Building a Future Without a Blueprint

By Denise Scott Brown, architect, planner and a principal in the firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates.

For most of the 20th century, the year for long-range urban planning was 2020. We called it the "perfect vision" year. Now we are asked to look forward another decade. Within the new time frame, architects will still, surely, look ahead, proclaiming the House of the Future, or the Ville Contemporaine as Le Corbusier did in the 1920s, or the New Urbanism as they do today. But their prophesies will be no more perfect than the previous ones, continuing to tell us more about their own time than about 2030, because cities rarely arise from visions.

To think realistically about housing and communities in 2030, we must see them as dependent variables that will owe their structure not to architects' dreams, but to forces at work within the society, technology and the natural world at the time they are built.

Demography is, of course, a driving force shaping all aspects of the city, but it isn't only population size and composition that brought us Levittowns, adult communities aimed at the over-50s, communes, McMansions (today's name for large, merchant builder houses), New Urban communities, and so on; the urban and suburban growth that accompanied the post-World War II baby boom also reflected the economic behavior and lifestyles of its families. Americans' transience further suggests that the three generations of "echo boomers" who will have been born by 2030 will not use the first boomers' schools, stores and housing. They will have left those neighborhoods, many heading west and south, in search of economically vibrant cities with good climate and plentiful amenities. If work is done electronically from home, we may also see large-scale adaptation of vacation houses for year-round accommodation.

By 2030, people may spend their leisure time at home, too, with their TV, Internet and fitness machines, or go off on vacation to Las Vegas, Europe or beyond, as the world goes ever more global. In both cases, civic places will lose their central role. As the private sector becomes what's cool, Americans may take their love affair with affinity and interest groups to the Web, planning community action via blog sites without need of physical meeting. Or they may gather in the shopping center's "community space" -- squeezed in an unprofitable corner off the corridor to the toilets.

Good times or low interest rates may raise family living standards. Today's economy, for example, has allowed people to buy McMansions. But when times are bad, these "Levittowns on steroids" may be adapted for rental or boarding use, or subdivided and converted into medical offices. In an America that is diversifying, race and class will come into the picture. If tomorrow's upwardly mobile minority families follow the patterns of earlier migrants, they will acculturate to suburbia, adopting Mount Vernon, Williamsburg and the American eagle as their housing icons, and adding to them the madonnas, menorahs and moon gates of their roots.

What would I like to see? In post-Katrina planning, I'd like to see government playing a stronger role in managing the relationship between our growing numbers and the natural world. I'd also like to see housing types that would suit the evolving needs of Americans. One model to look at might be the lilong of Shanghai. These early examples of architectural-cultural exchange emerged in the late-19th century from the mews housing of London. They combined residential with commercial uses, creating long alleys of small houses reachable via decorative arches on the street's commercial frontage, thus defining areas of private living in very public places.

Despite changes in the economy and in taste over the next quarter century, certain trends seem likely to continue. Cities may see modest increases in upper-middle-class returnees, but the majority of working Americans and many of the elderly will choose single-family detached suburbia. And in good times or bad, Americans who can afford houses will probably continue to ignore the plight of those who cannot.

Author's e-mail: scottbrown@vsba.com