Urbanologist Preaches Power of the Suburbs
Christopher Leinberger loves getting stuck in traffic jams. Sitting motionless on a freeway, watching the sun eat at a thousand paint jobs, can be instructive, he says.
“Traffic jams tell you a lot about employment patterns,” according to Leinberger, the head of a national, Beverly Hills-based consulting firm that specializes in urban problems.
Employment patterns are just his starting point, of course. Leinberger, who has a master of business administration in strategic planning from Harvard, throws in some observations about evolving residential neighborhoods, adds a dollop of information about new freeway construction and a dash of data on office occupancy and, voila , he pulls out some provocative conclusions about the broad sweep of the American megalopolis.
That, he said, is his real interest: the changing shape of the American city.
“The cities,” said Leinberger, 36, a trim man with squeaky-clean good looks and the durable-looking jaw of a middleweight contender, “are literally turning themselves inside out these days.”
For the last year or so, Leinberger has been spreading his ideas about the new “urban villages” in such publications as Atlantic and the Wall Street Journal. He often uses his hometown of Pasadena, which he calls a textbook urban village, as a model of the phenomenon.
In a nutshell, Leinberger thinks that the big, brawling cities of the past are losing their clout to suburban competitors. An alliance of white-collar workers and major central city employers, both of whom are in search of more tranquil work surroundings and less grueling commutes, is guiding the American workplace out of the cities and into the suburbs, he said, and people, money and power are following.
The result, from New York to Los Angeles, has been the growth of a series of mutually interdependent “urban villages,” suburban concentrations of office buildings, retailing outlets and cultural institutions.
Los Angeles, with its freeway life style, has been on the cutting edge of the urban village trend, Leinberger said. “It’s the classic example--the most evolved of all the cities,” he said. Leinberger counts 16 urban village cores, including Pasadena and, down the road, West Covina.
Other fully developed urban villages, Leinberger said, are Burbank, Westwood, Glendale, Costa Mesa/Irvine/Newport Beach and Beverly Hills.
What is the driving force behind the phenomenon? A shifting economy, new technology a dream of civilized living, Leinberger said.
“People have an ideal image of suburban living and urban conveniences,” he said, sitting in a conference room in his office with maps and charts spread before him on a table.
‘We Tell Them Where to Build’
His firm, Robert Charles Lesser & Co., serves clients like James Rouse, the developer of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor and New York’s South Street Seaport; Wayne Ratkovich, developer of the Wiltern Center, and the city of Pasadena.
“Basically, we tell them where to build,” said Leinberger, the firm’s president.
“Everybody wants to live on a five-acre lot, five minutes from the regional shopping mall and within walking distance of both the job and the symphony,” he said. A combination of circumstances has placed the dream within reach of many.
Back to the traffic jams. In recent years, Leinberger has been watching the Foothill Freeway.
“In the morning, during the rush hour, it’s pretty much backed up to the 605,” he said. “That’s about seven miles. But, if you’re going west, the dividing line seems to be Lake Avenue. After that, the traffic opens up.”
The point is that Pasadena, once almost exclusively a bedroom community, has become a major destination for commuters, Leinberger said. The city’s planning office estimates that the daily commuters include about 25,000 workers leaving Pasadena every morning and 60,000 arriving from outside the city.
“Ten or 15 years ago, Pasadena was a hick town with no business base and an image closely associated with the ‘little old lady from Pasadena,’ ” Leinberger said. Now, he said, the city is a major concentration of employment for companies providing financial and insurance services, the focus of cultural and business life for the western San Gabriel Valley and a prestigious address for corporate headquarters.
The city apparently represented the ideal solution for some relocation-minded companies, Leinberger said.
Thousands of workers down the Foothill Freeway, from Arcadia to Glendora, were there to fill the jobs while the presidents and chairmen of boards found executive-class housing west of the Arroyo Seco and in the upscale communities nearby.
The turning point for Pasadena came with the opening of the Foothill Freeway in 1976.
Pasadena’s Savior
“Some people fought it tooth and nail,” Leinberger said, “but it saved Pasadena. Without it, downtown Pasadena would be like San Bernardino, with bums and boarded-up buildings--depressing as hell.”
A series of dramatic post-World War II technological advances also came into play in Pasadena and elsewhere, Leinberger said.
For example, with development of the modern freeway system American workers no longer were bound by fixed-rail transportation or by the proximity to central terminals. Freeways and cars freed the jobs and markets from their urban locations.
And telecommunications--the technology that permits the exchange of masses of information through low-cost telephone hook-ups--allowed big corporations to decentralize.
The changes have been “as radical as the early 19th Century, when the Industrial Revolution changed Philadelphia, New York and Boston from trading centers to centers of production,” Leinberger said.
Fading Big Cities
Fading fast now is the archetypal big city, a once-powerful knot of power and population, with decreasing concentrations of people and influence farther away from the center.
Now, instead of the monolithic city, there is what Leinberger calls a “metroplex of urban villages,” with “nodes” of population and jobs spread through the general metropolis. Most important to the urban village citizens, these new focuses of employment are of human scale, with cultural amenities, restaurants and homes often a stone’s throw away from the workplace.
