 420 feet where the wall bends in right-center. This zone is an incubator for the second-most exciting play in the sport: the triple, which involves a well-hit ball, two racing outfielders, a speeding base runner, and a long throw to third base. Triples were hit in my first two games at Pac Bell. Baseball's most galvanizing play is the inside-the-park home run and this deep outfield angle should spawn a few of those as well.

This short right field allows home runs to be hit into the Bay, and Giants' slugger Barry Bonds did just that in the park's 9th game, registering "001" on the "Splash Hits" tally board near the right-field line. Hoping to retrieve a ball (or more likely, just to make the City's coolest new scene), people converge on China Basin in kayaks, canoes, rubber rafts, sailboats, catamarans, outboard motorboats, and small cabin cruisers. One sunny afternoon I counted 50 such watercraft awaiting flying cowhide.

People without tickets can watch some of the game from the waterside promenade through an open arcade. Inside the park there are a few rows of benches atop the arcade, and behind them is a pedestrian concourse that rings the stadium behind the last row of lower-deck seats. The most appealing stretch of this loop is the one in right, since it allows views of both the game and the Bay.

Beyond the left-field wall is a somewhat gratuitous fun zone: a kids' miniature ballpark, a tilted 80-foot-long Coke bottle, and a large fiberglass fielder's mitt occupy the area behind the bleacher seats. The two items may sound tacky in concept, but as objects in space they are surprisingly satisfying. The mitt is a 26-foot-tall replica of a beat-up old glove, Oldenburgian in scale, but utterly realistic in form and texture.

The site imposed a strong and pleasing asymmetry on the main stands, with most seats placed on the left half of the field. The usual four levels--field, club, suite, and upper-deck--are configured to put fans somewhat closer to the action than is typical today. But this intimacy, which partly stems from a low 40,800-seat capacity, cannot approach that of the classic parks. The need to pack today's stadiums with ultra-premium seating sections and scores of specialized vending stations means that intimacy in the historic sense is im-possible. Pac Bell's 13-acre site is deemed small by current standards, but Brooklyn's Ebbets Field managed to fit on a plot of about five acres. The upper- deck seats provide a comprehensive view of the game, as well as fine vistas of the Bay, Oakland, and part of the Bay Bridge and eastern edge of the city. The top-deck concourse allows no field view, but it more than compensates for this with dramatic downtown panoramas.

There's so much to see and do at Pac Bell that one wonders whether the game is ideally served by so many competing demands on spectators' attention. Baseball is a type of performance art, but here patrons are expected to leave their seats and engage in activities other than watching that art form unfold.

Another art that may have been shortchanged in the unprecedented baseball-building boom of the past eight years is architecture. Prompted by the success of Camden Yards, team owners keep asking for retro styling and nostalgic touches rather than cutting-edge design. In speaking with HOK's staff, one senses a longing for a few clients who might seek original expression rather than the usual "old-fashioned ballpark with all the modern amenities."

Just such a project might be underway 500 miles down the coast. The San Diego Padres are exploring life-beyond-Camden Yards, and have retained Antoine Predock and HOK to design a ballpark as the centerpiece of an ambitious 50-acre urban-renewal project that will also include a hotel, shopping and entertainment facilities, and a public park. Predock's well-honed Southwestern sensibility has produced a sculpted, terraced, and indigenously landscaped ball yard that looks like no other. San Francisco now has the best baseball stadium west of the Rocky Mountains, but perhaps not for long.

John Pastier is a Seattle-based architecture critic and design consultant who has worked on six stadiums and arenas, including Orioles Park at Camden Yards.

Design inSite
Developed to familiarize designers with novel products, materials, and processes, this manufacturing guide is off to a good start. The site is organized into about 100 items, all of which, for now at least, have been designed by Danes. Products and components can be searched for using different criteria ranging from technical properties to area of application. Each is described with text and photos or drawings--along with the occasional thumbnail animation--and there are links to relevant materials and processes. Brief entries describe the economic aspects of various technologies. The site will build out to include information pertinent to plastics, composites, surface treatment, ceramics, "smart" materials, and rapid modeling techniques. A well-thought-out guided tour shows you how to navigate through the categories.

Expo On Line
An online home for the Venice Biennale's 7th Inter-national Exhibition of Architecture, Expo On Line features projects inspired by a central theme: "The City: Less Aesthetics, More Ethics." With few design fripperies, the site posts "visions outlining urban utopy" as realized by more than 60 planners and architects, many of them young and relatively unknown. Proposals range from the ephemeral (I-Beam Design's suggestions for accessorizing a small urban park) to the humongous (a sinuous riverside megastructure by Morphosis). The site cries out for a more immersive experience--some fly-throughs would've been nice. The submissions, which suffer from the usual vagaries of translation, vary wildly in terms of how well they adhere to the brief.

Digital Experiences
Enter this virtual playroom created by London- based multimedia firm Digit Inc. and, once you get the hang of its low-key but ingenious interface, you're in for some mindlessly amusing, screensaver-style type-and-motion experiments. The site also has links to a handful of kindred design spirits and to Digit's commercial portfolio. The studio's online solution for a new interactive digital-TV service eschews the Elvis-on-black-velvet look favored by most entertainment-related destinations, implementing instead the same terse, highly calibrated styling that distinguishes many of Digital's projects.

onedotzero
Now in its fourth year, the London-based onedotzero festival is a real-world annual event intended to showcase the creative possibilities of desktop digital filmmaking. The site charts the festival's role in commissioning, programming, and producing work that involves the moving digital image, as well as in developing cross-media and interactive projects relating to the worlds of CD-ROMs, print, the Inter-net, museum installations, and television. Onedot-zero.com, its organizers claim, "has consistently programmed truly experimental and progressive work that is pushing the moving image forward." Unfortunately, this envelope-pushing boast is overstated; the site merely documents the festival's programming, which is largely made up of feature-length Japanese anime, interviews with music video directors, a few panel discussions, and a side-bar program of experimental Western shorts.

Creative Planet
Creative Planet addresses the emergence of the broadband Web and its potential for movie production. The site's editorial thrust is that the explosion of digital technologies offers working Hollywood a host of career opportunities. A consortium of six categories provides breaking news of interest to professionals in directing, editing, post-production, television, cinematography, motion graphics, DVDs, special effects, and more. Each mini-magazine posts current and topical news briefs, features, and interviews, many of them well-linked to re-lated information.

The Architecture Hate Page
Rather than promote their own wares, the folks at BBVH, a Dutch architectural firm, have opted to host a forum for anybody sufficiently ticked off at a building or project to nominate it for inclusion on the site's Ten Most Hated list. Now that's cold! Flanked by fetching thumbnail animations of memorable demolitions from the past, the scrappy site's chamber of architectural horrors is administered in a thoroughly democratic fashion. Once you register you can vote for your favorites, posting your own comments along with the heartfelt but frequently incoherent rants that accompany submissions. As projects decline in unpopularity, they're relegated to the Not So Hated Anymore gallery. You can also subscribe to a newsletter that keeps you posted on the latest atrocities.

O2
Sustainable design desperately needs an online for-um. Maybe this fledgling site--a meeting of "green minds"--will be it. O2.org supports the exchange of information among an international network of designers and entrepreneurs engaged in the development of environmentally sustainable products and services. Still it has a long way to go to become a truly useful resource. On a recent viewing, the section devoted to interviews with "eco-designers" included this gem: "People are taking more and more interest in rainwater," said one unidentified source, "and there is a big market for products connected with it." What, rain barrels maybe? The site gives no answer, and the rest of the content is of a similar placeholder variety. But O2.org is worth a visit, if only to check out its clever menu.