Achieving societies that enable and encourage thick community requires making everyday technologies more compatible with it. Today’s built environments too often discourage neighboring, walking, and dense networks of local social bonds; media and communication devices tend to support cocooning better than communing; infrastructures organize citizens as unencumbered selves; and dominant child-rearing techniques help enculturate an overdeveloped attraction to feelings of self-reliance and privacy. Instituting more communitarian technologies, however, is no simple task. Significant barriers stand in the way. Communitarians will need to direct much of their efforts to attacking the underlying social, economic, cultural, and political drivers of the technological thinning of community life.
Viewing technological change as sociopolitical, not just technical, remains uncommon in popular debate and discourse. Many people embrace a fairytale understanding of innovation, believing that the purportedly “best” technologies emerge from the ostensibly “objective” processes of industrial design and market-led investment and diffusion. This belief often rears its head in the widespread claim that governments need to take a “hands-off” approach to innovation and not interfere in the “free market,” even though economists long ago revealed the underlying Panglossian logic of such ideas.1 The following chapters aim to undermine such fairytale understandings of innovation, namely with respect to communitarian technologies.
The stability and direction of technological development is guided by entrenched, pervasive, and often significantly flawed patterns of thought; systems of regulation, tax, and subsidy; already established and “sunk” infrastructures; as well as the interests of powerful sociopolitical actors. In the language of STS, the sociotechnical status quo is often obdurate, or difficult to change, and certain technological trajectories gain more momentum than others, often leading to rapid sociotechnical changes but in fairly constrained ways.2 For instance, the ongoing and rapid innovation of frequently toxic petroleum-based chemical products contrasts the slow development of more environmentally benign and nontoxic alternatives to petroleum-based products through green chemistry. This has not been simply because green chemical processes, including the use of water or supercritical carbon dioxide as a solvent, lack promise or cannot perform adequately. Rather, the slowness of green chemical innovation partly stems from the existence of already established petroleum-processing and refining infrastructures as well as the lack of attention paid toward toxicology and chemistry ethics in university curricula and professional certification examinations.3 Green chemistry is hindered more by the sociopolitical challenges in altering ways of thinking among chemists, funding organizations, educators, and business managers and the costs of retooling industrial civilization as we know it than the technical challenges entailed in getting green chemistry to work. The attempt to realize more communitarian technologies is no different.
In the next chapters, I provide a reconstructivist look at community within technological societies.4 I discuss various barriers to more thickly communitarian technologies: cognitive, technical, cultural, sociopolitical, and economic. Such technologies are hindered by ways of (non)thinking, material or physical constraints, cultural preferences, the interests and dysfunctions of powerful political actors and institutions, as well as wrongheaded policies. Wherever possible, I suggest ways of mitigating or lessening the effects of these barriers. Although I fall short of providing an unequivocal roadmap to thicker communities, those seeking change in their own communities, cities, and nations should be able to extend my analysis and develop strategies better matched to the particularities of where they live.
Reconstructivism has yet to be applied to most of the sociotechnical problems affecting humanity. This line of inquiry within the “engaged program” of STS remains underdeveloped.5 Those researching sociotechnical change typically catalog problems rather than imagine solutions. This tendency afflicts community studies more generally. Many otherwise excellent works characterizing communal decline within technological societies could do more exploration of how such a decline could be opposed or partly reversed, often providing a few relatively weak prescriptions in their concluding pages.6 In contrast, chapters 7 through 9 in this volume aim to directly inform and assist citizens who wish their lives were more communitarian, beginning with urban form.7 Unless partisans for thicker communities systematically, collectively, and directly confront the sociotechnical barriers to the ways of life they desire, they should not be surprised if networked individualization and the thinning of community life continues unabated.
***
As architectural historian Howard Davis has pointed out, buildings are cultural products.8 Only people’s complete immersion in the standard practices of today and their lack of alternative reference points make the construction of sprawling suburbs, downtown high rises, and seas of parking lots appear to be as natural as the sun rising in the morning. Such urban form is the water within which an increasing number of citizens swim. Increases in the area of urban settlement and vehicle miles traveled have significantly outpaced population growth for decades. Such patterns, moreover, have spread far beyond North America: Europe has its own sprawl, especially in Ireland, Spain, and Portugal, and builders in poorer but economically growing countries like China and Brazil increasingly build gated high-rise complexes and detached homes.9 Regardless, because this kind of urban form is a cultural product, it could be otherwise. Buildings, streets, and neighborhoods could be redesigned to support and reflect a thick communitarian culture.
Such possibilities are erased by fairytale understandings of technological development. It is difficult for some to even fathom that large-scale suburbanization and the razing of medium-density urbanity to make way for high rises and big-box stores may not have been the result of simply providing “the people” what they really wanted. The view that urban form results from consumer choices, of course, has a modicum of truth to it. At the end of the day, building owners and tenants choose to sign mortgages and leases. Nevertheless, it fails to recognize that most people act within a building culture whose features are largely outside their control. How much agency do ordinary citizens really have concerning how their homes and businesses are constructed, especially when the character of surrounding neighborhoods, how bankers and investors decide which styles of building merit financing, and whether architects and contractors have the requisite expertise, imagination, and regulatory support needed to create alternative designs has already been largely decided? How is it accurate to say that the majority of North Americans have “chosen” the detached suburban home when most nonsuburban housing is located in either blighted urban areas or upscale neighborhoods? Even those who ardently desire a more communitarian environment cannot be reasonably expected to risk their physical or financial security for better urban form.
As is the case for most consumer markets, the majority of people are only able to choose among the residential options that entrepreneurs and businesses, in response to governmental regulations and incentives, are willing to produce.10 What exactly businesses produce, in turn, is only partly dependent on citizens’ “actual” preferences. Managers and owners, like consumers, act in response to a multitude of incentives, motives, regulatory pressures, and cultural ideas. Consumers’ desires are influenced by years of advertising and enculturation, not to mention their level of ignorance concerning or inexperience with alternatives. In the same way that a factory is not neutral with regard to what can be produced with it—one set up to assemble automobiles could only manufacture diapers with considerable effort and expense—the vast sociotechnical networks shaping building processes are not neutral with respect to the shape of resulting urban form. How do the design features of the “urban form factory” system bias it toward building urban environments unamenable to thick community? How might this bias be lessened or reversed?
The development and continuation of suburban growth has been sustained via massive subsidies and other financial incentives. Pamela Blais has described in great detail how residents of dense urban areas, namely Canadian cities, are forced to subsidize suburbia through the mispricing of development fees.11 Most services—including water, electricity, mail, road construction and maintenance, and electricity—are characterized by “economies of density.” That is, providing low-density areas with infrastructure, policing, and other services is much more expensive. This is true without even considering externalities like environmental damage, road fatalities, the health costs of sedentary and automobile-focused living, and wars in the Middle East.12 It might cost twenty-two thousand dollars for a city such as Albuquerque to provide infrastructure to a suburban house on the urban fringe but only one thousand dollars for a home in a more central, higher-density location.13 Development charges are routinely assigned, however, without taking such diseconomies into account. Impact or development fees could be set proportionally to the strain they put on municipal infrastructural services, and thus budgets.14
The perverse subsidization of sprawl likewise occurs through taxation and utility service charges. Standard mechanisms for assessing tax liabilities typically result in apartment dwellers paying more on average, despite the marginal per capita costs of snow removal, street cleaning, emergency services, and other municipal amenities being much higher in low-density suburbs.15 Service charges for water or electricity, moreover, usually make little distinction between an area requiring ten feet of water main or electric conduit between neighboring homes and one that demands fifty or a hundred. Simply requiring suburbanites to pay their fair share of infrastructural costs would constitute a large step toward better enabling alternative forms of housing.
In many jurisdictions, however, there are no neighboring dense urban areas to subsidize diffuse growth, yet the taxes and fees remain low enough to attract homebuyers. How can those charges be so low when there are no higher-density areas to cross-subsidize them? For such places, future growth is continually sought in order to collect taxes and fees to pay for past infrastructural development. Urban political economists John R. Logan and Harvey L. Molotch called such projects “infrastructure traps.”16 The financing of infrastructure traps bears a strong resemblance to a Ponzi scheme, a form of investment fraud in which initial investors are paid their returns by the investments of later participants. Ponzi schemes, however, inevitably crash because returns on investment can only be sustained by an exponential growth in new investors. This inherent instability has not prevented municipalities from financing their infrastructural projects in Ponzi-like arrangements. Tax liabilities are often set in ways that prevent municipal revenues from making up the original construction cost during an infrastructure’s lifetime. One analysis found that it would take seventy-nine years for the taxes collected from the residents living on a suburban street to pay for it, some fifty years longer than the expected lifespan of the road.17 Expecting future growth to finance past infrastructure therefore is not only potentially irresponsible but also hides the true economic cost of sprawl.
Besides more accurately pricing infrastructure and development, denser and more communitarian development could be encouraged by increasing the taxes on land in comparison to building improvements via split-level taxation. The relatively low taxes commonly assigned to land incentivizes speculative land owning and low-density construction. Low land taxes make hoarding or not fully developing vacant land inexpensive. Comparatively high taxes on building improvements penalizes the higher-quality construction required by multiunit and compact forms of housing, promoting the inefficient use of land by diffuse suburban housing, surface parking lots, and big-box stores. Studies of the implementation of split-level taxation in Pennsylvania suggest that it discourages land speculation—keeping property values more manageable—and encourages denser development.18 Care needs to be taken, however, when enacting land value taxation so that more desirable low-density endeavors, including greenhouses, farms, and greenbelts, are not discouraged.
While taxation and price systems certainly matter a great deal, the largest contributor by far to the production of thinly communitarian urban form is the ongoing subsidization of automobility. U.S. gas taxes and tolls cover only roughly half of the 150 billion dollars that state and local governments spend annually on roads and highways, the rest coming from income, property, and sales taxes.19 Seemingly unbeknownst to conservative commentators in the United States, who balk at the paltry public subsidy given to Amtrak, the costs of driving are socialized. The United States and countries like New Zealand are unique in this regard; European nations frequently collect taxes and fees above and beyond what it takes to build and maintain their road networks.20
Another, often overlooked, subsidy to automobility is the provision of “free” or underpriced parking. The costs to build and maintain parking spaces are bundled into rents, the prices of goods and services at brick-and-mortar stores, and local taxes. The construction costs of a typical apartment complex and commercial building can be increased 20 and 60 percent, respectively, by the need for parking facilities.21 Nondrivers end up subsidizing automobile owners’ parking costs, as when two dollars was added to the cost of the train fare to Pearson International Airport to compensate the airport authority for anticipated declines in parking revenues.22 Planning scholar Donald Shoup estimated the hidden costs or subsidy of ostensibly “free” parking to be at least 127 billion dollars annually in the United States.23 This figure might sound outrageous at first, but a single parking space costs between five thousand and a hundred thousand dollars to build, averages several hundred dollars in maintenance every year, and tends to occupy land that could be used for more productive ends. Moreover, countries such as the United States average three parking spaces for every automobile. To induce consumers to agitate for walkable neighborhoods and better transit, it would be necessary to increase gas taxes and make parking costs visible rather than hiding them in rents, taxes, and the price of goods and services.
The subsidization of suburbia does not end with cars: Numerous consumer-level incentives exist within the real estate industry. The ability of Americans to deduct mortgage interest from their federal taxes subsidizes exurban McMansions. Indeed, the benefits of this tax deduction accrue mainly to white suburbanites in the upper income quintile.24 Given that the deduction only applies to citizens owning a home expensive enough for their mortgage interest to exceed the standard IRS deduction, this outcome is not at all surprising. The policy might be fruitfully reformed by turning it into a tax credit rather than a deduction, like those currently offered for efficient appliances and solar panels, and directing it toward housing in denser, more walkable areas.
Other countries have similar sprawl-friendly policies. In Canada, first-time homebuyers are offered a break on the GST (goods and services tax) of their purchase. Because this applies only to the purchase of newly constructed houses and not repairs or modification, this program discourages the buying of older homes needing renovation, which also tend to be located in denser areas.25 Homeownership could obviously be encouraged without so strongly funneling new homebuyers into the suburbs.
More generally, the determination of potential homebuyers’ capacity to service a home mortgage is itself biased toward suburban housing. Suburban living looks more affordable on paper than it really is. Neither increased heating and cooling expenses nor commuting costs are included in the relevant calculations. The different realities of suburban and urban living are not factored into the process. The energy savings of a more compact home combined with not having to own two cars, if any, should translate into people looking to live in mixed-use, transit-oriented locales being able to take out a much larger mortgage than suburbanites. Indeed, one Canadian mortgage broker estimated that the total lifetime expenses incurred by a couple purchasing a $500,000 suburban house are roughly the same as a couple buying a $720,000 urban home, if the extra costs of commuting and owning two vehicles rather than one (though not increased energy use) are factored in.26 Accounting for such expenses when approving mortgage loans would encourage more citizens to look outside the suburbs when buying a home.
Even with these changes, urban properties may remain beyond the financial reach of the modal citizen. Partly driving their unaffordability is the extent to which central city apartments and condos are held by absentee owners, those wealthy enough to afford multiple homes or foreign investors looking for a profitable, nonconfiscatable investment in overheated housing markets. Available housing stock for residents is further depleted, and hence prices inflated, in desirable areas like San Francisco as entrepreneurs buy up and convert apartments into Airbnb rentals. Indeed, in many metropolises, large portions of the urban housing stock remain vacant most of the year. For instance, more than twenty-two thousand units in Vancouver and up to 30 percent of the apartments in the Upper East Side of New York are mostly unoccupied.27 Given that these vacancies are typically large luxury apartments, they take up space that could be made into several times the number of affordable housing units. These practices decrease the available supply of housing, raising prices for everyone, as more building space is dedicated to luxury units that house fewer tenants and sometimes no one at all. One way to limit this phenomenon would be to increase property taxes on absentee owners—a move currently being attempted by the Israeli Knesset—or give owner-occupiers a tax break.28 A more radical solution would be for local governments to seize vacant luxury apartments via eminent domain, an approach argued by some legal scholars to meet the “public purpose” criterion for such action: it corrects undesirable market distortions and could be used to create more affordable housing.29
Further driving the real estate industry toward sprawling urban development are current market-led pricing systems for urban and rural land. In Europe sprawl is enabled by the relatively low prices of agricultural and other rural lands compared to urban lots.30 This is unsurprising given that land markets generally do not factor in the long-term environmental and social costs of paving over quality farmland and other green spaces. Indeed, research suggests that an increasing level of sprawl has been one of the biggest factors driving ecosystem damage and desertification in Spain.31 Spanish suburbs probably would not have grown so precipitously if land prices had reflected the value of natural and rural areas as hedges against desertification. Moreover, developing greenfield sites is typically less expensive than urban infill projects, where some predevelopment remediation work may be necessary. Regionally coordinating development fees so that greenfield construction subsidizes the remediation of urban brownfield sites could slow the growth of sprawl by decreasing the costs of infill densification.
Such changes would have the added benefit of reversing the pervasive regulatory pattern wherein governments use citizens’ tax dollars to make sprawling development even more alluring to developers. High upfront capital costs and long project times make the construction of high rises, shopping malls, business parks, and planned neighborhoods a risky venture. Hence, it is not surprising that such projects proceed more quickly when the financial risks are socialized (i.e., covered by taxpayers). Although federal, state, and municipal government subsidies for urban projects often have the stated goal of eliminating blight or creating more affordable housing, the beneficiaries frequently end up being affluent suburbanites rather than the poor.32 For instance, Urban Development Action Grants offered by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development have provided millions of dollars for the construction of office buildings, ski resorts, shopping centers, posh hotels, and several corporate headquarters. Municipalities, moreover, compete with each other in the attempt to woo large private developers with tax-exempt economic development bonds and “special tax districts,” which force residents to subsidize large building projects while giving them little input concerning what actually gets built. The ability of “growth coalitions” of wealthy developers, contractors, bankers, and other powerful actors to elicit subsidies from politicians and bureaucrats in municipal and state governments33 biases urban policy making, rendering it harder to incentivize the development of affordable urban housing.
One of the financial tools most frequently used to subsidize sprawl, regional malls, and high-end condominiums is tax-increment financing (TIF). Originally developed as a means to induce housing investments in blighted areas, today TIF is regularly utilized by suburban municipalities to compete for development. TIF works by funneling all or some portion of the post-development increases in sales or property tax revenue (often tens to hundreds of millions of dollars) back to retailers and developers for a fixed period, which might be as long as several decades or until the original development loans are paid off. Already profitable suburban malls frequently get labeled as “blighted” for having too few anchor stores or not being as nice as a competitor opening up across town, resulting in public redevelopment dollars originally intended to improve urban housing being used instead to subsidize the building of an Abercrombie or Louis Vuitton store location.34 Moreover, TIF financing often ends up supporting suburban greenfield development rather than infill or densification, sometimes developments that would have probably been built anyway.35 Besides making suburban and regional mall development cheaper and thus more alluring, TIF subsidies divert funds away from municipal coffers that could support public services like schools and transit. Certainly, TIF could be used to subsidize infill densification, build walkable neighborhoods, and convert strip and regional malls into mixed-use developments. However, the state laws permitting its use would need to set strict conditions, otherwise TIF meant for increasing densities ends up subsidizing the expansion of regional malls or the construction of McMansions on slightly smaller lots.
A range of other obduracy-inducing sociotechnical factors drive thinly communitarian urban development. STS scholar Anique Hommels has characterized three sources of sociotechnical obduracy: sociotechnical embeddedness, dominant frames, and persistent traditions.36 Each of these sources of obduracy help explain the ongoing momentum of thinly communitarian urban form.
Embeddedness is the most straightforward cause of obduracy: it is the extent to which status quo technologies are embedded in other social and technical systems. Technologies become difficult to alter because doing so demands expensive or difficult changes. Mixed-use, medium-density neighborhoods are challenging to build because residential construction is firmly embedded in established zoning and code systems as well as existing transportation networks. Non-sprawling designs typically require expensive applications for “variances,” because their designs usually conflict with local codes. Realizing neighborhoods that more substantively encourage walking, moreover, would entail altering local transportation networks to discourage driving and encourage public transit as well as reconstructing retail networks to lessen competition coming from regional shopping centers. The opposition of those with a stake in automobility, like construction firms, certain developers, and owners of big-box stores and regional malls, makes this difficult. As a result, many new urbanist developments end up being semisuburban pockets of walkability within a sea of automobile-centric development, failing to draw residents out of their automobiles.37
The sheer costs and difficulty of altering already established infrastructure is another aspect of embeddedness-related obduracy. The conversion of the average suburban neighborhood into a medium-density, walkable urban area would be hampered by the tangled curvilinear streets meant to evoke the sense that one is driving through the countryside. Altering street systems to better enable pedestrian traffic is, in turn, constrained by the fact that houses and backyards stand in the way of more direct roads and sidewalks. Ground infrastructures, moreover, tend to follow these roads and would need to be relocated as well. Nevertheless, the effects of material obduracy should not be overstated: sprawling apartment and business parks, malls, and residential areas could be incrementally retrofitted.38 Large parking lots and building setbacks provide space for mixed-use development and erecting “liner buildings” close to sidewalks and the edges of streets; cul-de-sacs could eventually be connected; and suburban arterial roads could be narrowed to allow bike paths and transit lanes.
Ensuring that aging suburban infrastructure is not simply replicated but instead retrofitted could be accomplished by not only, as mentioned above, making sure development fees and land prices encourage it but also, as discussed below, establishing the right codes and zoning laws. Municipalities with the requisite political capital might consider dividing suburban lots or taking land and parking spaces bordering the street by eminent domain and selling it to those interested in constructing compact urban form—though few are likely to be so bold. More subtle policy changes could include applying a special tax levy on properties in sprawling areas that are a top priority for partitioning or retrofitting: those located on main thoroughfares or near transit stops.
Status quo urban form is obdurate as a result of its embeddedness in financial networks as much as in material ones. A case in point is the American real estate market, which has become increasingly financialized. Wall Street firms routinely trade multimillion dollar agglomerations of real estate equity and debt through real estate investment trusts and commercial mortgage-backed securities.39 This kind of financial trading, whether applied to real estate or wheat, only proceeds when the traded object can be commoditized. As a result of financialization, American real estate has been standardized into roughly nineteen different product types, including the detached home, the garden apartment, and the retail center. This practice drives the continued obduracy of currently dominant urban form because it limits financing options for buildings not easily placed into one of the standard types. Banks are more reluctant to finance construction that they cannot easily turn around and package into a real estate investment trust or commercial mortgage-backed security. Thus, for alternative and more communitarian urban forms to stand a chance of being significantly developed, alternative funding pathways will likely need to be created.
The obduracy of contemporary suburbia also stems from entrenched ideas and beliefs. The different ways in which various social groups view a technology are what STS scholars call dominant frames. They are the product of differences in worldviews, styles of problem formulation, cognitive heuristics, and political values. These divergences in thinking and imagination are often difficult to reconcile, leading to stalemate and, hence, a continuation of the status quo. Conflict over which dominant frame ought to define urban form has been perennial, led by urbanists like Jacobs and Mumford as well as more recent new urbanists. The status quo, nevertheless, remains that of the “American dream,” which presumes a “natural progression” of life toward the goal of the detached single-family home in the suburbs. This dominant frame guides the thinking of housing producers, motivating them to be quite conservative.40 The American dream is incommensurable with the dominant frames of activists and planners who view ideal urban form as entailing convivial street life or the sustainable usage of scarce resources and land. This incommensurability often means that the suburban status quo remains untouched when political battles over land use patterns emerge, a result that is no doubt helped by the financial resources and privileged position of large development, construction, and retail firms in local politics. The Greater Toronto Home Builders’ Association, for instance, has actively lobbied against attempts to direct residential growth away from sprawl.41
The obduracy-enhancing function of dominant frames is exacerbated by embeddedness. It is unlikely that building new urbanist or similarly compact urban form will enhance the feasibility of more communitarian neighborhood activity without simultaneously addressing the larger sociotechnical networks that suburbia, regional malls, and urban renewal high rises depend on. Dismantling these networks, in turn, will demand effectively opposing the dominant frames that undergird them. Consider the limited access highways that facilitate a networked individualist practice of urban mobility, fragment neighborhoods, make a suburban retreat from the city easier, and serve as barriers to walking and biking. Several cities have successfully torn down freeways and replaced them with traffic-calmed boulevards, often being able to fit bike paths, trolley lines, and additional housing in the former footprint of the highway and its on-ramps.42 In these cases, the main barrier to removal was not financial: many were in need of rebuilding or were damaged by earthquakes, and the cost of demolition and construction of a boulevard was less than that of rebuilding. Rather, the pervasive belief that removing highways inevitably leads to nightmarish traffic congestion, which often turns out to be mistaken, typically lies at the heart of opposition.43 Highways are seen as unequivocally “solving” the problem of traffic. The association of highways with broader aspirations and imaginaries of the autocentric good life no doubt further entrenches such assumptions, producing a dominant frame incommensurable with more communitarian visions.
The obduracy of contemporary urban form, however, is a product not simply of ideas and the inertia of technological systems but also of a range of too-rarely-questioned commitments and practices. While dominant frames are the competing conceptualizations mobilized by rival groups over specific technologies, buildings, or systems, persistent traditions are the practices and thought patterns that “transcend local contexts and group interactions.”44 They are the more typically taken-for-granted values, understandings, and habits that tend to carry on without significant opposition or challenge. They are dominant frames that have become naturalized.
Persistent traditions are visible in the pervasive myths that sustain status quo building patterns. High rises, which often amount to vertical suburbs in terms of their communitarian compatibility, are often aggressively incentivized by municipalities and states working under the belief that high rises drive downtown economic development and solve shortages of affordable housing through increased densities. The idea that high rises consistently produce higher densities at lower costs than medium-density buildings may be just an alluring myth, exceptional cases like Hong Kong notwithstanding. For instance, despite being built out of four- to eight-story buildings, the neighborhood of Eixample in Barcelona, Spain, houses twenty-thousand more people per square mile than Manhattan. The Le Plateau-Mont-Royal borough of Montreal is one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in Canada (more than 30,000 per square mile), even though three-story walk-ups make up a large portion of its housing stock.
Such counterexamples only appear surprising because contemporary building traditions carry the naturalized assumption that high rises are the surest route to higher and more affordable densities. The factors that limit the influence of tall buildings on density and housing costs are fairly obvious on reflection. High rises are typically spaced farther apart, being surrounded by large expanses of landscaping, parking lots, and/or large boulevards. Moreover, they often include features like elevators, extra emergency stairwells, underground parking garages, and complex HVAC systems that take up valuable floor space, and they are costly to build and maintain. Indeed, according to the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation, walk-up apartments cost less to build per square foot and have smaller energy footprints than high-rise apartments. Indeed, they typically have between one-half to two-thirds the overall development and maintenance costs.45 Insofar as high rises do not actually increase densities, or not sufficiently to offset increased costs, they exacerbate the problem of urban unaffordability. One wonders if their main purpose is really to signal a city’s ostensible “progress” toward modernity or to increase the revenues of local development firms.
Building codes and zoning practices help make contemporary urban form obdurate through both persistent traditions and embeddedness. Expectations for copious amounts of free parking are entrenched in parking minimums within municipal codebooks.46 Such minimums are strictly enforced, despite being incredibly costly in terms of promoting sprawl and rarely determined with much empirical rigor. Planning departments will often demand two spaces per apartment or ten for every thousand square feet of commercial space, regardless of the presence of walkable streets or public transit. This means that developers must dedicate 360 square feet of parking for every condo and 1,800 square feet for every 1,000 square feet of commercial building. In the latter case, these policies usually guarantee that more land area is dedicated to parking than occupied space in new commercial construction. Moreover, parking codes can discourage the renovation of older buildings, for they begin to apply to older buildings whenever owners attempt to renovate them for different uses, often making it necessary to demolish part of the structure.
The obduracy-inducing effects of the persistent tradition of “free” parking obviously could be mitigated by making requirements more flexible. Builders might be encouraged to contribute a fixed sum to improved transit infrastructure in lieu of having to build an expensive above- or below-ground parking structure.47 Given that a single space in a parking structure costs anywhere from fifteen to a hundred thousand dollars, this would result in every large development project potentially providing a multimillion dollar injection into local transit budgets. Developers might be enrolled by ensuring that contribution requirements do not totally cancel out the extra revenue they are likely to enjoy by being permitted to develop a larger amount of saleable and rentable floor area. Alternatively, developers could establish a fund that supplies building residents with free or subsidized transit passes in place of on-site parking. This would serve much the same function as an in-lieu contribution while more directly incentivizing transit use among residents.
Planning scholar Donald Shoup, furthermore, has recommended organizing existing public parking via business or neighborhood improvement districts, as has been done in East Pasadena, California.48 Neighborhoods could raise revenue by setting local parking charges in ways that reflect supply and demand, using the collected revenue for desired local projects or even as a source for financing renovation and new construction projects. By being more directly connected to local benefits, such districts would push local residents to care more about parking infractions. Rather than being seen as a source of frustration or a form of extortion by distant municipal governments, parking can be framed as a local common-pool resource. To the extent that neighborhood improvement districts are democratically governed, this strategy could serve a dual communitarian purpose: discourage auto-driven sprawl and support greater political and economic community.
Parking regulations, however, may be slow to change. Free or inexpensive parking often gets treated as if it were a natural right. For many urban policy makers, anything but a mandatory one to two parking spots per housing unit is nearly unimaginable. Developers might be able to deftly sidestep obdurate parking requirements, however, by seeking permission to fulfill them “virtually.” This was done in the Vauban neighborhood in Freiburg, Germany, where citizens established car-free neighborhoods: residents pledged not to own an automobile and to pay 3,700 euros to keep approximately two hundred square feet—a “virtual” parking spot—free of development.49 Those desiring cars, on the other hand, had to pay roughly 17,000 euros for a space in a local garage. Apart from freeing developers from having to pave over every available square inch of land, this forced drivers to bear more of the social costs of car ownership. Fulfilling parking requirements virtually, moreover, sets aside land that can be used for public leisure. In the case of Vauban, virtual parking spaces have been used for community barbeques and pickup soccer. Having become valued public amenities, any future effort to turn these virtual spaces into actual parking lots is likely to be met with strong local resistance.
Minimum parking requirements are just one component of a persistent system of zoning and building codes that help ensure suburban building patterns. Zoning and codes enhance the momentum of particular kinds of urban form by freeing them from political scrutiny: certain buildings and neighborhoods get rubber stamped, but all others must apply for variances. Sprawl is all but assured when codes in many municipalities dictate that buildings must be set between forty and one hundred feet away from the street, lots must be at least seventy feet wide, and the floor-to-area ratio—that is, the ratio of building square footage to the land area of the lot—must be much less than one.50 Municipal codes for the town of Framingham, Massachusetts, for instance, limit floor-to-area ratios to 0.32 in most areas, meaning that the square footage of any building must be less than thirty two percent of the piece of land it sits on; in certain residential areas, a detached home cannot cover more than fifteen percent of the lot.51
Requirements like these, put together, make proposed communitarian urban design harder to realize. Front porches are less effective in spurring social interaction when codes require that they be fifty feet from the sidewalk, if a sidewalk even exists. Large minimum lot widths and low floor-to-area ratios limit the number of possible units on every block. Moreover, the tradition of single-use zoning segregates residential from commercial and other uses, ensuring that residents live far away from everyday amenities, workplaces, as well as potential third places: grocery stores, pubs, and cafés. Detached homes with yards are often zoned next to parks, even though apartment dwellers have greater needs for parkland. Finally, the codebooks of many municipalities are long and complex, containing hundreds of zoning types and amendments. Developers save considerable time and money by using off-the-shelf status quo designs.
Simply making existing codes more flexible may help address the momentum of sprawling cities. Indeed, the developer of the pedestrian-friendly neighborhood of I’On in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, was forced to spend three years litigating to get out from under single-use zoning requirements.52 Advocates of new urbanism promote alternative sets of form-based codes, or SmartCode, as a way to go beyond simply making medium-density, mixed-use urban spaces legal again. Such codes encourage or enforce their development, discouraging large setbacks and the dead space created by large driveways and oversized lots. They trim parking requirements, placing spaces behind buildings and in the center of blocks, in addition to permitting narrower, traffic-calmed streets and boulevards.53 Such code and zoning changes are likely to be opposed by those who currently profit from building sprawl: already established developers, contractors, and realtors. Developing hybrid codes, in which form-based and conventional codes coexist in the municipality’s books, represents an incremental step that may be more politically feasible in the short run.
At the same time, form-based codes sometimes still contain minimum parking requirements that undermine new urbanists’ goals for medium-density walkable built environments.54 How strict they are varies from city to city. Some lower or eliminate minimums to parking, setbacks, and lot widths, and merely permit mixed uses, while others require new urbanist design features outright.55 Simply making new urbanist design legal, moreover, may be too weak a nudge to alter the momentum of suburbia and high-rise development. Without broader incentives and regulations that encourage experimentation or discourage conventional construction, alternative building codes may never actually get put into practice.
More communitarian building codes and zoning could be encouraged by mimicking the vast array of programs that originally drove sprawl. For instance, twentieth-century Federal Housing Administration policies mainly subsidized and insured the mortgages of detached suburban homes.56 An equivalent contemporary program could be tied to mixed-use medium-density design. Suburban planning departments are more likely to update their codebooks if housing subsidies are poised to draw homebuyers to more compact neighboring cities. Other incentives would hit municipalities’ budget lines more directly. Consider how alterations to states’ energy codes for residential and commercial buildings was a precondition to receiving stimulus dollars relating to energy projects through the 2008 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Code changes could be made a precondition for federal urban development dollars.
Working through codes at all, however, presents certain risks to the practice of community. As I noted above, the point of codes is to insulate certain kinds of construction from political scrutiny by ensuring that a narrow range of designs pass easily through local bureaucratic processes. Maintaining this degree of inflexibility for zoning and building regulations that enforce compact development, though understandable, given the momentum of sprawl, nevertheless limits the exercise of political community. The development of form-based codes does typically begin with a charrette, a public and participatory urban design workshop. As planning scholar Jill Grant has asked, however, “once the design is finished and the codes set, where are the opportunities for democratic action?”57 Indeed, most new urbanist neighborhoods are handed over to a homeowners’ association (HOA) once they are developed. Such associations, as discussed in chapter 4, are frequently conservative by design, weakly democratic, and privilege the protection of the exchange-value of properties rather than their use-value. From another angle, given that any charrette is unlikely to get urban form “right” the first time, it makes little sense to render its resulting design overly difficult to change. A more substantively communitarian planning process would involve periodic reassessment charrettes within neighborhoods concerning their urban form, zonings, and codes. To avoid the conservatism of HOAs, a supermajority vote should be required every decade or so in order to retain existing rules. That is, advocates of the status quo should periodically be forced to carry the burden of proof.
Adding to the barriers posed by the persistent tradition of sprawling or otherwise anticommunitarian design are deficits in countervailing knowledge among experts. Planners and architects could be better trained concerning the communitarian implications of urban design. In fact, several eminent planning professors and professionals have signed a statement lamenting the fact that planning students receive substantial training in public policy, geoengineering basics, and land-use law yet are provided very little guidance on how the arrangement of streets, buildings, neighborhoods, and parks affects the livability of a city.58 Planning professionals thereby are left ill-prepared to evaluate master plans, zoning maps, and building codes in terms of their social implications.
Architectural education, for its part, too often treats individual buildings as abstract pieces of engineering and art rather than technologies structuring everyday sociality. Although curricula at architecture schools differ widely, evaluation criteria set out by the National Architectural Accreditation Board (NAAB) place little emphasis on how urban form shapes social relationships. Schools are to ensure that students understand the varied “social and spatial patterns that characterize different cultures,”59 but there is little language indicating a recognition that architects help legislate the range of realizable patterns of social life through their building and neighborhood designs. Far more emphasis is placed on technical matters like acoustics, structural analysis, and environmental systems as well as the codes and financial concerns shaping the building process. Newly built high rises and suburbs alike will probably contain a relative dearth of the features that help establish social relationships through serendipitous interactions and shared routines when architecture and planning schools are not incentivized or explicitly required to teach designing for community as a professional skill.
Given that the actions of such experts have compounding effects on the prospects for community as a public good, it would be sensible for governments to push their accreditation boards and professional societies to require at least one course on urban design and community. Planning and architecture programs might be indirectly incentivized to include such topics if government contracts gave preference to new urbanist and similarly conceived design standards. The Department of Defense’s 2012 Unified Facilities Criteria, for example, already set form-based standards for the master planning of military bases emphasizing walkability, mixed uses, and less autocentric sprawl. Such standards could be a requirement in other government construction projects. Indeed, public spending on residential, commercial, and office construction amounted to roughly 16 billion dollars in 2013 in the United States.60 Although that represents a small but not totally insignificant 4 percent of the roughly 450 billion dollars in total construction spending, leveraging the buying power of governments in this direction—much like how the recycled paper industry was helped by the U.S. government’s turn toward “greener” public procurement policies61—might lead planning and architecture curricula to devote more time to compact urban form.
Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to overestimate the degree of agency possessed by urban designers. As philosopher Robert Kirkman has noted, designers, including new urbanist architects, face a range of sociopolitical forces that act to limit their “efficacy.”62 No matter how well trained on the coupling of social relationships and urban form, designers would still have to contend with conservative developers, financiers, and planning offices, together with many other barriers to more communitarian urban spaces.
It is not enough, however, to alter the policies and practices that stand in the way of developing more communitarian urban spaces through mixed-use, compact design and walkability; such spaces need to be affordable. Surveys of planned mixed-use developments often find that they are significantly more expensive than surrounding neighborhoods, threatening to make them nostalgic enclaves for the upper-middle class.63 This suggests that the standard model of using a single large private developer may be poorly suited to nonsprawling developments, at least for the time being.
There are two possible alternatives for achieving affordable communitarian urbanism as well as opening up opportunity for the practice of political community. First, the community land trust (CLT) model provides a way to keep urban land values from quickly pricing out lower-, working-, and middle-class residents. CLT land is owned by a community nonprofit that leases it to residents, who in turn own the building or unit on that land. The land is thus protected from the speculative investors, one of the most significant drivers of rapidly ballooning housing costs.64 The CLT model has been successfully applied by the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI) in Roxbury/North Dorchester, Massachusetts, and in Burlington, Vermont.65 In Roxbury/North Dorchester, a family is likely to pay $1,300 per month for a three-bedroom unit, roughly half the going rental rate in nearby neighborhoods. Although Roxbury/North Dorchester feels more suburban than urban in some areas, the DSNI exemplifies how a CLT ownership model could help reduce housing costs and improve local control over development. The organization leads local planning and zoning processes, having the ability to hold up construction if the design is found to be untenable.
CLTs, however, face barriers of their own. Land in blighted or run-down neighborhoods is more often turned over to private developers than to community organizations. Hence, advocates face an uphill battle in convincing municipal leaders that the model is feasible. The successes of Burlington and Roxbury can be attributed to a socialist mayor in the former and a massive, highly motivated social movement in the latter. Another drawback to CLTs is that they face very real limits as the local supply of vacant or inexpensive property runs out. The DSNI has struggled to compete with entrepreneurs seeking to “flip” foreclosed homes; it is regularly underbid by them. The CLT in Burlington has run into similar barriers to expansion.66 While many CLTs do receive some degree of governmental subsidy in the United States, including through the federal HOME Investment Partnership Program, the Department of Housing and Urban Development primarily focuses on public rental housing and voucher (i.e., rental assistance) programs. At the same time, national-level officials risk considerable political retaliation from the construction and real estate industries if they are viewed as “interfering” with private property markets, discouraging them from promoting more experimentation with CLTs. Without a significantly more favorable policy environment (subsidies, low-interest loan guarantees, and other assistance), the development of more CLTs will likely be plodding for the foreseeable future—at least in North America.
Another way around the private developer model involves institutionally supporting groups of citizens to develop their own multiunit buildings or cohousing via Baugruppen, or building cooperatives. Such initiatives are provided a large amount of public support in countries like Germany.67 For instance, in Hamburg the Agentur für Baugemeinschaften Hamburg (Hamburg Building-Communities Agency) helps groups of citizens locate and purchase suitable land as well as performs part of the logistical work between architects and contractors traditionally supplied by developers. By cutting out the intermediating developers and real estate agents, building cooperatives in Vauban, Germany, found that they could lower costs by up to 30 percent.68 The model could also be put to use retrofitting aging suburban sites, not just in new development. Given the observed reluctance of many private developers to implement urban designs more compatible with local social community as well as all the financial incentives pushing them to keep churning out status quo housing, lessening their privileged position in the process may be the most important first step in decreasing the obduracy of suburban and luxury high-rise construction.
Nevertheless, there are barriers to implementing building cooperatives in North America and elsewhere. First, they are unlikely to be successful in an institutional vacuum. Some equivalent to the Hamburg Building-Communities Agency needs to be available to guide cooperative members through the requisite logistical, legal, and financial processes. Probably most importantly, this organization needs to be prepared to mediate serious conflicts and lessen the force of the persistent tradition of relying on litigation to solve disputes. Indeed, a significant focus on conflict mitigation was a fundamental part of the planning process in Vauban.69 Citizens accustomed to private living and the suburban/high-rise culture of avoidance will be ill-prepared to work cooperatively with their future neighbors. Financing also needs to be made available. If traditional banks are wary of loaning to nonbusiness entities for multiunit housing, perhaps local credit unions could be encouraged to take on that role. Given that many municipalities already forgo millions in revenue via tax breaks to traditional developers to little avail, there is little reason that local politicians could not direct some of that spending to underwriting loans to building cooperatives.
As I have mentioned, a communitarian neighborhood is more than just compatible urban form. Such spaces must also contain attractive and affordable places for leisure. A mixed-use street full of swanky wine bars and artisan delis may attract networked communities of hipsters and creative-class professionals, and their pocketbooks, but hardly supports thick community. Third places, the local bars and cafés that center local community life, have traditionally provided low-cost hangouts for those living nearby. Yet, they are increasingly discouraged by a constellation of financial disincentives. To begin, alcohol at grocery stores and other outlets is often sold at one-third to one-quarter of the pub price. This price difference is exacerbated wherever groceries are allowed to sell alcohol at or below cost (i.e., as a “loss-leader”) to attract customers. Bars and taverns, moreover, have high operating costs, stemming from insurance rates, high rents, liquor licensing fees, and legal and contractual requirements that force them to purchase highly marked-up alcohol from only approved distributors. The widening gap between on- and off-premise alcohol prices encourages drinking at home. Even in the United Kingdom, where pubs have traditionally centered social life, people now drink twice as often at home as at bars, restaurants, and clubs.70
Several policy changes could help reverse this trend. First, setting minimum prices for a unit of alcohol, as is being considered in the UK, could lessen the gap between grocery store and pub prices.71 Third place creation could be encouraged by reducing the tax burden on pubs and cafés that serve community needs or, as the City of Chicago offers, a break on liquor license fees. Indeed, fraternal lodges like the Eagles and VFW posts in states like Montana are able to offer drinks for between one and two dollars, even to nonmembers, largely because of their nonprofit tax-exempt status. No doubt there are details to work out regarding how much community service and how big of a tax break. Rick Muir, associate director of the Institute of Public Policy Research, has suggested offering tax relief of 50 percent for UK pubs that center local social networks; encourage the mixing of diverse social groups; offer public services like mail storage, meeting space, and rides to intoxicated patrons; or pursue and host charitable fundraising activities.72 A similar set of requirements could be devised for cafés. Additional financial breaks, moreover, could be offered to pubs and cafés that embrace community ownership models that provide citizens the chance to practice democratic political community.
Centralizing the provision of certain goods and services at the neighborhood level could enable third places in neighborhoods otherwise not amenable to them by design. For instance, governments could lower the expenses incurred by their ailing postal services at the same time that they promote togetherness by ceasing to deliver mail to residents’ doorsteps. Residents would be forced, much like those living in small towns in Montana and elsewhere, to visit the mailboxes at a local mail sorting center. Such centers could be placed next to or even within a small community center complete with a pub or café. Even those picking up their Amazon purchases may be tempted to stay and linger if they spot an acquaintance or are feeling lonely. The efficacy of this approach likely depends on getting the scale right. There may be efficiency gains in attempting to serve ever larger populations, but only at the cost of greater anonymity. At the same time, centers serving too few residents may never achieve the critical mass to become vibrant gathering places.
Places for playing outdoor games like soccer or horseshoes or simply to relax under shade trees further provide informal and inexpensive places for social congregation. Nevertheless, municipalities tend to centralize these features into large parks and recreation centers in order to minimize operation expenditures. Such facilities may be within reasonable driving distance but still far enough away to discourage everyday usage. Many suburbanites, moreover, may continue to believe that the private backyard can support all of a family’s recreational needs, even though increasing rates of obesity and sedentary living in sprawl-based societies suggest that they do not. Bigger cultural forces in the forms of “stranger danger” and the organization of youth sports are also at play.
Regardless, changes to zoning regulations could ensure that all residents are within a half or quarter mile of some space for public recreation. Vacant lots could be cheaply converted. Alternatively, space might be opened up by taking control of superfluous parking spots or underutilized lawns. Regular operation and maintenance of these facilities could be partly handed over to neighborhood residents, along with funds for doing so or the ability to raise those funds through a neighborhood improvement district. Residents in the Water Hill neighborhood of Ann Arbor, Michigan, for example, pooled funds to purchase a SnowBuddy snow-clearing device, each taking their turn to clear the local sidewalks.73 Similar arrangements could be made for maintaining neighborhood recreational space. In many cases, however, that level of collective organizing is not even necessary. Most suburbs reliably contain a few residents with riding mowers grossly oversized for their lawns. They might be persuaded to occasionally mow the local soccer or baseball field by the combination of a six-pack of beer and their neighbors’ esteem, if not a credit on their local property taxes. Others might prefer a half hour spent flooding an outdoor ice rink to the equivalent time shuttling children to a megafacility across town.
Communitarian urban spaces, however, are unlikely to exist without lessening the barriers to more communitarian urban governance more generally. Although homeowners’ associations and business improvement districts have merits, they tend to be weakly democratic and focused more on property values or local consumer spending than on improving the livability of neighborhoods. A proposed outdoor hockey rink is likely to be viewed as a probable insurance liability and an “eyesore” that somehow lowers local property values. Nevertheless, there is no reason that homeowners’ associations and improvement districts could not be induced to become more responsive institutions of collective governance. I suspect, however, that many homeowners’ aspirations continue to lie in the direction of an exurban home where ostensibly no one can tell them what to do for, in North America especially, the alluring myth of rugged individualism undermines many people’s ability to see democratic action as a credible possibility. Residents’ limitations in thinking and conflict negotiation skills may stand in the way of communitarian self-governance more than anything else. Business owners, for their part, will likely oppose expanding business improvement districts to include homeowners, much less tenants, because the power of their own votes would thereby be diluted. Still, if permitted the regulatory space and provided a means to financially support their efforts, neighbors could be enticed into more often working together to operate small-scale local amenities.
People have not really “chosen” sprawling suburban development. Not long after Levitt and Sons broke ground on Levittown and the first bulldozers razed Boston’s West End, the momentum of suburbia and urban renewal became all but ensured through a constellation of subsidies and entrenched sociotechnical systems. I have outlined how the mispricing of land, utilities, and development leads to the perverse incentivizing of low-density construction. Developers of high-end condos and upscale suburban neighborhoods have been shrewd operators in getting public dollars to support their bottom lines. Other processes have simultaneously been at play. The way in which privileged actors—developers, planners, and political elites—understand urban form is often incommensurable with compact mixed-use development. Sprawl has its own physical momentum in the form of tons of concrete and asphalt. The arrangement of buildings in relation to roads and highways within suburban cities helps enforce the reproduction of the status quo. Finally, a range of persistent traditions, from entrenched parking and building codes to how architects and planners are educated and development is financed, make the current trajectory of urban development difficult to change.
In principle, however, policies and practices supporting thinly communal development patterns could be strategically attacked and incrementally altered. Development charges as well as gas and property taxes could be set to make suburbanites pay for the municipal services they receive. Forcing banks to include in mortgage calculations the hidden transportation and energy costs of suburban living would push more to consider living closer to downtown. National and state governments could encourage municipal and regional planning organizations to use, or at least permit, compact and walkable mixed-use development by tying federal funds and guarantees to codebook changes. Such code changes, moreover, might get more political traction if they were enforced gradually and flexibly, as in parking garages with first-floor retail that are designed to be easily converted into housing, rather than trying to realize ideal urban form at the outset. Changes to planning and architecture curricula, as well as more amenable regulatory environments, could ensure that care for community could figure more prominently in the skill sets and practices of professionals. Citizens could play a bigger role in determining the character of their neighborhoods. Through community land trusts, neighborhood improvement districts, building cooperatives, and/or participatory planning boards, residents could be enabled to ask more from local urban form, especially if designed to periodically place the burden of proof on the status quo. Finally, code and tax changes could make third places, in the form of a local pub, café, or soccer field, easier to realize.
Although the opportunity to intervene in the last generation of urban design and construction is already forgone, the chance to considerably alter the next generation of housing remains. According to some estimates, around 35 million residential units will be newly constructed and another 17 million will be rebuilt between 2000 and 2025 in the United States alone, representing more than 40 percent of the 2000 supply of houses.74 At the same time, 77 percent of the 76 million American millennials, those born around the start of the twenty-first century, express a desire to live in city centers.75
The limited life span of built form provides opportunities for ameliorative action. High rises are frequently demolished or demand significant renovations after thirty or forty years—or even in as little as fifteen, as residents of glass-skinned condominiums in Toronto have been loath to discover.76 Highways and roads need major renovations along these same timescales. Few of the cheap regional malls erected since the 1950s are likely to remain usable very far into the twenty-first century, and at least some of the homes will start to require serious repairs. Although massive changes to urban form are likely most feasible in countries like Japan, where the expected lifespan of most buildings is between twenty and forty years, intelligent steering of policy to more compact new construction and a significant focus on retrofits and infill could lead to a substantial shift in the building stock within a few decades.
Many of the barriers I discuss in this chapter have been known for quite some time, suggesting that constraints on learning and thinking might be the most significant obstacles. Indeed, I have already touched on some of the myths that legitimate the status quo: the belief that suburbia has not been subsidized but has been produced by a free market providing homeowners what they really want; that suburban living is more affordable; that cities can only cope with automobile traffic through limited access highways; that parking needs to be free; and that high rises uniquely or unequivocally solve deficits in urban density. Such myths sustain a vicious cycle. They help ensure that alternatives are rarely built. Because most citizens and professionals have little experience with alternatives, such legitimating myths proceed unchallenged. Plain unfamiliarity and the perception of more communitarian urban form as a noncredible alternative figure as significant barriers in the minds of consumers.77
These mental barriers could be chipped away bit by bit. Suburban dwellers can only imagine life to be impossible without the privacy of a sizable yard and a four-lane highway separating home and work partly because they have never lived in any other way, so no one could know which counterexamples would awaken their imaginations. Planners are enculturated to place too much faith in the codes set by their forebearers, tending to view them as objectively or scientifically determined laws of urban form rather than as fallible, value-laden, and often arbitrary. Such views can be attacked directly; indeed, this work is partly an attempt at that. And advocates for more communitarian urban form might be most successful by simply putting their heads down and working to realize the technological and political changes they desire, waiting for stubborn and anachronistic ideas to die with the people who hold them.
Urban form is but one of several types of technology that impinge on the practice of community. Having more neighbors and amenities within walking distance will likely have no more than modest effects on the practice of community if most citizens continue to meet their daily needs through individualizing devices, impersonal institutions, and large-scale technical systems. In the next chapter, I turn to barriers faced by more communitarian organizations and infrastructures.