City Slickers
Author Matthew Stadler is coming to Seattle's Town Hall next week to talk about a topic that probably will make some folks wince. His claim: suburbs increasingly embody urbane values -- in particular, economic and cultural diversity -- that are vanishing from the center city. He sees this trend in the riotous hodgepodge that's grown up in the inner ring of suburbs surrounding Seattle:
Anyone interested in the city—in the close press of strangers, in surprise, class-mixing, cosmopolitanism—has long since left the bourgeois pleasure grounds of the center to explore the urban landscapes springing up in the margins of the metropolitan area. In Seattle, this is as easy as a bus ride to White Center, where Hispanic and Southeast Asian mix with the remaining Scots and Irish, then south into close-packed Des Moines (the state's fourth most densely populated city), then east through Tukwila and Renton, with its huge Sikh population, then north into Kirkland (home of the region's only Bollywood cinema) and Bellevue, where the Crossroads shopping center has made a bustling market square inside an old mall—a culinary and cultural entrepôt that draws the Eastside's considerable Persian population to mix with Japanese, Korean, Anglo, and the area's upper-class South Indians, who want little to do with their Punjabi cousins in Renton.
Stadler lays out his thesis quite nicely here. He's a skilled and smooth writer, and while it would be easy to caricature his perspective as reflexively anti-city (or, really, anti-urban elite), that's a mistake. He's making a more subtle point: the old idea that "city" and "suburb" are separate and distinct entities -- either physically or culturally -- no longer holds water. He finds common intellectual ground with a German architect and planner, Thomas Sieverts (more here), who rejects the urban-suburban-exurban distinction in favor of the notion of the "in-between city," a single entity that encompasses the entire built environment in all its permutations.
Ok, that's fine -- as far as it goes. Obviously, the political boundaries separating "city" from "suburb" are arbitrary, and perhaps not all that helpful in understanding an ever-changing metropolis.
But the unsettling thing about Stadler's writing is that -- as far as I can tell -- some of his facts are simply wrong.
