By Joel Kotkin
For much of its recent history, the city of Fullerton remained,at least to the outside eye,just another part of Southern California’s ever-expanding suburban sprawl.
By the 1970s, the city’s once-vibrant downtown had gone the way of so many others, deserted by shoppers who were drawn to the ubiquitous surrounding malls.
During the past two decades, however, and most particularly since the 1990s, downtown Ful-lerton has enjoyed a remarkable rebirth, with a significant amount of new housing and a flourishing array of shops and restaurants. Older buildings are being retrofitted, including the city’s 1925 Fox Theater.
Fullerton’s resurgence as a social and cultural center for both its 126,000 residents and people from nearby communities is representative of a new dynamic that is sweeping America’s outer periphery: the suburban village.
Defined as a reconstituted,or brand-new,center for a suburb, the suburban village tries to reconcile Americans’ desires for space and security with a fundamental quest for community. It seeks to humanize the suburban experience and create options for residents.
Its promoters don’t hold out hope that suburbanites will sell their cars and become strap-hanging urbanites, but that they will instead accept and even celebrate the ideals of family, property ownership and independence.
This phenomenon allows suburbs to be more than mere appendages of the downtown core; they become something approximating a self-contained town. It is part of what Randall Jackson, president of The Planning Center, a consulting firm based in Costa Mesa, calls “New Suburbanism.”
In contrast to New Urbanism, New Suburbanism tries to work within sprawl rather than fight it. Promoters seek not a return to the dense urban paradigm of Jane Jacobs but instead the creation of an archipelago of villages connected not only by roads (and sometimes trains) but also by new communications technology. While it may sometimes follow the design principles created by New Urbanists, the suburban village looks less to the urban past of the industrial era and more to the postindustrial future of a new village-dominated epoch.
Although fairly recent in its current incarnation, New Suburbanism can trace its origins to the notions of the early 20th century British planner Ebenezer Howard, who advocated the creation of “garden cities” on the suburban periphery.
Few developments based on Howard’s model were built, but many idealistic designers shared a similar desire to create what James Rouse, the late developer of the 1960s planned town of Columbia, Md., described as “a sense of place at each level of community in which a person can feel a sense of belonging.”
Until recently, such efforts have been overshadowed by a more pervasive form of suburban development. Places like Levittown, N.Y., represented the postwar paradigm, housing the burgeoning middle class in what to a large extent served as bedrooms for the still-dominant urban cores.
New Suburbanism offers to correct the excesses of sprawl without trying to re-engineer the fundamentally dispersed nature of the American metropolis.
Indeed, despite the well-developed cant about a “return to the city” that is trumpeted every decade or so, the vast majority of U.S. metropolitan growth,well over 90% since 1950,has been in suburban and exurban areas, most notably in the West and South.
This trend gains particular relevance in light of an expected U.S. population surge in the first half of the 21st century,up from roughly 300 million to 400 million,that will take place overwhelmingly on the suburban periphery.
Two major forces underpin this demographic shift: immigration and retirement patterns. Some urbanists see immigrants as potential saviors of the inner city. But increasingly, immigrants, like other Americans, head for the suburbs as soon as they can afford to make the move.
Many, however, face challenges in finding affordable housing anywhere near their jobs on the suburban periphery. As a result, they may well be attracted to revived suburban cores and new villages, which tend to have mixed-income housing. In redeveloped areas like those in Fullerton, immigrants already have emerged as primary consumers of townhouses.
The other demographic group is the aging “empty nest” set, or “downshifting boomers,” as Brookings Institution demographer William H. Frey calls them. Most retirees in the first bloc of boomers appear to be sticking pretty close to the suburbs, where roughly three out of four now reside, according to Sandi Rosenbloom, a professor of urban planning and gerontology at the University of Arizona.
Suburban villages are either being built or proposed throughout the country. Massive new developments, replete with housing, shopping, and transit connections, already have been created throughout large parts of suburban Southern California, around Chicago, in the Washington, D.C., environs, and outside Salt Lake City.
The most promising,and environmentally respectful,sites are places like Fullerton or the Chicago suburb of Naperville, where the once-overlooked central districts of small towns have been revived.
With the demographic wind at their backs, suburban villages,whether in the inner ring or outer periphery,appear to have a bright future. Yet, they still face political challenges as fear of the negative aspects of urbanization makes some suburbanites leery of denser development.
Perceptive advocates of New Suburbanism, like Anaheim Mayor Curt Pringle, make it clear to skeptics that density need not come at the expense of existing single-family zones.
None of the challenges, economic or political, are likely to slow the evolution of New Suburbanism. What is needed now is the political will,and the buy-in by the planning and architectural communities,to capture this wave of the American future, perhaps the greatest commercial opportunity of the next half-century.
Kotkin is a fellow with the New America Foundation and author of “The City: A Global History,” just published by Modern Library. He also serves as a senior adviser to The Planning Center in Costa Mesa.
