A CASE FOR EMERGENCE.

Strong Towns contributor Norman Petersman asks, "What happens when the teacup cracks?"  It's a metaphor to get people thinking about excessively planned urban, suburban, or exurban development.  Excessive planning fails, but regular readers of Cold Spring Shops know we quibble with Strong Towns on the meaning of "finished state."  "It might be more subtle than that: the tract houses, supermarkets, and shopping centers might have had some evolutionary advantage, but when the Powers that Be decided to pick winners, bad stuff happened."  It's hard for Powers that Be to square two simple maxims.  "No neighborhood should be subject to radical change.  No neighborhood should be exempt from change."

That's where the cracking teacup comes in.

Think about a matching set of china. When you first buy it, everything feels right. The plates stack perfectly and the cups rest cleanly in their saucers. The glaze shines and nothing is chipped. It feels finished and, best of all, complete.

Master planned neighborhoods are built on that same instinct. The houses match. The setbacks line up. The landscaping is coordinated. Everything arrives at once, polished and cohesive. It looks intentional and it all feels safe.

Our zoning codes reflect that mindset. They assume neighborhoods should be delivered as unified products and then protected from disruption. There can be minor variations, of course. A slightly different model. A slightly larger footprint. But it is all part of the same approved set.

In a recent presentation, I talked about a master planned community in Santa Clarita, California with nearly 3,000 homes, no retail, and the primary access being dependent on the I-5 freeway. At one point I said, “I’d like to meet the master who planned this, because it’s not very masterful.”

It got a laugh but the point was serious.

When we build complete neighborhoods all at once, we also lock in their limitations. If there is no corner store in the original plan, adding one later becomes a battle. If daily life depends on a freeway, that dependency is baked in. The neighborhood is treated like a finished product, not a living place.

It's the "locking in of limitations" that might give us Karen in the homeowner association or the sudden exodus from a subdivision that has lost its usefulness.  Or think about that tea set.  What happens when one of the saucers chips or somebody drops a cup?  Must you rush out and get a new set of "the good china" or hope the pattern is still in production in order to make it whole?  Do you therefore treat "the good china" as "tableware never to be used?"  Think about a recent American Ancestors survey about china sets, in which participants have the option of ticking "I feel burdened by owning one or more china sets or china pieces owned by an earlier generation."

So it might go with the old neighborhood.  "The matching tea set looks perfect on day one. But when it chips, the flaw stands out. When it dates, the whole thing feels dated."

True though that might be, there might be more flexibility even in a rigorously planned and zoned suburb than there is in the china hutch.

None of these, though, were built to a finished state.  "In the same way that the American High built environment emerged piecemeal, whatever comes next is also likely to take shape piecemeal, although some experiments might be more successful than others."  So, too, to whatever adaptations to changing land prices or improved electronic commerce or delivery drones flying off trains comes next.

Emergence will still lead to better outcomes than radical change or stasis.