Kansas University professor Stephen Grabow gets paid to think and teach about where to put parks, roads, schools and the other services a growing city needs.
When he wants to see how his academic theories play out in the real world, he just looks out the classroom window to the city of Lawrence.
Stephen Grabow, a professor of architecture and urban design at Kansas University, uses Lawrence and its growth as a model for research and classroom lecture examples.
"It's like a magnified laboratory in urban growth," said Grabow, a professor of architecture and urban design at KU.
Grabow is one of many KU professors in fields ranging from administration to transportation to sociology who use Lawrence and its growth as a model for research and classroom lecture examples.
"I think it's more relevant to many of the students, particularly if they've lived here for a few years," said Alan Black, who teaches a course in urban mass transportation. "They're more interested when its something they can actually see themselves."
Most of the professors think Lawrence could do a better job managing growth. Grabow thinks his KU colleagues could lend a little more input into the city's ongoing debates on the topic.
"Those processes have not seemed to me to use a lot of expertise," he said. "I could be wrong, but it seems to me there's been little innovative thinking regarding Lawrence's future, just the traditional updating of old plans."
Setting boundaries
The most important thing, Grabow and his colleagues agree, is that Lawrence residents need to be more aware of the choices and forces that shape growth.
"I don't think people are really aware of the magnitude of the forces at work," Grabow said.
John Nalbandian, a former Lawrence mayor and a KU professor of public administration, uses Lawrence's growth in the classroom. A favorite example: The simple decision to put Free State High School at Sixth Street and Wakarusa Drive hastened the development of northwest Lawrence and created a host of challenges for transportation, sewers and other city services in that area.
"There's a tendency to believe that decisions made for virtuous reasons don't have secondary consequences, but they do," Nalbandian said. "There's no decision you can make about land use that doesn't have implications for growth."
Satellite image, 1967.
But Nalbandian said the most important decision about Lawrence growth hasn't been made yet: Where and if the city should stop growing.
"When you limit the supply of land, if it's attractive, it drives up the cost of land," he said. "On the other hand, if you make no restrictions on growth, then you have a city with virtually no boundaries. This city has virtually no boundaries."
That, Nalbandian said, has happened by default. He won't say if Lawrence should put limits and boundaries to growth, only that a choice needs to be made.
"My opinion is this city needs to decide what it wants to be and how big it wants to be," he said. "We spend so much time talking about what we're losing as we grow that we avoid talking about ... what we want to be."
What it looks like
Meanwhile, Grabow said, Lawrence is growing in contradictory ways: The population is skyrocketing as fast as a big city, but it's living arrangements look increasingly suburban.
Lawrence's population nearly doubled from about 45,000 residents in 1970 to 80,000 people in 2000. That's a rate, he said, that compares with Chicago's growth from a few thousand people in the 1830s to a "metropolis" within a century.
Satellite image, 1994.
"To double in 30 years is not typical of small towns," Grabow said. "That's the kind of growth associated with cities."
At the same time, he said, satellite photos of the city from the 1960s and the 1990s show what Grabow calls the "wormy" expansion of curving streets with cul-de-sacs west of Iowa Street, typical of suburban growth.
That has cultural consequences Lawrence residents should be aware of, said American Studies professor Norman Yetman.
"My sense is housing patterns are absolutely critical," he said. "Without looking at any data, I would say what you're looking at in the city is increasing socioeconomic segregation."
Simply put, Yetman said, Lawrence's affluent residents have gone to that suburban environment on the west side of town, leaving low-cost housing on the east side.
And research shows, he said, that "poverty has more deleterious effects the more you concentrate it."
If a city's poorer residents are spread throughout a town, he said, they'll have access to the same services, jobs and social networks as their richer neighbors. But concentrate them together, he said, and those opportunities wane.
That theory can be confirmed in the struggles of East Heights School, Yetman said, and will continue to be seen elsewhere.
"I think we've already seen the handwriting on the wall that LHS is going to be the lower socioeconomic school and Free State is going to be the higher one," he said.
It's tough for government to disperse people throughout a community, though.
"It would have to be through publicly assisted housing," Grabow said.
Yetman doubts that will happen.
"It's going to be damn difficult for Habitat (for Humanity) to build a home in Alvamar," he said.
Where from here?
Grabow has two suggestions for where Lawrence should go from here: Get green and, literally, grow up.
Open space, he said, needs to be taken seriously as a tool for shaping the city's growth.
"If you wanted to shape the future, that's the strongest way to do it is gather those areas ahead of time instead of reacting to permits for construction," he said.
That open space will contain the sprawl, he said, and that will require Lawrence buildings to get taller to accommodate an increasing population.
"We can go vertical," Grabow said. "I think eventually you could see a skyline."
The first hints of that, he said, can be seen in the city's new parking garage in the 900 block of New Hampshire.
"I think that people are willing to park on top of each other for the first time," he said. "It's a sign that the density is going upward."
Grabow said Lawrence needs to think internationally to find good role models.
"Most people try to look at places like Boulder," he said. "I think it's time Lawrence should look at places that were small that became cities, like Copenhagen."
That Denmark city, he said, created "fingers" extending from town where growth could occur each surrounded by lush open space.
"Copenhagen has quite a large spread to it," Grabow said. "But you don't feel it so much."
Getting involved
Despite Grabow's complaints, Nalbandian said he believes KU professors are active in helping the community. Several, like economist David Burress on the Lawrence-Douglas County Planning Commission and urban planning professor Kirk McClure on the Douglas County Economic Development Committee, are in key positions. Black serves on the city's Public Transit Advisory Committee.
"Faculty get involved in issues, in their neighborhoods and otherwise," Nalbandian said.
McClure agreed.
"As I look around at these boards I see a lot of people like myself who, although we work at the university, Lawrence is home," he said.
And of course, it doesn't hurt those professors to take that fresh real-world experience back to the classroom.
"When you need teaching examples, you can always do theory," McClure said. "But there's never a better example than when you can look out the window."
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