David Brooks, a columnist I usually read to get ready for a fight, posted an interesting op-ed in the New York Times today:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/17/opinion/17brooks.html?em.  Like most articles I find interesting, this one supports a long-held position of mine (I need validation).  My position, which you’re no doubt tired of hearing, if you’ve had a drink with me, is that the most reliable response of Americans to any suggestion from urban planners is to completely ignore them.  “Ignore us,” I should say, because metropolitan planning is where I started my career.  Brooks outlines several recent studies which ask how Americans feel about where they live, where they want to live, and the type of lifestyle they envision when they get there.  The results are totally conflicted, and very interesting.

 

In short, our nation’s regional and local growth-planning has, for at least the past decade, been guided by a preference for urbanization: increasing densities (where appropriate), creating walkable neighborhoods, incorporating transit in place of car-dependency, encouraging infrastructure and resource-efficiency in lots of ways.  In graduate school, these goals were axiomatic.  The only question was whether you were taking the New Urbanist train to get there (Joe Barnes), or the Fantastic European Modernist train (me).  These were knock-down-drag-out debates, in the planning theory world.  Thank goodness Joe and I never met in those days.  There might have been a dust-up. (Blog commenters: vote on who would’ve won?)

 

Well, it turns out that within the American population is significant ambivalence about these axiomatic goals.  In the abstract, people tend to agree, but when they think about what they want, as individuals, it’s more complex.  They want the walkable destinations, the “neighborhood feel,” the transit options in their regional plans, but what many of them seem to want for their family is to have a place in the country, by definition car-dependent, in easy reach of these amenities.  Satisfaction among city-dwellers, even in cities with excellent growth-management, is a pretty mixed bag.  Natural beauty, active outdoor recreation, these are the essential elements of many Americans’ “dream home.”

 

Brooks, taking a national perspective, offers examples of “popular” cities: Denver, Seattle, San Antonio, all places that offer these seemingly contradictory elements.  At a little smaller scale, but I’d argue an even higher quality, I’d offer Charlottesville.  Folks who move to Charlottesville, either to raise children, or to “downshift” or retire, seem overwhelmingly to be looking for this balance.  The beauty of the landscape beckons, and the Downtown Mall, West Main, Belmont and the University make a delicious urban experience nearby.  I think the Pew and other studies are telling us that the urbanizing influence is great, but it’s clearly not for everyone.  In fact it might not even be for most people.

 

This is why I think what’s happening at Bundoran Farm is important.  It certainly isn’t the only way, and it might turn out it’s not even the best way, but it’s an approach to put in the toolkit.  An approach that allows individuals to find their “place in the country,” in a way that doesn’t deface or crowd out what they came to see.  An approach which allows engagement with the rural landscape, with a structure for both disciplining that landscape, and for managing change over the long term.  And finally, an approach that doesn’t depend for success on fiat, or on gigantic expenditures by a fragile state treasury, where people who find the benefits of living close to the soil, but a little further from the bus stop, can make an investment in their homes, and in their community.  It’s not for everybody, but I’d argue (more convincingly, with a few freshly-minted studies) that neither is any other prescription the planning world has given us.

 

David