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Building
Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth 1820-2000
by Dolores Hayden
Vintage, 2004
Paperback, 336 pages
The
Cul-De-Sac Syndrome: Turning Around the Unsustainable American
Dream by John F. Wasik
Bloomberg, 2009
Hardcover, 240 pages
Changes to suburbia's physical structure
can be said to fall into one of two types: those created
by attempts to reverse its negative characteristics and
those acted upon by the forces that helped shape it initially.
While in neither case are the formal properties of change
apparent, it's clear the first is a proactive response --
ideally a combination of bottom-up and top-down strategies
-- and the latter is closer to a doomsday scenario enacted
by those who see the suburbs as wasteful, misguided, and
completely unsustainable. Arguments against the latter's
validity are many, rooted in the fact that most Americans
choose to live in what can be considered suburbs. Proactive
responses are understandably growing in number, as more
illustrations of the ills of suburbia circulate (its link
to obesity is just one of many) and as energy prices and
other factors make it clear that the path of suburbia cannot
continue indefinitely on its current trajectory. The wastefulness
and unsustainability of most suburban conditions is
a real thing, but now is a time for change that embraces
the positive aspects of these places, instead of ignorance
or refusal to accept the problems of 21st-century suburbs.
These books are two components of this positive change,
one geared towards an understanding of the circumstances
of the suburbs and the other towards an understanding of
suburbia's relationship to our current economic crisis.
Historian and architect Dolores
Hayden continues her investigation of the American landscape,
a word used in its broadest sense to include the physical
character of our inhabitation of the land, the mechanisms
that shape this use, and the social interactions and processes
that both influence and arise from this inhabitation. The
last sets Hayden apart from other authors tackling suburbia,
in such titles as 1984's Redesigning
the American Dream, in which domesticity and gender
roles are investigated where normally they are ignored.
Building Suburbia tackles close to 200 years of
suburban growth, a formidable subject and time period that
is reined in by the author's delimiting of seven historic
patterns and her use of specific examples to portray sweeping
pictures. This is history at its best, as understanding
is gleaned from a depth of investigation that, while hardly
all-encompassing, succinctly explains the path of suburbia's
rise, its "triple dream" of house, land, and community.
After Hayden's chapter on Rural Fringes -- the seventh pattern,
today's outer suburbs disconnected from cities, unlike old
suburbs -- she outlines future scenarios for dealing with
suburbia's ills. After finding fault in both New Urbanism
and high-tech houses, she targets older suburbs as the canvas
for change, a sentiment shared by John F. Wasik in his new
proposal for making suburbs sustainable.
Bloomberg columnist Wasik
usually doles out financial advice, but here he attempts
to link the "worst housing bust in generations"
with the American Dream's realization in the suburbs. This
is not an easy task. The book reads like two parallel tracks
-- economics and suburbia -- that only occasionally touch
each other, though by the end of the book it is clear
that the affordability that Americans hoped for in distant
suburbs ("spurbs", as Wasik coins them) cannot
last, subject to rising energy costs, ill health and other
factors. Wasik's primary argument sees Americans' belief
in the insoluble equity of their homes as the root of the
housing bust. Blame goes to homeowners more than lenders
and others who push the American Dream, but the privatization
of expenses that accompanied house depreciation did not
help matters, as people could not then afford their mortgages.
Wasik's reporting on sustainable houses does not address
this problem. He is enamored by engineering and technical
solutions, going so far as to equate prefab house designer
Michelle
Kaufmann with Henry Ford and Thomas Edison. (As discussed
in this week's dose,
Kaufmann's design practice recently closed, tempering Wasik's
hyperbole.) His solutions are a combination of homeowner-generated
ones (green homes, energy production) and policies (transportation
funding, adopting LEED in building codes, change real estate
tax breaks) that ignore land use, density and other
factors that would make living closer together the most
sustainable solution of all.
What separates these two titles is
the social. Hayden argues for the importance of community,
of how we live together, not isolated in smart
homes on large lots. Wasik barely mentions community, favoring
a presentation of green homes and New Urbanism, the latter
almost exclusively in terms of reduced VMT's (Vehicle Miles
Traveled). It's clear the future of suburbia must encompass
the social aspects of living alongside others. In this regard
Hayden's book is a valuable resource in generating ideas for moving forward
that Wasik, and others, should read.
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