Tag Archives: Silicon Valley

Are evolving suburbs really suburban anymore?

Silicon Valley google map

Leigh Gallagher is in the news with a provocatively titled book, The End of the Suburbs. Gallagher writes about the shifting geography of the American Dream from suburbia to growing cities and walkable places. In a summary for Time, Gallagher writes:

A major change is underway in where and how we are choosing to live. In 2011, for the first time in nearly a hundred years, the rate of urban population growth outpaced suburban growth, reversing a trend that held steady for every decade since the invention of the automobile. In several metropolitan areas, building activity that was once concentrated in the suburban fringe has now shifted to what planners call the “urban core,” while demand for large single-family homes that characterize our modern suburbs is dwindling. This isn’t just a result of the recession. Rather, the housing crisis of recent years has concealed something deeper and more profound happening to what we have come to know as American suburbia. Simply speaking, more and more Americans don’t want to live there anymore.

The American suburb used to evoke a certain way of life, one of tranquil, tree-lined streets, soccer leagues and center hall colonials. Today’s suburb is more likely to evoke endless sprawl, a punishing commute, and McMansions.

A few comments pop into mind:

This isn’t a new idea: Just googling some articles in recent years that I remember off the top of my head:

And I’m sure there are countless others, along with corroborating evidence from declining VMT, growing urban populations, and so on.

‘Suburb’ isn’t a descriptive term: Is Cambridge, MA suburban? Is all within the city limits of Houston, TX urban? The term could refer to the type of built environment, or to the nature of the political jurisdiction in relation to others in the region.

Suburbs are already evolving: Dan Reed highlights urbanizing suburban jurisdictions; Richard Layman describes potential paths for evolution; Josh Dzieza wonders if urbanizing suburbs might take some of the sting out of the culture wars and rhetorical battles between city-dwellers and suburbanites.

Suburban evolution isn’t a new thing: Alexis Madrigal offers a story about searching for the landmarks of Silicon Valley, finding that the center of a new industrial revolution is now a self-storage complex. Part of the myth of Silicon Valley is about a new industry emerging from agricultural landscapes; clean, new industry. But as Madrigal explains, the industry wasn’t that clean, and the pattern isn’t that new:

In our Internet-happy present, it’s easy to forget that up until the mid-1980s, Silicon Valley was an industrial landscape. Hundreds of manufacturers lined the streets of Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, Cupertino, Mountain View, and San Jose. This is the Silicon Valley when AMD, Apple, Applied Materials, Atari, Fairchild, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, National Semiconductor, Varian Associates, Xerox, and hundreds of other companies made their products right here in the Bay.

Now, with most of the production shifted overseas, the land uses have changed accordingly. Nonetheless, production of semiconductors and microchips is not without pollution, and leaking chemicals have littered the Valley with Superfund sites:

In contemporary descriptions of Silicon Valley as it was being built, every writer seems to note the absence of smoke stacks. A miracle! A clean industry! A better industrial capitalism!

The aesthetic was intentional. These factories of the future were designed to look like buildings on a college campus, which is to say, Stanford. The Stanford Industrial Park (later, the Stanford Research Park) set the visual standard from its founding in 1951 onward. There were rules governing which parts of the industrial apparatus could be visible, so as not to detract from the idea that these were locations for scholars, not laborers.

“Companies had to follow strict building codes, which included ‘complete concealment’ of things like smokestacks, generators, transformers, ducts, storage tanks, and air conditioning equipment,” environmental historian Aaron Sachs wrote in 1999.

Other municipalities wanted to encourage similar developments, and as Sachs concludes, “Stanford Industrial Park essentially replicated itself several times over–each time spurring the construction of new expressways and strip malls in neighboring areas.” What began as Stanford dean and Silicon Valley godfather Fred Terman’s dream to build “a community of technical scholars” in pleasant industrial parks became the architectural standard for the entire high-tech manufacturing world.

But the manicured look and feel had consequences. Storage tanks were placed underground, out of sight and out of mind. Until suddenly, in 1981, people in south San Jose living near Fairchild Semiconductor and IBM realized they were drinking water contaminated by the two firms’ manufacturing plants.

Several patterns of note: the influence of codes, unintended consequences, agglomeration economies, and the impacts of growth. And, hidden within the stereotypical suburbia is a more complex, evolved place:

What we see here is not simple suburbia. This is a landscape that industrialists, government regulators, and city planners sacrificed to create the computer industry that we know today. It has as much in common with a coal mine or the Port of Oakland as it does with Levittown or Google’s campus. All of which should lead us to a simple conclusion: the Silicon Valley of today is a post-industrial landscape, like the lofts near downtowns across the country, like Lansing, Michigan, like Williamsburg, like Portland’s Pearl District.

What we see now is a surreal imitation of the suburban industrial parks and commercial spaces of yesteryear. They’re built atop the past’s mistakes, erasing them from our maps and eyes.

The evolution of suburbia isn’t new. And Madrigal’s article is well worth the read.

Shaping Silicon Valley

Roosevelt Island Tram - CC image from The Eyes of New York

A couple of items that came across the internet about technology, innovation, the economy, and urban form:

Tech & the City

Nancy Scola pens a long piece in Next American City about the future of the technology industry in the city.  The piece looks at how policy can shape an industry cluster – or not.  New York’s tech university on Roosevelt Island is a key piece of the puzzle in helping shape an industry within a city:

Fortunately, by the late 2000s, the tech sector was on an upswing. Venture capitalists were nosing around the city. Talk of a “Silicon Alley 2.0” was in the air. Start-ups were starting up in DUMBO. But, says Pinsky, when the city held hundreds of conversations on economic development with everyone from academics to business leaders to community groups, they came to the realization that while there was, in raw terms, a good amount of applied science activity afoot, New York City’s economy is a huge one. There simply wasn’t the critical mass needed to create the sort of idea sharing and hopping from company to company that helped spread innovation in Silicon Valley. They concluded that there was a dearth of trained technologists able to do the heavy lifting.

Now, far be it from me to dissuade an investment in education – but there’s a concern about focusing too closely on chasing a specific sector rather than setting the rules and conditions to be ripe for innovation:

So what worries her? It’s the way government is getting involved. Along with Stanford, Silicon Valley had a mess of government contracts in the 1950s, particularly in the fields of naval research and aerospace. “Silicon Valley was never a purpose-built science city,” says O’Mara. “Dwight Eisenhower didn’t say ‘We’re going to build a tech capital on the west coast.’” Sure, there was a ton of money injected into the region. But there were few strings attached. It was pure profit that went to building out iconic tech companies like Hewlett-Packard and Xerox PARC. “In a way, it was a happy accident,” says O’Mara. “Part of my skepticism about this whole enterprise is a belief that government can have this great market impact. In the case of technology, it’s just a little more slippery and unpredictable.”

One common theme is the rejection of the idea that the strip-mall office park of Silicon Valley is critical to the kind of technological innovation seen there – that linkage of form and innovation is spurious:

Cities have, of course, made a comeback in recent decades, and much modern thinking — O’Mara points to Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From — “really emphasizes the urbanity of innovation,” with the accidental encounters and collision of ideas that are the product of density seen as creative fodder.

The Boston area’s high-tech corridor that grew along Route 128 pioneered what became known as the East Coast model: Giant firms that did everything in-house. But in New York, real estate costs alone might encourage that tech firms stay small, says O’Mara, in keeping with “the other industries that have been in New York for so long that have a similar small-scale communitarian [culture] — the creative industries, fashion, media…” In that way, even a tiny start-up can be part of something bigger: An industry, an economy, a city.

Speaking of the building that will house your enterprise…

A couple of items on Facebook’s planned Frank Gehry HQ.  First, from Allison Arieff in the NYT:

The choice of Gehry might have been “game-changing” — to use the parlance of the start-up community — two decades ago. Today, it’s a safe bet, representing Facebook’s true transition from rogue start-up to the establishment (no matter how strenuously they might dispute that designation).

Writing at the New Republic, Lydia DePillis (she’s back) sounds off similarly:

That’s a frustrating response. As shrouded in moss as it might be, the 10-acre campus is fundamentally no different from the tech parks of old: Single-use, completely isolated, and shamefully wasteful of the kind of space that commands such a premium on the other end of the Bay. The designs highlight the accommodations they’ve made for pedestrian and bike access—like an underground tunnel to its other campus across the highway!—but only glancingly mention the subterranean lake of parking, with 1504 spots for a projected 2800 employees (that’s a really high ratio, even for a suburban office). The horizontal layout might comport with Mark Zuckerberg’s conception of a social universe in which relationships exist independently of any physical reality. But from a practical standpoint, it ignores one of the most important qualities of a creative place: Density, activity, and exposure to the ferment of ideas.

Arieff notes that the designer and the client both want to foster the kind of interaction and proximity that comes naturally in cities – taking note of the fact that Facebook has no offices for anyone, regardless of rank – but something is still missing:

But so very unlike a city, the New Urban-ish campus is populated not by folks from different walks of life but solely by Facebook employees. For all the talk in startup circles of “serendipitous interaction,” it’s not the sort celebrated by Jane Jacobs. There may be a place to get a latte there but there is no Third Place, those accessible anchors of community life like bars, farmer’s markets or barber shops that help foster civic engagement and interaction with both regulars and new faces. Yes, it’s stating the obvious, but Facebook workers interact with other Facebook workers. There’s next to nil outside influence to be found on a corporate campus. Indeed, many tech employees (Facebook’s and others) have observed that many of their most meaningful encounters occur not at work but while waiting on city streets for the now-ubiquitous corporate shuttles from San Francisco that take them south to Silicon Valley.

Now, it’s tricky to separate some of the urban planning issues (transportation access, urban design) from the interior design ones (office layouts, use of internal space) from the economic geography issues (Silicon Valley is dense, even if filled with stereotypical office parks).  That said, the themes are interesting to track.  Add in the region-wide issues of housing costs and other drags on the local economy, and things can get murky quickly.

It’s not like the denizens of Silicon Valley are happy with the built environment…

Two pieces in San Jose’s MetroActive (the intro, the full piece) lament the lack of urbanism and the impact it has on innovation in San Jose.  The author, Michael Malone, talks about San Jose’s inability to embrace the values of Silicon Valley while similarly stumbling in creating a big, authentic city:

And there is one more thing I would expect our elected leaders to know something about: Entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship built Silicon Valley; entrepreneurship is the source of this valley’s economic power; entrepreneurship is this valley’s only hope of a prosperous future. San Jose claims to be the capital of Silicon Valley—and Silicon Valley is the world’s capital of entrepreneurship . . . so why is it that the leaders of this city appear to have no real understanding of entrepreneurship?: Who does it. How it happens. And what it needs to survive.

I know they don’t understand because their actions tell me so. Here are three truths about Silicon Valley entrepreneurs:

1. The big fancy buildings and famous company names don’t matter. The future is in the hands of men and women working on business plans in Denny’s and Starbucks.

2. Entrepreneurs don’t need support. They need benign neglect.

3. You can’t pick winners in advance. There are too many variables. Winners pick themselves.

Compare that with the approaches debated in New York.

Instead, you give the start-ups cheap office or warehouse space, tax breaks and the fastest broadband you can deliver. Then you get the hell out of the way and trust them to do the rest. Ninety percent of them will fail, but that last 10 percent will change the world—and the fortunes of the city of San Jose.

“Giving” cheap office space might not need an actual subsidy – and it likely speaks to a broader policy change that follows on the work of the Econourbanists.