Matthew Stadler - Sprawl and Urbanism

Sprawl and Urbanism

In the early 1990s, while living in Groningen, the Netherlands, to research his novel, The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee, Stadler was invited to take part in an architectural conference at the Technical University at Delft. Through this conference and subsequent invitations to write about architecture for the Dutch journal Wiederhal, Stadler became involved in that country's discussion of urban planning and design.

At a 1993 conference in Rotterdam, called Bliss, Stadler was asked to respond to Rem Koolhaas's recently published "Manifesto for Bigness." In his talk, subsequently published as "I Think I'm Dumb," Stadler characterized the sprawl of the American West Coast as "the native home for bigness," and endorsed it as a productive, urban landscape. Many of the subsequent themes in Stadler's work on sprawl and urbanism can be found in this initial essay.

In "I Think I'm Dumb" Stadler writes that the borderless West Coast city "feels like material scattered around in space or like electronic information. The huge glass boxes downtown could easily be kicked over, like models pumped up with growth hormones, huge and brittle air. Walking down the hill from where I live to downtown is like walking over a scab. The interstate freeway…has twelve lanes and cuts right through the middle of the city. It goes from Canada to Mexico." But rather than condemning this landscape as a failure, Stadler asserts that "this place has given rise to a peculiar, dumb and lovely pattern of work that 'reconstructs the whole' and is doing something with the collective (it's hard to describe exactly what that is), plus it sheds some light on 'the real.'" (Here Stadler links sprawl to the three positive capacities that Koolhaas's manifesto ascribes to Bigness.)

Stadler's inclination to look for positive potentials in the shapeless new landscapes of sprawl matured over the next decade as he read (and published) the essays of the Canadian poet Lisa Robertson. Writing as the Office for Soft Architecture, Robertson pursued what she calls lyrical research into the new, dynamic forms of cities, especially her home (then) of Vancouver, B.C., Canada. Robertson's evocations of "this permanent transience, the buildings or shelters like tents—tents of steel, chipboard, stucco, glass, cement, paper, and various claddings—tents rising and falling in the glittering rhythm which is null rhythm, which is the flux of modern careers..." helped Stadler understand how writing can transform degraded landscapes into sites of meaning and beauty.

This insight was confirmed and persuasively theorized by German urban planner Thomas Sieverts in his book, Zwischenstadt, which came into English in 1997 as Cities Without Cities. Stadler's encounter with Sieverts's work in 2003, catalyzed the analysis of cities and sprawl that he ultimately published in the annotated reader, Where We Live Now.

Where We Live Now is a collection of urban theory, historical documents, and literature that makes three simple arguments: (1) that Thomas Sieverts's description of what he calls "zwischenstadt" (literally the "in-between city") is a useful, accurate description of the built environment that has displaced the old concentric city; (2) that this condition, of a densely inhabited in-between landscape, has a deep history in North America, predating the arrival of European explorers, which can be usefully articulated if we study indigenous history in the Americas as urban history; and (3), that new literature which springs from this history can help us occupy the in-between landscapes fully and well. These three arguments — advocacy for the relevance of Sieverts's analysis; an insistence that indigenous history is urban history; and a faith in the power of literature to shape an urban future — form the core of Stadler's work on urbanism and sprawl.