One Million Acres & No Zoning

by Lars Lerup

Routinely dismissed as ‘mere sprawl’, the suburban city is the black hole of recent urbanism, absorbing human energy and resources but seldom revealing the principles of its operation. For the past 20 years Lars Lerup has explored Houston as its prototype. In this book he broadly approaches this complex conurbation so as to develop a vocabulary to interpret its urban forms. Loved by its inhabitants, defined by huge potential and difficult problems, Lerup’s Houston is a test-case for twenty-first-century urbanism and our understanding of unregulated cities everywhere.

273 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[Pam]

The title cracks me up. And the illustrations. And this funny paragraph that I opened the book to in the store, which sealed the deal on this impulse buy:
"Leaf-Blower
The hysterical rattle of a two-stroke engine and the reek of fuel disguise the emblematic significance of the leaf-blower - best seen in action blowing leaves and other vegetal matter onto the neighbor's property. The utter futility of erasing any sign of decay, the obsession with 'clean', the reckless expenditure of energy and an absurd reliance on technology to accomplish the simplest of tasks: ultimately the suburban arsenal of behavioural attitudes comprises 'passing of the buck'. Together with its operator, the leaf-blower forms the most synthetic 'weapon' of suburban existance."

I had a hard time getting into the book becasue I couldn't get his angle, or which 'side' he is on. It turns out this was intentional as he began the book trying to be objective but when he got stuck changed tack and started to write about 'his' Houston. So once he did that I could follow along better.

Throughout the book I struggled with his writing style. Lerup is not a native English speaker, but I don't think that's to blame for his vague sentences. He is very clever and insightful, but I had to reread many sentences because I got to the ends of them and had no idea what he just said, even when I knew the definitions of the words. His writing style is like his illustrations- sketchy and hard to pin down, but when taken as a whole a general picture emerges. However, I even had a hard time understanding some of his diagrams- I have an idea of what I was looking at, but I don't know if I was correct. Maybe it doesn't matter.

So, getting past esthetics, Lerup argues that Houston is a third kind of settlement- not completely suburban, and definitely not metropolitan, but what he calls the Third City. A network of development and the Holey Plain which is self-organised and operates differently than other cities in America and the western world. I think he finds this to be a fun challange, but he does suggest that his affection for the city is a result of Stockholm Syndrome (see? He's witty. I plan on stealing this joke).

He spends a decent amount of time discussing grand ideas for where the city could go and potentail starting points, which all basically depend on citizens beginng to act like they care because there is no governmental framework which does (that's how other cities function). I am pessimistic about this happening mostly because there is no urgency for Houston to change. But I also think there might be a very high turnover of Houstonians- I don't think people stay here long. And what we consider the greater Houton area is under the jurisdiction of many governments (a point Lerup discusses). It's difficult enough to work with and within one government.

In the end, it did motivate me to start (again) to try to like this place a little more (but that could also be blamed on the sub-90 degree Fahrenheit weather which coincided with my finishing the book. There's no way of knowing).

I wish I had time to finish the book before going to Lerup's lecture, because I would like him to clarify some things. The lecture was a good synopsis of mostly the middle section of the book where he describes what he calls 'Alphabet City' which are just names for aspects of Houston that are not all found in oth
er cities.

[Coulter]

This was a Christmas present from my father and stepmother, and it really ought to have been the perfect gift: I'm fascinated with the growth of Houston and urban planning generally; as a bonus, it's written by a professor in the Rice Architecture School. But this was the most vapid piece of writing I've come across in a long time - and I have to read a lot of content-free lit. crit. for my job. A typical quotation: "To complicate things, the downtown megashape is not the only megashape in the metropolitan field. Houston's zoohemic canopy (an urban forest of trees of varying species, size and maturity that together with the flat ground plane forms a potentially 'enchanted suburban forest' that I call the fieldroom) is so dominant that it too is a type of megashape." The main thing I took away from sentences like this is that my favorite xkcd dictum applies to non-fiction as well.

Still, it gets a second star for having some entertaining drawings.

[Booth Babcock]

Should have been amazing -- a moderately theoretical history of Houston told by an immigrant engineer turned urban theorist, who teaches at Rice? And it includes the author's illustrations throughout? Cool. But I found it hard to get through, it pretty much wanders aimlessly, the theory seems shallow and half-baked, and I can't imagine any of it meaning much of anything to someone not from Houston. I really do think the author gets it, but he seems to be having trouble expressing it.