Suburbia. Sprawl. Periphery. The old post-WWII dream of having a family safely nestled away in a quiet, residential suburb and commuting into the vigorous, urbane, cosmopolitan hub to do business has been replaced with a new reality: sprawling, white-bread, cookie-cutter-developments devoid of “culture.”

Yet right now, Bellevue is more ethnically diverse than Seattle. As many city dwellers commute out to the suburbs for work as suburbanites commuting in. Des Moines, Edmonds, and Renton are all more dense than Tacoma and Everett.

Matthew Stadler was interested in the relationship between cities and their peripheries when he traveled into the Portland suburb of Beaverton. Beaverton, home of Nike, is the most densely populated city in the state. Another Portland suburb, Gresham, is second. There are more jobs in Washington County, the largest suburban county near Portland, than residents — creating a commute to the suburbs.

Stadler challenges the traditional story of the city — a story that grants it a monopoly on culture, jobs, and the mixing of peoples of different ethnicities and classes. The suburb is a fact of life. The only remaining question is this: How can we find beauty and meaning within a landscape which has so often been derided as blasé, bland, and bleak?

How can we find beauty and meaning within a landscape which has so often been derided as blasé, bland, and bleak?

Mr. Stadler, you point out that cities are forming in new and different ways: sprawl is a dominant feature of landscape, businesses are turning over rapidly, developers focus on the outskirts of our urban centers. How does this challenge our idea of the city?

We have so much mobility that we lose any sense of the aura of place. We look for heritage in the built environment, we look for older buildings that reflect the power structure or aesthetic from a past time, and heritage or the preservation of the trace of the past becomes our approach to keeping it beautiful, to making it meaningful; but there is another way to find beauty or to generate beauty, which is through reinvention and use.

How does the German professor Thomas Sieverts’ notion of the Zwischenstadt, or in-between city, fit into this changing idea of “city,” and how does it address automobile use in the suburbs?

Thomas Sieverts talks about the zwischenstadt, which means “in-between city.” It is a terrain that does not have a clear city center, nor a clear periphery: the entire zwischenstadt is dispersed, multi-centered, driven by a single logic, a logic of in-betweenness.

With that in mind, we look at the problem of cars, which indeed is potentially one of the most distressing and destructive problems with how we live here now. Sieverts is asking us not to say that “Cars are a suburban problem, I live in a city, I’m free from it,” nor “I live in a city, I’m doing a better job of reducing car use.” The problem with cars is an aspect of the whole system. To blame it on the suburbs is like saying that diabetes is a problem with my blood, and not my digestive tract.

Is car dependency so much different in the city “center” vs. the “peripheral settlements”?

Sieverts point is that any divisions between city center and what happens on the periphery are [becoming] nostalgic divisions. Job production in Washington county, which is the largest suburban county in Oregon, actually exceeds its own population. So there’s a commute in [from Portland] if anything.

Sieverts takes these shifts as a starting point to look at things regionally, not as a problem of city vs. other municipalities. These are problems that require solutions that are non-concentric. For example, he is a strong advocate of light rail and bus transportation from, say, Bellevue to Mountlake Terrace, from Mountlake Terrace over to Lynnwood — rather than as it is in Seattle, transiting through the city center in order to get other places.

He also calls for a heavy investment in wireless technologies, so that the conduct of work no longer requires as much of a shuttling of people and materials across the terrain.

Is this compatible with social movements advocating for localized production, particularly food production?

We might begin to make a deeply interpenetrating environment in which the fine grain [of the landscape] includes places to grow food, live and work in high densities, as well as places for what you would call nature. One really interesting insight from Sieverts is to suggest that we are not going to succeed in creating built environments without getting used to nature as part of the built environment. We actually have to rethink how we live so animals can live with us.

To foster all this intergrowth, this non-centered pattern of production and population concentration, and the creation of vibrant cultural spaces within, who’s going to take the helm? Should we look to regional authorities, or individual involvement, or private marshalling from developer tycoons?

Well, I can see three very positive things. One is happening up in Seattle with Ron Sher, a private developer taking obsolete or disused malls — Crossroads Mall was first, and then Lake Forest Park Towne Centre as they call it — and simply trying to inhabit them with a rich mix of small businesses, restaurants, services, and cultural gathering space that reflects the ethnic richness of the community they’re serving. Crossroads Mall is very different from Northgate Mall. Sher is an example of the option you said of someone privately opening our minds.

The second is something that Sieverts suggests, which is called internal tourism. When you think about vacation, why always think about what great city you’ll visit, or what beautiful nature to go see?

Which comes straight out of a romanticized ideal of capital N nature, and the European model of city divided from the natural.

Yeah, the images that we go in search of when we travel come out of that nostalgia for the bucolic, and Sieverts asks, why don’t you take a vacation in the zwischenstadt — get on the Amtrak train and get off in Tukwila? There’s that Rocky and Bullwinkle family fun center. Or head to Bellevue: Crossroads Mall has its own Bollywood Cinema. Down here [in Portland] there’s the MAX Train which you can take for vacations in Beaverton, nature parks, Orenco Station, you name it.

Thus regaining a deeper understanding of our own surroundings?

And, if we make a commitment to using that way to get around, we support a greater network of non-car transport.

There’s one other thing Sieverts’ calls for: re-use. One of the points that Sieverts makes that is so compelling is that the zwischenstadt has more than enough of everything. We’re not facing any sort of shortage of built environment; what we’re facing is a crisis of imagination, where people don’t know how to look at a building and imagine its use, so then they tear it down. Sieverts suggests that we ask what else we could be doing with buildings [and spaces] that now lie empty or get demolished.

That is not only a sound politics of sustainability, it’s also a path forward into finding beauty and finding meaning in a landscape which we otherwise compare unfavorably to our dreams.

You see kids and other people who lack resources doing this all the time because they have to — making a skate park out of a disused parking area till you get kicked out by the police, etc.

You’ve said this will be possible also through re-imaginative culture workers; could you explain that?

Artists and writers have a huge role to play, but it’s not by going and making a neighborhood look more bohemian. What we need to do is imagine things that we don’t imagine now. A great piece of writing can make us start to see things that are different from our presumptions.

You are saying that when city-dwellers venture out to rediscover the landscape, they’ll be surprised?

They’ll be very surprised because when they’re traveling out of their neighborhood, they’re really traveling into the world. It’s happening on 99 in Lynnwood, I see it when I travel to Seattle to visit my family, and it’s vibrant and full of life in many languages and as many cultural frames that we don’t even scan.

This all starts with no more badmouthing the suburbs, no more badmouthing the city, no more glib denigrations of fat people who drive their SUVs, no more glib dismissals of homosexual culture, all those bigotries on both sides need to disappear.

You’re not going to go out and find the cute little London squares built out into the suburbs; you’re going to find people’s lives that are not like yours, and that’s what city living is all about.

editor@realchangenews.org