A very personal take: I’m struggling with the word “urbanism,” and here’s why
I’ve been sitting on this one for a very long time, unsure how I wanted to articulate it and, in particular, how it might be received by the many great architects, planners and developers who consider themselves urbanists and who, in many cases, are very good friends. Some are or have been close colleagues, and some are flat-out heroes to me. Am I trampling on sacred ground here?
I hope not. To cut to the chase, those of us in the business of creating and promoting better cities and towns must communicate effectively to be successful. And I have — somewhat reluctantly — become uncomfortable with the word “urbanism” as a term to describe what many of us in the field believe and do. I am particularly uncomfortable with using it when communicating to the general public. In addition, in some ways the term just doesn’t adequately fit what I personally believe and want to advocate regarding land use and development in and around cities and towns. Hang on, because I’m going to explain why by taking a deep dive into the aspects that concern me.
This is mainly about vocabulary, not substance
I’ll start in a moment but, at the outset, I want to clarify that my discomfort is not, for the most part, a problem with the substance of “urbanism.” Indeed, I generally agree with folks who consider themselves urbanists on how to build better cities and towns. My own basic tenets on what constitutes “good” city and town development include or are designed to produce such “urbanist” benefits as safe, walkable streets; a healthy mix of conveniences and amenities within walking distance of homes and jobs; reduced reliance on driving to get around; significantly more urban density than we typically see in most subdivisions; and being thoughtful about where to build.
I may prefer more moderate versions of some of those development characteristics than do, say, some ardent YIMBY (“Yes in My Backyard”) urbanists, but the basic direction of my preferences is aligned pretty well with that of the genre’s mainstream practitioners. (My basic tenets also include other relevant things such as accessible nature, green buildings, and conservation of rural land, which seldom get bundled into “urbanism,” but those aren’t the most important issues here; indeed, most of us in the field have additional things that we also care about.)
Most urbanists who know my work consider me to be, at least much more than not, an urbanist — and they aren’t necessarily wrong about that. For example, I have been a member of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) since the 1990s, almost as long as that organization has existed. CNU’s founding “constitution,” The Charter of the New Urbanism, is a brilliant description of why we need to change the prevailing patterns of American urban and suburban development and what the guiding principles of the new patterns should be.
I haven’t kept up with the various amendments and supplemental documents that may have been added since the Charter was originally created, but I agree with every word of the organization’s original founding language. (Now, I do not always agree with everything that some practitioners have done in the name of new urbanism, particularly concerning leapfrog development, but that needn’t detract from my main point here. I worked for a nonprofit environmental organization for over three decades, and I didn’t always agree with them, either.)
No, my main beef about “urbanism” isn’t about substance. It’s about the words we use to describe our beliefs and our work when communicating with others. Anyone who knows me well can tell you that I have long been obsessed with words and language. This won’t be the first popular term I have stopped using to describe what I advocate. First to go was “vibrant,” a word commonly used to describe the kinds of communities that people such as me want to create. I thought that the term became just way too overused and, in addition, its connotations seemed to exclude some rightly valued community features such as peace and quiet.
Next to go was “smart growth,” a phrase that, to some people, suggests big government and condescension to folks who prefer suburban or rural living. I don’t personally believe that it suggests those things, but I think those of us who care should be in the business of making friends, not enemies, for our cause. In addition, the practice of smart growth advocacy has evolved in a way that now seldom advocates directly stopping suburban sprawl, my primary reason for getting into the field in the first place.
With that I mind, here are some reasons why I don’t think the word “urbanism” communicates very well on behalf of our cause:
Many people don’t know what urbanism means
I suppose my most important problem with the word is that very few people outside the inner circle of self-identified urbanists understand what we are talking about when we talk about urbanism, good or bad. Allow me to share an anecdote:
A while back I was invited to join a small group of people interested in urban affairs and development on an extraordinary tour of redevelopment sites in France. We were a fun and knowledgeable band of five including, in addition to myself, a deputy housing director of a large US city; a sustainability director of another large US city; a prominent landscape architect in New York City; and a professor of urban planning at a major university. The professor was (and remains) also a close professional friend, with whom I co-taught a course on law and policy for sustainable communities at the Law School of George Washington University.
At the end of our time together, we were asked by our French hosts to react to what we had seen. I mentioned that one large redevelopment project in Lyon had some good qualities but, in my opinion, did not have good urbanism. (To me, it looked a lot like a suburban office park in the US, with large block-like modernist buildings and no obvious mix of uses, no amenities inviting to pedestrians.) I offered that its designers could have followed the example of exemplary urbanism found in some older parts of Lyon. I was basically — and, I hope, gently — preaching the gospel of new urbanism. But only one of my fellow travelers had a sense of what I was talking about: my professor colleague.
I had a similar experience when I was part of another small group of urban professionals, asked to judge architectural renderings of alternative proposals for new affordable housing on a pre-selected site. My fellow jury members, who thought in terms of individual buildings rather than neighborhoods, didn’t even get what I meant by “walkable,” much less what I meant by the buildings’ contributions (or not) to the urbanism of the neighborhood.
Let’s face it: when even city officials and people in the business of making better cities don’t understand important key words in our vocabulary, we have a problem. Do dictionaries help, at least in suggesting how the term might be interpreted by ordinary folks? Mirriam-Webster defines “urbanism” as a particular way of life, specifically, “the characteristic way of life of city dwellers.” The prestigious Oxford English Dictionary defines it (subscription required) as “urban life or character,” with a vague and passing secondary mention of “urban development and planning.” Wikipedia, as of this writing, elaborates a bit and describes it as a field of study:
“Urbanism is the study of how inhabitants of urban areas, such as towns and cities, interact with the built environment. It is a direct component of disciplines such as urban planning, a profession focusing on the design and management of urban areas, and urban sociology, an academic field which studies urban life.”
I suppose the Wikipedia explanation gets a little closer to how urbanists in my professional world use the term, but it still doesn’t get to heart of things. Most urbanists I know use the word to describe a particular kind of architectural and contextual character with some or all of the attributes I enumerated above — walkable streets, a healthy mix of building types and uses, decreased reliance on motor vehicles, and so on. It’s not just about the buildings but the way the buildings and streets interact with each other and with people.
“Urbanism” can even be a little deceptive in that it is not necessarily about cities, exactly, not in the way that most people think of them; the word also applies to places such as small towns and suburbs at a considerable distance from something ordinary folks would describe as a city. For example, consider the example of Serenbe, a favorite new community among many new urbanists I know. It’s a sort of suburban/rural hybrid, and a very nice one indeed if you like nature and don’t mind a good bit of driving to get to places outside the immediate community; it is located some 32 miles southwest of downtown Atlanta.
The population of Serenbe was reported in 2020 as “around 750” by writer Carrie Battan in Outside magazine, in a glowing overview. Battan noted that the community is planned to house roughly 3,500 residents when fully built out. But no one I know who is not an urbanist architect or city planner would think of it as “urban,” notwithstanding its many admirers in the profession who would say that it has great urbanism.
Now, these places that are not so obviously city-like can all be explained in ways that highlight their urbanist characteristics, sort of like how I was trying to explain my use of the word to my fellow travelers and our audience in France. But words that have to be explained are not great communicators to the general public. When we use them, we are not being “plain spoken,” as architect and new urbanist sage Steve Mouzon and his wife and business partner Wanda Mouzon admirably aspire to be — and usually are — in their own “original green” approach to sustainability.
Complicating common understanding of the word “urbanism” is that some major industries, including music and fashion, have long used “urban” to refer specifically to African-American cultural tastes, sometimes in ways that invoke racial stereotypes. That’s not helpful. Fortunately, these industries seem to be moving away from the practice.
I’m hardly the first urban professional who is troubled by the word. Here’s Sommer Mathis, former chief editor of The Atlantic Cities (now Bloomberg CityLab), writing in late 2013:
Not only does [urbanism] imply that there exists some universally accepted ideology of the best way to construct, organize, and manage any given urban area, it’s frequently misapplied as a term for the study of urban issues (shouldn’t that be urbanology?) or the basic interaction of people and things within an urban environment. Deploying this word should be undertaken with extreme caution, and always with the understanding that it almost never carries real meaning.
Public transit guru Jarrett Walker — an urban thinker whom I admire — has defended “urbanism” against this criticism, but it’s worth mentioning that, in one passage of his that I read, it took him some 800 words of nuanced discussion to explain why.
For many people, the word “urban” and its derivatives carry negative connotations
A closely related point is that many people we need to reach in order to win hearts and minds to our cause do not think of walkability and convenience when they hear a word associated with “urban” attributes. Sadly, they think about crime, crowding, traffic jams, noise, inferior schools, decrepit places, and a lack of nature. While those of us who care can and should challenge these unfortunate perceptions, they are out there, and we should be careful about whether the language we use triggers people in the wrong way.
Indeed, when I first began working on this article, I asked my wife what she thought of when I said the word “urbanism.” Her response: “super-dense high-rise buildings where I don’t want to live.” Now, Sharon has spent enough time with me over the years to know what I mean when I’m the one to use the word, but I was asking about her impression of the word in general, not the word when used by my urbanist friends and me.
Of course, that is also not how most urbanists I know use the word. They would probably say that, while “urbanism” can include high-rise buildings, such buildings don’t even come close to defining the term. Witness such well-known urbanist developments as Seaside in Florida; Orenco Station in Oregon; Glenwood Park in Atlanta; and Highlands’ Garden Village in Denver, none of which has very tall buildings but all of which have most of the characteristics I enumerated above. I like them all, especially the last two, which are located on urban infill sites.
Since I invoked my wife Sharon in this discussion, I hasten to add for the record that Sharon and I both love our village-y neighborhood of semi-detached homes on very small lots inside the city of Washington, close to all sorts of shops, restaurants, and other amenities within easy walking distance. I drive less than a thousand miles per year; Sharon drives more, largely because her roots and extended family are in DC’s Northern Virginia suburbs. (More about that in a minute.)
We’re decidedly in the minority. According to data collected by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the US Census in the 2017 American Housing Survey (and reported by HUD here) only 27 percent of American households describe their neighborhoods as “urban.” A slim majority (52 percent) describe their neighborhoods as suburban, and 21 percent describe their neighborhoods as rural. If those portions have shifted at all since the pandemic, it’s likely that the suburban portion has grown; an extensive analysis by former Commerce Department economist Jed Kolko shows that big cities and urban counties have been losing population, while lower-density suburbs are growing.
Now, to what extent these numbers reflect consumer preferences rather than a lack of affordability in American cities can be and is debated. Many committed urbanists believe the latter. Indeed, my close friend and noted architect David Dixon believes strongly that the future direction of American settlement is all about downtowns, because the anticipated growth in our housing market will largely be about singles, empty nesters, and other couples without children, most of whom are not going to need or want large homes on large lots. Professor Arthur C. (Chris) Nelson, an acclaimed expert in growth management and metropolitan development patterns would agree strongly about future household demographics, although Nelson believes — as I do — that many of these smaller households will prefer to practice their convenient lifestyles in more walkable parts of suburbs, rather than in urban downtowns.
But, until that comes to be — and it will take time, if it does — we remain largely a suburban nation. My personal reality check on the way most Americans live and think is supplied by my in-laws, almost all of whom live in and strongly prefer the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, some in the far outer suburbs (the one exception, a niece, lives in New York City). They own multiple cars and drive tens of thousands of miles each year. Driving isn’t considered an inconvenience at all; it’s simply considered a normal part of life, like breathing. They seldom have any interest in coming into the city, and many have never lived anywhere but a suburb.
I must emphasize that this is not abnormal in the least for Americans. This is literally the way that most of us live. Those of us who champion urban living, like myself, need to get real about this. Reading my urbanist social media feed, it’s easy to get the impression that no one lives in the suburbs by choice; I believe that is far from the case. Most of my suburban friends and family members would have a very hard time relating to the many posts I see — and personally like very much — about, say, cargo e-bikes, the many positive steps toward sustainability that mayor Anne Hildalgo is leading in central Paris, or sustainable transportation practices in the Netherlands. They may find those things interesting in the abstract, but can’t imagine applying their lessons to their own lifestyles.
Unfortunately, those who have negative impressions of cities and urban living can find their perceptions reinforced in some American downtowns that are now looking bleak, rather that robust, because of post-pandemic empty office buildings, workers who seldom come downtown, closed small businesses that traditionally have depended on those workers and, in some cities, rising crime rates.
For example, my own city, Washington, DC, had almost totally recovered from its infamous high crime rates of the late twentieth century and, prior to the pandemic, was enjoying a terrific amount of 21st-century growth and success. That’s still largely true in certain parts of the city, but not downtown, where on a typical weekday slightly less than half of office workers are in their offices. Many small businesses have closed as a result, including more than fifty restaurants in 2023 alone. Empty storefronts are now sprinkled all over downtown.
Even worse, in 2023 violent crime rates rose to their highest levels this century; vandalism and retail theft have also risen. Particularly worrisome to many is that carjacking — stealing cars at gunpoint — has now become a trendy crime, with nearly a thousand such incidents reported last year, some six times the pre-pandemic rate. A local commercial real estate publication reports that the trend is scaring away businesses and development.
Now, it must be said that DC crime is reportedly slowing so far in 2024, and that’s good news especially for those of us who live here. But it is still on track to remain substantially higher than before the pandemic. Outside of Washington, the news is more mixed, with many major American cities experiencing falling crime rates, while eight of 32 major cities, including Memphis and Seattle, are experiencing rising rates. Crime rates also fell in 2023 in the country in general, although “violent crime levels still remain elevated compared to before the pandemic,” according to an article in Forbes.
Whatever the latest facts, this essay is about vocabulary, not facts. And what matters are people’s impressions when we use the word “urban” and its derivatives. Those impressions are, for many, mixed or negative.
For me personally, the word may not adequately fit what I believe and advocate
My final problem with “urbanism” is a highly personal one, and here I am going to get into substance a bit: the word describes an important part of what I believe and strive to advocate, including the neighborhood characteristics I outlined at the beginning of this writing; but really it doesn’t come close to describing the true, complete picture of what I believe and advocate when it comes to land use and development.
What I really advocate is green and healthy places, including those in cities, towns, and rural areas. For me, that can include high-, medium-, or rarely but sometimes even low-density places, as well as conservation — and refraining from development altogether on certain land — every bit as much as it frequently includes typically urbanist approaches. I do not believe that urban intensification is always the right answer in making and sustaining green and healthy places, although it frequently is, especially when done with contextually sensitive design. Moreover, I believe that some developed places are, in fact, already dense enough, which seems blasphemous to the views of many contemporary urbanists.
The social media post that woke me up to the fact that I am not in alignment with some of today’s more ardent urbanists was this gem in my Twitter/X feed: “In a sane world, San Francisco would look like Tokyo.” Whoa. I’m sure there are arguments to support that position in theory; but, to me, they have little to do with the type of “sane world” I prefer, which regarding city development includes beauty, humanity, local identity, human scale and, yes, lovability in placemaking. I know that those are mushy words, difficult to define and even harder to quantify. But that does not make them unimportant. As Steve Mouzon, cited above, has explained at length, places that are loved are much more likely to be sustained over time than those that aren’t.
Now, I don’t doubt that Tokyo — the world’s second largest metro area, with 41 million people, according to Britannica — is a fascinating place loved by many as a city to visit or live in, but it is a huge change from San Francisco. I certainly wouldn’t substitute it for a beautiful American city that is on just about everyone’s top-ten list of “most popular” American big cities. Yes, San Francisco has expensive living costs, as does just about every beautiful and desirable city, neighborhood, and town. It is joined in Kiplinger’s Top ten expensive US cities by New York (Manhattan), Honolulu, San Jose, Brooklyn, Orange County (California), Boston, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Washington, DC. In the latest top-ten list of expensive cities published by US News and World Report, it sits at number twelve behind the likes of Hartford (!), Boston, and Miami.
But I suspect that, really, the post I quoted was intended to be rhetorical, not definitively factual. The poster’s real point was likely that we in the US should adopt a much more libertarian approach to allowing and building dense new urban development, especially housing, in established cities such as San Francisco. I would agree that, yes, even beautiful San Francisco could use some of that, built at appropriate scale in appropriate places; in my opinion, what is “appropriate” can and should be debated — as painful as that can be — and should vary according to circumstances.
But let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that the problem of housing unaffordability in America can be solved simply by adding more housing supply without also doing more, such as providing subsidies to those in need. It’s not that simple.
Consider the example of Vancouver, a city whose skyline is characterized by a multitude of newish high-rise towers, many of them full of apartments. The city nevertheless remains quite expensive. University of British Columbia Professor Patrick Condon, Vancouver resident and longtime expert in sustainable urban design, put it this way earlier this year:
I was and am furious about how all the efforts made by me and others over the course of three decades of adding well-planned new density to this city failed to make housing affordable as we had hoped . . .
It’s not widely known but Vancouver has added more housing than any other center city in North America. Since the 1970s, Vancouver has tripled its total number of housing units. If adding housing supply and new density to a city leads to affordable housing as many now contend, Vancouver should have the lowest housing prices in North America. It has the highest!
Condon explains at length in an interview about his new book, Broken City: Land Speculation, Inequality and Urban Crisis.
That said, I’m in general agreement with a more permissive approach to urban development in certain places. For example, I am a huge fan of “retrofitting” worn-out suburban strip malls, deserted big-box parking lots, and the like into walkable, mixed-use places that can then support good transit service. Among those who have written fantastic books on this subject — with lots of examples — are Professors Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson (see here), urban planner Jason Beske with my architect friend and downtown champion David Dixon, mentioned above (see here), and architect and urban planner Galina Tachieva (see here).
I also strongly support conversion of now-underutilized office buildings to residential apartments; development on vacant city lots; and the addition of accessory development units (typically small apartments associated with a larger house) and duplexes even in established neighborhoods that are now single-family. I certainly applaud sensitive, respectful restoration of badly disinvested city districts such as Old North Saint Louis in Missouri, which tragically lost some ninety percent of its population in the late twentieth century but is now beginning to come back.
Sometimes YIMBY, sometimes not
I like to think of myself as sometimes YIMBY (Yes in My Backyard), but sometimes not, depending on the situation. I have supported all sorts of development in and around my own neighborhood, which as I write hosts two large new developments that, when finished, will bring close to 1,500 new apartments on a street only two blocks from my home. One of them — the larger of the two — is fantastic in my opinion, having earned a LEED-ND (LEED for Neighborhood Development) gold certification for its plan. The other is going to house — among other amenities — my new gym, which I can’t wait to use. There are several hundred additional new apartments being constructed within easy walking distance. My only significant disappointment with these new developments is that they will contain very little affordable housing.
(City-wide, Washington has added 36,000 new homes to its inventory since 2019, almost as much as it added in the previous 18 years. That in itself is impressive, but I wish more of them were subsidized to be affordable.)
I like these new projects near my home, but I do not advocate dense new urban development blindly. As I keep up with current goings-on in the world of community-making, I read social media posts and other writing by more aggressive urbanist advocates who seem to take a sort of “build, baby, build” approach to dense new development. Some of them disdain all zoning, or so it seems, because it can get in the way of some types of new development, including new housing that they believe would help alleviate the very real continuing shortage. I prefer to reform zoning to be more permissible in mixing building uses and encouraging more residential units, including affordable ones, in more neighborhoods. But I also prefer that we do so incrementally in most places.
Many of today’s urbanist advocates also dislike and sometimes campaign against historic preservation, again because it restricts the building of some ambitious projects in designated historic places. I couldn’t disagree more. To me, the conservation of our historic legacy is critical to important human values. We have plenty of places to build without trampling on these special places, including the sites I mentioned above. I will grant that some NIMBY (Not in My Backyard) opponents of development grotesquely misappropriate historic preservation arguments in their anti-development advocacy, and it’s maddening when they do. Fake “environmentalists of convenience” have been known to do the same thing. In both cases, they should be called out for that; real environmentalists and preservationists should speak out when such opponents are wrong and say so, as I have done many times.
And there are fewer urbanist advocates than I wish who argue for integrating city nature (other than perhaps street trees) into urban development, despite the overwhelming evidence of its importance to human and environmental health. It’s a big deal to me and, if it sometimes means setting aside urban parcels for nature rather than development, so be it.
It is also a big deal to me to avoid so called “leapfrog” sprawl that bypasses the outer limits of current city and town development to jump over undeveloped land and to place intense new development on what is now farmland or forests. Even if done well, to me that’s just — at best — a prettier, more orderly form of suburban sprawl that almost always generates more driving, more conventional suburban sprawl nearby, and the disruption of existing watersheds and continuous ecosystems. That definitely separates me from some new urbanists and other architects, planners, and developers who do great work when concentrating on sites closer to and within existing cities and towns.
I get why those who pursue this kind of development like it so much. For developers, it allows them to assemble relatively inexpensive land and avoid some of the NIMBY conflicts that can seem inevitable when working in already developed places. (As one of them once put it to me, “cows and corn don’t come to public meetings.”) For architects and planners, it’s a clean, relatively uncomplicated slate with which to work as they apply their considerable skill to create a good new place. But environmentally, it usually creates more problems than it solves.
Where possible, I prefer to see rural and wild lands preserved, as Montgomery County, Maryland (photo above) and Lancaster County, Pennsylvania have done with stellar farmland conservation programs; as metropolitan Portland, Oregon has done with its urban growth boundary; and as the province of Ontario has done with a two-million-acre greenbelt around the cities of Toronto and Hamilton. All of these programs are imperfect, of course, and all must be maintained and defended constantly over time. But all have also been successful in reducing suburban sprawl and maintaining important natural resources. These kinds of efforts are very important to my personal view of city and town development, but they are not considered part of “urbanism” by anyone.
So, if it isn’t “urbanism,” what is it?
I’ll conclude with a bit about a question I am often asked when I discuss the vocabulary of “good development” informally with friends in the field: “well, if not ‘urbanism’ and not ‘smart growth,’ what exactly do you call it?” Personally, I’m not sure we need an all-encompassing term at all. I don’t need an “ism” to describe approaches to development that I prefer.
Instead, I just say that I work to create and sustain greener, healthier communities. That includes some environmental elements, some urban development principles, and some social and cultural elements, among others. But, if you’re looking for across-the-board consistency, you may have come to the wrong place. The right combination of those elements, and others, can vary substantially from place to place and situation to situation. There will be plenty of exceptions and nuances for anything definitive I might try to come up with. Let’s try to be greener and healthier in our approach to development and conservation, and let the outcomes and descriptions vary with the circumstances.
