"Want to Flee the City for Suburbia? Think Again/The 20th century is full of examples of the false promise of suburban living."

I clicked on that headline in the NYT. It's a column by Annalee Newitz, a science journalist and author of the "Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age."

The 20th century offers object lessons in why fleeing cities for suburban and exurban settings can backfire — even if it seems like a good idea at first. In the early 1900s, many large cities were suffering from the side-effects of rapid industrialization: they were polluted, full of high-density housing with bad sanitation. Crime flourished.... There were disease outbreaks, too... In response, a new wave of utopian thinkers proposed moving to... “the garden city”... As the craze for these British-style garden cities grew in the States, Frank Lloyd Wright wrote about building a uniquely American version. ... Wright argued that the Usonian city wouldn’t be a flight from modernity.... Brand-new inventions like telephones, radio and automobiles meant everyone’s work could be done remotely....

Great! What's the problem? Why isn't this the answer today, when the ability to work remotely is much more well-developed?

20th century suburbia was not "Utopia." There were racially exclusionary policies, the houses were more expensive in reality than in theory, and people needed cars. That's the basis of Newitz's warning about "the false promise of suburban living." She concludes:

Ultimately, the garden city future is a false Utopia. The answer to our current problems isn’t to run away from the metropolis. Instead, we need to build better social support systems for people in cities so that urban life becomes healthier, safer and more sustainable.

Some designers expressed Utopian ideas, but that doesn't mean it had to be Utopia to be worth doing at all. You have to live somewhere, and the alternative is also not Utopia. There's a lot that Newitz isn't saying here. Underlying her conclusions is, I think, a recognition that the cities are in decline — perhaps even approaching a death spiral. For the good of the city and all the people who don't have the means to leave, the more well-off people are encouraged to stay. If they go, the place will collapse. So please, city people with the means to relocate, stay here, keep paying taxes and give your  wealth to the noble cause of making "urban life... healthier, safer and more sustainable."

Neither the city nor suburbia is Utopia, but what happens when the city is virulently dystopian? How long are people supposed to tough it out? Perhaps Newitz's point is only a small one: Don't imagine suburbia to be any better than it is. You're always trading one set of benefits and problems for another.

But you're always taking your own selfish interests into account even as you want to support the good of the group. In a real disaster, of course, you will run. Is the disaster here yet... and when is it too late to run?

But don't you want to be optimistic? Ironically, if you're optimistic about the cities at this point, you're more like the theorists of suburbia, who dreamed of Utopia.