Preface to the 10th anniversary edition of Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream. Book by Andres Duany, Lizz Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck. Preface by Andres Duany.
When Suburban Nation was being written a dozen years ago, each of the authors fell into a role. Jeff was the purveyor of the light touch. His easygoing tone has contributed as much as anything to the book's appeal. It is probably responsible for the number of people who have told me that, to their own surprise, they read it to the end. Lizz, for her part, was the guardian of clarity. She has no patience for obscurantism in language or message. The simple and straightforward writing is an extension of her educational philosophy at the University of Miami, where what should be taught is "plain old good architecture." Her success is evidenced by the book's unexpected assignment as student reading-even in high school.My own contribution to the editing process was a result of simple time management. With new towns to design that could outlast the centuries, why spend an inordinate number of hours on a text that might have a shelf life of only a few years? I was aware of the tension between a book focused on a present problem and one of lasting relevance, and I pressed strongly for the latter. In this regard, Jane Jacobs' forty-year-old Death and Life of Great American Cities was my model. A difficult one to live up to, granted, but the pursuit of unattainable ideals is stimulating. And so I undertook the editing with an eye to issues that were of the more transcendental sort. In this, the magisterial subject of urbanism certainly provided a good start. The fashionable was eradicated under my pen-and so I bear any blame that the book is not nearly as hip as the younger Jeff would have had it.
Then, shortly after it was published, I realized that, while I had checked the book for technical obsolescence, I had not done so for political survivability. More out of curiosity than anything, I asked for assessments from two friends attuned to right-wing and left-wing bias. Both marked-up copies returned with a similar number of disputed passages, and I remember being surprised at how avoidable they were. Although we could have smoothed the feathers for this second edition, the original text remains intact, as it has done no great harm.
It seems that, for different reasons, Suburban Nation is read by radical protectors of the environment no less than by conservatives concerned with the restoration of the human community. Perhaps this is because it avoids ideology altogether and puts theory last-simply proposing an alternative habitat for the American middle class, which deserves much better than it is getting. Most Americans are self-interested and pragmatic enough to realize that New Urbanist communities make more sense than the sprawl model, and that they suffer very few downsides. Only extreme libertarians, who so relentlessly espouse choice, fail to understand that such communities are not allowed under the current planning regime, and that the book is actually proposing that they should be included among the available options.
But politics deliver only temporary buffetings, while obsolescence is terminal. There are important questions that should be asked now about the book, such as what has proven to be wrong, and what was left out? Although I am fairly certain that I will not be able to repeat this claim in a 20th anniversary edition, so far nothing much has been contradicted or become irrelevant. In fact, the book seems today less urgent only because its message has permeated the public discourse. It has been absorbed in initiatives of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Institute of Transportation Engineers, the U.S. Green Building Council, and others, as Lizz relates. In fact, many of the book's prescriptions have by now been institutionalized as regulations. I confess that for me this is not always gratifying, as I find revolution more interesting than administration.
Regarding what was left out of the book ten years ago: several issues that were then on the sidelines have grown in importance to become protagonists today. Chief among them is local food production, now evolving into Agricultural Urbanism ("Ag is the new golf!"). Then there is the awful health performance of the suburban lifestyle, which would warrant an entire chapter now that the research is available. And there was insufficient emphasis on the problems of water quality, although dedicating too many pages to any issue that is not experienced universally would not have been in the spirit of the book.
Perhaps what most dates Suburban Nation regards the problem we marginally addressed as atmospheric pollution, now understood to be the catastrophe of Climate Change. A better understanding of this issue would have warranted a greater urgency to our call for the reform of suburban sprawl, and positioned the book closer to the center of the current debate. We can now state in no uncertain terms that blame for the planet's environmental problems lies with the lifestyle of the American middle class: the way we live large and occupy land, the way we must drive to accomplish so many perfectly ordinary tasks, the way we grow our food, and the way a car-dependent social isolation leads us to compensate with an astonishing level of unnecessary consumption. In other words, the root cause of the fearsome crisis is this amiable suburban life of ours, and we have to do something about it RIGHT NOW.
And today, as clueless design consultants foist sprawl on Europe, Arabia, Latin America and Asia, this book becomes even more essential. There is apparently a Chinese edition of Suburban Nation. We should wish it many printings.
~Andres Duany
Read Chapter One of Suburban Nation: What Is Sprawl?
Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, book by Andres Duany, Lizz Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck. Preface to the 10th anniversary edition by Andres Duany. Reprinted with permission
