Privatized Lives: On the embattled ‘burbs
Harvard Design Magazine, Fall 2000
(Continued - 3 of 5)
The Arterial Umbilical
Belching factories did not rise up cheek-by-jowl with fetid tenements. As commercial and institutional uses located outside cities, suburbia spawned its most emblematic form, the opportunistic strip, in which the building fabric was oriented only to the convenience of the automobile. The fundamental unit of modern low-density urbanism is not the house on the lot, not the cul de sac, but the multi-lane 40- to 60-mph arterial. At the most simplistic level, the developer erects a building in the middle of a plot along this street and paves the surrounding land. But each element of urban development, whether residential subdivision, fast-food outlet, ballfield, or office park, is ranged podlike along the arterial. Auto access is carefully considered; the prospect of arrival by bus, by bicycle, or on foot is almost always ignored. Such developments were inevitably conceived individualistically, recognizing in no way their neighbors on the adjacent plot. They made no attempt to create a coherent urbanistic assemblage. Andres Duany and other New Urbanists demonstrate the folly of such “planning” by drawing the convoluted route a condominium dweller must take (inevitably by car)– out of the condo development onto the arterial and into the feeder and parking system of an adjacent mall. The actual destination may be perhaps 150 feet away as the crow flies, yet blocked by the lack of connection between development pods.
Of course, civic places, work places, recreational places and places of residence are not only rarely integrated in suburbia, but often separated by vast distances. What unites suburbia is not shared public space, or a coherent architectural vision, but a vast amount of civil engineering in the form of roads. In fact, to the extent that architecture or design are deployed in suburbia at all, they are deployed as advertising–as packaging that might attract the passing motorist; to the extent that any suburb possesses a sense of place, it does so because of the features of its native landscape, or because of an appealing treatment of roads.
Before the era of the automobile, the necessity of density and proximity produced cities with a consistent and efficient street-oriented fabric that offered a rich variety of experience. Public spaces were seen as an inevitable and desirable extension of private spaces, which were often small and crowded. You used the porch, the stoop, or the street to socialize, to play, to beat the summer heat or simply to escape the suffocating embrace of family. Citizens learned to observe a range of social norms in language, manner, and dress that ordered the shared public realm. One of those norms required that buildings be dressed in an architecture that would at the least make a minimal gesture to decorum and that at best–the great railway stations, the urban-park systems, the museums, monuments, and civic gateways–might brilliantly represent community aspiration, or create a distinct sense of place.
By contrast, the privatized model of urban development embodies no non-mercantile aspirations. Suburbia today is fashioned according to a simplistic, low-density, auto-dependent economic model. True, certain aspirations are satisfied in the provision of residential and commercial structures that reflect consumer taste. Nonetheless, what one drives by in the typical American suburb is the resultant of thousands of purely economic transactions. And in this instrumental landscape, each individual development is manufactured and considered only within its own short-term economic parameters. Any sense of a larger community or shared culture must struggle against the physical impediments of distance and the devotion to the automobile; Architect and planner William Morrish helps neighborhoods understand these consequences by creating maps showing libraries and parks. These often appear in easy proximity to residents, until–in the “aha!” moment–he overlays the arterials and freeways that form the psychological if not physical barriers within their communities.
Invasion of the Suburban Metropolis
Over the years places like Houston, Atlanta, Dallas, Phoenix, and Los Angeles have become incomprehensibly vast suburban metropolises, offering a full range of urban employment, housing, and recreational opportunities. Silicon Valley, in California; Westchester County, in New York; the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington and the beltway suburbs of Boston have become wealth-creating powerhouses, with economies comparable to entire nations. American suburbia has assumed the mercantile functions of the once-distant city, and has reaped the benefits, able to offer diverse economic opportunity and generous government services. But the benefits have come at high cost: in recent years perils once confined largely to the city–poverty, crime, traffic congestion, pollution, failing schools, frightening otherness, anonymity–have invaded the once tranquil leafy streets.
The cacophonous, fragmented landscape of today’s low-density urbanism would be unrecognizable to such spiritual godfathers of suburbia as Andrew Jackson Davis, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Calvert Vaux. Today few suburbs remain only bedroom communities, reliant on the nearest metropolis for shopping and working. Indeed, Robert Fishman argued, in Bourgeois Utopias, that the suburban era ended as bedroom communities became urban places in their own right. Though New Urbanism has addressed the public/private equation at the neighborhood level, its long-term viability remains unproved. No method or mentality–no planning technique, no social consensus, no cultural tradition–has yet been developed to create a workably expressive suburban urbanism at a scale larger than the individual subdivision or office park, one that would reproduce the rich array of public rituals that were negotiated for the city.
Fishman, like many students of suburbia, cites Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City as a model for an integrated vision of the low-density city, where people live, work, and enjoy the pleasures of a civic identity. With its picturesque groupings of buildings separated by swaths of greenery, Broadacre City offered a powerful visual ideal; in privatized America, however, it was an ideal that cannot be realized.
(Continued)