New Suburbanism – A Smart Alternative to ‘Smart Growth’

Smart growth

New Suburbanism – A Smart Alternative to ‘Smart Growth’

Furthering property rights, innovation, initiative, and economic pluralism with respect to land development

By Edward Ring, June 5, 2019 2:15 am


Solutions to California’s housing shortage invariably focus on increasing the density of preexisting cities and suburbs. Legislative solutions include SB 375, passed in 2008, which “incentivizes” cities and counties to approve high density land developments, and the failed (this time) SB 50, which would have forced cities and counties to approve high density development proposals.

How high density land development benefits special interests cannot be ignored. Politically connected developers enjoy windfall profits by selling overpriced homes crowded onto smaller parcels of land. Existing cities collect higher taxes from property owners and shoppers who would otherwise have moved into new cities. Government at all levels can spend more money on pay and benefits, and less on infrastructure. Investors harvest higher returns thanks to the real estate bubble.

In front of the hidden agenda of special interests, however, are moral arguments for so-called “smart growth.” The crux of these moral arguments for high density “smart growth” are that regional ecosystems bordering urban areas should not be sullied by new growth, and that high density development reduces emissions of greenhouse gasses, which furthers global ecosystem health.

Both of these moral arguments are flawed. As documented in an earlier analysis “Grand Bargains to Make California Affordable,” if 10 million new residents moved into homes on half-acre lots, three persons per home (with an equal amount of space allocated for new roads, retail, commercial, and industrial development), it would only use up 3.2 percent of California’s land. If all this growth were concentrated onto grazing land, much which is being taken out of production anyway, it would only consume 21 percent of it. If all this growth were to fall onto non-irrigated cropland, which is not prime agricultural land, it would only use up 19 percent of that. Much growth, of course, could be in the 58 percent of California not used either for farming or ranching.

California’s ecosystems can easily withstand significant urban expansion. Even this extreme low density growth scenario – as if there wouldn’t still be parallel development within existing urban areas – only consumes 3.2 percent of the land in this vast state. Similar concerns about greenhouse gasses are unfounded, because they rest on the assumption that higher greenhouse gas emissions are correlated with low density development. They are not, or they don’t have to be. Telecommuting, dispersion of jobs into new suburban nodes, clean energy, and clean vehicles, are all examples of future trends that belie the falsehood that all growth must be confined to existing cities.

Moreover, it is unlikely, if not impossible, for high-density development alone to ever deliver a supply of homes that meets demand, lowering prices to affordable levels. Part of the reason for this is the understandable resistance high-density proposals arouse from existing residents who don’t want to see the ambiance of their neighborhoods destroyed. Equally significant is the extraordinary cost of construction in California. But evidence from around the nation is unambiguous – in areas such as the San Francisco Bay Area where urban containment is practiced, home prices are unaffordable, and in areas such as Houston where urban growth is permitted, home prices are affordable.

If you accept these premises – that urban expansion will not cause unacceptable harm to the environment, and that urban expansion is the only way to deliver enough new homes to lower prices, “smart growth” starts to take on a different meaning. “Special interest growth” might be more descriptive.

New Suburbanism Offers An Alternative to Smart Growth

The concept of New Suburbanism is not original, but it also isn’t well established. This makes it malleable, or, at least, this leaves room for a fresh interpretation of its meaning. First expressed in 2005 by urban geographer Joel Kotkin, New Suburbanism is a complement to New Urbanism, a movement initially devoted to the twin principles of architectural and landscape design that celebrates local history and traditions, along with promoting accessible, pedestrian friendly, aesthetically engaging public spaces. Over time, New Urbanism and New Suburbanism have been taken over by the smart growth crowd, with high-density neighborhood design now the overwhelming priority of these movements. But consider these quotes from Kotkin, written in 2006:

“One critical aspect of New Suburbanism lies in its pragmatism. One cannot always assume, for example, that building a new town center, constructing denser housing, or introducing mixed-use development would automatically improve quality of life.”

Kotkin goes on to explain how “sprawling, multipolar” cities that permit suburban growth are creating more jobs and have more affordable homes, how most people starting families prefer single family detached homes, and average commutes in these cities are actually less because “jobs move to the suburban periphery.” He writes:

“We instead should follow a pragmatic, market-oriented approach to improving the areas in which people increasingly choose to live. For example, in a low-density suburban community that seeks to retain its single-family character, it may be more appropriate to introduce single-family detached housing, rather than assume multi-family apartments and lofts must be part of the solution.”

New Suburbanism is a necessary alternative to Smart Growth because Smart Growth is failing. It not only delivers an inadequate supply of homes, it delivers the wrong mixture of homes, because it delivers apartments, condominiums, townhouses, and “detached” homes with yards barely big enough for an outdoor grill, but it does not deliver what people want, which is a home with a yard.

New Urbanism has become an intellectual movement indistinguishable from the Smart Growth policies that mandate high-density development. Here, from the website “New Urbanism” is an accurate representation of the principles of New Urbanism:

1 – Walkability,
2 – Connectivity,
3 – Mixed-Use & Diversity,
4 – Mixed Housing,
5 – Quality Architecture & Urban Design,
6 – Traditional Neighborhood Structure,
7 – Increased Density,
8 – Smart Transportation,
9 – Sustainability, and,
10 – Quality of Life.

And here is a summary of why New Urbanism, or “Smart Growth,” is not so smart:

1 – Artificially and selectively inflates land values, making housing less affordable,
2 – Emphasizes public space over private space,
3 – Makes war on the car,
4 – Promotes high-density infill in low density neighborhoods,
5 – Prefers open space to homes, but not to biofuel crops, solar fields, or wind farms,
6 – Presumes that social problems will be alleviated through forcing everyone to live in ultra high density, mixed neighborhoods,
7 – Incorrectly claims there is a shortage of open space and farmland, and,
8 – Presumes to have the final answer; that its precepts are beyond debate.

New Suburbanism offers an alternative ideology – one that embraces much of New Urbanist concepts, but from an entirely different perspective. These “Principles of New Suburbanism,” are not intended to refute the virtues of high density, but to extol the virtues of low density. Embodied in these principles is the idea that human stewardship and private land ownership, combined with 21st century clean technologies, can enable a suburban and exurban landscape to host bucolic and utterly clean low density communities across thousands of square miles.

PRINCIPLES OF NEW SUBURBANISM

(1) Embraces Aesthetic Values: Suburbs can be beautiful. Spacious, forested, with architectural character. New suburban communities can be built with an emphasis on aesthetics, as well as towards creating a sense of place, especially when high density isn’t the prevailing mandate.

(2) Low and High Density Are Not Mutually Exclusive: New Suburbanists support high density zoning in the urban core of large cities. New Suburbanists enthusiastically support building 21st century cities, with high-rises and plentiful car-independent transit options and everything else inimical to the central cores of megacities.

(3) Land is Abundant: There is abundant available land for low density suburban and exurban development. New Suburbanists encourage zoning that recognizes the importance of progressively lower density zoning from urban cores, instead of draconian “urban service boundaries” that arbitrarily restrict development, especially low density development.

(4) Car Friendly: Cars are the future, not the past. Personal transportation devices are tantalizingly close to becoming ultra safe conveyances that can drive on full autopilot and have zero environmental footprint, and we are within a few decades at most of having abundant clean energy. The age of the personal driving machine has just begun.

(4) Road Friendly: Roads are the most versatile of all mass transit corridors since people, bicycles, cars, busses, and trucks can all travel on or alongside roads. Commercial areas should be car-friendly as well as bike and pedestrian friendly. Since land is abundant, this is not all that difficult.

(5) Decentralized & Off-Grid Friendly: New communities can have neighborhood-scale groundwater extraction, distribution and recharge systems. Using new off-grid technologies, sustainable and cost-effective energy and even water independence can be achieved at a household or neighborhood basis, often enabling lower taxes through avoiding more expensive larger public infrastructure.

(6) Farm & EcoSystem Friendly: Via the economic pluralism fostered by permitting flexible and low density residential zoning, i.e., small independently owned, often independently constructed homes on large lots of .5 to 20 acres, you create the potential for a vibrant market in small property leases for specialty farming. Through zoning (or protecting) vast tracts of outer suburb and exurban lands according to New Suburbanist precepts where low density home building and road building is encouraged instead of discouraged, you create a market for relatively cheap abundant land, making more affordable acquisition of land set-asides for agriculture or nature conservancies.

New Suburbanism embraces the inspiring original vision of New Urbanism, its call to create the 21st century’s version of cities and buildings that are welcoming spaces. But New Suburbanism rejects the ideological stridency, the coercion, and the porcine corruption of the powerful high density coalition.

At its heart, New Suburbanism is the necessary counterpart to New Urbanism and Smart Growth, because they are constrained by an imbalanced, unnecessary bias towards high density. New Suburbanism gives back to our cities and towns their freedom; gives us abundant land; gives us affordable homes; gives our cities turned suburbs turned exurbs the unforced, organic, natural and easy transition from dense to sparse. If New Urbanism defines the aesthetic of our new and renewed cities, than New Suburbanism helps define the aesthetic interface between city and country; it gives us back the smooth transition from urban chic to country soul.

The Secret History of the Suburbs

Steve Bronstein/Getty

The Secret History of the Suburbs

AMANDA KOLSON HURLEY 8:58 AM ET
We all know the stereotypes: Suburbia is dull, conformist, and about “keeping up with the Joneses.” But what about the suburbs of utopians and renegades?



The following is an excerpt adapted from the new book Radical Suburbs(Belt Publishing, $16.95).

Back in the early 1960s, Malvina Reynolds wrote a song called “Little Boxes,” inspired by a drive past rows of lookalike pastel-hued houses in a new suburban housing tract in the Bay Area. (Her friend Pete Seeger had a hit with the song in 1963.) Reynolds saw the cookie-cutter houses as both symbols and shapers of the conformist mindset of the people who lived in them—doctors and lawyers who aspired to nothing more than playing golf and raising children who would one day inhabit “ticky-tacky” boxes of their own.

But Reynolds was wrong about who lived in this suburb, Daly City, just south of San Francisco. It was not originally home to the martini-chuffing doctors and lawyers she imagined, but to working-class and lower-middle-class (white) strivers who were the last group to get in on the postwar housing boom.

Then, only a few years after Reynolds wrote the song, Filipinos and other immigrants from Asia began arriving in Daly City. The “ticky-tacky” architecture that Reynolds scorned proved amenable to them remodeling and expanding homes for extended families, and Daly City became the “Pinoy capital” of the U.S., with the highest concentration of immigrants from the Philippines in America.


Clichés and misconceptions still define suburbia in the popular imagination, and it drives me crazy. I live in Montgomery County, Maryland, outside of Washington, D.C. I’m a suburbanite, but my life doesn’t revolve around manicured lawns, status anxiety, or a craving for homogeneity. My suburban experience is riding the bus as people chat around me in Spanish and French Creole. It’s having neighbors who hail from Tibet, Brazil, and Kenya as well as Cincinnati. It’s my son attending a school that reflects the diversity—and stubborn inequality—of America today.(Belt Publishing)

The basic story of the suburbs that most Americans know goes something like this: In the 19th and early 20th centuries, country retreats for the wealthy and “streetcar suburbs” popped up on the outskirts of cities. Then, after World War II, new roads and cheap government mortgages drew millions of people—white people, that is—from apartments and rowhouses in the city to freshly graded suburban subdivisions. Many of them were fleeing neighborhoods and schools that African Americans had recently moved into, the destructive phenomenon known as white flight.

Suburbia was where these white, middle-class Americans could isolate themselves from perceived urban ills, in a static and regulated environment where private space, property ownership, racial homogeneity, and the nuclear family were the dominant values.

This isn’t untrue—but it’s far from complete. Radical Suburbs is about waves of idealists who established alternative suburbs outside of Eastern U.S. cities, beginning in the 1820s and continuing through the 1960s. These groups had very different backgrounds and motivations, but all of them believed in the power of the local community to shape moral and social values, and in the freedom provided by outskirts land to live and build in new ways.


As opposed to the groups who went far into America’s interior to settle isolated communes, these were, in a paradoxical-sounding phrase, practical utopians. Staying close to the city let them try out new ways of living with a financial lifeline and emergency exit. Now, at a time when—it could reasonably be argued—the future of the country hangs on what suburbs do over the next 20 or 30 years, their history shows that bold social and architectural experimentation is not alien to suburbia. In fact, it’s a suburban tradition.
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***

The suburb is not an American or even Western invention. Suburbs have been around as long as cities have. In the third millennium BCE, the suburbs of Ur stretched miles beyond the city. In ancient Rome, the urban outskirts were where the nobility kept “country” retreats. But this zone was also where the Romans pushed what they didn’t want to see, hear, or smell—noxious industries like tanning and brickmaking, for instance.

Even in the Middle Ages, city walls were not the hard boundaries they seemed to be. Suburban zones spilled out beyond them, and people and goods moved back and forth. “[W]alled medieval cities in Europe and elsewhere enlarged their walled areas several times to accommodate their fringe belts and to prepare for future expansion,” writes the urban scholar Shlomo Angel. Prostitutes, gypsies, and lepers were often consigned to live sub urbs, literally “below the city.” The very term implies the height of the protective wall and the uncertain status of those outside its embrace.

The American suburb dates back much further than European colonization. Near St. Louis, archaeologists recently found the remains of a 900-year-old suburb of Cahokia, once the largest Native American city north of Mexico. (The site of the ancient suburb is in the modern town of East St. Louis, Illinois, “halfway between a crumbling meat packing plant and a now-closed strip club,” as NPR reported.)


Boston, New York, and Philadelphia all had suburbs before the Revolutionary War. As was (and still is) the case in Europe, they were mostly for lower socioeconomic groups. The elite stuck to the city center. But the mid-19th century saw the founding of the first suburbs we would easily recognize as such—pastoral upper- and middle-class enclaves including Frederick Law Olmsted’s Riverside, Illinois, and Llewellyn Park in New Jersey. Not coincidentally, this period also saw the rise of a cult of domesticity that promoted the housewife as “the angel in the house,” and the freestanding suburban villa, located a safe distance from urban grime and vice, as the ideal American family residence.A Currier & Ives lithograph of idealized upper-middle-class family life. (Library of Congress)

Well-to-do suburbs that blossomed around American cities in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the leafy realms of Anglo-Saxon families living in elegant Queen Anne and Tudor Revival houses, such as Kansas City’s Country Club District, Philadelphia’s Chestnut Hill, and Beverly Hills, California. Industrial and most commercial activities were often banished from these suburbs, and blacks and Jews were prohibited from purchasing homes by restrictive covenants.

However, even in their heyday, elite enclaves weren’t the norm on the urban periphery. Agriculture still thrived there, often practiced by foreign-born and non-white farmers, while factories encroached. Shantytowns dotted the city’s rim, as did no-frills developments in which people built houses on raw lots, dug wells, kept chickens and cows, and grew vegetables. In his book Places of Their Own, historian Andrew Wiese recounts the history of Chagrin Falls Park, a self-built black suburb of Cleveland, which grew to have hundreds of residents, four churches, an elementary school, and a community center.


Throughout the 19th century and into the 20th, communes, colonies, and other intentional settlements kept popping up near cities, too. Among many examples from the early and mid-1800s, a celibate, German-speaking religious sect called the Harmonists built a handsome and prosperous town called Economy, in what is now Ambridge, Pennsylvania, in the 1820s. Proximity to the Pittsburgh market was important for their manufactures and the tourist trade (the town had a hotel and even a museum, one of the first in the U.S.).

The Harmonists kept no private property, holding all goods in common, and the town’s architecture reflected this, with infrastructure like shared bread ovens and a community kitchen for preparing holiday feasts. Unrelated adults sometimes lived together, not unlike in a modern group house. Friedrich Engels wrote admiringly of the Harmonist social system—minus the religion. The sect gradually dwindled in number and finally dissolved in 1905.Friedrich Engels wrote admiringly of the Harmonist social system—minus the religion.

Ten years later, in 1915, a loose band of anarchists and socialists boarded a train in New York and disembarked in central New Jersey, where they set up a colony and progressive school—and evaded police scrutiny back in the city. When they flew the red flag from the water tower, locals climbed up and tore it down. But they were more or less left alone, and the Stelton colony lasted, through the Great Depression and much political infighting, into the 1950s.

Some of its residents commuted into New York, boarding a 5:45 a.m. train to get to their jobs in the Garment District or to sell eggs from the chickens they raised. Many of them lived in basic two- or three-room cottages. They were tiny-house dwellers long before it was a fad—not out of a yen for minimalism, but because that was all they could afford. Renting out any spare rooms to boarders was a common way to supplement incomes. As anarchism waned as a political movement, some colonists trickled away, and the opening of a large Army base nearby when the U.S. entered World War II hastened Stelton’s demise.A child plays a violin in front of a cottage at the Stelton colony in New Jersey. Some middle-class visitors to the colony were shocked by the crude buildings and infrastructure, but the residents, mostly working-class anarchists and socialists, were able to purchase lots and build homes here despite having little money. (Special Collections and University Archives, Rutger University Libraries)

After the war, private homebuilders—armed with techniques of mass production and boosted by government policies—stamped their “little boxes” across thousands of square miles of suburbia. But there were alternatives and challenges to the new tract suburbs.


For example, one unusual homebuilder named Morris Milgramcontested the white supremacy of Levittown almost in its back yard. A former socialist activist, Milgram opened an integrated subdivision of 140 houses called Concord Park in 1954. It was just northeast of Philadelphia, and a few miles away from Levittown, Pennsylvania. Homebuyers included several interracial couples, a few communists, and many nonconformists. Their children played together, while their parents formed a babysitting co-op and bowling, photography, and sewing clubs—just like the residents of any other new suburb.

“SUBURB BREAKS RACIAL BARRIER,” announced a headline in the New York Times. “New Private Housing Project at Philadelphia Integrates Negroes and Whites – NO INCIDENTS OCCUR – Not a Family Has Moved From Colony That Ideals and Tenacity Built.”A monthly neighborhood meeting at Concord Park in 1957, as portrayed in Ebony magazine. (Morris Milgram papers [Coll. 2176], Historical Society of Pennsylvania)

Concord Park was close enough to Levittown that in 1957, when Daisy and William Myers, Levittown’s first black residents, were being harassed by an angry mob, the neighborhood dispatched an interracial group to walk over and stand guard over their house.

***

Even in its counter-cultural variations, the postwar suburb was planned around stay-at-home Mom, Dad, and little Jack and Sally. America now has more single people, one-parent families, and multigenerational clans than nuclear families with young children. Millennials, with anemic wages and lots of student-loan debt, often can’t afford the suburban split-levels they grew up in. And many of them wouldn’t want to buy them if they could, anyway.


It’s the stuff of countless trend pieces, but Millennials really do have a preference for urban living. Polls show they value being able to walk to shops and restaurants and having short commutes. Young adults also report being happier in cities than previous generations did at the same stage in life.

We could be in the middle of the “Great Inversion,” as the writer Alan Ehrenhalt terms it: a national shift from the postwar pattern of wealthy suburbs and poor city, back to the historic norm of elite city and downmarket suburbs. Even if we aren’t, though, rising social inequality and demographic shifts—and above all climate change—make it imperative to rethink who and what our suburbs are for.

Already, some suburban jurisdictions are adapting to new realities, transforming themselves into “urban ’burbs” with pedestrian downtowns, light-rail lines, and denser forms of housing. This conscious urbanization is savvy in terms of meeting younger people’s preferences. But it’s also the only responsible course. The October 2018 report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that we have only a short window of time—until the year 2030—to bring down emissions enough to avoid catastrophic warming, and doing so will require “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.”

Research shows that sprawl-style land use increases greenhouse-gas emissions by decentralizing jobs and services and prompting us to drive more. People who drive everywhere are also less active and therefore more liable to chronic conditions such as diabetes. Suburbs, like cities, need many more neighborhoods where residents can meet daily needs on foot; streets that give priority to walkers, cyclists, and light rail and buses over cars; and high-quality public spaces. Retrofitting suburbia, to quote Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson, who wrote a book with that title, is “the big project for this century.”Children play in a fountain in Silver Spring, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. (Jose Luis Magana/Reuters)

Unfortunately, the suburbs carry a stigma among the very people who could improve them: architects. The design elite has alternately patronized or inveighed against suburbia for years, ever since the International Congress of Modern Architecture called the suburb “a kind of scum churning against the walls of the city” in 1933.


“The suburb hates itself,” claims the Belgian architect Léon Krier, known for his polemical writings and cartoons in praise of traditional urbanism. For Krier, the suburb is by definition a parasite, a malignancy. “It knows that it is neither countryside nor city and wants to conquer the world because it cannot be at peace with itself,” he has written. “The suburb strangles the city by surrounding it and kills the city, tearing out its heart. A suburb can only survive, it cannot live.”

The idea that they lived in zombie-communities would have been laughable to the early residents of experimental suburbs, who believed they were trailblazers and threw themselves with gusto into public life. In Greenbelt, Maryland, a progressive demonstration town built by the federal government as part of the New Deal, some residents thought they offered a pattern for a society redrawn along different, more cooperative lines. One Greenbelter wrote in a letter to a Washington newspaper on the eve of World War II:


We in Greenbelt have learned that, though as individuals we are feeble, as a group we have power. We have learned the significance and potentiality of united social action—and what greater lesson must our people learn if our democracy is to survive?

Jon Thoreau Scott, a retired university professor who grew up in the Stelton colony, told me, “I think it was the best kind of childhood anybody could ever have.“ Laura Thomas, a retired math teacher, remembers going to see the integrated New Town of Reston, Virginia, in the 1960s with extreme skepticism. She was African American; why would she move to Virginia? But she ended up settling there, raising a family and becoming involved with the civic group Reston Black Focus.The idea that they lived in zombie-communities would have been laughable to the early residents of these experimental suburbs.

“Whatever [Reston’s founder Robert] Simon did, whatever the message was, however he advertised it—I can’t put my finger on it,” Thomas said. “He attracted people who were very different ethnically and socioeconomically. But they had a commonality of point of view about people. And that became the pervasive thing in Reston.”

Behind Krier’s words is a revulsion at the hybrid quality of suburbia—how it confounds the neat binaries of town and country, manmade and natural. I’ve heard the same sentiment echoed in complaints that the suburbs are the “worst of both worlds”—more built-up and trafficked than the countryside yet less exciting than the city.

But what if we chose to embrace suburban in-betweenness instead of condemning it? Over the past 150 years, suburbanites have lived in large communal dwellings and tiny shacks, Modernist apartments and neo-Gothic mansions. They’ve been renters and homeowners, domestic servants and corporate executives. They’ve cultivated both emerald lawns and food crops. They’ve sought escape from social progress, and freedom from convention.

Heavy-handed zoning and land-use regulations might try to make time stand still, but nothing is predestined about the future of suburbia, where most Americans live. Instead of despairing over the suburbs’ problems, we should be inspired by suburban history to try to solve them. As the anarchists at Stelton knew, and the Concord Park residents who stood vigil over the Myers’ house in Levittown: Suburbia is what we make it.

Did you know Frank Lloyd Wright would likely be a staunch defender of the suburbs?

Is the world ready for Frank Lloyd Wright’s suburban utopia?

Inside the architect’s overlooked plan for Broadacre City

By James Nevius Jan 4, 2017, 10:00am EST
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If you read enough about Frank Lloyd Wright, a standard narrative begins to emerge: There’s early Wright, where the brash young architect breaks from his Chicago School mentors to create the Prairie style and design such early icons as the Robie House in Chicago and Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel. Then there’s late Wright, the mature genius who brought us Fallingwater and the Guggenheim Museum. In between, there’s a fallow period of personal scandal, a slowdown in commissions, and oddball musings, such as his 1932 plan for a utopian, libertarian community he called Broadacre City.


Though Wright remains America’s most famous architect, his Broadacre theories are often relegated to a footnote of his career; indeed, many biographies don’t mention them at all. But what if the Broadacre plan—a sweeping, individualized American “anti-city” that fused Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian ideals into a seamless, Wright-designed, suburban landscape—was, in fact, the architect’s most enduring idea?

Had Wright followed in the footsteps of an architect like his rival, Le Corbusier, who both theorized about master-planned cities and got a chance to design one in Chandigarh, India, the Broadacre concept might today be seen as more central to his career.

Even though Wright didn’t get the chance to bring a Broadacre City to fruition, many of his Broadacre ideas have become central to the American landscape. With today’s telecommuting and technological breakthroughs—like the promise of self-driving cars just around the corner—will there finally be a full-fledged version of Wright’s Broadacre vision?


Wright first proposed the Broadacre concept in 1932 in a book called The Disappearing City, but the public didn’t take notice until he unveiled a model of a Broadacre City in 1935 at an industrial design fair held at Rockefeller Center.

The irony of that location was certainly not lost on the architect, who thought that New York’s newest skyscraper complex represented “the entrails of final enormity.” Rockefeller Center—and by extension, any dense urban agglomeration—was the exact opposite of what his Broadacre concept entailed.

Displayed in a huge scale model that was 12 feet square and eight inches high, Wright’s first Broadacre rendering showed what a low-density modern city could look like—if you removed nearly everything from it that was remotely urban. Most of the model was taken up by neatly gridded plots for what Wright would later term “minimum houses.” Areas were set aside for recreation and Wright envisioned a skyscraper or two for recovering city dwellers who couldn’t bear the thought of too much open space. Today, looking down at the Broadacre model from above, it resembles just about any American suburb; at first glance, it doesn’t seem radical at all.
American architect Frank Lloyd Wright at the Rockefeller Center, New York, with a model of his ‘Broadacre City’ concept for suburban development, April 15, 1935. Photo by Keystone View Company/FPG/Archive Photos/Getty Images

Soon after the model went on view, Guy Hickok in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle praised the “charm” of this “City of the Future”:


A good way to get the full thrill is to stand by the big relief model and imagine yourself motoring, coming upon it by surprise …. It would dawn upon you gradually that the landscape had taken a turn for the better, that for once … the works of man, taken collectively, were lovely, that the usual urban scar or scab was in this case a garden …. Before you left you would almost certainly ask how to become a resident. It is a city of pre-fabricated houses, built under zoning regulations plotted in advance to keep everything under control from the very start.

That same year, Wright summed up his vision in a piece for Architectural Record titled “Broadacre City: A New Community Plan.” The architect distilled The Disappearing City into five pages, outlining the central tenets of the Broadacre concept, in particular the “freedom to decentralize,” and the idea that every citizen has “his social right to his place on the ground as he has it in the sun and air.”
What if the Broadacre plan—a sweeping, individualized American “anti-city” that fused both Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian ideals into a seamless, Wright-designed suburban landscape—was, in fact, the architect’s most enduring idea?

Wright’s use of the term “Broadacre” reflected this. At a minimum, each “childless family” would be guaranteed one acre of land in a Broadacre City, though larger families would require more. As Wright’s plan was refined over the next two decades, he ultimately envisioned a population density of about 2.5 people per acre (or roughly the current population density of the state of Arkansas).

To put that in perspective, in the 2000 census, Manhattan had about 104 people per acre (down from a peak earlier in the 20th century). Another way to think of it is that a typical New York City block is about five and a half acres—in Wright’s thinking, only enough room for about 13.75 people.

It was apparent from the start that while Wright was using the term “city” to describe Broadacre, he was actually creating, in the words of architecture critic Lewis Mumford, an “anti-city.” To critics like Mumford, a place like Broadacre City would destroy all that was good about urbanity.

Wright probably would not have disagreed.

In “Broadacre City: A New Community Plan,” he wrote that one of the problems of the modern city is that it cheats citizens “of their democratic values.” He goes on to note:


The landlord is no happier than the tenant …. The present success-ideal, placing, as it does, premiums upon the wolf, the fox and the rat in human affairs and above all, upon the parasite, is growing more evident every day as a falsity just as injurious to the “successful” as to the victims of such success. Well—sociologically, Broadacres is a release from all that fatal “success” which is, after all, only excess. So I have called it a new freedom for living in America.

Wright’s concepts of success and freedom come not just from getting people out of overcrowded, non-democratic cities, but also from three key technological advances that make a Broadacre City possible:


1. The motor car: general mobilization of the human being.

2. Radio, telephone, and telegraph: electrical inter-communication becoming complete.

3. Standardized machine-shop production: machine invention plus scientific discovery.

For Wright, the car was key (he had a mild obsession with them). Older cities like New York had been built to emphasize the pedestrian, but that was the model of the past. As Wright wrote in The Disappearing City, “grid-iron congestion is crucifixion now.”

The rapid spread of the automobile—by 1930, there were over 25 million cars on the road—meant that cities would continue to get overcrowded and highways were the new key to American living. Wright envisioned phasing out railroads and putting the right of way once occupied by train tracks “into general service as the great arterial”: lower decks for slower moving truck traffic, upper lanes for “speed traffic,” and in between a “continuously running” monorail. As designed by Wright—or by his surrogates—such highways would, of course, “become great architecture.”

Today, someone coming to Wright’s Broadacre plan with the author’s name stripped from the title page would be forgiven for thinking it was the musings of another urban planner from the 1930s: Robert Moses. As the mastermind behind such projects as the Triborough Bridge, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the Cross Bronx Expressway, and the ultimately doomed LOMEX superhighway, Moses sought to transform New York in a similar fashion. As he once remarked, “cities are created by and for traffic. A city without traffic is a ghost town.”

Moses’s 1920s highway projects on Long Island—like the Southern State and Wantagh State Parkways, which improved access to Jones Beach—prefigured Wright’s ideas that roads could efficiently usher a decentralized population to and from recreational (and other) “hubs” as desired.
Ellen Moody/Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art

These hubs included gas stations, which Wright predicted would become the “advance agent of decentralization.” And, as Neil Levine writes in his book, The Urbanism of Frank Lloyd Wright, Wright “correctly predicted [the gas station] would ‘naturally grow into a neighborhood distribution center, meeting place, restaurant, rest room or whatever else is needed.’” In essence, Wright’s highways would be dotted not just with gas stations, but with shopping malls and, due to efficiencies in production and shipping, what today we’d call big box stores.

Wright’s second rationale for abandoning an urban core was the improvement in “electrical inter-communication.” Here, too, he was peering into the future, imagining a world where abundant electricity—allowing a radio, telephone, and television in every home—would render downtown office districts moot. And that’s without envisioning computers or the internet. As he wrote (somewhat convolutedly) in The Disappearing City:


Financial, official, professional, distributive, administrative: offices may now all go where they belong to function as units of whatever industry they represent and be found there where actual production is taking place.

He again pictured decentralized hubs along the arterial roads, where police, fire, and the judicial system would congregate, housed in utilitarian structures and “not in the braggadocio buildings now customary.”

For those not employed in public service or retail, Wright sees the success of a Broadacre City coming from the desire to work at home, whether you are an artist, doctor, or other “professional.” Not only does this dovetail with his emphasis on the rights of the individual, it would also cut down on what he calls the “human wear and tear in the ‘back and forth haul’” and the “vain scramble in and scramble out” of commuting.

But more than just envisioning the telecommuter, Wright was looking at each individual “broad acre” as a spot for every person to self-actualize. There’d be room for every type of activity, just on a personalized, manageable scale:


little farms, little homes for industry, little factories, little schools, a little university going to the people mostly by way of their interest in the ground, little laboratories on their own ground for professional men. And the farm itself, notwithstanding the animals, becomes the most attractive unit of the city.

Wright’s final point about “standardized machine-shop production” is mostly about raising the collective standard of living. In The Disappearing City, Wright noted that “mass production … [can] now make expensive utilities and accommodation cheap for all concerned instead of questionable luxuries for the few.”

This last point was perhaps the most important, since Wright was, above all, an architect of actual buildings, not just an urban thinker. For much of the remainder of his career, he would embrace a new style of architecture—mostly domestic, but sometimes in civic buildings—that he called “Usonian.”
Wright was looking at each individual “broad acre” as a spot for every person to self-actualize. There’d be room for every type of activity, just on a personalized, manageable scale.

That word, which he first used in conjunction with Broadacre City, was a neologism that he popularized to describe the uniqueness of the United States. (Wright rejected “America” because it might refer to either North or South America.)

The early hallmark of his Usonian house plan—which was in many regards an update of his earlier Prairie style—was that it would be within easy reach of the average citizen, who would prosper in it. For example, “to build Broadacres as conceived,” Wright wrote in Architectural Record, “would automatically end unemployment and all its evils forever.”

In his book Frank Lloyd Wright: Essential Texts, Robert C. Twombly neatly summarizes the characteristics of Usonian homes:


radiant floor heating, a single story with flat floor and widely cantilevered eaves, floor-to-ceiling windows and doors opening to a garden with patio, a kitchen-bathroom unit slightly elevated above roof line, a bedroom zone, a kitchen-dining-living zone semi-divided by function, partially prefabricated walls that could be assembled on site (or potentially in a factory) and raised into place, street-facing clerestory windows and, next to the entry, a roofed but open-ended carport, a term Wright coined.

Wright’s first Usonian home, built in 1936 in Madison, Wisconsin, cost just $5,500 (including Wright’s fee). Today, that would be approximately $94,000, certainly a bargain for a home built by the country’s premiere architect.

By the 1950s, Wright had designed prefabricated Usonian homes to be sold by builder Marshall Erdman, but only 11 of these less expensive units were ever constructed (including Staten Island’s Crimson Beech house). Most Usonian homes went to wealthier clients, and costs skyrocketed. For example, the Hagans, who built a Usonian called Kentuck Knob in Pennsylvania in 1956, spent $96,000 (about $850,000 today) for a custom-built design that in some ways had more in common with its famous neighbor, Fallingwater, than with the Erdman prefab homes.

Even as suburbs developed following World War II—aided and abetted by the car, just as Wright had hoped—Wright couldn’t get a Broadacre concept off the ground. While many manufacturing jobs left large cities, the urban centers remained. Business districts weren’t replaced with a generation of homesteaders and at-home entrepreneurs. In fact, as people moved farther away from urban centers, Wright’s highways merely became conduits to move them in and out of cities each day—the “vain scramble in and scramble out” that Broadacre was supposed to solve.

Wright died in 1959 at age 91, and his Broadacre concept pretty much died with him. Just two years later, urban thinker Jane Jacobs published The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which stood as a rebuke to people like Wright and their auto-centric visions of suburbia.

Jacobs’s work not only began a trend toward revitalizing cities, but also had a profound effect on New Urbanist thinkers, whose modern suburbs reject the diffused Broadacre vision in favor of miniature, walkable, Jacobs-inspired exurbs.


The closest Wright ever got to seeing a Broadacre City was in 1947, when one of his former students, David Henken, enlisted a group interested in creating a master-planned, cooperative community. (An earlier, similar project near Detroit was abandoned when many of its potential residents were conscripted into World War II service.)

Henken’s group purchased 95 acres near Pleasantville, New York. With Wright’s help, Henken and fellow architect Aaron Resnick began drawing up plans for a town, which they called Usonia in the architect’s honor. Wright designed three Usonian homes (out of a total of nearly 50), along with the town’s road system. In keeping with the Broadacre concept, house lots were each one acre. At the beginning, all the land in Usonia was cooperatively owned—though that hadn’t been one of Broadacre’s guiding principles—but eventually trouble with mortgages meant the community had to convert to a more traditional ownership scheme.

Another development influenced by the Broadacre concept was Levittown. Principal Alfred Levitt had been inspired in part by talking to Frank Lloyd Wright when Wright was building a home in Great Neck in 1936. It was the embrace of mass production, as Wright advocated in the plans for Broadacre City, that allowed the Levitts to create their homes quickly and affordably, both on Long Island and in suburban Philadelphia.
Aerial view of the vast spread of Levittown, Long Island, New York, the nation’s first suburban housing development complex, circa 1955. Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images

None of these communities were utopias. Nor did they fulfill Wright’s other dreams for a Broadacre City. They weren’t filled with little farms, factories, or laboratories. In fact, other than its innovative, Wright-inspired architecture, Usonia was like any other exurban town, a mix of commuters and those employed nearby in Westchester County. Moreover, while the people in both Usonia and Levittown felt they were a part of a community, they were communities that strove to keep other people out. In Usonia, a somewhat oddball application form was designed to ensure compatibility for residents; in Levittown, black people were barred from ownership. The spirit of true democracy that Wright saw as underpinning Broadacre City never flourished.

Could it today?

In 1932, a planned community of telecommuters probably seemed like science fiction. Today, why not build a Broadacre City where high-speed internet allows everyone who wants to to work at home? In addition, the rise of urban farming and a growing interest in sustainable communities means that Wright’s “little” backyard farms are already a reality in many places. Why not in a Broadacre City?

In his original plans, Wright envisioned cars and monorails whisking people to their gas station/shopping hubs. Soon, gas stations may be a thing of the past, but mercantile hubs make sense. (After all, you need your Starbucks and Pilates studio somewhere.) Why not reach them via light rail—already a viable solution in many communities—and build a town with “great arterials” that are designed to embrace the driverless car? Autonomous cars save both time and land (since so much acreage today is given over to parking lots), so they could be an important step in making a Broadacre City work.

Lastly, there’s the architecture. We will never have a city filled with Wright-designed Usonian homes. But the rise of the tiny house movement has seen a concurrent revitalization of prefab buildings. While Broadacre homes wouldn’t need to be tiny to comply with Wright’s writings, the ethos of the tiny house movement works well within the Broadacre vision. In fact, Wright’s love of little schools, factories, and more has been embraced by a generation that’s in favor of a smaller-scale, more DIY approach.

In the 1940s, the members of the collective that built Usonia each chipped in $10 a week for a few years until they had enough money to buy the 100-acre parcel to create their town. Today, a hundred investors chipping in $100 a week for three years would raise $1.56 million—before interest. Surely that’s enough to secure the land for a future Broadacre City.

Who’s in?

California must stop trying to stomp out suburbia

California must stop trying to stomp out suburbia

Photovoltaic panels like these would become standard on new California homes starting in 2020 under a proposed new energy code up for review in Sacramento on May 9. Currently about 15 percent to 20 percent of new houses in the state have solar power systems, a state building industry officials said. Here a SunPower Corp. employee finishes up installation of new solar panels at KB Home’s Terramor development in Riverside County. (Photo by Will Lester- The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)

By JOEL KOTKIN | Orange County Register
PUBLISHED: September 22, 2018 at 7:10 pm | UPDATED: September 22, 2018 at 7:10 pm

We may be celebrating — if that’s the right word — the tenth year since the onset of the financial crisis and collapse of the real estate market. Yet before breaking out the Champagne, we should recognize that the hangover is not yet over, and that a new housing crisis could be right around the corner.

This is particularly true in California, which took one of the biggest hits in 2008 as its sky-high prices collapsed, causing enormous problems in areas including the Inland Empire, where incomes are lower and the economy was largely built around new housing construction. The urbanist punditry helpfully came out in force to declare such areas as “the next slums”.

The unsurprising slowdown in housing after the Great Recession was further hampered, once the economy began to recover, in large part due to tough regulations. By 2017, California metros like Los Angeles-Orange and even the Bay Area were producing housing at half to one-third the rate, on a per capita basis, of places such as Nashville, Dallas, Houston, Orlando and even Indianapolis and Columbus. The shortfall in single-family home production, greatly discouraged by state policies, lagged even further. Stronger land-use regulations have been associated with higher land cost and regulatory delays driving house prices well beyond historic norms, as recent research indicates.

Toxic realities

Due to lack of affordable new product, prices have remained high, absurdly so in some areas. New state legislation, seeking to expand Jerry Brown’s climate jihad, including new mandates for solar roofs for new houses, promise to raise prices by at least $20,000 and without doing much for the environment, warns environmentalist Mike Shellenberger.

This is all part of a toxic regulatory overreach that led California housing prices, relative to incomes, to grow at three times the national rate since 2010. By one recent calculation by howmuch.net, California, with the exception of Hawaii, has by far the highest statewide gap — almost $50,000 — between the salary needed to buy a house and its price.

With more of the economy built around low paid “gig” and service workers, the pool of potential buyers is shrinking. California home sales overall are falling — down over 12 percent in the largest market, Los Angeles-Orange County. The biggest losers have been minorities and the young. Already barely 25 percent of people 25 to 34 in California own their own home compared to 37 percent nationally.

Ways toward a new bust?

We could be setting the stage for a new kind of housing debacle — and not only here. Higher interest rates tend to undermine the viability of high-priced markets in particular. There are other clear disturbing signs, such as the rising percentage of buyers paying 45 percent of their income on mortgages; the number is four times the percentage in 2010. Then there’s the return of the home equity loan market back to its pre-recession level.

The rising cost and declining sales also reflect to some extent the inability of governments and developers to catch new demographic trends. Instead of flocking permanently into dense cities, more millennials are following in the footsteps of previous generations by locating on the periphery of major metropolitan areas and sunbelt cities, most of which are simply agglomerations of suburbs. Over the last year, according to the Census, the ranks of renters decreased while homeownership increased 1.8 million. A recent National Homebuilders Association report shows more than two in three Millennials, including most of those living in cities, would prefer a house in the suburbs, findings confirmed as well by the Conference Board and Nielsen.

By trying to stamp out suburbia, California is playing fire with its own future. Already the price differences between our state and the rest of the country are greatest, notes demographer Wendell Cox, at the lower, “starter” end of the market. The state, sadly, seems to have little interest in meeting the demand of young families, posing a long-term demographic threat.

A different kind of debacle?

Instead, we may be overbuilding small expensive apartments. Already many analyses show that the apartment markets here, and elsewhere, including places like New York and Seattle, are doing worse than before, with rents stagnating or even declining.

Other factors such as the gradual withdrawal of Chinese buyers, in large part due to Beijing’s own financial problems, could play a role, particularly in places like California and New York. Now, for the first time in recent memory, there are more Chinese sellers than buyers as sales falter. Ironically new measures to address the housing shortfall, notably rent control and inclusionary zoning, may help some people, but will likely further slow new construction.


So what would a new bust look like? Some of the same people — middle- and working-class families as well as minorities — would be hurt. But the biggest pain may be felt more in expensive speculative markets like Manhattan, San Francisco, West Los Angeles or downtown rather than in the distant, and disdained, outer suburbs. To borrow from the late Yogi Berra, it could be “déjà vu all over again,” but with a somewhat different cast of victims.


Joel Kotkin is the R.C. Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism

Pervasive Suburbanization: The 2017 Data

in Housing, Suburbs, Uncategorized /by Wendell Cox

The most recent Census Bureau population estimates have made it clear that migration to the suburbs and away from urban cores has accelerated dramatically since the early years of the Great Recession (see here and here). More detailed national data, from the Current Population Survey (CPS) indicates that moving to the suburbs is pervasive (CPS is a joint program of the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics). The CPS data is much higher level geographically than similar data Census Bureau and Internal Revenue Service migration, providing no state, county or metropolitan area breakdowns. CPS data is national, and divided further into the 4 regions (Northeast, Midwest, South and West) and nine divisions (New England, Mid-Atlantic, East North Central, West North Central, South Atlantic, East South Central, West South Central, Mountain and Pacific).

Domestic Migration: Plus 2.3 Million to Suburbs, Minus 2.3 Million from “Principal Cities”

Between 2016 and 2017, more than 2.3 million (net) US residents moved into what the CPS classifies as. “suburbs.” At the same time, 2.3 million (net) moved away from “principal cities,” with most of their population in those classified as “central cities” (urban core cities) before 2003 (Figure 1). In fact this approach probably under-estimates the extent of migration into suburbs and out of the urban cores of metropolitan areas. This is because many principal cities are, in fact suburbs whose high employment levels, not their overwhelmingly suburban and automobile oriented urban form, determines their classification. For example, suburban principal cities, such as Plano, Texas, Mesa, Arizona, Bellevue, Washington, Sandy Springs, Georgia, and many others are likely to be not losing domestic migrants, while the suburbs with smaller employment bases around them are gaining. Indeed, many non-historical core principal cities did not even exist when the great post-World War II automobile -oriented suburbanization started and were some were primarily rural into the 1960s.

The move to the suburbs was so pervasive that CPS found gains in 89 of 90 categories. The principal cities, on the other hand lost in 89 of 90 categories (Figure 2), which are organized into total, sex, age, race and Hispanic origin, relationship to householder (formerly called “head of household), educational attainment, marital status, nativity, tenure, poverty status, income, labor force status, major occupation and major industry.

This article summarizes some of the most important findings from the latest CPS data.

Millennials: Moving to the Suburbs

One of the most enduring urban myths has been that millennials are rejecting the suburbs for the inner cities. We have previously shown that the largest percentage of millennial growth is in the suburbs not the urban core. According to CPS, those aged 20 to 29 are net moving in large numbers away from the principal cities, even including some largely suburban cities, (minus 329,000) and to the suburbs (plus 383,000)

All Other Ages: Moving to the Suburbs

Millennials are not alone. It is well known that the more family friendly characteristics of the suburbs attract people with young children. This is obvious by the 165,000 children aged 1 to 4 who are moved to the suburbs by their parents, compared to the 222,000 who are moved away from the principal cities (the balance of 57,000 were moved to non-metropolitan areas).

An even bigger gap is noted among children aged 5 to 9, 292,000 of whom were moved to the suburbs compared to the 334,000 moved away from the principal cities (and the 42,000 moved to non-metropolitan areas). This is consistent with the perception that core cities generally have inferior public schools, inducing parents to move to the suburbs or beyond when it comes time to enroll their children in schools.

The largest suburban advantage occurs in the 30 to 44 age category, when households are often starting families. Suburbs attract an astounding 683,000 domestic migrants in this category, while the principal cities lose 712,000. The suburban gains continue, but at a lower rate, as people reach 45 to 64 years of age. Suburbs gained 371,000 net domestic migrants, while principal cites lost 347,000.

The often suggested view that retirees are flocking to the inner cities is countered by the reality that in 2017, 104,000 aged 65 to 74 moved to the suburbs, while 78,000 moved away from the principal cities. The numbers moving are small since older people are increasingly aging in place, which for most is in the suburbs.

In every age category, then, the suburbs gain net domestic migrants, while the principal cities lose (Figure 3).

Minorities: Moving to the Suburbs

Perhaps the most important trends relate to ethnicity and race. The early post-World War II suburban migration might be characterized as “white flight,” but in recent decades minorities have been migrating to the suburbs. It is no surprise that White Non-Hispanics migrated strongly to the suburbs (plus 1,121,000) and away from the principal cities (minus 1,069,000). But Hispanics migrated even more strongly to the suburbs (plus 722,000) and away from the principal cities (minus 748,000). Similarly, African-Americans migrated to the suburbs (303,000) and away from the principal cities (minus 333,000). Asians, though a much smaller share of the population, also chose the suburbs overwhelmingly (plus 103,000) and abandoned the principal cities (minus 62,000).

Overall, among those who are minority or mixed race, 1.3 million moved to the suburbs, while 1.3 million moved away from the principal cities (Figure 4).

All Levels of Educational Attainment: Moving to the Suburbs

Regardless of educational attainment, net domestic migration is positive to the suburbs and negative to the principal cities (Figure 5). In relation to the total population of the educational attainment categories, the largest suburban over principal city gain was among those with bachelor’s degrees, while the smallest was among those without high school educations (Figure 6).

All Income Levels: Moving to the Suburbs

People of all income levels are moving to the suburbs. The highest income category shows the most significant movement into the suburbs and away from the principal cities (Figure 7)

Regardless of Poverty Status: Moving to the Suburbs

Both people above and below the poverty line exhibited strong net domestic migration to the suburbs and away from the principal cities. Approximately 85 percent of domestic migrants to the suburbs were above the poverty line (Figure 8). Our last review of central city versus suburban poverty showed that urban core poverty rates were double those of the suburbs.

Native Born and Foreign Born: Moving to the Suburbs

Both the native born and foreign born population exhibited strong net domestic migration to the suburbs and away from the principal cities (Figure 9).

Why People Continue to Move to the Suburbs

CPS summarizes reasons for moving, indicating that 43.0 percent of moves are housing related, 27.9 are family related, and 18.5 percent are employment related. Other reasons account for 10.6 percent. Housing related reasons would include moving to larger houses with yards, especially for their children. Family reasons would include households moving to school districts perceived likely to provide better educations to their children. Finally, employment reasons doubtless includes many households that move to be closer to jobs. All of these reasons favor the suburbs, where the houses are bigger and more spacious, where schools are perceived to be better and where 80 percent of the jobs are located.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), Senior Fellow for Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California). He is co-author of the “Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey” and author of “Demographia World Urban Areas” and “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.” He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.