How We Need to Change (But Why We Don't)

Cultural Perceptions & Economic Realities 

To heal Miami’s urban ills, we must rethink sprawl. The only way us to convert sprawl to something more livable is to limit explosive outward growth for its environmental and social consequences. We also need to apply Jacobs’s fundamentals for healthy urban environments to our neighborhoods. We should also use existing methods which have led sprawling neighborhoods to become urban communities such Smart Growth or New Urbanism.

Local Diagnosis (Miami)

In Miami, the urbanism situation is similar to Phoenix and Los Angeles. Miami has a low population density, low urbanization, and no definable border for growth; environmentalists still struggle to keep the Everglades from being destroyed even more. 

From a bird’s eye view, there are the frustratingly curvy streets which appear to bring the driver nowhere in particular. Then there are the flat-roofed houses that go on for miles with no escape until suddenly a four-lane street parallel to shopping centers and parking lots pops up.  This brings us to the question of whether or not Miami is actually a “city”. The "city" spreads from the coast to interior wetlands with no way for us to tell if there is even a center (except for some sky-scrapers; and though I must admit that Miami has a beautiful skyline, it's too bad the streets below are not very attractive for leisurely pedestrian activity). The fact that The New York Times named Florida the most dangerous state for pedestrians is now self-evident (Winter). This city, not including downtown, Coral Gables, and Miami Beach, looks like it’s been built according to automobile scale. Initially it was not so, until repeated waves of immigration caused the sharp increase in population, giving city planners no time to think and so, they created sprawl. Now Miami is no longer a metropolis, but instead, it belongs to a specific group of newly planned and built cities: megapolises.

from Miami Real Estate Attorney Blog

A Little Comic for the Day

from Incidental Comics blog 

New Planning Trends

Once the Form-Based zoning code is applied to a neighborhood, the most necessary thing to do in all suburban areas is retrofit existing spaces, instead of planning the wrong way and building more. There are various techniques for good planning such as New Urbanism, Smart Growth, Sustainable LEED, and TOD, which Miami21 hopes to use in their planning trends for retrofitting. To find existing projects which use the above  mentioned techniques and energy efficiency, visit Honest Buildings, a website dedicated to connecting architects, urban planners, and promoters of environmental awareness and walkability. 

Miami21's Good Planning Animations

See Planning page to read more. 

How to Become Sustainable

The first thing that’s necessary to reduce U.S. dependence on fossil fuels and vulnerability to climate change and dwindling resources is to make the automobile an unnecessary commodity for simple tasks such as picking up children at school, finding entertainment, going to work, or buying a cup of coffee. But simply changing infrastructure to pry Americans from their cars won’t cut it. Americans don’t just drive because they have to, but because they want to, and this results from a cultural paranoia ingrained in us since the beginnings of suburbia. It began with the white middle class suburban flight when whites were xenophobic and needed their own exclusive safe haven. Then, during the first Red Scares, as Red Book claims, certain suburban homes were said to be designed in particular ways which could protect a family from an atomic explosion. Suburbia has more than once given Americans a false image of safety, but who would blame people for having this perspective? Red Book christened suburbia paradise for young adults and their children because the neighbors would always be watching and plenty of amenities were available for children. It just seemed safe. However, Americans began fearing things within suburbia too—anything that resembled urban life.

This short historic film, "The House in the Middle" (1954) gives a tutorial on how the average suburban home could be made safe in case of atomic war

Americans obviously do not want to give up their lifestyle which worsens such large-scale problems. However, we must get the word out that regardless of people’s “entitlement” to the agrarian castle life, realizing that retrofitting will cost four times more in the future than now, Americans must make a move quickly. During the 2011 World Energy Outlook forum, an economist from the IEA stated that “we have to, in the next 25 years, find and develop 47 million per day barrels of oil to stay where we are, which means to find and develop two new Middle Easts” (Van der Hoeven ). This frightening prognosis could encourage people to demand a change in our petroleum- addicted society.

Restoring the American Dream

Support for Jefferson’s dream of a lifestyle grew well after the 18th century, but instead of living and working in the countryside, Americans simply wanted a separation of work life and home life. In the mid-1800s, those who did not want to live in great metropolitan areas like Manhattan would live in New York City’s outside boroughs like Queens and Brooklyn and commute into Manhattan for work by ferry. Today, we see a similar concept on the West Coast.  Many live in suburban Marin County and commute by ferry to San Francisco for work. Throughout the 1800s, the first suburbs grew outside the city, and streetcar lines connected homes to the workplace. Americans gradually preferred to keep the growing industry separate. 

Here's a short film, "In the Suburbs" (1957), depicting how our "happy-go-spending" society came to be. We jump into the perspective of the average 1950s young adult pursuing a wonderful American life in the suburbs. 

Perhaps it's easier after watching this to understand that suburban life did have its temporary benefits on an individual's life after all.

The Dimensions of Unsustainability

It has become more than obvious already going into the 21^st century that America faces a national problem—a consumption problem, a security problem, and a health problem. We consume more than any other country, spend more than any other country, and so on. 40 years ago, Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan in the presidential election, giving Americans that which they didn’t want to hear: we have a problem. The following message from Jimmy Carter’s (1978) speech can explain how our desires and confidence are actually causing our crisis. We had to much optimism as a result of our modernity which was unrealistically utopian (Kunstler, geography 60). . Americans feel we will continue living this lifestyle because growth is necessary, so consumption is completely acceptable and justified. We have been so complacent however, that we chose to ignore Carter’s message even over the last 30 years as our oil situation became dire. We are still convinced that our economic growth is the path to success, but in reality, what Carter says we should have done decades ago when we had ample time, is what the World Energy Outlook warns us to do now: “I ask Congress to give me authority for mandatory conservation and for standby gasoline rationing. To further conserve energy, I’m proposing tonight an extra $10 billion over the next decade to strengthen our public transportation systems. And I’m asking you for your good and for your nation’s security to take no unnecessary trips, to use carpools or public transportation whenever you can, to park your car one extra day per week, to obey the speed limit, and to set your thermostats to save fuel. Every act of energy conservation like this is more than just common sense—I tell you it is an act of patriotism" (Carter). 

Jefferson & Agrarianism

Whether or not all of Jane Jacobs’s diagnosis of the metropolis sickness applies to large-scale sprawl in Florida, some of her advice can still enable us to understand why we should control our size, discourage cookie-cutter and cul de sac neighborhood building, and revitalize our quiet suburbs and abandoned urban districts to transform our car world into a foot world. However, before we jump to why we must change, we must understand how we got to this point. 

As surprising as it sounds, before the United States became a nation, the first settlers of the New World had predilections for the suburban life style we had today. It started with the Puritans, who had a traditional, Feudal outlook on wealth. They didn’t believe everyone was equal; their social order was quite hierarchical. Those who have more money and a higher position were allotted more land. All land was distributed according to this hierarchy. Also, the 1950s suburban flight was not the first “escape” that occurred on our continent because the mass emigration could be considered “a reenactment of the same drama that had brought the Pilgrims to Plymouth Harbor” (Kunstler, Geography 39).  The Pilgrims, besides escaping persecution, abandoned the industrial cities, and instead they dreamed of a better, more agrarian life on their “City upon A Hill.” Their intentions were also of course, religious, for they believed their old world was filled with human depravity, and nature appealed to them. 

Understanding Urban Environments

Metropolis sickness can be dealt with if we are able to discern cities by understanding the relationship between cities and city dwellers. The Radio Lab special, “Cities”, examines whether the people create the city, or whether the city creates the people. It explores the unique beats of each city and their reason for having these beats. Individual suburbs or sprawl cities cannot be considered unique because they cannot be identified with their own beat because there are no “foot falls” in a suburb. If a neighborhood has poor walkability, there will be fewer “foot falls”. Radio Lab urban physicists can deduce from the average number of footsteps of a city pedestrian how many libraries and how much crime the city has and how high the GDP the city is. Because suburbs and sprawl cities have no pedestrian activity, they cannot be differentiated.  Suburbs and neighborhoods within sprawl cities lack a purpose and a character, and therefore, they have no pulse. Mathematically, the scale of the city helps the urban expert decide what the city’s beat is. However, in a suburb, none of this exists. A city beat makes a city unique, so therefore, sprawl creates mundaneness because the area is missing a soul. We learn that “jamming people up in an urban space, so that people bump into each other, creates urban friction,” underscoring Jacobs’s radical urban fundamentals; higher density promotes health in an urban environment.

Jacobs' Theories

Cities can be compared to ecosystems or the human body—they are comprised of buildings, streets, parks, and governments that all have their distinct role in creating neighborhoods which are like the vital habitats or organs in an entire system. These parts respond to human changes, and it is necessary for us to understand them in order to know how to practically structure them. This is how Jane Jacobs, an urban renewal critic and the author of The Death and the Life of Great American Cities, sees them.

Urban Fabric: The Form of Cities (from YUrbanism blog) 

Community vs. Car World

As a result, many people suffer from a lack of contact with other people. An area loses its community. These frustrations due to disconnection would not occur in a true neighborhood. In an urban neighborhood, face-to-face interactions are unavoidable. Members of a community typically recognize the faces of their neighbors (often, they have frequently had interactions with them), and everyone has some sort of niche, much like in an ecosystem. Values and opinions are known, youth have a place to converse, walking is an option, and people are healthier. However, in a suburb, things are a bit different. What is perceived as a neat network of homes with safe streets and a neighborhood park is actually a ghost town, where people rarely exchange a word and where people leave and enter through their garages in order to go elsewhere. There is little close-up view into the lives of others. 

In the ideal suburb, residents have privacy. Houses have large gardens and enough space exists between houses. However, the suburb has become Car World.  Houses like mine are kept separate from commercial areas. Instead of straight, quiet roads and sidewalks being the infrastructure in neighborhoods, noisy highways cut through them, and meandering streets (often with speed bumps) to nowhere and congested three-lane roads are the only way out. Americans got to this point with a sudden economic boom and large expanses of land, and our ability to grow anyway we wanted. 

Who Gets Affected

In the eighties, the media raged with multiple tragedies concerning teenagers across America who mysteriously formed suicide pacts, riddling adults for quite some time. There were a particularly large number of teen suicides in Bergenfeld, a majorly middle-class, Caucasian sprawl town in New Jersey. Donna Gaines, who was an adolescent in the sixties, when resistance to any authority was a popular ritual among the youth, set out to Bergenfeld as an adult and befriended a group of “burnouts”, learning a bit about their lives. These burnouts, though suspicious of her intentions at first, let her into their social “adventures” and conversations. Upon finishing her involvement with Bergenfeld’s “dead end kids”, she found the phenomenon happened to be less about the suicides and more about how baby-boomers falsely interpreted teen behavior in such neighborhoods. For one, she noticed how teens could not fully express themselves anywhere amongst each other and in privacy from adults. As a result, teens would “go crazy” (act out, perform poorly in school, use foul language, do drugs, or commit suicide) and adults would demand they receive psychiatric help, attend reform schools, or check into mental institutions. The children came from “good homes,” but their activities indicated “possible mental illness, future criminality, and maybe even brain damage!” (Gaines 138). The assumptions many adults made are, when looked at retrospectively, pathetic. Not only did most adults fail to find a sensible solution, but they also neglected to see the problem, which was them and their social realities. However, today, in the 21^st century, some parents ask that their children be prescribed Prozac and Ritalin, which isn’t a big difference from thirty years ago. Back then, they blamed heavy metal rock bands (today it’s the rappers). And so the suicides continued.

The Problem

Metro Miami suffers from urban sprawl. I use the word “suffers” because in Car World, citizens become more inconvenienced as a result of everything being so widespread. Also, in a time of scientists and average Americans discovering the world has limited resources, Metro Miami has buried itself in a hole, and it will cost money and time to dig itself out. We are dealing with an energy crisis, having to import foreign oil from countries which have far different value systems from the United States. Miami depends on this oil to support its design and infrastructure. While some people are disconcerted with the possibility of reaching peak oil times, Metro Miamians should also be concerned with social disconnection as a result of our lifestyle. 

Since the fifties, baby boomers have played a part in changing the American way of life. They changed housing styles, from the semi-urban home with a front porch to the air- conditioned house with an unwelcoming façade, garage, and drive-way up front. This contributed to the “everyone- mind- your- own- business” credo, which Americans live by. This environment led to a lack of conversations between different classes of people, and even deeper misunderstandings between different generations, particularly adults and adolescents. It is nothing new that teenagers are the victims of suburbia (along with mothers, the poor, and the elderly). The biggest issue since the creation of today’s suburbs is the absence of place.  

Here's My Story

I am a Metro Miami resident who just graduated (this year) from a suburban high school in Car World. For the past thirteen years, I’ve been living in a quaint house in the suburbs, about a thirty minute car ride from anything (seriously) urban. That means few pedestrians, little noise, no tall apartment buildings, no subway stations, few if any laundromats, no bike racks, and so on. There are advantages and disadvantages to this life style. I have a large garden in which I can run around and a swimming pool, so I can splash around with friends and family in the summer months. Also, I never have trouble sleeping at night due to disruptive neighbors. 

At the same time, my ears always perk up when I hear the loud drone of an engine which I think belongs to a bus. Much to my disappointment, each time I look out the window, it is a garbage truck, rolling past the corner of my street. When I was thirteen or fourteen, my parents had to drive me to a mall fifteen minutes away so that I could have some low key teenage fun interacting with other suburban kids. If I desired any form of social interaction, it depended on my parents’ schedules. Even when I just wanted to go biking around my neighborhood with a friend, I could forget about it; my friends’ mothers were not willing to let their child run around the suburbs supposedly filled with kidnappers and molesters. (They didn’t even use the number of speeding garbage trucks as an excuse.)

Without a driver’s license, I felt like the main character from Stephen King’s Misery, who sat with both of his legs broken in bed in a remote Colorado home during the winter. But how could this be? I live in Miami—a city people all over the world dream of visiting. It is home to America’s best beaches, hottest hang outs, and of course sunny, warm weather year-round. However, those areas were always inaccessible for me, even as a sixteen- year- old. Parental paranoia (my friend’s parents) and highways stood in my way.