Car Country: An Environmental History

Epilogue: Reaching for the Car Keys

289 ePilogue Reaching for the Car Keys In real life . . . the implications of accommodating a few more cars and a few more cars and a few more cars are a little harder to see. But swiftly or slowly, the positive feedback is at work. Swiftly or slowly, greater accessibility by car is inexorably accompanied both by less convenience and efficiency of public transportation, and by thinning-down and smearingout of [land] uses, and hence by more need for cars. —Jane Jacobs (1961)1 after 1956, Car CoUntry qUiCkly beCame the nation’s signature landscape: sprawling, single-use, low-density, and bound together by an overwhelmingly car-oriented transportation system. Remaking the nation as Car Country has had its benefits. It has made it dramatically easier to drive, for example, helping expand homeownership to previously unfathomable levels and making real estate investments more profitable and secure. Yet it has also had drawbacks, most notably , that Car Country’s one-size-fits-all landscape does not, in fact, fit all: it only fits cars. To take an agricultural metaphor, Car Country is a monoculture, a landscape designed to maximize the benefits of carbased mobility. Yet it succeeds by imposing a brittle simplicity on the landscape that sacrifices environmental resiliency and complexity. As a result, ever more complicated and expensive technological and managerial interventions are necessary to keep it functioning smoothly. In the case of Car Country, we might add that the lost complexity is not just ecological, but social, technological, and economic as well. Among the postwar critics who decried the complex mix of incentives ,regulations,andplanningpracticesthatgaverisetoCarCountry, perhaps the most perceptive and outspoken was Jane Jacobs. Jacobs, a writer, community activist, and resident of Greenwich Village in New York City, first became interested in the negative effects of urban renewal on cities while working as an associate editor for Architectural Forum Advertisement for Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). Courtesy of Random House. 290 || ePilogue in the mid-1950s, a period when federal slum-clearance programs were remaking American cities in significant ways. In the spring of 1956, she “stepped into prominence at a planners’ conference at Harvard,” as Lewis Mumford, the urban planner and historian, later described it. “Into the foggy atmosphere of professional jargon that usually envelops such meetings, she blew like a fresh offshore breeze to present a picture, dramatic but not distorted, of the results of displacing large neighborhood populations to facilitate large-scale rebuilding.”2 She expanded her critique for a national audience in a provocative essay in Fortune titled “Downtown Is for People” (1958) and then again in a bombshell of a book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), which combined a fierce and eloquent defense of urbanism with a trenchant critique of prevailing city-planning orthodoxies. “This book,” it began with characteristic forthrightness, “is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding.”3 Jacobs devoted little attention to new car-dependent development on the urban periphery, the era’s most visible part of Car Country. But she generated significant insight into such places by focusing on what she saw as Car Country’s antithesis: the nation’s “great” cities, which she considered the nation’s historical hubs of economic, political, and social innovation. In contrast to the bird’s-eye view of most planners, she took a street-level view of city life, celebrating the “intricate ballet” of city people’s comings and goings in an effort to understand what made cities vibrant, vital, and safe. Jacobs disparaged city planners for trying to transform even very dense cities into car-friendly places, but she was surprisingly ambivalent about cars themselves. “Automobiles are often conveniently tagged as the villains responsible for the ills of cities and the disappointments and futilities of city planning,” she wrote. “But the destructive effects of automobiles are much less a cause than a symptom of our incompetence at city building.”4 Jacobs, in other words, was one of the first prominent critics to understand that land-use decisions—and not just a car-friendly transportation infrastructure —profoundly shaped the context in which cars operated. Wherever one found car-friendly transportation and land-use policies in city planning, Jacobs argued, one could find cars having a destructive impact. This was true, she argued, mainly because cars “competewithother [land] uses for space and convenience.” Invibrant, ePilogue || 291 walkable cities, she believed, even the...