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[tags]joel kotkin, urban planning, bill fulton, jane jacobs[/tags]
Joel, you are no Jane Jacobs.
Credit: Kotkin photo from Curbed LA, Jacobs photo from Wikipedia
Joel Kotkin had another article published in the Los Angeles Times, wagging his finger at us for daring to “Manhattanize” our city. And it has gotten the urban-leaning urban planning set hot under the collar.
Curbed LA, the tip-off for this piece, calls Kotkin “increasingly delusional” and further links to a California Policy & Development Report riposte by Bill Fulton, who says he’s finally had it with Kotkin. He also has little love from Clueless and Slightly Slack blogger and Trojan Peter McFerrin, whose also had choice words about Kotkin.
Kotkin’s pieces regularly draw heated criticism for essentially the same theme. And the criticism tends to be the same rebuttals, though the critics themselves flirt with emotionalism when they take on Kotkin.
But Kotkin, who regularly speaks and writes ex cathedra, so to speak, has to work an angle if he wants the access of mass media. Kotkin can make very sound, scholarly-grade arguments for his position. When descending from the ivory tower, Kotkin adopts the persona of the anti-Jane Jacobs. Kotkin believes, academically, that he should be the polymath and the voice of suburbia in the way Jacobs is linked inextricably with cities.
The difference is, though, that Kotkin approaches the role as an impressionist rather than an actor cast for a biographic portrait, complete with pathos. The impressionist has a far easier job: portraying a serviceable rendition of a subject where caricature is acceptable and often preferable. Kotkin understood Jacobs’s work and chose to emulate that, while ignoring how Jacobs got to be associated with her work.
Jacobs is forever linked with her work on cities, primarily through her actions as a private citizen. Her New York neighborhood was in the path of an expressway, and the person charged with building highways in Gotham was the imperious Robert Moses. This set her on a path to first connect the urban form with social interaction. Jacobs has said that cities should take the forms of the people living and interacting with the space. She then went on to plumb deeper into the birth and decline of cities throughout history, developing a unique theory of an urban scale of political economy. And she veered again, this time into sociology, with her work “Systems of Survival,” an examination on work.
Kotkin familiarizes himself with Jacobs’s work, but did not go through the experiences or turmoils Jacobs did. Instead, he settles for the shortcut of the high concept. What Jacobs is for cities, Kotkin will be for suburbs. It’s as if Kotkin takes a Jacobs text, runs it through his word processor, and replaces “city” with “suburb.”
Kotkin settles in his suburban niche at a similar frame of time as when Jacobs found her voice. Jacobs’s interest in cities bloomed at a point in time where they were on the top of a roller coaster, and the car slowly crawls in its descent before things start to go downhill fast. This is what’s happening to suburbs now.
Many suburban communities are mature, and older suburban communities are mired in urban ills or are seeing their declines. Suburbs are being pulled in two directions like a wishbone: cities are beginning renaissances, while traditional “suburbanites” (middle- and upper-class whites) are increasingly turning to exurbs. A layman’s definition of “exurb” is a suburb with a really long commute. A more technical definition of exurb is to have large house or lot sizes commonly built around a natural or man-made amenity, such as a mountain, body of water or even a golf-course or resort town.
As cities are seeing abadonded or derelict communities revive, exurbs are also rapidly expanding as modern technology and wealth makes it able to build in actual nature, whereas the first suburbs were a simulacrum of a back-to-the-pasture path to happiness away from the brutal industrial city, yet feeding off the city’s economy like a lamprey.
Now many older suburbs are going to fill the void as the residences of decline, as city dwellers expect to move into a new area and find the same prosperity as when the communities were fresh off the factory floor. Also, poorer residents will be forced into suburbs by gentrification of the urban core.
So Kotkin implicitly sees suburbs at the top of the roller-coaster and wishes to be the champion of suburbia, with exurbia as a good shield against urbanism. Kotkin now practices the role of the anti-Jacobs.
Yet Kotkin, as an intellectual, knows the proper methods of research and the customs of scholars. At the same time, he communicates with a credulous mass audience who’ll accept his work at face value. They won’t ask tough questions or make him sweat as, say, an urban planning scholar or practitioner would. But he knows the only way he can communicate with the hoi polloi is to bait the audience.
“Manhattanization” is a shibboleth of right-leaning intellectuals, use to chum the waters of discourse. He plays to a very specific audience, the ones who develop visceral, emotional reactions against cities and feel comforted and nurtured by the “happy place” of suburbanism and their golden age in the latter 20th century. It, along with such a term as “social engineering,” has no underlying definition but is a useful tool to get a desired reaction out of a select population.
Kotkin could be more honest with his knowledge. He can see what factors led to the formation of suburbs through time and space. He can then explain the uniqueness of American suburban development, and why major cities have stronger financial, commercial and cultural foundations worldwide.
But then, where’s the showmanship in that? Kotkin can just get on stage, do his Jacobs send-up, get some noise out of the rubes and collect a check for a schtick well done.
Hey, if all Kotkin cares about is getting his name out there and putting on an urban-planning-as-performance-art piece, that’s fine. He shouldn’t make the mistake of taking himself too seriously, though. Jacobs, over the years, cautioned readers that her work should not be romanticized. She always said communities had to develop spontaneously, not manufactured by developers or decreed by regulatory fiat. Then again, if suburbs are founded on and richly laced with romantic notions (back to nature at Whispering Elms!), Kotkin can give himself a free pass.
But Kotkin must decide on the gravity of his work. He can take his theories to battle in the planning realm and risk fighting a war of attrition of ideas, or be an urban planning showman and improve his act or risk devolving from the anti-Jacobs to the anti-William Howard Kunstler.
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Beautifully written Wad!
You might ask Bill Fulton what happened at CSUCI two years ago to set them at odds. I was there. It was tragicomic to say the least. The new urbanists were decimated in the space of 15 minutes.
Indeed Kotkin has widened to a more general audience precisely because his work has fallen on deaf ears within the profession and halls of power.
As a former Manhattanite, I think LA should be so lucky as to be “Manhattanized”.
Californians are terrified of tall buildings. They are terrified of living near other people. In general, they are terrified of other people.
I agree Raphael, I think “Manhattanized” and the first thought that comes to mind is “when can we start?” Except we’ve already started long ago. People who throw that word around don’t understand that NYC isn’t focused on the intersection of Broadway and Wall Street; NYC’s environs also has many different commercial hubs, including Midtown, Columbus Circle, Downtown Brooklyn, Newark, etc. To slow development so much to keep LA in its suburbanized past would be to kill LA’s economy and to return to the bad old days of the ’80s and early ’90s. Growth is progress.
I’m not a Kotkin fan in the least, but it seems that a drastic increase in residential density with 500K+ market-rate condos nonetheless (read choice riders) must be accompanied with or follow a drastic increase in RAPID transit capacity. (And to be rapid transit it must go FAST.) Absent that, we’re only adding to the problem.
I don’t wan Manhattanization, though. San Francisco significantly slowed down Manhattanization in the 60’s and 70’s, turning Downtown San Francisco from a charming urban burg into a 9-5 downtown, and kicking many people out in the process. The fact is that a lot of development in the Westside is being built with no attention to infrastructure (look at the residential condos in Century City, or five and six story infill projects in Beverly Hills in single family neighborhoods).
On the other hand, the best place to put Manhattan style density is in the Downtown, for people who want to live Downtown. I don’t want to live in Downtown. I’ve categorically ruled out purchasing anything in the City of Los Angeles. I currently live in a neighborhood of turn of the century homes with moderate density, and I like it. The highest ideal density I would live in would probably be a Downtown-Pasadena level of five to six story buildings.
Kotkin also does make a good point about the problems with the problems of the Los Angeles City Council. Big cities always tend to have more political grease going on. In smaller communities, not only is it easier for the citizenry to contact their local elected officials, but any attempt to overrule the politicans is much easier to qualify. Imagine, for instance, trying to put together a referendum on the Home Depot in Sunland-Tujunga or the Century City development. It would be impossible, even for a large corporation. Yet the voters will now decide land use planning in Anaheim, a city a tenth of the size, as they vote to determine if the strawberry fields near Disneyland will be housing or not. Kotkin does raise a good question of how large Los Angeles be. Should we price people out, like San Francisco has successfully done? Or do we keep building more density, and risk those areas turning into crap in the next downturn? (The San Diego condo market, once credited for revitalizing the city, has fizzled since prices can’t drop fast enough for buyers.)
The term Manhattanization is ridiculous. It’s a ruse for a reactionary opposition to urbanism.
San Francisco’s historical anger towards “Manhattanization” is amusing, because it exposes that city’s actual lack of urbanity, despite what it looks like and what they’d have you think about them. SF is simply too small to have the vibrancy of a place like NYC.
When I lived there in the 90s, people were virulently anti-growth, anti-hirise, anti-everything, just like good conservatives. The high prices came about there as a result of restrictions on growth, not because it was built up. What development did happen (and a lot did happen in the past 7 years) as largely a product of the Redevelopment Agency using its powers to force the issue.
Los Angeles is not fearful of growth, and I love it for that. I look forward to the day when we have a denser core and surroundings. The building of the suburbs in the 40s and 50s did not depend on academics to tell people what was right or wrong, and the re-urbanizing of Los Angeles will not need an academic to tell us that we are bad and wrong.
Kotkin can complain all he wants, but the market is responding to a need, and filling that need.
Five and six story infill projects in single family neighborhoods are exactly what we need to be doing. We need to be changing single family neighborhoods to five and six story apartments. Maybe not everywhere, but certainly in some places.
Unfortunately, this is the natural course of things. It has happened before and it will happen again. Downtown Los Angeles was loaded with single family two story residences, say, prior to 1890. But that didn’t last and it couldn’t last. Now we have 40 story skyscrapers there.
If only it were not so. If people stopped having babies, then maybe we could talk about it. One day we’ll have 40 story skyscrapers in Palmdale, if the human race is still here.
We need to be changing single family neighborhoods to five and six story apartments. Maybe not everywhere, but certainly in some places.
And you Scott, elquoent advocate that you are have vollunteered to tell the neighbors. In person, unarmed, in writing and including your full contact information.
I don’t think we have to “change” single-family neighborhoods. By increasing residential density in our many existing major economic centers and elegantly increasing density (in every sense of the term) around major local community centers I think we can preserve them, breathe new life into local centers and address our housing shortage. Yes, have the 20-40 story high-rises residential buildings in Century City, Westwood, Warner Center, Downtown Glendale, and Downtown LA. But in areas like Lawndale limit it to 4-6 with an occassional 10-story right next to a major mass transit intersection or station. And it doesn’t require taking taking single-family homes or placing the new structures in the middle of streets loaded with R1s, but rather simply replacing the single-story commercial property that currently lines many boulevards with mixed-use. The added benefit of this is stronger local economies and job markets, both which reduce travel trips.
But again, I stress that the success of such a plan is GREATLY dependent on building the transportation infrastructure (rapid transit) sufficient to move people between the many centers in our region and building housing stock affordable to 30-something couples with a toddler, who collectively make $40-50K a year. And in many respects rapid transit infrastructure helps if accompanied with significant reduction of parking requirements and increase in allowable density.
Doing it half-assed will only exaccerbate the problem.
Damien general has the right idea. There are a few things that need further refinement.
The added benefit of this is stronger local economies and job markets, both which reduce travel trips.
This is not true. Just delete this comment and leave the rest. Strong economies generate more traffic of all kinds.
The second related modification is the same assumptions about mixed use. Mixed use can be used to level out traffic but mixed use does not reduce travel and does not reduce requirements for adequate parking or roads.
Look, there are lots of legitimate reasons to promote higher density and mixed use. Stick with those. Anytime anyone tries to promote them as reducing travel or costing less is going to sabotage those legitimate reasons.
Wasn’t the original use of the term “Manhattanization” used also to describe La Defense in Paris which ignored the historical arrangement of buildings and streets and instead created canyons of steel and glass?
The same can be said for San Francisco which saw a lot of black glass skyscrapers built in the late 60’s and early 70s that were not in keeping with the light colored stucco context of the city.
RobDawg,
I didn’t explain my statement well. I meant it reduces regional trips South LA to Westwood types. But you’re right, car traffic is often the result of a successful economy. Which is why local community centers need to have good pedestrian and bike linkages to the residential area.
I brought this up on the Miami Option thread. Southern California must keep in mind that transportation and land use often do not work hand in hand.
The Blue Line succeeded in ridership while doing nothing for land use throughout the route except in downtown Long Beach. Downtown L.A. developed independent of the existence of the Blue Line.
The Gold Line had the opposite effect. It became popular in the communities it runs through almost instantly, yet ridership has been both poor and stagnant.
The Red Line was built into a neighborhood that had the land use and ridership density to support subway service.
The Green Line is very much like the Blue Line, but because it’s in the middle of a freeway, the land use will still be oriented toward cars.
Doesn’t the Blue Line mostly run in industrial areas? There really hasn’t been that much interest in developing (any more) housing along that corridor (issues w/brownfields cleanup?)
What probably hurts the Gold Line most is not necessarily speed (although that portion through Eagle Rock is downright painful) but the necessity to transfer to the Red Line at Union Station. This adds at least 5-10 minutes of walking to any trip. Building the downtown connector would work wonders for Gold Line ridership.