Douglas Kelbaugh, Dean, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan printable version Q: There are those that will say, and do say, that we recreate new urban villages that become entertainment centers for one purpose of central economy and we neglect the neighborhoods. You could certainly see that today in Detroit. A: Many American downtowns are like World's Fairs. There's lots of entertainment, lots of excitement. Businesses are willing to invest. City and state governments are willing to invest in these sort of festival marketplaces which are definitely positive destinations. They're far better than an empty downtown, but getting that development to spread into the inner city neighborhoods is tougher and again I think tax based sharing is a big part of doing that. We need vibrant, vital downtowns, but we also need inner city neighborhoods that are viable places, amendable places, desirable places to live. Q: Do you see those kind of resurges of those downtowns as being effective in the long run or do those neighborhoods just become urban fields and get plowed under and get a new use? A: Yes and no, I mean there's some beautiful neighborhoods that flower near downtowns in American cities, but if you've been to Washington or Baltimore or Philadelphia are often across the street are devastated neighborhoods. So there's no simple answer to that, but in general the investment downtown is positive and I think should be encouraged and can be effective, but it's not enough. Q: One last question on cities and the sharettes that you did. What can be done in a city like Detroit? How does one use that to attack some of the problems that we've been talking about? A: Well the sharettes we've done in Detroit have dealt with very intractable problems in very difficult neighborhoods in some cases the most disinvested neighborhoods. So it's hard to think that a lot will immediately come out of these sharettes, but the sharette is a way to get a community vision generated that a lot of people share in buying into. All you can hope is that it will jump start investment. There have been sharettes in Detroit and other cities that have jumpstarted it, but basically their design exercise is to show what's possible and what's desirable and excite, titillate and otherwise sort of inspire people including developers. Now some of the sharettes we did in Seattle did, in fact, result in actual projects and we're hopeful the same will happen here. This year we're going to do the Grand River Avenue corridor which we think is ripe for some development. It really depends on how difficult a sight, how challenging a sight you want to deal with. We happened to have picked some very very tough ones, but we have, I think, generated multiple visions from which the community can then pick and choose what they like and dislike and there's been some hint of private development that's starting to pursue some of these visions. Q: Talk a little bit about what happens between a small town needing and seeing that revenue screen potential and what they get themselves into with the developers, the pressures that come from the developers, the pressures that the small towns have to face. A: In many ways when a big box - when a big box retailer comes to a small town and offers a major development it really brings to a head the sort of underlying tensions and contradictions that any society, particularly American society. As citizens we wear two hats. We're consumers, typically fiscally conservative consumers. We want to get the best deal we can. We want to stretch our income. We want to stretch every dollar we have. So, obviously big box appeal to that - there's a lot of choice, no questions asked, decent merchandise, good prices, you can return it if you don't like it. You don't have to get involved with your hairdresser's son who works there. There's no personal interaction. It's sort of fail safe. You know, there's just no personal interaction. So, it's very tempting as a consumer to invite big box into your town, but you're also a citizen. You wear a second hat and as a citizen you're told that, in fact, this big box may rip the heart out of your downtown. So, here you are torn between some new jobs that the big box offers although not very well paying jobs, but this incredible cornucopia of products at cheap prices knowing that it will probably kill, or at least maim, a lot of the locally owned businesses, particularly the ones downtown. It's a real dilemma. Usually Wal-Mart wins. They figure out a political way to make it work. It takes a very coherent community to stop a Wal-Mart. It took Vermont, New England Vermont. When Wal-Mart moved into Vermont two communities said no. One worked out a compromise where they built a Wal-Mart downtown and I believe, I don't know the outcome of the other, but I think Wal-Mart might have ultimately been scared away. It takes that sort of community that realizes that the private gain was going to be exceeded by the public loss. These retailers are very savvy and clever about separating the community and sort of dividing it and conquering by offering, essentially, cheap merchandise and new jobs - tough problem. I think ultimately the Wal-Marts are not in the best interest of the community, but they're very persuasive. They give money to local charities. They tend to, I think, compensate in very token ways for the social disruption and dislocation in the economic harm that they do. They build their buildings to last four or five years. Mechanical systems aren't designed to last much longer than that. They don't really think of their buildings as architecture. They think of their buildings as sort of operating expenses like furniture and notepads and pencils. They don't think they're investing. They build a building of say, 80,000 square feet that's meant to last four or five years. They develop a local clientele and then they move out a little further and build a much bigger store also not designed to last very long or built to last very long and they have an even bigger captive audience with an even bigger parking lot around it. What they've done is essentially shifted - they've shifted the distribution of merchandise to the consumer. It used to be that wholesalers would distribute to retailers who would sell to consumers. By leaving out the retailer, in a way, by being a sort of retail wholesaler they have shifted the whole burden of distributing goods to the consumer who doesn't think about it because remember, he's only paying, or she's only paying, $1.50 a gallon for gasoline. It may well be a 15 mile trip to and from the Wal-Mart in many communities. If you take in the true cost of transportation, not just the cost of gasoline, but of owning the car and maintaining the car, policing the street, building the streets, all that, some people think it's more like $1.00 a mile. Well, if you add fifteen or thirteen -- Q: Architectural sprawl. A: There are architectural costs as well as environmental, social and economic costs associated with sprawl. Generally buildings built in a suburban landscape are low one-story buildings. So they don't have the sort of presence that higher buildings have. They're usually surrounded by a lot of parking. You have to realize that the parking ratios required in most suburban communities require you to build one or two square feet of parking for every square foot of building. It's impossible to build a walkable, compact, beautiful city where twice as much space is devoted to the automobile as it is to building. It's going to be, by definition, spread out, empty and not pedestrian scale. Malls rarely have parking structures. That's what they need just like downtowns need them. By the way, the public municipalities should think of building parking garages the same way they think of building streets. It is public infrastructure. If you're going to build streets that are going to provide capacity for automobiles you need to provide parking capacity as well and that means it's got to be in structures. If it's in surface lots you won't have a city. If you -- all the parking lots in Ann Arbor, for instance, it would look like California or any other suburban community. They're as essential as streets and bridges. They are part of the public infrastructure. So anyway, these buildings out there surrounded by seas of asphalt, by the way, oversize, designed for the biggest shopping day of the year, say the day after Thanksgiving, typically empty most of the time, make for a very forlorn, empty sense of place. All that asphalt, those fumes, they're hot in the summer, they're cold in the winter, piled up with snow, they're not very pleasant places. The architecture is not built to last usually. It's built for a short life expectancy I'm told. I'm not privy to numbers but I'm told that Wal-Mart likes a one or two year payback. It's just unheard of. You can't build good architecture if you expect it to be paid back in a couple of years. Architecture that we travel to Europe to see or downtown New York or Chicago or Detroit to see wasn't built to be paid back in a couple of years. It was built to be paid back in a generation or two. So, you don't get the sort of detail, the quality materials. They'll fluff up the entrances to malls and arterial strip commercial developments, but basically they're built cheaply. They're cinder block. So, there isn't the detail to award closer inspection and as I said, they're often designed to be seen through a windshield anyway at 45 miles an hour or from a quarter mile distance. It's a cartoon architecture in many cases. It's not mix use. It doesn't last as long. It's not well designed. So, we're getting sort of cheap architecture as well and the big boxes are worst of all. Q: Let's talk about government and governance a little bit. A: Yeah, well, as you know, the way the American governance system works is we have municipalities. Then we have counties and states and we have the Federal government. That's the sort of traditional mode that's worked very well. It's served this country exceedingly well for the last 200 years. In the global economy, though, it's the city/state, the metropolitan region that is the economic unit and governance, as you know, doesn't fit very well with that new economic model. Cities are too small. They're not the full metropolitan region. States are too big. So I think over time we're going to see governance tend towards regional governance because that generally governance follows economic imperatives and economic directions. So I think a municipal government and a state government may slowly give up power to some sort of regional government. It isn't going to happen overnight. This is politically a very hot potato, but the tendency, I think, will be for more regional government. There will also be a tendency for less national government. There are more and more common markets. Europe is giving up a lot of its national sovereignty to a common market. That will probably happen more and more in North American between Mexico, Canada and the US. So there will be a tendency to have these multinational trade groups, common markets, whatever. So, at that federal or state level, I'm sorry, level of national government will tend to form other collectives. What this means is that there is nothing left at the very local level. So, I think the neighborhood which has been around for 3000 or 4000 years may become a strong political unit in the government system. So rather than having municipality, state, federal, over time we may slowly see power shift down to the neighborhood up to the regional government from the city and down to the regional government from the state and nation states will tend to collaborate more and more. So, we may end up with quite a shuffled deck over time. The nice thing about that is the neighborhood is a real unit. It's not a political contrivance. The neighborhood's been around for 3000 or 4000 years. It's basically the distance you can walk in five minutes. It's typically a quarter mile in radius. The neighborhood is a real time tested, proven, palpable, viable thing. It's not an invention. It grew up very naturally. The neighborhood, I think, could become the focus of a lot of government action. Right now, as you know in our society, we tend to have lots of horizontal initiatives and agencies. We have a housing agency that takes care of housing across the city or a state or a nation, a health agency or organization. We have these very problem specific agencies from housing to health to defense. You name it. If we went to a more place specific, as opposed to problem specific way of solving problems and concentrated on an area, like a neighborhood and take care of the social, the economic, the environmental, the educational, the health problems in a collective way where we start to collocate things where the neighborhood school is also a community center, a social center and so on, where we concentrate on place as we address social problems which are inevitable and will always be with us as opposed to a bunch of specialized agencies that work across a much more effective - that may also be a direction we're heading. These are not sort of conscious policies. I think they're maybe inevitable as government reconfigures itself. The neighborhood will probably become more important and it will be more place specific as opposed to problem specific. This is not something that's going to happen quickly or overnight, but this might be the direction of governance in this and other industrialized countries. Q: At the same time that seems to run counter in one way to something I know you've looked as being an issue in the state of Michigan and that is the township system. Talk a little bit more about that. A: Well, I mean home rule which is so strong in Michigan is, I think, in some ways, part of the problem rather than the solution although it does decentralize decision making and make, in many cases, full responsive government. It doesn't make for regional coherence. It makes for less competitiveness. I think these are the other states and other nations in this new global economy. So, I think home rule is going to be challenged. In fact I think property rights which are stronger in America than in any place in the world are going to prove as politically cathartic to this country in the next decade or two, as civil rights and gender rights proved in the last decades of the 20th century. We haven't crossed that bridge yet. Property rights represent the individual who inevitably is in collision with the community. Community rights, or is it property rights, have not really been brought to a head in America yet. I think it will shake us to our constitutional boots or ethical roots, if you will. It will go to the Supreme Court. It will become like civil rights. We just haven't gotten to the bottom of this problem. We have bedrock values in individual rights and freedoms and liberties including property rights and yet we're a country that aspires to be a democracy and to be, you know, more than the sum of its parts, E Pluribus Unum. We haven't really, I mean we've had lots of skirmishes, but I don't think we've really had the big sort of national catharsis that this promises to be. As we become more populated and more urbanized and even more suburbanized more and more people are having to live close to and relate to other people. Inevitably it's going to come to a head. It's not a problem in Europe. Community rights are simply stronger there than they are here and property rights and private rights are less. So the whole tendency the last century to privilege the individual over the community I think may have gone to a point now where the pendulum may swing back and there's going to be a lot of discord and friction and litigation and it's a bedrock value which was there at the origins and conception of this country and it's going to be a major issue, a major trauma for this country. Q: What kind of a case, what kind of a scenario, would you see creating, forcing the nation to the Supreme Court? A: I mean often the individual, the NIMBY, not in my backyard person who doesn't want the lulus, the locally unacceptable land uses, no neighborhood wants the jail or the homeless shelter or the halfway house for battered wives or whatever, that the community knows it needs to provide these services, but no individual community or no individual wants that next door. So that sort of collision of values has always been there, but it hasn't come to the head that I think it will in the future. You know, most people still feel their land is entirely theirs. They can do with it anything they'd like and we know that if taken to the extreme that adds up to a society that's less than some of its parts. It just becomes a society at war with itself. So somehow we're going to cross that bridge and it's probably going to be ugly at times. Q: I thought it was fascinating when you were talking about policy rights being an issue, but I wasn't clear on how that conflict would occur. A: I mean new urbanism and communitarianism and other movements like smart growth, liberal communities tend to emphasize the right of the community as opposed to the right of the individual, that houses have to conform a little more. They have to relate to the street. They have to yield some of their autonomy to bigger communal interests. We've had that luxury of space that you mentioned that Horace Greely talked about. We've always had that safety valve of just spreading out a little further. Well, as our ecologists convinced us that we can't keep spreading out and as we begin to believe that we have to face up to some of the arithmetic of a tighter, more compact society which invariably has more opportunities for disagreement and discord. So, without that safety value, I think this is an issue that's going to percolate up and perhaps boil up in the next decade or two. Q: Condominium associations, cooperatives and co-housing greatly limit some of the personal freedoms. There's an ownership of property but a restriction on property also. A: There is. As a matter of fact that's a good example of sort of covenants that you get in many subdivisions and in cooperatives and condominiums is an example of the individual giving up some of his or autonomy to a larger group, but many of these gated communities want to opt out of the community. They don't want to pay taxes for roads and schools or whatever. They want to provide their own. They want to become their own isolated independent unit. That's the sort of collision, I think. Ultimately we can't be a country of a bunch of privatized, gated communities, I don't believe. I don't think that's a viable or sustainable community. So the ability of the individual or these individual groups to carve out their own little realms and their little kingdoms and try to drop out of the responsibilities towards a larger community are probably freedom and mobility are absolutely bedrock American values cherished as much as anything. But freedom comes with a responsibility and of course that's the easy half of the equation you forget. That's the hard part being a responsible citizen as opposed to just a free and liberated one. So, I think the emphasis will have to swing back a little bit more to the responsibilities which have always been there in all democratic theory and democratic practice. It's always been the conjoining of liberty with responsibility. Q: What are the consequences for the future if we don't tackle sprawl? A: Well, if things keep going on the trajectory they are now many inner cities, despite recovered downtowns, many inner cities will become even more disinvested and empty and devastated. Sprawl will continue to gobble up the countryside. There will be more and more privatized communities, gated communities, where people spend their lives going from private schools to private clubs to private subdivisions which will be comfortable for those people, but will come at some cost of social insulation from the rest of the community and the rest of the human condition which ultimately I think builds up to all sorts of social upheaval and cataclysm. So there's that danger. Environmentally the likelihood of continued sort of low grade degradation--that will catch up with us. It's more expensive to build sprawl. The infrastructure costs more. I think it will tend to deplete the national economy. We'll have less money to spend on playing a role in the world political scene or economic scene. We'll be spending more and more money on private development and less and less on the public realm and public culture, public amenities, public life. So, we'll probably end up even more polarized between private wealth and public poverty and between the haves and the have-nots. The middle class is already shrinking and environmentally we may just cross that proverbial bridge beyond the point of return where we have a bunch of collapsing environmental systems that come down all at the same time too quickly for us to deal with them one at a time, everything from global warming to water pollution to air pollution. We're sort of able to deal with those one at a time now, but I'm not sure we're going to have the time and the money to deal with all these problems if they come together at the same time. I think that's the big fear is that the environmental, social, economic problems will all come to a head at the same time. There simply won't be enough time, money and resources to deal with them. Q: What do you think we have to do to convince Americans that we have to live differently? A: Well, I don't think we can do it just through moral imperatives. I think we have to get to the pocketbook. Americans are pragmatic people, economically driven, "homoeconomous" is one word I've heard to describe sort of the American psyche. If people paid the real cost for land and gasoline, energy, I think we'd start to behave more reasonably. So, I think that we're in a market system. We're increasingly in a market system. We're totally in the thrall of a market economy and yet we know that the market sends us all false cues in many cases as individual consumers. We're encouraged because we're always trying to stretch the dollar to buy this or do that or provide that and they're not always in our best long-term interest as individuals or society, but those are the clues and the cues that we're given in the marketplace. So, I think ultimately the marketplace which has produced incredible wealth more than any system in the history of the world, needs to be revised and reformed a bit so that it sends out the right signals to the consumers who are going to behave in their own self interest and should and always will, but in so doing will also be behaving in the social interests, the community interest. This is already being developed by various thinkers in America, futurists, who are coming up with ways to make the market respond to its environmental costs, the hidden external costs that the market tends to ignore now. So unless we sort of reform the market, not give it up, but reform it so that it makes us behave more reasonably and get a handle on sprawl I think we probably will spin out of control and we'll be bypassed by other societies that have done a better job at this just like all the other great societies in history have been ultimately bypassed.