Privatized Lives: On the embattled ‘burbs
Harvard Design Magazine, Fall 2000
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A recent New York Times story captures a dilemma that is becoming all too familiar at the developing edges of urban America. It tells of Carol and Dennis Ferry, who in 1978 thought they’d found their close-to-nature dream when they moved from a starter home in Trenton, N.J., to a house on the edge of farm fields in Hamilton. But a few years later, houses covered those fields, and a drive . that once took ten minutes stretched to half an hour. So the Ferrys moved to Hopewell at the rural fringe of Mercer County. But once again, their dream looks like it will vanish under the treads of bulldozers. The couple recently learned that they will be sharing their idyll with an office park being built by Merrill Lynch, a development that could reach 5.5 million square feet–about the size of one tower of Manhattan’s World Trade Center. “Where do we go next?” Mrs. Ferry asked the reporter. “There’s really no place you can go to hide.”
Places to hide are indeed scarce in today’s suburban landscape. The Ferrys have pursued the American dream, the dream of the sylvan retreat far from the restless metropolis, with unusual dedication. What is not unusual, however, is that a retreat–at least one close to urban amenities and opportunities– continues to elude them, even in a state that claims a commitment to funneling development into existing communities so that natural surroundings remain close by. As the Times put it: “. . . money and jobs–in this case the threat to move 3,500 jobs to Pennsylvania–can trump public land preservation policy.”
The Ferrys–like most Americans–are ignorant of the powerful urban-development mechanisms that draw bulldozers toward their ephemeral idyll. Their naiveté is telling. If you buy a new house in a new subdivision next to open land, what guarantees exist that the land will remain open, undeveloped, uncluttered by speculative houses and office “parks”? And yet thousands of people every year buy new houses in new communities, hoping that the view will stay the same. They imagine that it is the next development, the place down the road, not their own, that is spoiling the pretty landscape and clogging the quiet country roads.
The Ferrys’ blinkered view is indicative of the largely unacknowledged means by which the vast suburban landscape has been produced in the United States in the last half century and is still produced. Suburbia as an urban entity has now long outgrown commonly held frames of reference. Even the word suburbia no longer describes America’s low-density urbanism, even when it takes on countrified trappings. Such trappings cause social and cultural critics to focus too often on the presumed uniformity, conformity, and cultural emptiness of suburbia. But the communities that fit this mold are increasingly rare. Only the outermost belt of white-flight suburbs offers critics the old-fashioned grist. The nation pays insufficient attention to what these new settlers are fleeing and why today’s suburbia has mutated into such an unstable and unsatisfying form. How America builds its urban areas is the critical issue of the built environment at the start of the new century. Deeper pathologies are just beginning to become widely understood, and they will vex the nation well into the 21st century.
A home surrounded by lush lawns and quiet, leafy streets where children can safely play: this was the dream that inspired the great suburban building boom of the 1950s. It is a dream that retains a powerful hold over the American imagination, even as today’s suburbanites admit how distant that image is from contemporary reality. Indeed, the Ferrys’ choice of the word “hide” is revealing. For a long time ownership of a home on its own plot of land, a place capable of being molded to the needs and desires of its owners, has been an emblem of freedom and individualism. While that idea remains powerful, a new, hunkered-down suburbia of gated communities and tank-like SUVs recognizes a present that promises less security and threatens many potential, if sometimes inchoate, dangers. Deed restrictions covering everything from paint color to roof-tile configuration to landscape features enforce an orderliness that seems no longer to exist outside the subdivision.
The Anomalous Era
Robert Fishman has written of the “powerful cultural ideal” of suburbia, its power derived “from the capacity of suburban design to express a complex and compelling vision of the modern family freed from the corruption of the city, restored to harmony with nature, endowed with wealth and independence, yet protected by a close-knit, stable community.” Escaping the city to a place of refuge, where, as Kenneth T. Jackson put it, one could “keep the world at bay,” has long been a leitmotif in the cultural construction of suburbia, one that has, perhaps to the nation’s peril, received too little attention. The corrupt city to which suburbia historically offered itself as the utopian opposite was the noisy, congested, chaotic, amoral, unfettered, everyone-for-himself, capitalistic free-for-all. Who could live a decent life in a restless metropolis where office towers clawed their way skyward without regard for the neighbors they cast in darkness or where an odiferous tannery might set up shop next to a genteel apartment building?
Post-war suburbia appeared to have restored orderliness and civility to the urban-development process. In particular, William H. Whyte’s seminal sociological dissection of Park Forest, Illinois, The Organization Man, depicts a community of admirable solidarity. Friendships were quickly formed there. Doors were left unlocked. Neighbors shared baby-sitting duties with little fuss or formality. Early residents participated in an impressive variety of community-service activities and personal-enrichment forums. Neighbors felt comfortable entering each other’s homes with only a knock and a shouted hello. So much was shared in the early years of Park Forest that residents used to joke about their “socialist” tendencies.
Park Forest was by no means unique. Consider an image published in a Time-Life survey of the Pacific states in 1966. The view takes in a single block of a single subdivision called Newport Hills, in Bellevue, outside Seattle. The image and its annotations are extraordinary less for what is there than for what is not: no single people, no single parents, no elderly, no members of any non-white ethnic group, almost no women who worked outside the home. Should the Time-Life editors want to recreate this scene, they would no longer be able to, even though Southeast 54th Street remains as well-tended as it was in 1966. They would be hard-pressed to find a place of such singular homogeneity anywhere in suburban America today.
This comforting environment reflected less a triumph of social engineering or the art of planning than a unique moment in American history. “The middle decades of the 20th century were an entirely anomalous period in American history,” writes David Frum in How We Got Here: the Seventies, the Decade That Brought You Modern Life. “Never had the state been so strong, never had people submitted as uncomplainingly, never had the country been more economically equal, never had it been more ethnically homogeneous, seldom was its political consensus so overpowering.” Author Alan Ehrenhalt also describes a1950s of easy sociability and of a broadly understood ethic of civic obligation and family duty in another Park Forestlike suburb of Chicago. But in The Lost City: Discovering the Forgotten Virtues of Community in the Chicago of the 1950s, he also finds such solidarity in a city neighborhood in southwest Chicago and even to a degree in Bronzeville–the center of Chicago’s black ghetto.
In the cities, this era proved momentary, falling victim to the enormous economic and social dislocations of subsequent decades. The suburban ideals of family, closeness to nature, and the commitment to community borne, if nothing else, on the self-interest of homeownership, was long thought to fortify suburbs against such social and economic vicissitudes. But lately a growing percentage of suburbs has fallen victim to urban maladies. As early as 1955–the end of his research–Whyte found the impressive solidarity of Park Forest dissolving. Today, 45-years after The Organization Man was published, the tidy bungalows and split-levels look surprisingly little changed there. But the companies Whyte chronicled have closed their doors or fled, sweeping away countless jobs. The Northern and Western suburbs prosper now, while “for rent” banners dangle from Park Forest’s few office buildings. The once stylish shopping center has struggled against abandonment for more than a decade. Population and household income have slid; single parents head more families. The once nearly all-white suburb now boasts of its ethnic diversity, but drugs, racial tension and gang activity are among “urban” social ills that have become familiar.
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