Coming Soon to Sprawl Near You

The demise of Detroit is the most striking example of the self-destruction of most US cities. We call it self-destruction because it was not by accident, but the result of unintended consequences of a series of decisions.

The common thread of these decisions was to abandon the thousands-of-years-old tradition of building cities around the scale of human self-propulsion. In the USA, this tradition was abandoned in favour of building the urban field - a better name for what resulted than city - around the needs of the motor vehicle.

Even most of those few remaining cities which have lively and livable downtowns are surrounded by a ring of strip malls, big box stores, and industrial and office 'parks'.

Now that the US has seen peak automobiles, and the age of the motor vehicle is drawing to a close, the USA will find itself very much in trouble. It has constructed a type of city - this urban field - which will find itself soon utterly obsolete and mostly useless.

Steps could be taken to correct this: allowing mixed-use zoning; promoting 'infill' and small lot redevelopment. But communities which allow this are few and far between. The norm is strict segregation of land use, and new development on big lots with copious parking. People will be living with the unhappy consequences of this ongoing, bad planning for decades.

Detroit is the city most molded by the automobile - right down to its broad, highway-like streets and its too-long-to-walk blocks. The average house in Detroit now sells for $6,000. You can say that it is the crime, or the unemployment, but we call it a failure of urban form.

This same failure of form exists in the suburbs of Detroit and the suburbs of every American city (as well as most of the cities), and the same decay and economic ruin that afflicts the rustbelt cities will spread to them. Expect to see $6,000 houses more the rule than the exception in the years ahead.