Place Spacings

In 1964, the urban planner Melvin Webber described the “non-place urban realm” as a site of glamorous new networks of telephones, private cars and quick-andeasy mobility. In short, he described suburbia. Charging that city planners were ignoring these dynamic developments in favor of tired and traditional “static concepts,” he encouraged a broader consideration of the urban periphery.

Almost a halfcentury after Webber’s essay, David Kolb hopes to revise the reputation of the suburb — which has gone from bad to worse — with his new book, Sprawling Places. He argues that suburbia might be a place after all; not just commodified or inauthentic, sprawl actually exhibits complexity. Kolb hopes to question easy assumptions about the supposedly “thin” social roles found outside city centers.

On his journey, Kolb packs his suitcase with all the tools of his training, accessorized by his personal interests. As emeritus philosophy professor at Bates College, he has made a project of considering how history and the present interact, and sees architecture and urbanism as the physical manifestations of this dialogue. His book begins by challenging the dichotomies of most critiques of sprawl (such as “place” versus “non-place”), since he believes these terms oversimplify the realities. Spatial complexity appears, he argues, when a place’s physical structure and social norms are in conversation, when it is subject to continuous debate and freedom of interpretation or when it makes external connections through the Internet, politics and beyond.

Kolb then turns to another site of designer’s disgust — “themed places” — which range from Epcot Center to Irish pubs. Such sites require a “doubled inhabitation,” where users enjoy the fantasy but also never forget who they really are. While this detour into such daydreamy sites works well on its own, its inclusion may also blur the reader’s emerging map of what places Kolb sees as “sprawling,” since themed places might also be found a city center or a small town

Among those sitting in Kolb’s passenger seat are Henri Lefebvre, Manuel Castells and Frank Lloyd Wright, and he stops off everywhere from the planned community of Årsta, Sweden, to the Hello Kitty theme park in Tokyo to identify places that have earlier been labeled merely inauthentic. Given such breadth, Kolb’s crescendo to a universal “suburb” that turns out to be American in general and New Urbanist in particular is somewhat surprising. That other responses might be required in, for instance, the periphery of Paris or Jakarta, is not considered. While explicit efforts to rehabilitate New

Urbanism might be regarded as provocative (the residents of Disney’s Celebration are portrayed as an activist group), places with less official status, such as parking lots, are said to lack social complexity. But what happens when a parking lot is regularly used for a farmers’ or flea market? Do social roles remain “thin”? This restricted view sometimes reproduces the myopia that Kolb claims to challenge. And whom is this book addressing? It is a manifesto on “place,” but it also acts as a manual. Kolb comments on architecture, suggesting “adding niches or low walls” to buildings, but such cursory attention to proposals for practice and policy, and the book’s lack of illustration, do not suggest an appeal to practitioners. Likewise, Kolb calls for non-professionals
to create complexity through “bricolage,” but then suggests changes to “the length of blocks,” which seems out of their potential domain. Clues to solving this conundrum may be found on Kolb’s companion website, www.dkolb.org/sprawlingplaces.

Perhaps fittingly, the bullet points, hyperlinks and illustrations on the site achieve a greater synthesis in their fragmented form than in the linear printed version. In Web form, the user can choose among philosophical insights, examples, and proposals, or combine them. Flexible interpretations of sprawl are necessary on a planet that shows no signs of divorcing itself from its cars and suburbs, and Kolb provides some imaginative theoretical tools for reconsidering, with fewer prejudices, both fragmentation and polycentrism. With a work directed toward a more specific audience, and with more global understanding of the suburb as a type, we might have had a better sense of how to refuel for the excursion too.