SUBURBS:
A NEW URBAN FORM?
The City and Citizenship
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Suburbs and the Evolution of
Modern Cities
 Modern cities first centralized, then decentralized
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Fishman: decline of central cities part of “constant upheaval and selfdestruction”
 Consider not just suburbs, but their emergence in the context of
metropolitan trends (and their effect on central cities)
 Demographic evidence
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Population shifts : 23% suburban in 1950, >50% by 2000
Commuting patterns: 38% from suburb to suburb, 19% suburb to city
Office space: 57% now in suburbs
 Suburbanization
Classic (since early 19th century): "a process involving the systematic
growth of fringe areas at a pace more rapid than that of core cities, as a
lifestyle involving a daily commute to jobs in the center"
 Contemporary (late 20th century): suburbs now have complex
economies with specialized services, retail, hospitals, etc.
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The City and Citizenship
April 13, 2015
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Suburban Form:
Sprawl
 Sprawl
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Skyline v. sprawl
Fishman: "familiar decentralized world of highways and tract houses, shopping
malls, and office parks”
Suburbs lack "dominant single core and definable boundaries"
“Technoburb has no proper boundaries; however defined, it is divided into a crazy
quilt of separate and overlapping political jurisdictions”
 Panoply of names:
 "exurb, spread city, urban village, megalopolis, outtown, sprawl, slurb,
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the burbs, nonplace urban field, polynucleated city, technoburb“
 Mumford: “formless urban exudation”
Seemingly unplanned: "no one imagined the form of the new. Instead it
was built up piecemeal, as a result of millions of uncoordinated decisions
made by housing developers, shopping-mall operators, corporate
executives, highway engineers and, not least, the millions of Americans who
saved and sacrificed to buy single-family homes in the expanding suburbs"
The City and Citizenship
April 13, 2015
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Subdivisions & Tract Housing
Colorado Springs
Suburban Ranch House
Newer Suburban Tract House
The City and Citizenship
April 13, 2015
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Causes of Suburbanization
 Emergence of suburbs not an accident
 Technological developments
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Advantages of geographical concentration (primarily for industry and
transportation) undermined by technological developments
 mass transportation, first buses and trains, then cars
 Spread of electrical grid
 Mass marketing
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Especially of new housing developments
Linked to “labor-saving” devices, peacetime economy
 Suburban “utopias”
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Played on cultural ideal of land
Ideal of domesticity, especially for middle-class women
 Political interventions
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Housing policy, e.g. FHA loans
Planning by municipalities
Federal government support for development/maintenance of highways
The City and Citizenship
April 13, 2015
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Levittown
Dream House
Curving Streets
The City and Citizenship
April 13, 2015
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Promoting Suburbia
Cabinets!
Closets!
1958 California advertisement
The City and Citizenship
April 13, 2015
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Highways
Highway interchange
Dallas, 1960
Paying for highways
The City and Citizenship
April 13, 2015
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Shopping Malls
Sharpstown Mall, Houston TX
Lakewood, California
Woodfield Mall
The City and Citizenship
April 13, 2015
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Suburbs and Car Culture
 Facilitated by development of Interstate Highway
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System
Garages and houses
Motels supplant hotels
Theaters: movie palaces, drive-ins, multiplexes
Gasoline service stations (suburban “corner stores”?)
Shopping: downtown department stores, mall
complexes, strip malls
Production
 Factories move to suburbs
 Corporate offices move (and are “balkanized”)
The City and Citizenship
April 13, 2015
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The Impact of Cars
The City and Citizenship
April 13, 2015
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Shopping, Working, Walking?
The City and Citizenship
April 13, 2015
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Signs, Signs, Everywhere…
The City and Citizenship
April 13, 2015
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Are Suburbs “Cities?”
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No, not according to typical definitions, even of “modern” cities
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No center or boundaries
Little distinction between functional zones
Yes, according “post-modern” criteria
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"Instead of a single privileged center, there would be a multitude of crossings, no
one of which could assume priority. And the grid would be boundless by its very
nature, capable of unlimited extension in all directions"
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Not defined by space, but by time (how long it takes to get to
something, not how far it is)
The City “a la carte”
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defined by each family for own purposes: "each family home has
become the central point for its members. Families create their own
'cities' out of the destinations they can reach (usually traveling by car) in
a reasonable length of time“
 Overlapping networks
 Household: moving kids around to school, practice, lessons
 Consumption (Mallopolis)
 Production
The City and Citizenship
April 13, 2015
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Suburban Form: Technoburbs
and the Technocity
 Technoburbs are part of a broader technocity
 Resulted from the “almost simultaneous decentralization of
housing, industry, specialized services, and office jobs”
 No longer suburbs, but new form of city
 Technoburbs no longer need urban “core”
 They are “a peripheral zone, perhaps as large as a county, that
has emerged as a viable socioeconomic unit”
 Residents oriented to immediate surroundings rather than to
central city (multicentered)
 Technoburbs in more direct communication with each other (or
other technocities) than with “center”
 Symbolized by “beltways” (the “Main Streets” of the technoburb)
 Decline of “suburbs” and rise of “technoburbs”
 “Renewed linkage of work and residence”
 Commuting is multidirectional, rather than “tidal wash”
The City and Citizenship
April 13, 2015
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Back to Sprawl – A Critique
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Duany, et al paint a grim picture:
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Sprawl built by insisting on segregation of the five key components
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“cookie-cutter houses, wide, treeless, sidewalk-free roadways, mindlessly curving
cul-de-sacs, a streetscape of garage doors – a beige vinyl parody of Leave It to
Beaver. Or, worse yet, a pretentious slew of McMansions”
“a national landscape that is largely devoid of places worth caring about”
Housing subdivisions
Shopping centers
Office and business parks
Civic institutions
Roadways
End result: “an uncoordinated agglomeration of standardized single-use zones
with little pedestrian life and even less civic identification, connected only by an
overtaxed network of roadways.”
That is, sprawl the result of planning designed to “make cars happy”
This contrasted to “traditional neighborhoods” and to possibility of
“good growth”
The City and Citizenship
April 13, 2015
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Sprawl – Bruegmann’s
“Defense”
 Sprawl not a recent American development
 Many cities in history have experienced “sprawl”
 American sprawl distinctive because it’s a mass
phenomenon
 Sprawl happens when there is prosperity and (housing)
choice
 Examine “sprawl” as cultural concept
 Set of diagnoses and solutions that reveal cultural and
historical contexts
 Thus, Duany’s description of sprawl reveals author’s
attitudes more than it defines what sprawl is
 Bruegmann’s definition: “low-density, scattered urban
development without systematic large-scale or regional
public land-use planning”
The City and Citizenship
April 13, 2015
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