Suburbanization

Lewis Mumford on the history and ideal suburban ideal: 

“All through history, those who owned or rented land outside the city’s walls valued having a place in the country, even if they did not actively perform agricultural labor: a cabin, a cottage, a vine-shaded shelter, built for temporary retreat if not for permanent occupancy..”

The suburb, very nearly from the beginning of its development in ancient times, “might almost be described as the collective urban form of the country house–the house in a park–as the suburban way of life is so largely a derivative of the relaxed, playful, goods-consuming aristocratic life that developed out of the rough, bellicose, strenuous existence of the feudal stronghold.”

the modern mass suburb (1815-): 

"To be your own unique self; to build your unique house, mid a unique landscape: to live in this Domain of Arnheim a self-centered life, in which private fantasy and caprice would have license to express themselves openly, in short, to withdraw like a monk and live like a prince--this was the purpose of the original creators of the suburb. 

"This utopia proved to be, up to a point, a realizable one: so enchanting that those who contrived it failed to see the fatal penalty attached to it–the penalty of popularity, the fatal inundation of a mass movement whose very numbers would wipe out the goods each individual sought for his own domestic circle, and, worse, replace them with a life that was not even a cheap counterfeit, but rather the grim antithesis.

"In the mass movement into suburban areas a new kind of community was produced, which caricatured both the historic city and the archetypal suburban refuge: a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing teh same television performances, eating the same tasteless pre-fabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold, manufactured in the central metropolis.

"Thus the ultimate effect of the suburban escape in our time is, ironically, a low-grade uniform environment from which escape is impossible. What has happened to the suburban exodus in the United States now threatens, through the same mechanical instrumentalities, to take place, at an equally accelerating rate, everywhere else–unless the most vigorous countermeasures are taken."  [Mumford 1961].

 

 

• Fishman, Robert. Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia. (1987). 
   
• Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. (1985).
   
• Mumford, Lewis (1961). The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. Google preview: https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0156180359. 
   
• Vaux, Calvert. Villas and Cottages (1857).