The Man Who Loves Sprawl

Before I begin, I must make two things clear. One, the author and
critic Matthew Stadler is a deep thinker, a remarkable writer, and a
longtime friend. Two, I’m mentioned twice in Stadler’s new anthology, Where We Live Now: An Annotated
Reader. The book is a curious theoretical defense of urban sprawl
in three parts.

It begins with a section of Cities Without Cities: An
Interpretation of the Zwischenstadt by the German architect and
urban planner Thomas Sieverts. Diana George’s excellent translation
describes zwischenstadt, literally “in-between city,” as “where
we live now.” Sieverts argues that the dichotomy of center and
periphery (downtown and suburbs) is over, that we must now look at
cities as clusters of multiple centers, and that sprawl isn’t a problem
to be fixed. It’s just where we live now. Stadler appends this essay
with 400 pages of theory, criticism, history, and fiction that help
develop this concept. The third part is the running commentary by
Stadler in the margins. “The middle ground, the new in-between
condition, must be articulated,” he writes in the introduction to
Where We Live Now. “This shared story… is bracing. It is
possible that it could also become
liberating.”

Stadler’s project to reevaluate and theorize sprawl has three
levels: a political level (about sprawl’s poor and diverse population),
a historical level (arguing that Northwest Native Americans basically
lived in a pre-European kind of sprawl), and an aesthetic level. “What
could make sprawl more beautiful, more enriching, and more human?”

Stadler writes. “Better art and writing.”

Stadler was not always a defender of sprawl. He had a turn in his
path, and it mostly corresponds with his move from Seattle to Portland
(a journey he made with a three-year stop in Astoria). To begin to
understand the turn, one must read this brilliant passage from the end
of Stadler’s defining essay on Rem Koolhaas’s Seattle Central Library,
“An Artificial Heart,” published in Nest magazine in 2004:

OMA and the library have kick-started new possibilities by
implanting this artificial heart at the center of the city. The heart
will be severely tested when its doors are thrown open and people pour
through. Can a building oxygenate a population or circulate it
sufficiently into the vast compromised flesh of the surrounding blocks?
As in many other places, vitality is being driven out of Seattle’s core
and squeezed into its margins. Downtown has been given over to the
colossal drama of money’s rise and fall, pushing the mess of urbanity
out to fill the exurban strip malls, now teeming with fluorescent box
restaurants, nail salons, and taverns. Maybe this artificial heart will
pump hard enough to reach those margins and bring some kind of life
flooding back across an urban fabric that will otherwise soon be
starved of it.

That was Stadler before the turn. At that time, the center was for
him still a battleground between the interests of the many and the few.
And the library represented a victory for the many in this long and
sometimes deadly struggle for what the Marxist geographer David Harvey,
borrowing from French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, calls “the rights to
city”—the destruction of one type of urban space that privileges
capital and the creation of another that links with the needs of “urban
inhabitants.” The success of the Central Library transformed the center
of the city from private to public space, from closed to open, from
controlled to creative. The Central Library, the best-
designed
building in the Pacific Northwest, was made by the people
for the people. Stadler played a significant role in its
realization—he was on the panel that selected Rem Koolhaas and
Josh Ramus’s design.

The library defines the importance of the core, the heart of the
urban system. It’s worth fighting for the heart, because that is where
the socially generated wealth is concentrated and controlled by the
few. The few push the many to the margins, to the third world, out of
Manhattan (which Harvey calls a gated community), on the other side of
the wall—always the many must be kept at a
distance from the
wealth of the few. And the 30-year neoliberal project has structured a
kind of globalization that promotes the easy flow of capital but
impedes, blocks, erects barriers against the flow of poor humans to the
centers of power. But what is history but the movement of people from a
bad situation to a better one? Two thousand years ago, because of the
spreading Sahara desert, Bantu Africans began migrating from Central
Africa to Southern Africa. Today, Bantu go to the centers and suburbs
of London or Brussels not for the weather, but for the wealth.

“An Artificial Heart” expressed this mode of politics—the
right to the city. His turn to the suburbs, however, expresses another
mode of politics. Stadler writes in an annotation in Where We Live
Now:

Today, in the United States, those “displaced from [the third
world]” find their new homes in sprawl. In Portland, for example, among
documented arrivals, five new immigrants move to the city’s suburbs for
every one that moves into the city; adding the undocumented may well
tip the balance even more sharply to the [suburbs]. The city itself is
far less dynamic or international than the belt of sprawl around it.
What do we refuse when we reject the suburbs?

The main point of the book—which functions as a great
introduction to Sieverts, and a number of urban theorists such as Yi-Fu
Tuan, Saskia Sassen, and Aaron Betsky—is to give the
periphery/sprawl/suburbs/where we live now a new literature, poetry,
and history.

The political part of the project emphasizes diversity. This part of
the turn I absolutely agree with. If you refuse to see where we live
now, you are rejecting its racial and ethnic richness. This is
certainly the case with an in-between area like South Seattle and its
center, Southcenter Mall. The diversity there is like nothing you’ll
find in downtown Seattle or Fremont, which is over 80 percent white.
And so we have a center that boasts a diversity of
architecture—meaning a diverse surface—but a homogenous
depth. The opposite is the case with the suburbs of South Seattle: They
have a homogenous surface but a diverse depth.

The historical part of Stadler’s turn, however, is more difficult to
appreciate. He connects the pre-European world of Northwest Natives
with the current sprawl culture of flows and decenteredness. Though
living off an economy of hunting and foraging, the Natives in this
region lived with a density that was urban but without city centers. It
was a dense circulation of human souls. Stadler tries to ennoble sprawl
by suggesting its origins are in Native, pre-European settlement. (He
even equates Native traders traveling in boats up and down rivers with
current suburbanites driving their cars up and down highways.) To
associate those migrations and modes of subsistence with the urban
flows of our day is an imposition on a past society that was radically
different from our own.

The main problem, and this problem is even visible in the anthology,
is that Western scholarship speaks for much of that part of the
region’s history. (In the book’s Native American/historical section,
only one text is by a Native American, Louis Kenoy, and it hardly says
enough about the substance of the pre-European experience.) The
pre-European form of economy and way of living is not a precursor to
the sprawl of the present. It is really, really gone—and we live
in the world that brought about its destruction. That is also a part of
where we live now.

True, the culturally empty spaces of sprawl present a surface for an
artist to project his/her ideas, rather than a packed space of power
projecting its ideas on the artist. It is the opposite of the “City
Beautiful” movement—the turn-of-the-century project to pour money
into fancy buildings that would aesthetically “correct” flawed
citizens. (Washington, D.C., is a result of this movement: the
anti–strip mall.) Stadler’s is a kind of “City Ugly” movement.
The empty, smooth surfaces of consumption become the flat surfaces of
projection. But that demands that we do all the work. In any creative
experience, one wants to get as much as one gives. A situation of
exchange produces the richest kind of relationship between what
Lefebvre called representational space and represented space: designed
space and lived space.

Ultimately, Stadler’s current project is to become a stranger kind
of poet: a poet of sprawl. We have seen the poet of the country and the
poet of the city… but a poet of sprawl? Is that even possible?