What does the 21st century city look like?
Many major cities are looking to the past to shape their future. Gainesville should do the same.
What picture pops into your head when you think of a city? I suppose that largely depends on what your experience has been with different cities. Perhaps you think of Singapore and its sometimes crowded but always clean streets despite a lot of people walking everywhere. Or maybe you think of Paris with its ubiquitous six and seven story Hausmann buildings that seem to be almost everywhere in the city core. In Paris, as in Singapore, it’s pretty easy to walk around to get to where you need to be for the most part and when you can’t walk, you can take public transit. Maybe you think of a US city like New York, loud with car noise and tall with skyscrapers, but yes, even there walkable with good transit options for those further places. Perhaps you think of Los Angeles or Atlanta, two large cities similar in the way they’ve been rolled out flat in most directions with cars dominating the landscape.
A lot of those big cities have developed the way they have due to a lot of different factors – top down management by way of zoning ordinances in some areas and some old fashioned creative chaos in others. In the US especially, nothing has had more of an impact on how cities look and feel than the automobile. For a large portion of post-World War 2 America, cities were designed around the car, not the person.
In recent years, a shift in thinking about how we build cities has started to take hold among urbanists and city planners. We’ve realized what a huge mistake it’s been, not just in terms of aesthetics but function, the environment, equity, and health, for cities to cater so much to cars. And so some cities have started to look to the time before cars came to dominate them for inspiration about how they might chart a better, more sustainable future.
In Paris, Mayor Anne Hidalgo, who for my money has been one of the most progressive and productive mayors on the planet during her term, has transformed Paris into a pedestrian and cycling haven. Cars no longer dominate the roads and the air there is cleaner than it’s been in a long time. Paris, like many other places, drew inspiration from the success of Scandinavian cities that showed how great cities can be when they are centered around people instead of cars.
In New York under Eric Adams, a mayor who is notably worse in every fashion than Mayor Hidalgo of Paris, the city is installing protected bike lanes and extending the car-free portions of Broadway Even in historically car-dominated Los Angeles, the city has managed to build 115 miles of metro lines in the last 33 years. That’s a pretty incredible feat given the various challenges, economic and otherwise, of the last 30 years. In Minneapolis, a place with a pretty solid light rail and bus rapid transit system, the city government did away with exclusionary zoning to promote density and affordable housing, making that mass transit even more valuable to the city. Even in small cities like Kenosha, Wisconsin, streetcars have reappeared as people there have wanted more car-free options. From Paris to Los Angeles to Kenosha, city leaders increasingly believe the key to a sustainable 21st century city is to borrow some elements of the 19th century city.
My current home city of Gainesville, Florida, has started to take steps toward a less car-centric future. Gainesville has already explored what light rail might look like, a key first step in actually implementing it in the future, and the city has gotten a little denser and a little more walkable and a little more bike-friendly in spots, mainly near the University of Florida campus. University Avenue, arguably the most important street in Gainesville, will soon undergo a diet by losing a lane of car traffic and gaining a bike lane in some areas. The city’s proposed new comprehensive plan would go along way in getting city leaders to think about equity, public health, and the environment when making big city decisions. It’s exciting to see cities big and small look for ways to drastically improve how people experience them.
Against that backdrop of progress both locally and abroad, a small but vocal group of mostly older homeowners have to come together to look at that more equitable and sustainable future and say basically “nah.” These people are sometimes referred to as NIMBYs (Not In My Backyard) because of their opposition to many new development projects. We have a similar group in Gainesville. Gainesville Neighborhood Voices formed initially to oppose the changes to zoning regulations. To recap, those zoning changes would have allowed for more (and more affordable) smaller homes to be built in almost every neighborhood. Those zoning changes would have brought an end to exclusionary zoning and allowed for two story quadplexes to be built, giving the city some much needed gentle density and opening up some neighborhoods to people who have been excluded from those areas due to racial and socioeconomic reasons. Additionally, those changes would have given homeowners much more flexibility with their land.
Despite a wealth of evidence showing the economic and environmental benefits to ending exclusionary zoning and support for ending it coming from as high up as the White House, the city, having been sued by Gainesville Neighborhood Voices with an assist from the DeSantis Administration, reversed course and reinstated exclusionary zoning. Clearly this is a group with some influence in town, and clearly some members of the city commission could be better informed. I figured I should know more about Gainesville Neighborhood Voices, so I went on their website to learn more about their vision for Gainesville:
The closer people live to each other, the less public infrastructure is needed—fewer roads, shorter utility pipes and lines, etc. The shorter distances are to work, school, shopping, worship, and other daily activities, the less gas is needed for transportation. In addition, when more people live on smaller pieces of land, more greenspace, outside the urban core, can be preserved for farmland or forest. Cities in which people can carry out their lives by walking— without need for car or bus—use less fossil fuel and preserve more open space. (This phenomenon is known as a “20 minute city,” where it takes fewer than 20 minutes, or one mile, to walk to one’s destination.) Smaller historic cities, that developed before fossil fuel-based transit, demonstrate this calculus well.
Color me surprised, but so far, so good, except, it’s a 15 minute city. I’m picking nits. It’s clear this group understands that density carries many environmental, health, and economic benefits. After all, it’s free to walk, but it’s not free to drive a car. At this point in my reading, I’m confused as to why I’m not working with this group.
While many agree on this ideal, and some of us have been lucky enough to live in such cities, Gainesville, is not one of them. Like many 20th century American cities, Gainesville grew too large in area, though not in population, to return to the nostalgic development pattern of a 19th century village.
Oh, there it is. The throwing up of hands and giving up on trying to change for the better. And even worse, the group belittles the work of progressive cities from Oslo to Emeryville, California, as “nostalgic development patterns.” Look, if LA of all places can start to try to have a retro future city, we certainly can here too. Nowhere is as sprawled out as LA and yet, at least they’re trying on transit, if not yet fully on dense housing. Champaign, Illinois, a college city similar in size to Gainesville (also oddly enough, the place Coach Ron Zook went after he was fired from UF), has taken some of the same steps Gainesville has in terms of elimination parking minimums and has gone further in other areas by changing zoning laws to encourage the development of more multifamily housing. Surely we can at least match Champaign’s efforts.
We also have challenges. Our community’s “activity centers,” including UF, downtown, Butler Plaza, North Florida Regional/The Oaks Mall, are too distant to walk from one to the other. We must think about each as a walkable node and consider the neighborhoods within a mile of each as a distinct district. Our public transportation system is under-developed, and heavily reliant on UF students’ fees, which naturally dictate current bus routes. Our school system favors newer, wealthier parts of the city, as do shopping complexes and other shared resources. Unless we simply abandon large portions of our built fabric, we must work with what we have, to envision a community built on our neighborhoods’ unique attributes and strengths, not on an idealized generic no-where-land.
Here again is an acknowledgment from the group of how the status quo sucks. Also, it’s pretty hilarious to think of Butler Plaza as a “walkable node.” It’s a series of giant parking lots with some stores. Walking there is akin to taking your life in your own hands.
The choice presented by the group is to either abandon the “built fabric” or keep things as is. I know there’s some nice language around the status quo about taking advantage of existing neighborhoods, but there are no actual plans or vision beyond thinking of our neighborhoods in context to areas like the Oaks Mall parking lots and the Butler Plaza parking lots and campus and downtown. This choice is false of course. Like all things, cities can change! They change all the time! Paris has changed, New York has changed, LA has changed, Minneapolis has changed, Kenosha has changed!
Gainesville should change too. It has to. We need a more sustainable city and that largely means we need to shift away from car dependency and start creating communities around people. Building infrastructure that depends on a car to get around can exacerbate poverty. No small wonder given that the average price of a used car in the US in June 2023 was roughly $27,000. Car-centric thinking is what gave us Butler Plaza and the large number of shopping centers where stores are hidden behind an acre of parking spaces. And as it turns out, driving, even in electric cars, is pretty bad for the environment, for air quality, and for child safety.
Instead of pretending Butler Plaza is walkable, the city of Gainesville can start promoting ways to make that actually possible by mapping out future road diets and creating more bike and mass transit-oriented infrastructure. We have a duty to future generations to cut down on our carbon footprint and leave things better than we found it. Good news/bad news for my generation: we found things in pretty bad shape so the bar for leaving it better is rather low. And there’s an urgency around change because of the looming problem of climate change. We’re on the clock now. We don’t have time to dither like we did in the past.
I don’t want to paint anyone with a broad brush, but I think there are at least some members of an older generation of homeowners who just can’t fully grasp the various challenges we’re facing on the environment, on basic safety, and on matters of equity because they are removed from seeing those effects up close. And I get it to some degree. I’m a homeowner. I’ve been lucky enough not to struggle with rent now for a while. But I still know people who do. That’s why there are groups who want to change zoning laws to encourage more housing, to build off the successful work of Minneapolis.
I can relate personally to the safety issues. I bike around town a lot, and I think nothing will radicalize you faster than cycling in a place built for cars. You’ll wonder why we give so much to a form of transportation that takes so much away from us. We need to change car-centric infrastructure to reclaim public spaces. Parking lots are ugly. And they’re a huge barrier for people to actually get to the places they want to go. Some folks in town lose their minds when we try to turn a parking lot into housing. That’s so backward. Thankfully there are some groups for people who want to change our streets so that people are put before cars, to cut down on the excessive speeding and to get people to stop looking at big swaths of Gainesville as a means to getting from one side of Alachua County to the other.
With all that we know about how our infrastructure affects so much of our lives and with the effects of climate change being felt more and more each year, I just don’t see how we can be ok with trying to preserve the status quo. Those people who pride themselves on listening to neighborhood voices ought to take a trip down to UF and Santa Fe and talk with the generation that will have to try to clean things up and see how they feel about the status quo.
Gainesville should not be for cars or parking lots or solely for landlords looking to exploit a market inefficiency with low housing supply. Gainesville should be sustainable. Gainesville should be welcoming. Gainesville should be equitable. Gainesville should be for people because people-centric infrastructure and design is the future of every great city.