The Sustainable Urban Development Reader

During one of my rough days as a substitute teacher, I got the idea of having the class look up their favorite city on Google-Earth, hoping to kill time until the bell rang. One of them picked Los Angeles, and inquired about the “gray thing” running through the city. “That’s the Los Angeles river” I told him. More questions followed about why it was that color, and I explained that he was looking at concrete. The river runs through a man-made concrete bank, designed to conserve the water and prevent flooding. The next questions was “how come there’s no water in it?” and I replied “LA is arid, so the river’s usually dry.” More questions, this time on how they can fill all those swimming pools.

   The fact of the matter is, throughout the USA, we have cities that are not naturally sustainable. LA was nothing until the dams and aqueducts came in, and even today you’d think they’d have a water shortage. Same thing with Las Vegas, Phoenix, El Paso, and just about every other city in the Southwest. So many of our cities grew up from unnatural beginnings, with no plan for how they’d get food, water, or building materials, nor any plan for bringing them in.

   One of the first essays is Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic, written in the 1940’s. The conservationist discusses communities setting rules for land use, agreeing on the best way to save water, dispose of waste, and take care of all the environmental issues that will effect the people. Unfortunately, his essay stresses “community” which doesn’t always suffice. If an industrialist wants to put a factory in a community, he can bypass their laws by applying to the state for eminent domain. The same holds true for water use; it is usually up to the state, not the community. Take for instance the recent controversy with the village of Kiryas Joel in upstate New York. The village wants to drill wells into the aqueduct, and the surrounding residents claim this will deplete the aquifer which all of them are using. One community’s needs may trump the other’s.

   Fast forward to 1993 with Peter Calthorpe’s The Next American Metropolis. He argues that car use has increased, leading to greater sprawl (or vice versa.) His argument is that while Americans were car-dependent back in the 70’s (OPEC embargo as proof) we were driving a lot less than we are now. Commutes were shorter, and houses were smaller, but as Americans desired bigger homes, the builders took their blueprints out into the sticks. He cites “traditional” neighborhoods, with tightly packed townhouses, where everyone gets along and you can walk to the store, school, and library, but this did not work in post WWII USA. According to him, Americans liked the feeling of privacy, so a private backyard made sense. A swimming pool in the backyard would definitely ice the cake of suburbia, along with a nice big private driveway, and a front yard to seclude the house from the street. But when you add those things together, you get increased auto traffic, water use, and lack of sociability. In New Jersey there’s a beautiful town of wooden homes called Ocean Grove, and it’s definitely a sociable community. But it would not work everywhere. A lot of people still want private houses.

    The Sustainable Urban Development Reader is a collection of writings on this topic. One of the greatest things about it is that it doesn’t draw any conclusions, that’s left to the scholar. There’s no sense in arguing that the desert is infertile or that New Orleans has poor drainage, those are facts. What the book does is it collects articles on sustainability going back decades, all the way to the days when some of our greatest cities barely existed.