You may have heard the term “ens**ttification“, sometimes used to describe what happens as big tech platforms like Amazon or Facebook have evolved their business practices to churn out ever increasing profits. It’s a predictable lifecycle where a service starts out great for customers, then slowly degrades its quality to make people pay more or get less over time, eventually becoming a frustrating, broken version of what it used to be.
Cory Doctorow coined this term (I’ll be swapping in the synonymous term ‘decay’, or ‘platform decay’ as we go for obvious reasons), and today I’ll be considering how this same process might be happening more than you realize throughout our cities.
If you live in a modern North American city with suburbs like Orléans, you’re effectively living as part of one of these decaying platforms. Our cities have been systematically redesigned since the middle of the last century to serve a business model that prioritizes corporate margins over your quality of life.
The Eastern Ottawa Urbanism Club meets regularly. Learn more:
The Mandatory Subscription
In the early stages of suburban growth—call it the “free tier”—the city offered a dream: high-quality homes and infrastructure at a perceived low cost. Wide roads, new pipes, and quiet streets were provided way under their actual value to get you to “sign up” and buy a home. This way of building cities was radically different to what came before, but the city made money from this new rapid development.
And it wasn’t just the city that was happy about this arrangement though, the home builders also made lots of money selling these homes on land that came cheap. And both car companies and oil and gas producers made lots of money selling cars these new homeowners couldn’t wait to buy to travel through their shiny new neighbourhoods.
This is where the ‘decay’ part kicks in. Now that homeowners are all in on the dream of an idyllic plot of private land in the suburbs, the system has stopped evolving and innovating for you and has begun to monetize you. Walking and biking—the free ways to get around—can’t safely be used here except to get a little exercise. To participate in your own community, you are effectively forced to purchase a vehicle ‘add-on’ that costs the average Canadian household over $10,000 a year (and most families in the suburbs find they need two).
In the suburbs, car ownership isn’t a “choice” or a “lifestyle”—it’s a mandatory subscription fee. You aren’t a resident; you’re a captive subscriber to the Car+ subscription. Even though these costs are mostly hidden from you day-to-day because the next car trip only costs a few dollars on average, *every* trip is just a few dollars more, and that adds up.
Even people who love their cars and wouldn’t trade them for anything bristle today at the sky-high car prices and ancillary costs of driving. Using your car to get around in the suburbs is nearly always faster point-to-point than using any other mode of transportation. But this is only the way things are because they’ve been designed that way, to the exclusion of everything else.
Infrastructure Decay
New developments on the edge of town can’t save us. Even with that extra cash, the city is facing massive shortfalls, leaving older suburbs with crumbling roads and fewer community services. The math simply doesn’t add up.
Like a retailer on the brink of bankruptcy, the city is incentivized to stock its ‘shelves’ with high-margin junk. Why would a city choose to build this way, selling land for development but not charging enough to pay for its upkeep? Most people will tell you if given unlimited cash that they want a single-family home (it’s the surburban dream, after all). But very few could actually afford the bill for all the infrastructure that connects you to the city if they were forced to pay the true cost. And even fewer are likely going to be able to explain (or stomach) the other social ills that stem from building communities in this way.
Support The New Orleans
In urban planning, car-centred subdivisions and giant roads are the “junk food” of the industry. They’re easy to approve and make developers, car companies, and oil giants rich, but like eating too much candy, they make the city sick over time. Just as a grocery store puts the healthy food where you need to pass the snacks to get to it, the city makes walking for groceries challenging or impossible so you’re forced to “consume” car-centric infrastructure instead.
Zoning laws keep this broken system in place. They make it illegal to buy a coffee without driving out of their communities to a massive parking lot first. This isn’t about “convenience” for drivers; it’s about the city staying out of the way of gas companies and car dealers. Every time we widen a road like the 174, we aren’t performing a public service—we are providing corporate welfare for the industries that profit from our dependency.
Even big corporations that have nothing to do with driving are dependent on customers in cars, like Tim Hortons or Walmart. These companies slurp up profits from local economies and funnel them to a far-off corporate HQ. Compare that to our neighbourhoods’ small businesses, where our hard earned money should be spent, and where it can then be re-invested into the community.
The Crash
In Ottawa, we’re just waiting for the bottom to fall out. The city is drowning in maintenance debt. Without a massive change in how we build, we’re forced to keep approving new subdivisions just to pay for the crumbling infrastructure in the older ones. It’s a pyramid scheme, and we’re running out of space.
Eventually, the math stops working. You can’t maintain our many, many kilometers of pipes and asphalt forever on a suburban tax base, and even the surplus from denser areas doesn’t cover the difference (nor is it fair to ‘borrow’ from other parts of the city like that). We’ve ended up in a trap where taxes keep climbing, but the service gets worse—roads fall apart and the local bus only shows up once (or maybe twice) an hour.
This is the end-state of the decay: you’re paying more than ever for a city that gives you less. You spend hours of your life sitting in traffic on a highway that cost billions to widen, heading to a job you might not even like. All this just to pay for the big house in the ‘burbs and the car(s) you need to get there. The entire suburban landscape has been designed to extract every possible cent from your commute and each errand you run.
Version 2.0
The good news is that this was a choice, and we can choose something else. A quiet and calm suburban community is something lots of families cherish. Modernizing our suburbs with small shops, cafes, and “few-plexes1” doesn’t ruin the suburban vibes. In fact, it makes them stronger. We can have quiet streets with “neighbourhood character” *and* the ability to walk to a community centre or a restaurant.
All we need for local communities to thrive is undo the exclusionary zoning keeping low-impact commerce out of our neighbourhoods. If you want to stay in your single-family home, nothing is stopping you.
We need to stop treating our cities like a charity for the oil and car industries. Cities are for people, and right now, they are failing us. It’s time to demand a new type of suburb—a true Suburban Village that prioritizes people and mobility over corporate margins and vehicle throughput.
- Few-plex is my term for multi-unit housing at a human scale, so duplex, triplex, quadriplex, up to maybe 6-plex. ↩︎
Leave a Reply