June 27, 2011 Issue

Due to the postal strike, I’m behind in my New Yorker reading. Even though the mail carriers were legislated back to work last week, the magazine’s June 27th issue still hasn’t arrived in my mailbox. Today, I decided to go online and access the electronic version. Reading the magazine on a computer screen is not nearly as enjoyable as reading it in its tactile paper-and-ink form, but it’ll do in a pinch. The article in the June 27th issue that most struck me is Nicholas Lemann’s “Get Out of Town,” a review of a clutch of recent books about cities and urban planning. Reading Lemann’s engrossing piece, I learned a new word to describe what our cities have become – megaburbs. According to Lemann, “In much of the world, it seems pretty clear that most people who have the chance do leave dense inner cities, while staying in metropolitan areas.” Is this a deplorable trend? I recall David Owen saying a few years ago, in his excellent “Green Manhattan” (The New Yorker, October 18,2004), that population-dense centers such as Manhattan are models for how we should address our environmental ills. Owen characterized sprawling suburbs with their lawns, cars, swimming pools, etc. as environmentally unfriendly. He said,

The environmental challenge we face, at the current stage of our assault on the world’s non-renewable resources, is not how to make our teeming cites more like the pristine countryside. The true challenge is how to make other settled places more like Manhattan.

Nevertheless, Owen’s notion isn't easy to embrace. In the most memorable passage in his piece, Lemann says:

I lived in the suburbs – Pelham, in Westchester County – for twenty-one years, after which my family moved to an apartment in New York City. We’re all intermittently homesick, especially at this time of year, when suburbia feels like the land of fecundity, as green as a jungle, the streets and sidewalks jammed with children playing. Pelham is devoted to a (long) season of life, parenthood. Most people moved there because they couldn’t afford to live decently in the city with children, and, like Frank and April Wheeler in “Revolution Road,” they claimed that they stayed there out of necessity. As time passed, our collective secret became clear. It wasn’t just good public schools and one bedroom per child that kept us in Pelham. We actually liked it – liked the houses, the slower pace, the regular unplanned access to each other. And given the kids, we couldn’t have done all the wondrous things you can do only in cities anyway.

I think the above passage represents how a lot of us feel about life in the city versus life in the suburbs. It helps explain the “megaburbs” phenomenon. I commend Lemann for weaving his personal, suburban slant in with his presentation of the various pro-city theories under review