Travelogue: Houston, Texas

Houston is a big mess. Unorganized, discordant, congested, and totally, unabashedly expansive. If there is one, this is the capital of sprawl. No - make that the capital, seat of government, and home province of sprawl. Dallas and Los Angles pale in comparison to the featureless terrain of this place. It remains the record holder for largest U.S. city without zoning, and shows it. It's not that there isn't land use control here; there are overlapping covenants and deed restrictions that form development parameters, as well as a mesh of developer agreements that form what tenuous control the planning department has over the territory. It's mostly that you can't tell that they're there.

Here you have industrial, warehouse, high-end multi-family, retail, and niche medical cheek-by-jowl. Here you have unabashed commercial strips careening through single-family neighborhoods, frontage roads packed with generica to the horizon, and office towers that occur in clumps like so much reflective cottage cheese. Something I can't quite put my finger on feels eerily like Los Angeles.
For a city this size (actually the 6th largest US MSA, between Philadelphia and Miami, and between Dallas Fort Worth and San Antonio in Texas) it has a surprisingly underdeveloped freeway system. One wonders if this is a result of anti-tax sentiment, or simply weak urban representation at the Federal trough. Maybe they spent all of it on rocket ships.

Undifferentiated landscapes are notoriously hard to grasp at a glance, and this one is no exception. There are pockets of gracious residential, and smatterings of urban character in individual businesses, but it may take quite a bit more study to understand the environment at any kind of deep level.

So much for the intelligible city.