Can we “slow” the growth of San Francisco’s metropolitan region without stopping it? By “slow,” we make reference to the Slow Food movement and its CittaSlow offshoot, especially in their emphasis on the value and pleasures of regional difference. “Without stopping it” is to acknowledge the projected growth of the region, which we accept. Our title’s “smart” refers to “smart growth”—“livable” is another favored adjective, both endorsing density without always asking what it means in practice. Like the Buddha, we see a middle way between “slow” and “smart” that emphasizes enjoyment and livability. Like the Californians we have both become, we want to have our cake and eat it, too.

The Problem Space
Between 2007 and 2030, according to Greenbelt Alliance [1], the nine counties that make up San Francisco’s metropolitan region will grow in population from 7.2 million people to 8.7 million, a net gain of about 1.5 million people. Will these newcomers be housed within the 700,000 acres (290,500 hectares) of currently developed land, about 15.5% of the region’s 4.5 million acres (1.87 million hectares) of total land area? Or will they continue to erode the undeveloped balance, reducing still further the land available for farming, recreation, wildlife, and the maintenance of the region’s ecosystem? (No small matter, as it includes much of the river delta that supplies much of California with fresh water—an area for which substantial low-density residential development is proposed.)

This is half of the problem; the other half has to do with the density of development required within the already developed areas of the region simply to maintain their current boundaries. (Ideally, it would be possible to undo some of this, especially in areas where low-density sprawl has penetrated mindlessly into farmland or the ecosystem.) Greenbelt Alliance is analyzing the question of density in abstract, with the goal of calculating on a county-by-county basis what would be required [2]. However, its analysis does not consider the qualitative side of the problem: what does density mean in human, experiential terms?

So the “problem space” that the region poses is how to accommodate future growth in ways that preserve and if possible reclaim open space for the uses outlined above in ways that are not just “sound” in terms of current planning dogma (e.g., “dense, compact, and transit-served”), but also create appropriate settings for a humane and enjoyable life as broadly understood by those who live and work in its cities, towns, and neighborhoods.

In framing it in this way, we want to emphasize that the future of the region must be thought of holistically, seeing open space preservation and growth as connected ideas, both of which point to the pleasures and enjoyments that the region offers its residents.

Greenbelt Alliance’s Prescription
Focused on preserving open land, Greenbelt Alliance has formulated a program that is widely accepted by other policy-shaping organizations in the region. Here is the gist:

Growth boundaries: cities, incorporated towns, and counties in the region should agree to establish inviolable boundaries for development. Land falling outside them (but within their jurisdiction) are to be left as open space, whether under private or public ownership.

Walkable urbanism: to accommodate future growth, cities and towns should require a higher density of development, especially around transit (train and light rail stations) and transit corridors (arterials served by buses). Even when transit is not yet in place, patterns of development should anticipate it by favoring compactness and higher density.

Opposition to this program came initially (and predictably) from some owners of large land parcels that fall outside of the growth boundaries established by suburban towns and rural counties. Most elections in these areas feature ballot measures aimed at creating exceptions for specific parcels. Now opposition is also coming from some of the affected town and city residents. The Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) sets goals for housing development in the region that, if disregarded, can theoretically impact a town or city’s ability to tap regional grants for affordable housing and other purposes. In Berkeley, for example, meeting the goal would require the construction of 14 16-story housing towers in its downtown core, according to the city’s planning staff. The State has also mandated development “bonuses” that increase multi-unit housing density in a way that overrides local zoning. This is triggering a NIMBY (Not in my backyard!) reaction in “progressive” areas that are traditionally strong supporters of open space preservation.

“Density” and its Enemies
Density is emerging as a major point of contention in the region. In the urban core, it is focused on absolute density—height and bulk—and how it contributes to or detracts from the community around it. In urban neighborhoods and the inner suburbs (like Berkeley), the question of impact is heightened. Style, use, ownership, and a desire to preserve the existing fabric figure in the debates about each and every project. In the outer suburbs, intensification of established areas to preserve green-space vies with efforts to carve out new territory for office campuses and estates.

Especially in the city and the older inner suburbs, the debate about density comes down to two positions: that it’s good because it provides affordable housing and prevents sprawl; or that it’s bad because it undermines a community’s existing character (and, by implication, its property values: Berkeley was extensively down-zoned in the seventies by residential real estate interests, representing middle- and upper-middle-class owners). In recent years, these positions have hardened, with each side refusing to acknowledge the other. Density is “entirely good” and preservationists “almost always wrong” (about the historic merits of what they try to preserve); and vice versa. This deadlocked situation has created a vacuum that developers and politicians have not failed to fill and exploit. Berkeley exemplifies the situation. Working with a handful of developers, the city has approved a series of ever-larger housing developments in the downtown area and along University Avenue, a busserved arterial that also defines the city’s north-south divide. When one of these developers proposed a project along San Pablo Avenue, a north-south arterial lined with small-scale commercial buildings, this sparked successful opposition to the project by its single-family residential neighbors.

Fear of over-development has led to constant skirmishes in Berkeley around the issues of growth and density. Measure P, put on the ballot by petition from the community, sought to limit the height of any and all new construction in the city. A more recent measure sought to maintain the current, restrictive Landmarks ordinance. Both were widely seen as referenda on growth. Both were defeated, but the second came much closer to victory.

The Parallel Issue of Chains
The debate about density parallels a second about chain stores (Gap, Starbucks, et al) that arose initially in Berkeley and in some San Francisco neighborhoods. It resembles the opposition shown to McDonald’s by the Slow Food and anti-globalization movements in Europe. In this case, the argument is between advocates of the rights of property owners and the freedom of market forces, on the one hand, and those asserting their rights to local self-determination and self-expression, on the other. The movement has gained enough traction in San Francisco that an ordinance affecting the Hayes Valley district has been extended to the entire city. It requires “chains” with more than 11 stores (anywhere) to obtain a conditional use permit—a major obstacle, as this requires political review [3].

In the Grip of the Duopoly
As in other U.S. cities, Berkeley and San Francisco have politicized the development and redevelopment process so that almost every project of any size has to be reviewed in a way that stretches out the entitlements (planning permission) process inordinately and makes the owner or developer liable to a variety of political pressures. The time and money involved favors national and global developers with the “deep pockets” needed to make their way through this process. This creates a “duopoly” that pairs these developers with their public sector gatekeepers, either as actual partners or as active beneficiaries.

As one of us has argued elsewhere [4], this situation results in projects that in their scale and nature are disconnected with their immediate surroundings and even from the city itself as a place with a unique character or identity arising from its history, topography, climate, ethnicity, and other factors. From Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards to San Francisco’s Transbay Tower, this is the province of global “starchitects” who lend their signature styles to projects that are often oversized and overly prepackaged. (Ironically, old-style developers like Tokyo’s Minoru Mori have understood the importance of leaving room for “demotic” content in the retail component of the project and its public open spaces.)

This argues for breaking the grip of the duopoly in the town and cities of the region, and for giving buildings there a looser frame that encourages people to reshape them over time. It needs to be looser because there are natural limits on what the frame should do. So much that is bad or silly in recent urban development flows from the hubris of politicians and bureaucrats as to what can actually be achieved through regulation. An official’s views on the design of an entry or fenestration, however well intentioned, are really just his or her opinion, a matter of individual taste. That’s not really their business. In the realm of restaurants, we expect the authorities to inspect the food and the kitchens, but not choose the cuisine or dictate the menu. Place making is no different.

It also argues for a new view of regional citizenship that makes urbanity an individual as well as a communal responsibility. Anyone who has seen Ostia Antica outside of Rome knows that the press of in-migration to the capital region at the height of Roman power led to an urban density—five story walkups—that looks familiar. That same pressure led the government to achieve a modern level of public sanitation, build the aqueducts to provide an adequate and reliable source of potable water, and improve the roads. The Romans had a very clear sense of what a city should be. The Roman state provided the frame, and Roman citizens were obliged to defend and enliven it. The whole arc of Roman life focused on this symbiotic relationship. It posited an active, socially mobile, and above all pleasure-loving existence, rooted in family, friends, the city, and the land.

Parallels with Slow [5]
How is it that the food of northern California is so widely and generously celebrated, but contemporary place making here is not? Restaurants and markets, chefs, farmers, and the public have managed to join forces around this source of daily pleasure, raising it to a global standard, but our ways of place making lack a comparably virtuous circle. This situation brought to mind the Slow Movement, which has critiqued fast food and cities. The “branded” urban experience one finds here now, reducing locality to mere caricature and denying any real possibility of demotic influence, creates a desire for a town or city life that can restore the meanings and pleasures of an authentically local existence.

The Slow Movement has tremendous resonance in the Bay Area, where a love of good food and wine has led to a renaissance in local organic food production catering to food halls and farmers’ markets. The wineries started this, transforming themselves from bulk producers of a purely domestic product (like Gallo) to “bespoke” producers of limited, high-cost products that compete globally for prizes and buyers. Chefs like Alice Waters, now an international vice-president of the Slow Food movement, have extended it to restaurants, home cooking, and the availability of locally grown “seasonal” ingredients. Even the Berkeley public schools have embraced this ethos, with gardens, collaborations with producers and Ann Cooper as the chef.

The Slow Movement is easy both to parody and to criticize for its contradictions and its elitism. It can seem like something from the pages of Theory of the Leisure Class, and yet its manifesto has a commonsensical truth, whether we are thinking of food or city life: the pleasures of eating and living well are worth defending in the face of external forces, not least our own ignorance and negligence, that deliberately or inadvertently erode them.

“Slow” in the Bay Region
Efforts to apply the Slow Food perspective to urban life began in small towns in Italy, worried about the impact of tourism and development. The Cityslow (Cittaslow) offshoot that resulted limits itself to “cities” of no more than 50,000 residents. This places it below the threshold even of Berkeley (more than twice the maximum size), and it seems to miss the fact that even much larger cities are made up of districts and neighborhoods that are really analogous to towns or villages, experiencing many of the same kinds of pressures as those Italian hill towns that first penned the Cittaslow manifesto.

We believe that a metropolis like San Francisco would benefit from “Slow” thinking – but not too slow. As we have suggested, the real issue here is to defend the region from itself – that is, defend it from forces that, for different reasons, seek to diminish or homogenize the quality of urban life. With the Slow Movement, we could call these forces “Fast.” They are, much too often, defining what the Bay Region is becoming.

We use the term “urban life” because, with Jane Jacobs, we believe that a metropolis is inherently urban or urban-influenced, and that this has been the case more-or-less since antiquity. As Jacobs points out in The Economy of Cities, the countryside is a reflection of its markets, and its markets are an urban phenomenon. One of the benefits of the Bay Region’s food and wine culture is that makes city dwellers aware of the countryside in their midst, giving them a more direct and visceral stake in its preservation as farmland.

In the Bay Region, preserving the quality of urban life means accommodating growth in “sustainable” ways. This is the other side of “Slow.” In urging local producers to find global markets, Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini was acknowledging that growth can be positive, an indication of quality and urbanity, when approached in the right way. This is a crucial distinction. Slow Food’s manifesto, written by Folco Portinari in 1989, attacks “speed” rather than growth as the enemy of “a better future.” The 20th century, he wrote, that “began and has developed under the insignia of industrial civilization, first invented the machine and then took it as its life model.” He asserts “real culture is about developing taste rather than demeaning it,” arguing for “ a firm defense of material pleasure” as “the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life” that “in the name of productivity has changed our way of being and threatens our environment.”

In the background, surely, is western Europe’s uneven transition from an industrial to a postindustrial economy. Whole regions – Antwerp, Delft, and Glasgow are examples – lost their economic reason-for-being in the postwar decades. Factories were shuttered and entire districts – docklands and industrial zones – slipped into obsolescence along with the communities that depended on them, like Glasgow’s East End. Putting a floor under these decimated areas, stanching the outflow of population before it hits rock bottom – these are the tasks associated with decline. “Slow” provides an argument for reversal that sidesteps the question of what exactly will revive a region’s economic fortunes. That kind of thinking reintroduces nature, for example, where industry at all but banished it.

This argument for reversal is broadly applicable to postindustrial regions “in recovery,” whether they are declining in population, as Japan is, for example, or still growing, like the nine counties that have grown up around San Francisco Bay. In Japan, the opportunity is literally to undo what a vibrant postwar industrial economy put in place, especially in the sixties through the eighties, when that country’s export engine was in full gear. The future of Japan as a postindustrial economy is very likely to see a wholesale restoration.

The Bay Region is a successful postindustrial economy. One of its versions of “speed” is its penchant for developing the urban edge, not just for single-family housing, but equally for the palazzos of the digiterati, whether the hilltop or gated mansions of entrepreneurs or the shuttle bus-served quarters of Google or George Lucas. Today, young employees of these vast and fast-growing companies reverse-commute to Silicon Valley, choosing to live in San Francisco rather than move down as their parents did. Some take the train, but it has no connection to where they work, necessitating company-provided buses. (In the Valley, transit has yet to spark density the way that it has elsewhere in the region.)

Not so Fast, not so Slow
“Smart” development in the urban core is another form of “Fast” – a willingness to accept bad design as long as it hits the density target. In San Francisco, there are signs that this is changing. Architects who regularly secured commissions based on their ability to push projects through the slow and contentious entitlements process are finding that they have lost their touch, and developers are turning to better firms. Some of the best architects and builders of housing in the city are showing that pleasure is affordable, and that not every new building has to cater to empty-nest baby boomers returning from the suburbs.

We oppose “Fast” in these terms, but equally, we oppose a “slow” that clings without reflection to what exists. If smart growth is too often “speed” by another name, then no-growth is its inevitable twin, locked in a battle that produces mediocrity and sameness. Slow is, in our understanding, not the same as “no.” Growth is desirable if it enables the region to remain “alive,” to “rediscover the flavors and savors” that make it what it is. That this requires pruning and paring has to be faced as part of that active cultivation.

The pleasures that a city offers reflect the nature and administration of its underlying framework, on the one hand, and the tastes and initiative of its individual citizens on the other. They also reflect their relative power and influence. Ideally, each is a check to the excesses of the other. Whenever a city slips into imbalance, its pleasures diminish.

In the spirit of Slow, we have put together a manifesto for the Bay Region with urbanity at its heart. Urbanity for us is something that unfolds along with the rest of life. We cook and garden, watching things change from this to that to something else, seeing the rich variation that some patterns afford and how chance and even error can prod a creative response. Part of the pleasure a city affords is its ability to allow for this. It’s what gives the city’s parts and pieces their authenticity, and it argues for a looser frame and for agreements on place making that make room for the demotic [6], establishing patterns that ordinary citizens can then activate, both as their right and as a vitally necessary role.

Our SlowBay Manifesto
Here is our first draft of a manifesto for a “slow” Bay Region that affords both growth and urbanity.

Create boundaries for density, not just growth
We need to cut through the current impasse by agreeing on what we mean by density in each and every area where development can still occur. Density is not just an abstraction; it has to serve communities and support their existing residents, not only the new ones. There’s nothing wrong with establishing goals for density, but they have to contribute in clear and fundamental ways to the experiential qualities that make each place what it is.

Make urbanity count
We need a robust vision of the region’s urbanity that takes lessons from its rich culture of food and wine, not shrinking from creativity, experimentation, or the demotic element that challenges and changes tastes, and is unafraid of outside influences, knowing that the region will absorb them and make them its own. Then we need to put this vision first.

Restore the demotic; end the duopoly
The tendency of Bay Regional cities to politicize development at almost every scale, making owners and leaseholders jump through endless hoops, is depriving us of the demotic element – the spontaneous contributions of individuals, operating within rules that are broad enough to allow creative interpretation. It makes for a duopoly that favors large projects that are shaped by “global” assumptions about market preferences, and that attract only the biggest players. There are exceptions, but this is too much the norm.

See the region as a whole
Understanding the region holistically, especially as an ecosystem, would immediately put a halt to insanities like the current pressure to develop the Delta, one of California’s main sources of fresh water, as single-family housing. It would encourage us to invest much more in transit and much less in freeways, and to value open land like our first-born.

Honor our real traditions
The historic patterns of the region have favored a humane density in urban development coupled with preservation of the natural landscape, which has always acted as a brake to heedless sprawl. Making these patterns the law of the land would solve a lot of problems.

Put our money where our mouth is
Americans tend to wait until the future they dreaded arrives before dealing with it. We have to break that habit. The best way to do this is to fall in love again with a region that, for many of us, captured our hearts when we first set eyes on it, tasted its delicious food, savored its wine, walked its captivating streets. We know what it is and what it can be. Something this beautiful demands our indulgence, our generosity, and our commitment. We know how to treat it well, and yet we have so often failed to do so. Time to change.

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Richard Bender is a Professor of Architecture and Dean Emeritus of the College of Environmental Design at the University of California at Berkeley.  He is also a founder and director of the non-profit BRIDGE Housing Corporation.