Abstract
The suburban built form of sprawl and auto-dependent communities that permeated the US post–World War II landscape is often rebuked as unsustainable by many scholars and urbanists. Yet in the face of overwhelming condemnation of suburbia, Grady Gammage’s The Future of the Suburban City: Lessons from Sustaining Phoenix presents a sustainable defense of the suburban built form, particularly as it has manifested itself in the US Southwest.
Gammage’s argument and his use of the city of Phoenix as a case study can be viewed as a rebuttal to Andrew Ross’s book Bird on Fire, published in 2011, which labeled Phoenix as the world’s least sustainable city. With ever increasing climatic, economic, and social uncertainty, sustainability has become the base at which cities are being judged. The Brundtland Report defines sustainability as “development which meets the needs of current generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987, 8), and is in many aspects a contrast to numerous suburban Sunbelt cities of the United States, such as Tucson, Arizona; Phoenix, Arizona; and Albuquerque, New Mexico, which are identified by sprawling, car-centric, and water-dependent built forms. Sunbelt cities present a challenge to the ideal notion of what a sustainable city is, establishing the core of Gammage’s thesis.
Gammage bases his argument on the fact that there needs to be a new or alternative ideal of sustainability for Sunbelt cities. He sees the present view held by many that suburban Sunbelt cities are unsustainable as too “simplistic.” Rather, an alternative sustainable paradigm would create a scale that “would place greater emphasis on catastrophic sudden natural disasters that cannot be anticipated—and in this many suburban cities would shine. Such a metric would advantage places that store a lot of water rather than rely on local rainfall; that generate a large amount of renewable energy; that do not force all citizens to commute to a single location” (15).
Using Phoenix as the archetype of this new form of sustainability, Gammage employs four cases to illustrate his point. His argument for an alternative set of sustainability measures for suburban Sunbelt cities centers on the issues of water consumption and more importantly, water management, the polycentric built form, energy usage, and economic dispersal.
The first case pertaining to Phoenix’s sustainability is related to moving and storing water. Most scholars consider the need to draw water from great distances and relocating that water to reservoirs to support an arid region as unsustainable, Gammage credits the area’s ability to store water for future use as a measure for considering Phoenix as a sustainable city. Gammage argues that Phoenix, which averages roughly eight inches of rainfall per year through its reservoir system, buffers itself from long periods of drought for which other cities are unprepared, in turn making the city sustainable. Furthermore, as Phoenix continues to grow its urban realm outward, it is annexing more farmland for urban uses, thus ironically saving the region water as urban areas use less water than rural areas.
The second case relating to Phoenix’s sustainability is connected to energy. Gammage states that energy usage per capita is lower in Phoenix than in many cities in the Northeast and Midwest because it takes less energy to cool than to heat a home. Another key facet of energy sustainability is that the Phoenix region is poised to be one of the leaders in renewable energy, especially solar, which is seen as being one of the long-term solutions to decrease the economy’s dependency on foreign oil.
The third case to consider is the city’s polycentricity exemplified by spread out pockets of activity resulting in a lack of density in one central location. While many would call polycentricity unsustainable, Gammage views it as a form of sustainability, particularly as it pertains to traffic congestion. He argues that as a result of Phoenix’s polycentricity and its lack of a dense urban center, there is not a mass of commuters going to one location. Rather, residential and office/commercial locations are distributed across the city, dispersing traffic congestion. While some consider the area’s relatively late freeway development with its well-maintained arterial roadways that relieve pressure from the freeway system as a curse, others consider it a blessing. Because of the freeway system and the arterial roadway network, Gammage argues that Phoenix is “among the least congested big cities in America” (80). Thus, for Gammage the addition of light rail, BRT (bus rapid transit), and in the future driverless cars, further add to the argument that Phoenix is a model of sustainable mobility.
The fourth and final case is the lack of one big employer in a city that has the fewest number of Fortune 500 companies of any big city in the United States. While this appears to be in direct contradiction to most notions of sustainability, in Gammage’s view, it enhances economic diversification, as there are multiple employers from multiple industries. By not being a one-company or industry town, Phoenix is able to insulate itself from extreme economic shocks that may hit one segment of the economy. In turn, being able to sustain a robust economy if one segment of the economy suffers a crisis.
While Gammage’s argument for an alternative way of ranking sustainability for Sunbelt cities presents an interesting contrarian view toward much of the established literature and debates surrounding sustainability and suburbia, in the end it is a problematic argument. The tenets of sustainability, which came out of the Brundtland Report, are designed for humankind to work with the Earth, not to alter it to fit a desired way of living.
I argue that the four cases that highlight Phoenix’s sustainability are also unconvincing. First, while Phoenix has done an amazing job at moving and storing water, it does not make it sustainable by any means. For example, the policy of the area’s water relocation practices have resulted in other areas going without sufficient water, having devastating consequences to the environment. For example, due in large part to the siphoning off of its water to support places like Phoenix (as well as California), the Colorado River is now just a trickle when it reaches the Sea of Cortez, which creates undue stress on communities in Southern Arizona and Northern Mexico.
The author’s second case, centered on the use of alternative energy strategies does present his most solid position for sustainability, especially in regard to the search and need for alternative energy sources. Many cities of the Sunbelt could serve as case studies for new forms of solar and wind energy as they will be the first to feel the brunt of rising temperatures and will need reliable energy sources to maintain their ways of living.
While the author’s second case on alternative energy has merit, his third and fourth cases concerned with Phoenix’s polycentric built form and economic diversification resulting in sustainability also falls flat. First the built form of the Phoenix region is almost entirely reliant on motorized transportation and primarily private vehicles. Even with increases in mass transit such as BRT and light rail, the very form of the city does not allow mass transit to function with much success due to the sprawling nature of the city. Phoenix’s polycentricity, what Gammage sees as being a strength, allowing theoretically for less congestion as traffic, is not directed to one fixed point, is its downfall. By not allowing for agglomeration of transit, there is a large segment of the population being left behind who are unable or unwilling to drive a car. Second, the economic diversification, which the city is based on is a service sector economy, often a back office economy, typically the last stop before jobs are relocated overseas, as acknowledged by the author. Thus, the jobs that are created in the region are not designed to last and thus are not designed to sustain an economy.
In sum, while Gammage presents a contrarian argument to the sustainability debate, which often is, in the opinion of this reviewer, unconvincing, his argument is one that should not be completely disregarded. As the suburban built form exemplified by US Sunbelt cities continue to grow, these cities will look to validate themselves and in so doing will use many of the unfounded arguments that are made in this book. While inherently this book is written for a nonacademic audience, it can also be used in a graduate-level seminar on sustainability. This would be particularly interesting if coupled with Ross’s book as it would present a rebuttal to not only his thesis of Phoenix being unsustainable but also to much of how sustainability is understood within the urban environment, particularly in a Southwest suburban context.