I have a piece coming out in a few days at Greater Greater Washington, on Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. There’s obviously much more in there, but I wanted to preview it instead of following up on it.
Lancaster is not a foreign or special sort of place; it is a place we can learn from in thinking about regional development and land use here in the Washington region:
Lancaster County isn’t unique; it’s something common which has been destroyed in almost all other instances. This is true of both the urban-countryside dynamic and of cities themselves, many of which saw much of their historic fabric bulldozed for urban renewal.
Lancaster—the city, the county, and the extremely well-preserved urban-rural dynamic between them—is a sort of living fossil; a rare echo of what a metro area would have looked before America’s break with traditional urbanity, which eroded both genuine urbanity in cities as well as the character of the countryside (by replacing it with the quasi-urbanity of suburbia).
It is too late, impossible really, to restore something like this to our region, in its fullness. But it is more or less what our region would have looked like at one time, and so its persistence somewhere else is a sign of what once existed, as well as of what is at least theoretically possible. As I note in the piece, my own suburban neighborhood sits on what was once a dairy farm; this is common in western Fairfax County, which was quite remote from Washington, D.C. a century ago—though also connected by rail in a way that probably equals or exceeds today’s coverage.1
In this way, once again, “urbanism” is not a series of newfangled ideas, but an attempt to recover, restore, and maybe to some extent reverse engineer what urbanity and rurality looked like at an earlier moment in time.
So part of visiting Lancaster is experiencing a striking realization about perception and reality. A place which looks rare, or special, or unique from today’s vantage point—and for that precise reason may seem distant or irreplicable—is in fact a rare survivor, a common thing rendered an artifact by time and attrition.
Another reaction is, if I’m being honest, a NIMBY or anti-urbanism feeling, upon seeing new housing developments and strip malls sprouting up, even here, around the urban edge, looking out over fields. Does it have to go here? Isn’t there somewhere else they can put it?
Of course, “somewhere else” is not a place—or rather, it is any number of places which, for someone else, is their “here.” And “not now” is not a time, but a deferral which, in the future, will simply be someone else’s “now.”
We do need to build. But the most appropriate place to build is not at the urban periphery, but to densify and more properly urbanize the city and its urbanized edges themselves.
If you like the city, of course, you should support this, as most if not all urbanists and housing advocates do. But even if you don’t like the city, you should support it. There is not infinite demand for housing; and there is much evidence that urban housing is under-supplied. Allowing more urban housing and filling in genuinely urban landscapes reduces housing pressure on still-preserved small towns and rural landscapes.
I make this observation in the piece:
It’s possible to quickly visit any number of farm or country destinations, activities from Lancaster City or its narrow sprawl ring, or any of the smaller towns in the county. It’s not possible for me to do that in Fairfax County in a short drive because the ring of sprawl between Washington, DC and the countryside is so vast.
It takes at least half an hour, really closer to an hour, to get to an actual genuine countryside landscape, where I live. The kind of landscape where you can go to wineries, orchards, observe working farms, find old-school country stores, etc. But in Lancaster City, you can live in a genuine urban downtown and still be just a short distance from an unbroken agricultural landscape. That is the path we could have taken, or continued to take.
In our region, much as it is associated with sprawl and traffic, we do have a hint of this old urban/rural interplay. The Montgomery County Agricultural Reserve is a small and generally successful attempt to do something like this in our region.
A friend of mine, who lives along the I-270 corridor, took me on a little tour of the agricultural reserve. Her home in a modern middle-density development, right along the highway that will take you into D.C., is about 10 minutes from the natural and agricultural landscape of the Reserve. It was quite an experience to move from one of those to the other, with no long, dreary “ring of sprawl” in the middle. Even post-suburbia, it is possible to do this, at least in part.
And again, we must resist that strange impulse to take the current scarcity of such things as evidence that they are unlikely or difficult, rather than as evidence that they are possible.
To observe Lancaster is to feel regret and possibility; a single metro area, one of the few remaining in the United States, which effectively exists in an alternate timeline: a world in which “urbanism” was never necessary because it was never lost. But for all of that, neither is Lancaster frozen in time; there is much change and dynamism, but shaped by a pattern which has been abandoned almost everywhere else.
There is something almost otherworldly about this; something wistful; but something hopeful. Its existence proves that it is possible to once again place our communities, regions, and metro areas in continuity—after what may turn out to have been a brief and revolutionary interlude—with an unbroken line of placemaking wisdom.
Related Reading:
The Evolution of Amish Country
The French Revolution For Buildings
The End of Lancaster’s Family-Style Dining
The same is true of Rockville, Maryland, which functioned as a D.C. suburb with trolley connections decades before the Metro arrived. In so many ways, again, urbanist priorities are restorations rather than innovations.