Thank you for checking this out. My hope is that in each post I will introduce you to some facet of our modern urban lives that isn’t obvious or well-known. I think you will find these interesting because I find them fascinating and also because these ideas help to explain what is actually happening in our world.
Most of what I’ve planned here is the result of asking simple questions about everyday things, and asking more questions until the final answer is some immutable act of physics or psychology.
Today’s topic sets the stage for posts that follow, stemming from this one very consequential small observation that has disrupted and shaped pretty much all of my life for much of the last decade:
Suburban problems need suburban solutions.
Exciting, right? It’s important, anyway, and if you read on for just a bit longer, you’ll see why.
But first, a bit about me:
I love cities. I really do. I love all of them - the old crunchy barnacle-covered European relics, and the soft-serve paint-by-number swaths of stucco’d suburbia that most of us now call home - the megalopolises (megalopoli?) and the tiny hamlet. Nothing shows mankind’s genius and will better than the cities we build, and no part of our world better reflects the values and state of technology in place when it was built.
I’m also stubbornly curious, (and curiously stubborn). It’s always been really important for me to understand how things work - how they really really work. If I ask “what makes a car speed up,” “pushing on the gas pedal” is not an acceptable answer. I needed to understand how the pedal is connected to the carburetor (I learned on an old ‘65 Mustang). I also needed to see how that opened up the air intake and increased the flow of fuel that was mixed in. But that’s not the part that mattered. It’s obvious that more fuel and air equals bigger fire. It’s not so obvious why it should equal higher rpms. At the end of the day it does. Understanding exactly why and how reveals the real profound beauty of a combustion engine and opens up all kinds of brand new questions. More importantly, it allows me to build a foundation of knowing things that goes down to bedrock understanding.
Finally - I’ve become fascinated by the idea of proportion. Before everybody had a calculator, before we got in the habit of assigning numbers to everything, we compared things to other things. Apples to Oranges even. They taught proportion in schools - it was the body of ideas that connected art and science, bringing beauty into physics and formal elegance into the arts.
Davinci’s Vitruvian Man is a function of this:
He doesn’t need numbers: it’s an expression of ideas. In the Modern era, Le Corbusier follows with his Vitruvian Man:
You can see he’s already blown up the bridge - proportions converted to numerals, then those are applied abstractly to form. It’s not inaccurate, but it doesn’t aid basic understanding, either. And many of the urban concepts we so regularly get wrong boil down to a poor understanding of basic proportions.
We often use proportions to talk about priorities and scale - Pareto’s Law, or the 80/20 rule - the idea that small improvements on 80% of the whole is more useful than larger improvements on the other 20%. From a math standpoint, improving the large part by 10% has exactly the same result as improving the smaller one by 40%. In the real world, increasing something by 10% is so much easier than expecting 40% gains.
Transit is a great example. I love buses and trains, but they’re tools for making people’s lives better, and they don’t work equally in every environment. In the United States, ridership has been declining for years, but occasionally you’ll hear about an exception - advocates and agencies are working really hard to get more users, and when a system grows it’s big news. In a typical city like Phoenix where transit serves about 2% of trips, a huge theoretical 10% increase means it now serves 2.2% of all trips. Driving drops to ~97.6%, with Ubers, taxis, and bikes filling in that last 0.2%. It’s very impressive on its own, but if the overall goal is to get people away from driving, this is a tough way to move the needle.
I’m just not that patient. So let’s get back to the main topic, a simple question, and one single proportion.
Let’s get our language straight. This is Urban:
Also this is also Urban:
This is confusing.
The United States is about 86% Urban - but only if you include this obviously ex-urban housing plat and everything like it.
The United States is actually Suburban.
77% of All Americans live in places that are low-density suburban/ex-urban, or small town (suburban for short). That proportion is increasing, in spite of the tower cranes in Manhattan or Houston. According to the ULI, 91% of all new housing built since 2000 is suburban. Only 9% of us (~29 Million) live in tall building places (we’ll call that urban).
Even worse - the vast majority of urban innovation/smart city efforts in the US are focused in those urban areas. Micromobility, car-sharing, app services - all of them are built with San Francisco and New York City in mind. Some argue that these technologies trickle down to the suburban areas. They don’t - at least I haven’t found any examples of urban innovation taking hold in suburbia. It appears to be just the opposite: suburbia has much more influence today on urban areas than the other way around. So back to the refrain:
Suburban problems need suburban solutions.
We’ve got this double whammy - far fewer resources are invested in suburban areas, using ineffective solutions built for urban areas.
There are more than 8 times as many suburbanites as there are urbanites.
People in the suburbs have lower incomes and are much less connected with opportunities, which results in lower efficiency and productivity.
There is so much room to improve, and so much need.
Imagine walking into a parking lot of cars - 8 high-mileage SUVs, minivans, pickups and gas guzzlers. And in the middle is one Toyota Prius. We’ve got $1000 spend on efficiency upgrades across all of them.
Now imagine that most of that $1000 is spent on the Prius.
It’s not easy. We don’t even have a common language to talk about these places. But we can do better.
My mission with this letter is to show how.
Thank you, and please share, subscribe, and let me know what you think.