Ever since they began to sprout on the outskirts of North American cities some 60-odd years ago, the post-second world war suburbs have had enemies among people who think a lot about cities.
In the past few weeks, however, the prophets of suburban doom have been rushing into print in unusually large numbers, proclaiming that high gas prices and the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis are doing what generations of right-thinking urbanists could not: stem the outbound emigration to the fringes and bring people back to the high-density urban centres.
Take, for example, the recent article in The Atlantic magazine by urban planner and real estate developer Christopher B. Leinberger. "Strange days are upon the residents of many a suburban cul-de-sac," Mr. Leinberger reports. "Once-tidy yards have become overgrown, as the houses they front have gone vacant. Signs of physical and social disorder are spreading."
In a suburban community near Charlotte, N.C., more than half the vinyl-sided houses are in foreclosure. "Vandals have kicked in doors and stripped the copper wire from vacant houses; drug users and homeless people have furtively moved in."
Even in a much more affluent suburb, near Sacramento, Calif., "the phenomenon is the same. At the height of the boom, 10,000 new homes were built there in just four years. Now many are empty; renters of dubious character occupy others. Graffiti, broken windows and other markers of decay have multiplied."
While Mr. Leinberger acknowledges that the subprime mortgage problem has precipitated this decline, he also believes that "a structural change is under way in the housing market — a major shift in the way many Americans want to live and work. It has shaped the current downturn, steering some of the worst problems away from the cities and toward the suburban fringes. And its effects will be felt more strongly, and more broadly, as the years pass."
Writing last month in The Globe and Mail, Richard Florida, director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto, chimed in with a similar version of the apocalypse. "Just as the demand for SUVs plummets and consumers have finally begun to see the point of hybrids, people are turning away from sprawling exurbs toward urban neighbourhoods and inner suburbs," Mr. Florida says.
"But what's happening here goes a lot deeper than the end of cheap oil. We are now passing through the early development of a wholly new geographic order — what geographers call 'the spatial fix' — of which the move back toward the city is just one part."
This "spatial fix" involves, most conspicuously, large metropolitan concentrations such as Toronto. Here, as in London, New York and Tokyo, "the shift from the suburbs toward the urban core is most pronounced, as talented, ambitious people trade more space for shorter commutes."
As a committed downtower with no inclination to flee to suburbia, I find the prognostications of Mr. Leinberger and Mr. Florida attractive. I would be delighted if all the talented, ambitious people in the greater Toronto area moved into my downtown neighbourhood. But I seriously question whether any such vast demographic switch is now taking place. It seems quite likely, in fact, that the prophets of suburban demise are merely repeating the old anti-suburban prejudices that have been making the rounds since sprawl was new.
Once upon a time, to be sure, Toronto's suburbia was white, Anglo-Saxon commuter-land. The Don Valley Expressway and the communities of Don Mills and York Mills are architectural monuments to an era when most of these white-collar working people slept in suburban bungalows and worked in the financial district towers.
Because of the massive influx of immigrants from outside Canada over the past few decades, however, our suburbs are now sharply different in character from what they once were. They are now composed of hundreds of thousands of hard-working Chinese (in Markham), Jews (in Thornhill), Italians (in Woodbridge) and South Asians in many parts of the city.
Many of these people have found work, or created it, in their suburban communities, thus making long commutes unnecessary. In the process, they have built — and are building — new urban employment and residential hubs that no longer resemble the older models of Toronto suburbia invoked by Mr. Florida.
If pundits are going to discuss the future of North American suburbs — and this is surely an excellent time to do so — then they should have in mind a clear picture of the very dynamic phenomenon they are talking about. If the upmarket suburbs of Sacramento are lapsing into desolation, the exurban communities around Toronto appear to be doing everything but.
The conversation that needs to take place certainly won't get very far without accurate views of the remarkable places Toronto's suburbs have become.
