The dream of suburbia has crashed hard in the last ten years or so. Like anything, this did not happen overnight and really no one thing or person's fault. The concept of suburbia has thrived in all sorts of places far and wide and outlived most of its critics. So how and what happened. Was just bad policy and politics, the economy, the real estate boom and bust, over planning, all of the above and more? I think it's best to look at the history suburbs if we can begin to understand what happened to the dream and how it all came crashing down so horribly.
Grame Davison of Monash University in Australia chronicles a brief but complete history of the rise and fall of suburbia in the current issue of the Journal of Urban History. Professor Davison focuses on England while drawing examples from the United States and Australia. He follows suburbia from its ideological roots in the Victorian era to its detractors in the present day. The modern suburb began life in the early to mid-nineteenth century England. By the 1830s, urban areas such as London and new industrial cities such as Manchester were beginning to stretch beyond the boundaries of their cores. One observer in 1843 commented that unlike Paris, which was a desert beyond the center, and Rome, a desert, London was laid out in concentric sub-communities. Davison wrote that by 1850, London had six times the population of Vienna by twenty times the area. A similar pattern was emerging in the United States and Australia. In fact, by the close of the nineteenth century, Chicago, Illinois and Melbourne, Australia had smaller populations than London but covered as much land (Chicago) and more (Melbourne).
Professor Davison argued that it just was the pressure of population that encouraged this early form of sprawl. There were other factors at play including, improved rail transit which made commuting inside and outside the center easier. Davison also points to four major ideologies-in the fields of religion, science, the arts, and social life-were also critical sources of the shift:
1) Evangelicalism-the purity of the home was a central value in the Evangelical revival. Cities were portrayed as sources of corruption, while the countryside was seen as a moral refuge
Just to go off on a tangent for a moment, we can see this in the Tea Party strain of the Republican Party. Witness Paul Ryan. Anyway back to the subject.
2) Sanitarianism-dovetailing on Evangelicalism, cleanliness was next to godliness. Cities were rotted through with garbage, manure, and soot everywhere-breeding grounds for disease and corruption. They suburbs were this clean hygienic places. In the nineteenth century, this description of cities would have been accurate.
3) Romanticism-this is not a reference to love but to the aesthetic movement that promoted feeling over reason, nature over artifice, solitude over society, nostalgia over ambition. Thus detached residences and private gardens were considered more beautiful than the cramped quarters in the city. Again, if this were the nineteenth century, this would probably be true.
4) Class Segregation-as urban cores became places of industry and manufacture, suburban areas became places of retreat for the upper classes. The suburbs served as a protective border between the upper and laboring classes. This may account for the misconception of poverty and social ills are urban problems not suburban issues.
These ideologies resulted in avoidance ( the desire to get away from the vice and dirt of the cities) and attraction (the need to embrace virtue and cleanliness) behaviors which formed suburban culture. With suburbia came its detractors. Libertarians rejected the Evangelical strain, Socialists rejected class segregation, Artistic realism rejected Romanticism. This sounds like the beginnings of modernism. Improvements in medicine allied fears of disease. Suburbia became an emblem of snobbery. As I've said in a previous post, in an ironic twist, hipsters in Brooklyn, New York who swore they would never become their-suburban-living-minivan-driving-parents are moving to the suburbs to find more affordable housing. Hey it could happen in YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD. Hey mom check out the multiple pierced tatted up new neighbors next door. The push back grew in the twentieth century as urban planners recognized that sprawl was wasteful and unsustainable-a type of environmental disease. In the fifties and sixties, at the apex of America's migration to the suburbs, social critic and one-time suburban cheerleader Lewis Mumford chastised the burbs for clinging to its illusions. Mumford felt that suburbanites were not only withdrawing from the cities but also shirking their civic duties.
In the interim, the original goals of suburbia-exclusivity and seclusion-have been undermined by its newfound affordability and popularity. The promise of individuality became a mandate for conformity. Think neighborhood associations, not be confused with Historic Preservation Overlay Zones, that can tell you what color to paint your house or how high your grass should be. In short, in contemporary times, the idea of a suburb is more of a marketing tool than an ideal. The day of the suburb is at an end. Now its time for policy and politics to catch up.
www.theatlanticcities.com/arts-and-lifestyle/2013/03/brief-history--suburbias-rise-and-fall/4979
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