Spreading out

I have a country boy's love of downtowns, so I like to see vibrant ones. But the people who want to keep funneling time, effort and, especially, money downtown need a reality check:

The ongoing Census reveals the continuing evolution of America's cities from small urban cores to dispersed, multi-polar regions that includes the city's surrounding areas and suburbs. This is not exactly what most urban pundits, and journalists covering cities, would like to see, but the reality is there for anyone who reads the numbers.

To date the Census shows that  growth in America's large core cities has slowed, and in some cases even reversed. This has happened both in great urban centers such as Chicago and in the long-distressed inner cities of St. Louis, Baltimore, Wilmington, Del., and Birmingham, Ala.

This would surely come as a surprise to many reporters infatuated with growth in downtown districts, notably in Chicago, Los Angeles, Denver and elsewhere. For them, good restaurants, bars and clubs trump everything. A recent Newsweek article, for example, recently acknowledged Chicago's demographic and fiscal decline but then lavishly praised the city, and its inner city for becoming “finally hip.”

[. . .]

But the bigger story — all but ignored by the mainstream media — is the continued evolution of urban regions toward a more dispersed, multi-centered form. Brookings' Robert Lang has gone even further, using the term “edgeless cities” to describe what he calls an increasingly “elusive metropolis” with highly dispersed employment.

Rather than a cause for alarm, this form of  development  simply reflects  the protean vitality of American urban forms.

[. . .]

So what does this tell us about the future of the American urban region?  Certainly the expansion of relatively low-density peripheral areas negates the notion of a  ”triumphant” urban core. Dispersion is continuing virtually everywhere, and with it, a movement of the economic center of gravity away from the city centers in most regions.

But in another way these patterns augur a bright future for an expansive American metropolis that, while not hostile to the urban center, recognizes that most businesses and families continue to prefer lower-density, decentralized settings.  The sooner urbanists and planners can accommodate themselves to this fact, the sooner we can work on making these new dynamic patterns of residence and employment more sustainable and livable for the people and companies who will continue to gravitate there.

"Most businesses and families continue to prefer lower-density, decentralized settings." Cities are developing the way they are because people are living the way they want to. I think a lot of "urbanists and planners" have trouble dealing with the fact that we aren't living the way they think we should. Accommodating themselves to reality is not in their nature.