I have, by now, been to many cities. I have seen pretty, pastel-coloured cities, I have seen grey, skyscraper cities, I have seen cities that were barely worth the name. But Phoenix was something altogether new, unlike anything I’ve encountered before. The huge roads of multiple lanes were more like motorways, and the pavements were usually deserted. The streets were barely streets; there were no terraced houses or high streets that I could see. There were rows of houses, yes, but they were more like the houses of villages or suburbs, each low and squat with a yard or a garden. Just getting anywhere in the huge sprawl took ages. I had already heard of this problem before reaching Phoenix (specifically that it’s particularly pronounced in Los Angeles), which is referred to as American cities not being “walkable”. Across six continents, nowhere else I have seen has this issue of there being such large, unnecessary gaps between buildings, stretching the city into unreasonable lengths.
Turns out that this has deep roots in the American psyche. From the beginning, members of the “Founding Fathers” favoured an agrarian vision for their new nation, and expressed antipathy towards the idea of the dense, bustling cities of Europe. Benjamin Franklin declared that “the great Business of the continent is Agriculture”, George Washington warned that the “tumultuous populace of large cities are ever to be dreaded”, and Thomas Jefferson, similarly, believed that if the population was “plied upon one another in large cities, they will become corrupt as in Europe”. Americans, then and now, celebrated the abundance of space of their country, seized as it was from various Native American groups. The vastness of the country and the availability of land was doubtless one of the main draws for both the early settlers and the later immigrants, their heads filled with hopes of having plentiful land and a large house of their own.
It would have been a justified hope. Houses in America are far larger than in Europe – at an average of 17,000 square feet in 2011, they were almost double the size of the average British house at 900 square feet. The type of property that is prized above all else, emblematic of the American Dream, is the single-family detached house, with either a yard or a garden. In the EU in 2014, the percentage of people who lived in such properties was 34%. In the US, it was 63%. Moreover, the American zoning system, which sets out what category of building is allowed in which part of the city, ensures that swathes of the cities are dedicated to these houses and their gardens. So, the city doesn’t just grow – it sprawls, over miles and miles. Phoenix was founded as a farming town in the desert in the 19th century, taking advantage of the abandoned remnants of a native irrigation system in the desert, only for industrialisation to overtake farming in the 1950s, quadrupling its population to 439,000 before reaching one million people in 1990. Despite the strain it placed on the water supply, the expanse of large houses and the empty spaces between them kept spreading across the desert.
The car played a key part in shaping this expansion in the latter half of the 20th century, as it did in cities across the US. Between the Second World War and the 21st century, the push to create interstate highways led to the demolition of entire neighbourhoods and further facilitated the flight to the spacious suburbs, to the point that by 2000, more people lived in the suburbs than in the cities themselves. It seems safe to say that the car is generally assumed to be the main method of transport in modern America. In 2022, 91.7% of American households owned at least one car, compared to 78% in the UK in 2024. In Phoenix, the bus network is extensive within the city boundaries, but the light rail system consists of just two short lines in the very centre of the city, incongruously tiny in the urban mass. Public transport is available, but only as an afterthought to the enormous roads, and walking is practically out of the question.
I’m told that Phoenix is a particularly strong example of a non-walkable city, partially because the desert heat discouraged pedestrianisation, but the pursuit of that distinctly American idea of prosperity – a big house, complete with a tidy lawn and a car – is, arguably, incompatible with city living. So, what resulted from America’s 20th century urban expansion is effectively not city living, but rather endless suburbia, with the shopping concentrated in malls rather than high streets. The American Dream means being able to afford streets that are silent apart from the roar of cars.
Sources: Zoned in the USA: the origins and implications of American land-use regulation by Sonia Hirt (2014) / The Rough Guide to Southwest USA by Greg Ward (2024) / On the Interstate, National Museum of American History / Bureau of Transportation Statistics / Department of Transport: National Travel Survey 2024
Wandering/Wondering 