St. Louis has 'obduracy' problems.

Judd, Dennis R.

Architects and urban design experts employ a wonderful term, "obduracy." It describes the manner in which the structures of an urban environment inherited from the past make it difficult to accomplish present purposes. When renovating a building, for example, an architect will often find that the stray arch or bearing wall makes it impossible to achieve the most efficient or aesthetic result. The features that cannot be moved must be accommodated in some way.

In cities, this same thing happens all the time. In many cities a freeway built in the 1950s or 1960s runs along a waterfront, separating the downtown from areas that might be converted to tourist or recreational uses. Water systems built a 100 years ago may require constant repair and leak large volumes of water; in this way the city of Boston loses perhaps one-fourth of its water every year. If cities could afford to, they would simply level much of the physical infrastructure built in the past and build new, efficient buildings and service systems using better, safer materials and superior design. But such massive rebuilding is expensive or even impossible. Normally it is done piece by piece. Few cities can raise a few billion dollars in local, state and federal funds to bury their freeways, which Boston has been doing. Usually people learn to live with the remnants of the past, irritating though they may be.

Obduracy is everywhere, and it takes many forms. In his wonderful book, "Guns, Germs, and Steel," Jared Diamond explains how the typewriter keyboard came to be designed to be intentionally inefficient. Diamond writes that the QWERTY keyboard (named for the keys on the upper left side) was designed in 1873 to solve the pesky problem of sticking keys. Thus, the keys were placed to slow down the fastest typists. Even after the problem of jamming keys was solved, the original design persisted, so that today people continue to type about half as fast and with double the finger movements compared to the most efficient possible design.

The typewriter example is instructive. Even when people understand the past and even when they know it has burdened us with dysfunctional inheritances, it may be impossible to change. And so here I sit, typing on a keyboard meant to be slow and frustrating, going with the flow, like a lemming. I am a hapless participant in obduracy.

The concept of obduracy can be applied to the social and cultural realms as aptly as to physical structures and technology (and actually, the persistence of the QWERTY keyboard is not a technological but a cultural example). Obduracy, for instance, is commonly expressed in institutional terms. Take the case of St. Louis. For many years people have recognized the problems associated with excessive fragmentation in public authority.

But no matter how often the problems are pointed out, the old structures persist. The St. Louis region is famous not only for the extreme fragmentation of governments, but also for the number of times it has attempted reform. Jon C. Teaford features St. Louis prominently in his recent book "Post-Suburbia," probably because, as he says, "Nowhere did the battle over metropolitanism rage so loudly or long as in St. Louis County." When the city of St. Louis opted to secede from St. Louis County in the constitutional convention of 1875, it was, ironically, accomplishing the kind of governmental consolidation that would later become the watchword for 20th-century reformers.

Convinced that the mostly rural St. Louis County could not serve their needs, St. Louisans made the city of St. Louis into both a city and county unto itself. It was scarcely a quarter-century later, when the city's population began spilling beyond its boundaries, that the drawbacks to this arrangement began to become manifest. Many times in this century people have been trying to undo the damage. As early as the 1920s city officials began to express concern that the city's separation from the county was compromising the city's economic future. In 1926, county voters overwhelmingly defeated a proposal to consolidate the city and county. Just four years later a consolidation proposal that would have created a more limited metropolitan government by leaving key services in the hands of municipalities was also defeated.

After World War II, with property values and the tax base shrinking in the city, more proposals came along. Each one foundered. In 1959, county voters rejected a proposal for a Greater Saint Louis City-County District that would have assumed many of the services provided by municipalities. Two years later voters overwhelmingly defeated the "borough" proposal, which would have created a Municipal County of St. Louis and replaced the existing municipalities with 22 boroughs.

The two most recent reform attempts have also failed. In 1987, reformers took advantage of a provision in the Missouri state constitution, and successfully pushed for the establishment of the Board of Freeholders. Among other reforms, the board proposed that municipalities participate in a revenue-sharing scheme and that the number of municipalities in St. Louis County be reduced from 92 to 37. A vote scheduled for June 20, 1989, was delayed while the plan wended its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which finally declared it unconstitutional (on the ground that the land ownership requirement for freeholders violated the equal protection clause).

Most likely, the court's decision allowed reformers to escape another crushing defeat at the polls. The test of this came in 1990 with the plan put forward by a Board of Electors. The electors judged that comprehensive reform was not palatable to a large proportion of the public. So a modest proposal was put forward, for the creation of a Metropolitan Economic Development Commission and a Metropolitan Park Commission, each to be funded by a modest tax. The proposal was soundly defeated at the polls.

The lesson of the QWERTY keyboard can be applied to the history of metropolitan reform in St. Louis. Like the designers of the typewriter keyboard, the reformers of 1875 devised a solution to a problem that soon faded away. But their original design has become impossible to undo. Unlike the case of the QWERTY keyboard, a lot of folks think the present arrangement of fragmented governments is just fine. However, this circumstance does not make the metaphor inapplicable. Quite the opposite.

Political arrangements, once in place, create deep attachments and loyalties, even if the original advantages of the political arrangements have disappeared. As Teaford argues in his book, the series of reform measures in St. Louis failed because the suburban ideal of Jeffersonian democracy, an ideal rooted in the glorification of small-scale village life, continues to be nurtured even in today's fully urbanized suburbs, with their subdivisions, malls, glutted highways and social problems. Governments at a scale larger than the suburban municipality present the specter of an all-consuming leviathan unresponsive to the needs of citizens. As long as such attitudes prevail, most attempts at reform will fail. But that's not the only reason. Reform would probably fail, too, because inertia often carries more energy than change. The inheritance of the past stays in place of its own accord, and it often takes huge effort to move it aside. In the governance of the St. Louis region, obduracy is a mighty force.

Dennis Judd is professor of political science at University of Missouri St. Louis.