For as long as anyone can remember, the Arizona Republic has been part of the big booster engine in Phoenix. Lately, under pressure from falling revenue and corporate owners, the paper’s bosses have demanded that the news “say something positive about the area.” So it wasn’t surprising to see a Feb. 18th article pimping the Williams-Gateway hinterlands, nominally a part of Mesa, as a “brand new city” on the way.
Jim Tinson, identified by the article as a Yale-educated, New York-based architect and urban planner working on the project, said “This is an opportunity of international significance.” The idea is to create an “aerotropolis,” with the city surrounding the “maturing” Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport.
The article goes on, “Planners stress that the current economic downturn and housing slump would not affect the overall long-term vision, which they expect to unfold over decades and through multiple economic cycles.”
Of course, the planners have no stake in telling unpleasant truths to the power that pays them.
Indeed, there are many reasons to suspect that the "current … housing slump" represents a secular, rather than a cyclical, change. Rising energy prices, water shortages and global warming are all making far-flung suburbia more difficult to sustain.
It would be nice to imagine this brand new city would be geared to that future. But it sounds a lot like the edge-city suburbia that grew up in the era of cheap gasoline, different global realities, different mindsets. I doubt any of the powers would look at a truly sustainable, car-free new city, as is being built in Dubai. In Phoenix, planners and architects’ dreams somehow always devolve into the same old automobile slum schlock.
The Gateway area presents its own challenges. It is far from most areas of the Phoenix area and difficult to get to. Even with some freeway access, it lacks any realistic chance of having rail or transit connections. It has little chance of gaining much airline service, because Sky Harbor is already the close-in, relatively inexpensive airport. The big employers it hopes to attract would depend on private capital that can go anywhere. It hardly has the dynamics to become the next Irvine Ranch. Sprawl in the region is already adding terrible infrastructure costs, which are deferred while the developers profit. The region can’t dig out of this hole. The inability of Mesa to be a big city only adds to the implausibility of the scenario (which the article and hilarious/tragic blog comments allude to).
The sprawl machine is capable of throwing up lots of subdivisions, in "master-planned communities" divorced from real cities or community — maybe; we’ll see how this downturn really shakes out. Places like the fringes of metro Phoenix are the epicenter of the crisis. But even if everything returns to the normal self-destructive sprawl building, can you imagine Mesa retirees wanting to live near a busy airport?
Yet metro Phoenix goes on with the next big land grab, as if nothing has changed, as if the next 30 years will be a reprise of the past 30. Everything in the region’s history shows that people will keep moving there. So "sustainability" means finding every way, no matter how costly, to keep doing the same things the same way.