Technoburb

“Beyond Suburbia: The Rise of the Technoburb” from Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (1987)

Robert Fishman

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION Robert Fishman is a professor of history at the University of Michigan who established his academic reputation with his first book, the magisterial Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century (1977), a study of the work of Ebenezer Howard, Le Corbusier, and Frank Lloyd Wright (see Part Five of this volume). For his second book, Fishman decided to address a seemingly prosaic, non-visionary subject – the history of suburbia – only to discover that “the suburban ideal” was, in the final analysis, yet another form of utopia, the utopia of the urban middle class.

As the real focus of Bourgeois Utopias is the suburban ideal, more than suburbia itself, the logic of Fishman’s analysis leads him to many surprising insights and conclusions. In the medieval period and up through the eighteenth century, suburbs were clusters of houses inhabited by poor and/or disreputable people on the outskirts of towns, just outside the walls. When suburbs were first established for the upper and middle classes – a phenomenon that has thrived more in North America than in Europe where working-class suburbs and banlieus often predominate – the ideal was to create a perfect synthesis of urban sophistication and rural virtue. Here was a conception as utopian as that of any visionary social reformer but with an important difference: “Where other modern utopias have been collectivist,” writes Fishman, “suburbia has built its vision of community on the primacy of private property and the individual family.”

What suburbia has evolved into today is “technoburbia,” a dominant new urban reality that can no longer be considered suburbia in the traditional sense. In Redmond, Washington, and in Cupertino, California, the Microsoft and Apple corporate headquarters mix with residential neighborhoods, retail centers, and even bands of open space to make up a new urban form where city and suburb – urbanized and un-urbanized areas, high-tech and conventional development – flow seamlessly together.

To describe this new reality Fishman has coined two new terms “technoburb” and “techno-city.” Fishman defines technoburbs as peripheral zones, perhaps as large as a county, that have emerged as viable socioeconomic units. The new technoburbs are spread out along highway growth corridors. Along the highways of metropolitan regions shopping malls, industrial parks, campus-like office complexes, hospitals, schools, and a whole range of housing types succeed each other.

By “techno-city” Fishman means the whole metropolitan region that has been transformed by the coming of the technoburb. In Fishman’s view we may still refer to the New York Metropolitan region as “New York City,” but increasingly by “New York City” we mean the entire New York City region. And much of the economic and cultural life of the region no longer resides just in the core city. The old central cities have become increasingly marginal, while the technoburb has emerged as the focus of American life. In Fishman’s view, the new technoburbs surrounding the old urban cores do not represent “the suburbanization of the United States,” as Kenneth T. Jackson (p. 73) would have it, but “the end of suburbia in its traditional sense and the creation of a new kind of decentralized city.” That suburbia has become the city itself is, perhaps, the final irony of modern urbanism.

Fishman lays out a strong indictment of what is wrong with technoburbs. They consist of an unplanned jumble of discordant elements – housing, industry, commerce, even agriculture – with little coherent pattern or structure. They waste land. Technoburbs are dependent on highway systems, yet their highway systems are in a state of chronic chaos. They have no proper boundaries, but consist of a crazy quilt of separate and overlapping political jurisdictions that make meaningful region-wide planning virtually impossible and, as Myron Orfield observes (p. 338), access to revenue to pay for local government services becomes highly inequitable. And at a time when issues of environmental sustainability predominate in discussions of urban planning that emphasize the superiority of dense, compact center cities, the “greening” of technoburbia may need to become one of the central concerns of planning practice.

For all that, Fishman notes that all new urban forms appeared chaotic in their early stages. Even the most “organic” cityscapes of the past evolved slowly after much chaos and trial and error. For example, it took planners of genius like Frederick Law Olmsted (p. 364) and Ebenezer Howard (p. 371) to create orderly parks and garden suburbs (like Olmsted’s Riverside, a romantic suburb on the outskirts of Chicago) out of the chaos of the nineteenth-century city or to first imagine and then actually build Garden Cities like Letchworth and Welwyn. Fishman acknowledges that there is a functional logic to sprawl. Perhaps, he speculates, if sprawl is better understood and better managed it might prove to be a positive rather than a negative development. Fishman looks to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City vision (p. 388) as an example of how inspired planners may yet devise an aesthetic to tame technoburbia, while Robert Bruegmann’s selection from Sprawl: A Compact History (p. 218) suggests that building ever-outward is merely a logical, indeed “natural” response to increased population pressures and the desire of the middle class to avoid the disagreeable aspects of inner-city life. The techno-city, Fishman concludes, is still under construction both physically and culturally. How it will evolve is unclear, although Richard Florida (p.

163) offers persuasive insights into who will live in the new techno-communities and how they will work and socially interact. The jury is still out on whether technoburbia will ultimately be judged as an advance over earlier urban forms. Another question is how technoburbia relates to the cities of the emerging global society discussed in Part Eight of this book. This selection is from Fishman’s Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic Books, 1987). His other major books on cities are Urban

Utopias in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1977) and The American Planning Tradition: Culture and Policy (Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2000).

For other views of emerging postmodern suburbia, see journalist Joel Garreau’s Edge City (New York: Anchor, 1992), Edward Soja’s “Taking Los Angeles Apart” from Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), Michael Dear’s “The Los Angeles School of Urbanism: An Intellectual History” (p. 187), and Peter Calthorpe and William Fulton’s The Regional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2001). For an excellent collection of articles on the history of suburbia, see Becky Nicolaides and Andrew Wiese (eds.), The Suburb Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). Also of interest are two recent books that call for a reconfiguration of the city–suburb relationship: Myron Orfield, American Metropolitics: The New Suburban Reality (Washington: Brookings Institution, 2002) and David Rusk, Cities Without Suburbs: A Census 2000 Update (Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2003).

If the nineteenth century could be called the Age of Great Cities, post-1945 America would appear to be the Age of Great Suburbs. As central cities stagnated or declined in both population and industry, growth was channeled almost exclusively to the peripheries. Between 1950 and 1970 American central cities grew by 10 million people, their suburbs by 85 million. Suburbs, moreover, accounted for at least three-quarters of all new manufacturing and retail jobs generated during that period. By 1970 the percentage of Americans living in suburbs was almost exactly double what it had been in 1940, and more Americans lived in suburban areas (37.6 percent) than in central cities (31.4 percent) or in rural areas (31 percent). In the 1970s central cities experienced a net out-migration of 13 million people, combined with an unprecedented deindustrialization, increasing poverty levels, and housing decay.

[…]

From its origins in eighteenth-century London, suburbia has served as a specialized portion of the expanding metropolis. Whether it was inside or outside the political borders of the central city, it was always functionally dependent on the urban core. Conversely, the growth of suburbia always meant a strengthening of the specialized services at the core.

In my view, the most important feature of postwar American development has been the almost simultaneous decentralization of housing, industry, specialized services, and office jobs; the consequent breakaway of the urban periphery from a central city it no longer needs; and the creation of a decentralized environment that nevertheless possesses all the economic and technological dynamism we associate with the city. This phenomenon, as remarkable as it is unique, is not suburbanization but a new city.

Unfortunately, we lack a convenient name for this new city, which has taken shape on the outskirts of all our major urban centers. Some have used the terms “exurbia” or “outer city.” I suggest (with apologies) two neologisms: the “technoburb” and the “techno-city.” By “technoburb” I mean a peripheral zone, perhaps as large as a county, that has emerged as a viable socioeconomic unit. Spread out along its highway growth corridors are shopping malls, industrial parks, campuslike office complexes, hospitals, schools, and a full range of housing types. Its residents look to their immediate surroundings rather than to the city for their jobs and other needs; and its industries find not only the employees they need but also the specialized services. The new city is a technoburb not only because high tech industries have found their most congenial homes in such

archetypal technoburbs as Silicon Valley in northern California and Route 128 in Massachusetts. In most technoburbs such industries make up only a small minority of jobs, but the very existence of the decentralized city is made possible only through the advanced communications technology which has so completely superseded the face-to-face contact of the traditional city. The technoburb has generated urban diversity without traditional urban concentration.

By “techno-city” I mean the whole metropolitan region that has been transformed by the coming of the technoburb. The techno-city usually still bears the name of its principal city, for example, “the New York metropolitan area”; its sports teams bear that city’s name (even if they no longer play within the boundaries of the central city); and its television stations appear to broadcast from the central city. But the economic and social life of the region increasingly bypasses its supposed core. The techno-city is truly multicentered, along the pattern that Los Angeles first created. The technoburbs, which might stretch over seventy miles from the core in all directions, are often in more direct communication with one another – or with other techno-cities across the country – than they are with the core. The techno-city’s real structure is aptly expressed by the circular superhighways or beltways that serve so well to define the perimeters of the new city. The beltways put every part of the urban periphery in contact with every other part without passing through the central city at all.

[…] The old central cities have become increasingly marginal, while the technoburb has emerged as the focus of American

life. The traditional suburbanite – commuting at ever-increasing cost to a center where the available resources barely duplicate those available much closer to home – becomes increasingly rare. In this transformed urban ecology the history of suburbia comes to an end.

PROPHETS OF THE TECHNO-CITY Like all new urban forms, the techno-city and its technoburbs emerged not only unpredicted but unobserved. We are still seeing this new city through the intellectual categories of the old metropolis. Only two prophets, I believe, perceived the underlying forces that would lead to the techno-city at the time of their first emergence. Their thoughts are therefore particularly valuable in understanding the new city.

At the turn of the twentieth century, when the power and attraction of the great city was at its peak, H.G. Wells daringly asserted that the technological forces that had created the industrial metropolis were now moving to destroy it. In his 1900 essay “The Probable Diffusion of Great Cities,” Wells argued that the seemingly inexorable concentration of people and resources in the largest cities would soon be reversed. In the course of the twentieth century, he prophesied, the metropolis would see its own resources drain away to decentralized “urban regions” so vast that the very concept of “the city” would become, in his phrase, “as obsolete as ‘mailcoach.’”

Wells based his prediction on a penetrating analysis of the emerging networks of transportation and communication. Throughout the nineteenth century, rail transportation had been a relatively simple system favoring direct access to large centers. With the spread of branchlines and electric tramways, however, a complex rail network had been created that could serve as the basis for a decentralized region. (As Wells wrote, Henry E. Huntington was proving the truth of his propositions for the Los Angeles region.)

Wells pictured the “urban region” of the year 2000 as a series of villages with small homes and factories set in the open fields, yet connected by high speed rail transportation to any other point in the region. (It was a vision not very different

from those who saw Los Angeles developing into just such a network of villages.) The old cities would not completely disappear, but they would lose both their financial and their industrial functions, surviving simply because of an inherent human love of crowds. The “post-urban” city, Wells predicted, will be “essentially a bazaar, a great gallery of shops and places of concourse and rendezvous, a pedestrian place, its pathways reinforced by lifts and moving platforms, and shielded from the weather, and altogether a very spacious, brilliant, and entertaining agglomeration.” In short, the great metropolis will dwindle to what we would today call a massive shopping mall, while the productive life of the society would take place in the decentralized urban region.

Wells’s prediction was taken up in the late 1920s and early 1930s by Frank Lloyd Wright, who moved from similar assumptions to an even more radical view. Wright had actually seen the beginnings of the automobile and truck era; he was, perhaps not coincidentally, living mostly in Los Angeles in the late 1910s and early 1920s. Wright, like Wells, argued that “the great city was no longer modern” and that it was destined to be replaced by a decentralized society.

He called this new society Broadacre City. It has often been confused with a kind of universal suburbanization, but for Wright “Broadacres” was the exact opposite of the suburbia he despised. He saw correctly that suburbia represented the essential extension of the city into the countryside, whereas Broadacres represented the disappearance of all previously existing cities.

As Wright envisioned it, Broadacres was based on universal automobile ownership combined with a network of superhighways, which removed the need for population to cluster in a particular spot. Indeed, any such clustering was necessarily inefficient, a point of congestion rather than of communication. The city would thus spread out over the countryside at densities low enough to permit each family to have its own homestead and even to engage in part-time agriculture. Yet these homesteads would not be isolated; their access to the superhighway grid would put them within easy reach of as many jobs and specialized services as any nineteenth-century urbanite. Traveling at more than sixty miles an hour, each citizen would create his own city within the hundreds of square miles he could reach in an hour’s drive.

Like Wells, Wright saw industrial production inevitably leaving the cities for the space and convenience of rural sites. But Wright went one step further in his attempt to envision the way that a radically decentralized environment could generate that diversity and excitement which only cities had possessed.

He saw that even in the most scattered environment, the crossing of major highways would possess a certain special status. These intersections would be the natural sites of what he called the roadside market, a remarkable anticipation of the shopping center: “great spacious roadside pleasure places these markets, rising high and handsome like some flexible form of pavilion – designed as places of cooperative exchange, not only of commodities but of cultural facilities.” To the roadside markets he added a range of highly civilized yet small scale institutions: schools, a modern cathedral, a center for festivities, and the like. In such an environment, even the entertainment functions of the city would disappear. Soon, Wright devoutly wished, the centralized city itself would disappear.

Taken together, Wells’s and Wright’s prophecies constitute a remarkable insight into the decentralizing tendencies of modern technology and society. Both were presented in utopian form, an image of the future presented as somehow “inevitable” yet without any sustained attention to how it would actually be achieved. Nevertheless, something like the transformation that Wells and Wright foresaw has taken place in the United States, a transformation all the more remarkable in that it occurred without a clear recognition that it was happening. While diverse groups were engaged in what they believed was “the suburbanization” of America, they were in fact creating a new city.

[…]

TECHNOBURB/TECHNO-CITY: THE STRUCTURE OF THE NEW METROPOLIS To claim that there is a pattern or structure in the new American city is to contradict what appears to be overwhelming evidence. One might sum up the structure of the technoburb by saying that it goes against every rule of planning. It is based on two extravagances that have always aroused the ire of planners: the waste of land inherent in a single family house with its own yard, and the waste of energy inherent in the use of the personal automobile. The new city is absolutely dependent on its road system, yet that system is almost always in a state of chaos and congestion. The landscape of the technoburb is a hopeless jumble of housing, industry, commerce, and even agricultural uses. Finally, the technoburb has no proper boundaries; however defined, it is divided into a crazy quilt of separate and overlapping political jurisdictions, which make any kind of coordinated planning virtually impossible.

Yet the technoburb has become the real locus of growth and innovation in our society. And there is a real structure in what appears to be wasteful sprawl, which provides enough logic and efficiency for the technoburb to fulfill at least some of its promises.

If there is a single basic principle in the structure of the technoburb, it is the renewed linkage of work and residence. The suburb had separated the two into distinct environments; its logic was that of the massive commute, in which workers from the periphery traveled each morning to a single core and then dispersed each evening. The technoburb, however, contains both work and residence within a single decentralized environment.

By the standards of a preindustrial city where people often lived and worked under the same roof, or even of the turn of the century industrial zones where factories were an integral part of working class neighborhoods, the linkage between work and residence in the technoburb is hardly close. A recent study of New Jersey shows that most workers along the state’s growth corridors now live in the same county in which they work. But this relative dispersion must be contrasted to the former pattern of commuting into urban cores like Newark or New York. In most cases traveling time to work diminishes, even when the distances traveled are still substantial; as the 1980 census indicates, the average journey to work appears to be diminishing both in distance and, more importantly, in time.

For commuting within the technoburb is multidirectional, following the great grid of highways and secondary roads that, as Frank Lloyd Wright understood, defines the community. This multiplicity of destinations makes public transportation highly inefficient, but it does remove that terrible bottleneck which necessarily occurred when work was concentrated at a single core within the region. Each house in a technoburb is within a reasonable driving time of a truly “urban” array of jobs and services, just as each workplace along the highways can draw upon an “urban” pool of workers. Those who believed that the energy crisis of the 1970s would cripple the technoburb failed to realize that the new city

had evolved its own pattern of transportation in which a multitude of relatively short automobile journeys in a multitude of different directions substitutes for that great tidal wash in and out of a single urban core which had previously defined commuting. With housing, jobs, and services all on the periphery, this sprawl develops its own form of relative efficiency. The truly inefficient form would be any attempted revival of the former pattern of long distance mass transit commuting into a core area. To account for the new linkage of work and residence in the technoburb, we must first confront this paradox: the new city required a massive and coordinated relocation of housing, industry, and other “core” functions to the periphery; yet there were no coordinators directing the process. Indeed, the technoburb emerged in spite of, not because of, the conscious purposes motivating the main actors. The postwar housing boom was an attempt to escape from urban conditions; the new highways sought to channel traffic into the cities; planners attempted to limit peripheral growth; the government programs that did the most to destroy the hegemony of the old industrial metropolis were precisely those designed to save it. This paradox can be seen clearly in the area of transportation policy. Wright had grasped the basic point in his

Broadacre City plan: a fully developed highway grid eliminates the primacy of a central business district. It creates a whole series of highway crossings, which can serve as business centers while promoting the multidirectional travel that prevents any single center from attaining unique importance. Yet, from the time of Robert Moses to the present, highway planners have imagined that the new roads, like the older rail transportation, would enhance the importance of the old centers by funneling cars and trucks into the downtown area and the surrounding industrial belt. At most, the highways were to serve traditional suburbanization; in other words, the movement from the periphery to the core during morning rush hours and the reverse movement in the afternoon. The beltways, those crucial “Main Streets” of the technoburb, were designed simply to allow interstate traffic to avoid going through the central cities. The history of the technoburb, therefore, is the history of those deeper structural features of modern society first

described by Wells and Wright taking precedence over conscious intentions. For purposes of clarity I shall now divide this discussion of the making of the techno-city into two interrelated topics: housing and job location.

Housing The great American postwar housing boom was perhaps the purest example of the suburban dream in action, yet its ultimate consequence was to render suburbia obsolete. Between 1950 and 1970, on the average, 1.2 million housing units

were built each year, the vast majority as suburban single family dwellings; the nation’s housing stock increased by 21 million units or over 50 percent. In the 1970s the boom continued even more strongly: twenty million more new units were added, almost as many as in the previous two decades. It was precisely this vast production of new residences that shifted the center of gravity in the United States from the urban core to the periphery and thus ensured that these vital and expanding areas could no longer remain simply bedroom communities. This great building boom, which seems so characteristic of post-1945 conditions, in fact had its origins early in the

twentieth century in the first attempts to universalize suburbia throughout the United States. It can be seen essentially as a continuation of the 1920s building boom, which had been cut off for two decades by the Depression and the war. As George Sternlieb reminds us, the American automobile industry in 1929 was producing as many cars per capita as it did in the 1980s, and real estate developers had already plotted out subdivisions in out-lying areas that were only built up in the 1960s and 1970s.

[…] Even the late 1970s combination of stagnant real income with high interest rates, gasoline prices, and land values did

not diminish the desirability of the new single family house. In 1981 a median American family earned only 70 percent of what was needed to make the payments on the median priced house; by 1986, the median family could once again afford the median house. Single family houses still constitute 67 percent of all occupied units, down only 2 percent since 1970 despite the increase in costs; moreover, a survey of potential home buyers in 1986 showed that 85 percent intended to purchase a detached, single family suburban house, while only 15 percent were looking at condominium apartments or townhouses. The “single,” as builders call it, is still alive and well on the urban periphery. This continuing appeal of the single should not, however, obscure the crucial changes that have transformed the

meaning and context of the house. The new suburban house of the 1950s, like its predecessors for more than a century, existed precisely to isolate women and the family from urban economic life; it defined an exclusive zone of residence between city and country. Now a new house might adjoin a landscaped office park with more square feet of new office space than in a downtown building, or might be just down the highway from an enclosed shopping mall with a sales volume that exceeds those of the downtown department stores, or might overlook a high tech research laboratory making products that are exported around the world. No longer a refuge, the single family detached house on the periphery is preferred as a convenient base from which both spouses can rapidly reach their jobs.

Without the simultaneous movement of jobs along with housing, the great “suburban” boom would surely have exhausted itself in ever longer journeys to workplaces in a crowded core on overburdened highways and mass transit facilities. And the new peripheral communities would have been in reality the “isolation wards” for women that critics have called them, instead of becoming the setting for the reintegration of middle-class women into the work force as they have. The unchanging image of the suburban house and the suburban bedroom community has obscured the crucial importance of this transformation in work location, the subject of the next section.

Job location As those who have tried to plan the process have painfully learned, job location has its own autonomous rules. The movement of factories away from the urban core after 1945 took place independently of the housing boom and probably would have occurred without it. Nevertheless, the simultaneous movement of housing and jobs in the 1950s and 1960s created an unforeseen “critical mass” of entrepreneurship and expertise on the perimeters, which allowed the technoburb to challenge successfully the two century long economic dominance of the central city.

[…] At the same time, the growing importance of trucking meant that factories were no longer as dependent on the

confluence of rail lines which existed only in the old factory zones. Workers had their automobiles, so factories could scatter along the periphery without concern about the absence of mass transit. (The scattering of aircraft plants and other factories in Los Angeles in the 1930s prefigured this trend.) The process gained momentum as a result of thousands of uncoordinated decisions in which managers allowed their inner city plants to run down and directed new investment toward the outskirts … These changes in job location during the 1950s and 1960s were, however, only a prelude to the real triumph of the

technoburb: the luring of both managerial office employment and advanced technological laboratories and production facilities from the core to the peripheries. This process may be divided into three parts. First came the establishment of “high tech” growth corridors in such diverse locations as Silicon Valley, California; Silicon Prairie, between Dallas and Fort Worth; the Atlanta Beltway; Route 1 between Princeton and New Brunswick, New Jersey; Westchester County, New York; Route 202 near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania; and Route 128 outside Boston. The second step was the movement of office bureaucracies, especially the so-called back office, from center city high-rises to technoburb office parks; and the final phase was the movement of production-service employment – banks, accountants, lawyers, advertising agencies, skilled technicians, and the like – to locations within the technoburb, thus creating that vital base of support personnel for larger firms.

Indeed, this dramatic surge toward the technoburb has been so sweeping that we must now ask whether Wright’s ultimate prophecy will be fulfilled: the disappearance of the old urban centers. Is the present-day boom in downtown office construction and inner city gentrification simply a last hurrah for the old city before deeper trends in decentralization lead to its ultimate decay?

In my view, the final diffusion that Wells and Wright predicted is unlikely, if only because both underestimated the forces of economic and political centralization that continue to exist in the late twentieth century. If physical decentralization had indeed meant economic decentralization, then the urban cores would by now be ghost towns. But large and powerful organizations still seek out a central location that validates their importance, and the historic core of great cities still meets that need better than the office complexes on the outskirts. Moreover, the corporate and government headquarters in the core still attract a wide variety of specialized support services – law firms, advertising, publishing, media, restaurants, entertainment centers, museums, and more – that continue to make the center cities viable. The old factory zones around the core have also survived, but only in the painfully anomalous sense of housing those

too poor to earn admission to the new city of prosperity at the periphery. The big city, therefore, will not disappear in the foreseeable future, and residents of the technoburbs will continue to confront uneasily both the economic power and elite culture of the urban core and its poverty. Nevertheless, the technoburb has become the true center of American society.

THE MEANING OF THE NEW CITY Beyond the structure of the techno-city and its technoburbs, there is the larger question: what is the impact of this decentralized environment on our culture? Can anyone say of the technoburb, as Olmsted said of the suburb a century ago, that it represents “the most attractive, the most refined, and the most soundly wholesome forms of domestic life, and the best application of the arts of civilization to which mankind has yet attained”? Most planners in fact say the exact opposite. Their indictment can be divided into two parts. First, decentralization has been a social and economic disaster for the old city and for the poor, who have been increasingly relegated to its crowded, decayed zones. It has resegregated American society into an affluent outer city and an indigent inner city, while erecting ever higher barriers that prevent the poor from sharing in the jobs and housing of the technoburbs.

Second, decentralization has been seen as a cultural disaster. While the rich and diverse architectural heritage of the cities decays, the technoburb has been built up as a standardized and simplified sprawl, consuming time and space, destroying the natural landscape. The wealth that postindustrial America has generated has been used to create an ugly and wasteful pseudocity, too spread out to be efficient, too superficial to create a true culture. The truth of both indictments is impossible to deny, yet it must be rescued from the polemical overstatements that seem to afflict anyone who deals with these topics. The first charge is the more fundamental, for it points to a genuine structural discontinuity in post-1945 decentralization. By detaching itself physically, socially, and economically from the city, the technoburb is

profoundly antiurban as suburbia never had been. Suburbanization strengthened the central core as the cultural and economic heart of an expanding region; by excluding industry, suburbia left intact and even augmented the urban factory districts.

Technoburb development, however, completely undermines the factory district and potentially threatens even the commercial core. The competition from new sites on the outskirts renders obsolete the whole complex of housing and factory sites that had been built up in the years 1890 to 1930 and provides alternatives to the core for even the most specialized shopping and administrative services. This competition, moreover, has occurred in the context of a massive migration of southern blacks to northern cities.

Blacks, Hispanics, and other recent migrants could afford housing only in the old factory districts, which were being abandoned by both employers and the white working class. The result was a twentieth century version of Disraeli’s “two nations.” Now, however, the outer reaches of affluence include both the middle class and the better-off working class – a majority of the population; while the largely black and Hispanic minority are forced into decaying neighborhoods, which lack not only decent housing but jobs. This bleak picture has been modified somewhat by the continued ability of the traditional urban cores to retain certain

key areas of white collar and professional employment; and by the choice of some highly paid core workers to live in high-rise or recently renovated housing around the core. Compared both to the decaying factory zones and to peripheral expansion, the “gentrification” phenomenon has been highly visible yet statistically insignificant. It has done as much to displace low income city dwellers as to benefit them. The late twentieth century American environment thus shows all the signs of the two nations syndrome: one caught in an environment of poverty, cut off from the majority culture, speaking its own languages and dialects; the other an increasingly homogenized culture of affluence, more and more remote from an urban environment it finds dangerous.

[…] The case against the technoburb can easily be summarized. Compared even to the traditional suburb, it at first appears

impossible to comprehend. It has no clear boundaries; it includes discordant rural, urban, and suburban elements; and it can best be measured in counties rather than in city blocks. Consequently the new city lacks any recognizable center to give meaning to the whole. Major civic institutions seem scattered at random over an undifferentiated landscape.

Even planned developments – however harmonious they might appear from the inside – can be no more than fragments in a fragmented environment. A single house, a single street, even a cluster of streets and houses can be and frequently are well designed. But true public space is lacking or totally commercialized. Only the remaining pockets of undeveloped farmland maintain real openness, and these pockets are inevitably developed, precipitating further flight and further sprawl. The case for the techno-city can only be made hesitantly and conditionally. Nevertheless, we can hope that its

deficiencies are in large part the early awkwardness of a new urban type. All new city forms appear in their early stages to be chaotic. “There were a hundred thousand shapes and substances of incompleteness, wildly mingled out of their places, upside down, burrowing in the earth, aspiring in the earth, moldering in the water, and unintelligible as any dream.” This was Charles Dickens describing London in 1848, in his novel Dombey and Son (Chapter 6). As I have indicated, sprawl has a functional logic that may not be apparent to those accustomed to more traditional cities. If that logic is understood imaginatively, as Wells and especially Wright attempted to do, then perhaps a matching aesthetic can be devised.

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