Community life in an American Suburb and a Spanish Village

An older drawing of Montclair: from a few years ago

I spent a good chunk of my youth in a town twelve miles west of Manhattan, a suburban part of the United States' Northeast Megalopolis. Montclair, NJ is a former streetcar town of about thirty thousand residents with no discernable borders—typical of the Northeast Corridor, the towns run right into each other and most are totally indistinguishable to the untrained eye. The best way to tell the towns apart is to look for differences in color in road signage and fire hydrants. As far as suburbs go, Montclair isn't bad, and it certainly is not a cookie-cutter "development" à la Levittown; while Montclairites commonly do commute to "The City" (Manhattan) for work, Montclair has several downtown areas, replete with an arthouse movie theater, an art museum, and a bevy of ethnic restaurants (besides the Italian ones), making Montclair a destination of its own for the surrounding towns.

A major difference between Montclair and the "developments" which are the object of Kunstler's ire lies in the existence of a local economy, downtown areas, and an unusually diverse population (the town borders on half black, though the distribution is quite segregated: black families are generally poorer and predominantly live in the parts of town with lower elevations and smaller houses). Still, the town is large enough to warrant public transportation, and, following the trend Kunstler describes, the trolleys have long since been replaced with buses.

But while Montclair handily beats out Levittown in terms of resources, convenience, and quality of life, its sense of community has nothing on a few Spanish villages I recently spent some time in: San Pantaleon das Viñas and Betanzos, both in Galicia. To its credit, Montclair boasts two big community events: a Fourth of July parade, and First Night, in which the town hosts musical acts and other performances as an alternative to drinking 'till you puke to usher in the new year. There used to be a major street fair on the town's main avenue as well, but that stopped years ago because of retailers complaining that it disrupted their business.

The Spaniards of San Pantaleon das Viñas, by contrast, drink constantly and heavily, and they have festivals every chance they get, complete with fireworks and mountains of seafood, for any pretense they can dream up. This might be in large part thanks to the extremely rural qualities of the town, which is little more than a small agglomeration of houses, a Roman bridge, and a church operated by Opus Dei. It's understandable that the very few villagers, in absence of any local night life, opt to create their own whenever they can. The whole town regularly turns out, and everyone really knows everyone.

A drawing of the Church of Santiago: in the center of Betanzos

A nearby town, Betanzos, serves as a better comparison to Montclair and other American suburbs in that it is larger and more comprably sized but is laid out completely differently—Betanzos is a model medieval European village, of the type that Kunstler disparigingly compares suburbia to. Betanzos has a number of different physical attributes that no American town could hope to replicate (and some they wouldn't want to): it features steep and narrow cobbled streets, ancient churches, several Roman gates marking where the town walls used to be, and, most importantly, plazas.

The streets are unfit for driving by American (and, I daresay, reasonable) standards, and indeed many cars can not even fit down these roads. By Spanish standards, they are not only fit for driving, they are fit for speeding, which can make pedestrian life somewhat hazardous in certain areas. The town also features an incredibly ugly apartment building right near the town center that is fully nine stories taller than any other building in the area. (It is known as "El Torre"—"The Tower"—by the locals).

These shortcomings aside, the appeal of a town like Betanzos truly becomes evident upon stepping into one of its plazas. Broad and open, lined with cafés, bars, grocery stores, tobacco shops, pharmacies and all of the other amenities village life requires, the plazas are the social centers of the town. It is here that the townsfolk work, shop, sip coffee and talk excessively by day and eat and carouse by night. They are the sites of the local farmers' markets. They are also where the town hosts its regular festivals, and though the town is modest, its festivals put (say) Montclair's to shame. These include musical events that pack the streets and last long into the night, art festivals, and a several-day-long medieval fair, in which the town's streets are strewn with hay and rickety stalls are set up that offer all manner of medieval trinkets, foods, and drinks.

One gets the impression in Betanzos that everyone knows everyone else and the architecture and layout speak of a long and storied history—though the physical elements of the town are unfortunately deteriorating as few steps are being taken to preserve its old buildings and streets. The growth-at-any-cost mentality Kunstler derides has spread even to Betanzos. Ancient buildings are being torn down for new developments, the driving of cars on the narrow streets endanger pedestrians and drivers alike, and many locals desire the same "progress", whatever the consequenses, as we do in America.

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