Want To Build Strong Cities? Win the Definition Game, First
What is a city, anyway?
A few weekends ago, driving home from church, my mood dropped as I watched two children making circles on their bikes in the parking lot of a massive abandoned building a mile from where we live. “We should turn that into a bike park,” I said aloud. If you spent much time with me here in Waco, you’d know this is par the course for driving around town with my husband: rattling off ideas for the city and then riding the emotional roller coaster; excited by the idea one minute and deflated by befuddlement the next.
This roller coaster happens so often that I’ve gotten used to it by now. I’ve gotten used to driving around downtown and daydreaming about what could be built on all the land dedicated to parking. I'm used to daydreaming about ways to slow the cars that drive through neighborhoods full of painfully wide lanes (how could children ever play on such dangerous streets?). I'm used to daydreaming about better public transit for the poor people waiting in the heat for a bus outside the grocery store (a bus that I know is probably only running for half an hour). I'm used to daydreaming while walking the same block over and over again in my neighborhood, afraid to explore new routes because of the city’s ongoing struggle to manage unpredictable loose dogs.
I’ve started writing down a list of all my daydreams. On the one hand, it’s exciting to think about the potential and all the opportunities the city presents. But some days, I find myself utterly bewildered that we even have to have these conversations in the first place. I love cities. I understand that advocating to make them better takes time and relationships. But sometimes, when I’m up at night listening to the late-night racing unfolding blocks from where I’m raising my child, I want to scream. Why does it have to be so complicated? Isn’t it common sense that cities should be beautiful, safe and productive?
I know progress is happening. When I get up in the morning and open my urbanism-focused email newsletters or check my LinkedIn feed, I see story after story of cities daylighting their streets, building protected bike lanes or banishing parking minimums. I see more and more ordinary folks jumping into the fray, advocating for their cities. "Okay, this is good," I think. But the impatient part of me pushes back: "Why is any of this news at all? Shouldn’t this be the status quo?"
Perhaps you’ve felt a similar frustration at the way bad ideas, bad design and bad policies prevail; perhaps you’ve also experienced a brow-furrowing perplexity at how hard it is to convince city leaders to move with urgency on the abundance of common-sense, research-backed solutions to our most pressing problems. After all, lives are at stake!
I think about this conundrum daily, especially now that I’m in the very beginning stages of organizing a Strong Towns Local Conversation here in Waco. I like to think that behaviors, no matter how baffling, are rational in some way. So what’s the rationale behind the hesitation and timidity? What’s the framework, the narrative, the paradigm that keeps the status quo in place?
Perhaps the resolution to this tension lies in the first step of any meaningful debate: define your terms. This seems to be at the heart of the problem. The urbanism world is full of conversations about issues, but more and more it seems like the conversation we’re really having is one about definitions. The increasing use of phrases like “places for people,” “human-centered design,” “placemaking” and “people over cars” seems evidence to me that we’re starting to intuit a deeper problem: Something is broken, not just about how we’ve designed our places but how we’ve defined them, too.
This is the actual biggest challenge that we’re facing. Anyone who cares about cities, neighborhoods, towns and suburbs must begin with this preliminary question: What is a city? If we can answer this question well, if we can cast a compelling vision for what a city is, perhaps it will become easier to make the case for better design and policy.
Answering this question well means providing an alternate vision to what we received after World War II, with the federal backing of car culture, suburbia and mass consumerism. It was during this time that we launched the Suburban Experiment, and it was also when policies fundamentally redefined the purpose of the city. No longer were cities considered containers for human life. Instead, they became transactional spaces that sustain our individual pursuits of happiness and our national economy.
Think about it. Think about the single-family home, the segregated, hyper-private neighborhoods, the car dependency, the single-use zoning. Think about the debt-based model of growth that counts as success. Or about how some cities uphold big-bet economic development schemes even when they rely on the risky spending of precious public resources. Or consider the levels of internal devotion to the preservation of standards, codes and processes at the expense of adaptability and innovation. Ponder why we get excited when new chain stores come to town or when the ease of finding parking is the litmus test for a thriving downtown.
This makes sense in a vision of the city where success means participating in the national project of “growth,” which relies on creating as much certainty and homogeneity as possible. In this vision of the world, the most important goal is not for cities to develop robust local economies, codes and patterns of design that fit their unique local realities. The goal is not to cultivate a collection of self-sufficient local towns but rather to simplify the country into one big, predictable chessboard for the investment of capital.
This contests against another vision of the city, one that sees it as a living ecosystem in which people collaborate to provide solutions for their needs: social, political, economic and even spiritual. I think this is the vision gaining traction, but its success relies heavily on winning the definition game.
If we’re going to create places for people, we have to change policy and design standards, yes. But we also have to cultivate conversations where we wrestle with more complex questions about who and what the city is for. Now is a good time for that. Perhaps the growing interest in intentional communities, walkable neighborhoods and even locally grown food is a sign that the transaction-oriented vision of the city is beginning to crack. Perhaps we’re ready for a new vision to take its place.
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Tiffany Owens Reed is the host of The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast. A graduate of The King's College and former journalist, she is a New Yorker at heart, currently living in Texas. In addition to writing for Strong Towns and freelancing as a project manager, she reads, writes, and curates content for Cities Decoded, an educational platform designed to help ordinary people understand cities. Explore free resources here and follow her on Instagram @citiesdecoded.