Robert Bruegmann went to Paris as a graduate student in the 1970s to study 18th-and 19th-century architecture. But when he flew in and out of Orly Airport, on the city’s southern edge, he saw something that blew his mind: a cityscape that looked like suburban Chicago or LA. European cities, he thought, were supposed to be pedestrian friendly, not like our monstrous agglomerations of auto-dependent sprawl.
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Anywhere Bruegmann pulls on the threads of conventional urban planning wisdom, it comes apart like a badly knitted sweater: Why do antisprawl activists want to protect and preserve places like Sonoma Valley and Nantucket Island but not Oak Brook? (Bruegmann notes that Oak Brook is denser and was built to a plan.) If the suburbs are impoverishing the inner city, why are many of them even poorer? (Drive U.S. 30 through Ford Heights sometime, a suburb so poor that it’s fighting the Illinois EPA to allow it to keep a massive, allegedly hazardous dump open.) There’s more. If LA is more densely populated than Chicago why is it considered a more sprawling city? If the Europeans do these things better, why do less than 10 percent of Amsterdam commuters use public transportation?
If living in the city is an alternative to suburban blandness, then why do Chicago dwellers choose to travel by car, kick factories out of their neighborhoods, and patronize big-box stores? Bruegmann describes the gentrified Chicago neighborhoods he’s lived in as idealized versions of urban life, without the packed tenements and smoke-belching industries. Similarly, exurban ten-acre lots are idealized versions of rurality, minus the machine sheds and manure. These opposite ends of the regional continuum have a good deal in common, up to and including (in places like New Buffalo) people who split time between the two.
Whether as a matter of profession, temperament, or philosophy, Bruegmann doesn’t offer an urban agenda beyond “Go see for yourself ” and “Watch out for unintended consequences.” Those two maxims might be plenty, considering how few observe them, but one might expect more imperatives from someone willing to compare unzoned Houston favorably with tightly girdled Portland. But just when he seems ready to join the libertarian parade, his fascination with the quirky particulars of how cities function gets in the way.
