Excerpts

From the chapter “The Changing Face of Suburbia”

The American house-car suburb was more or less invented in Los Angeles in the 1920s, but in the post World War II period, it became an American institution. Following the war, 14 million military personnel with sudden family syndrome played a frantic game of musical chairs, living with extended family or friends, or whatever else they could find: converted boxcars, chicken coops, and garages. Crowds lined up at funeral parlors to get the addresses of newly vacant apartments. One Omaha newspaper ad read, “Big Ice Box, 7 by 17 feet. Could be fixed up to live in.” In response to the emergency, the U.S. government shifted gears and came up with a new plan of attack. We had open land, and we knew how to access it, strategically. In a manner of speaking, we declared war on American soil, deploying bulldozers instead of tanks to level hills, fill creeks and yank trees out like weeds to build one subdivision after another, and the economy boomed!

Various factors shaped the suburbs, including the availability of open, affordable land, the embrace of the automobile, urban flight, and the birth of a glitzy new American Dream, as seen on the new technology of television. Even fear played into the equation. If nuclear attack were to occur, military experts warned, high-density developments would be more vulnerable, so we should spread development out. Highways would be needed to evacuate civilians, after the bombs hit. Eisenhower met that challenge by signing the Interstate Highway Act in 1956, which authorized and scheduled the construction of 41,000 miles of roads. These were the days of bomb shelters, and elementary school kids obediently covering their heads in basement hallways during air raid drills.

Economists loved what the new Dream did for the Gross National Product, and the media loved the storyline, too: GI FAMILIES OCCUPY SUBURBIA. Developer William Levitt, a five-star general on the tract home front, appeared on the cover of Time magazine, and stories about Levittown, the nation’s first subdivision, also ran in Life and Reader’s Digest. How could we question this energetic, giddy, sexy Dream? All the pieces seemed to fit together, and money flowed into the country’s green fields like harvested grain through a combine, making subdivisions the last and most profitable crop. In battalions of brand new Fords and Chevies, Americans rolled into the suburbs on highways and streets that now measure four million miles – enough to circle the planet 157 times. Just ten years earlier, only 44 percent of American homes were resident-owned, and fewer than half of the households had cars. But that was changing, quickly.

The ideal of the suburb was country homes for city people – nature without the mud. In the suburbs, a family could have it all: community, fresh air, proximity to the city, and convenience. “The most house for the money,” was the mantra for both buyers and sellers. Naturally, people wanted the biggest and best piece of the Dream they could get, and the best perceived value was in the suburbs. With FHA guaranteeing buyers’ loans, the new American Dream lay on the horizon — on the outskirts of Emerald City.

But there was a glitch.

A legal precedent, Ambler v Euclid (1926), in effect made it illegal to put houses, businesses, and stores in suburban neighborhoods. Based on the dubious assumption that residences should be separate from commerce, civic life, and even recreation, planning departments throughout North America adopted boilerplate code systems. What resulted were look-alike neighborhoods that stretched from suburban Toronto to suburban San Diego. Subdivisions typically weren’t custom designed to fit the needs of each piece of land, they were simply mass-produced like automobiles or metal mailboxes.

From the chapter, “How to Remodel a Neighborhood:”

When you remodel a house, you have certain goals in mind – to make the kitchen bigger, for example, while at the same time providing a place for taking off muddy shoes and boots when coming in the back door. We propose a similar strategy for remodeling a suburban neighborhood. The goals might be to create a sense of community, provide more public spaces, and meet more individual needs right in the neighborhood.

After building the neighborhood’s social capital to create a functional network (Chapter 2), and identifying common values like a sense of community and sustainability (Chapter 3), the next step is to agree on basic design principles and building blocks that can guide a long-range neighborhood remodeling program. This, in turn, can make streets, sidewalks, and backyards more valuable, and neighborhoods less dependent on costly, imported resources. By thinking outside the box, we can gradually upgrade the performance of our neighborhoods, making them more desirable to live in. Really, our only other option is to keep looking for those elusive neighborhoods where “the grass is greener.” In other words, to participate in the huge game of musical chairs in which one-sixth of the U.S. population moves every year.

Neighborhoods and communities have five basic types of features: paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks. As we begin to think about remodeling our neighborhoods, we need to look at how these components interact. At the end of this chapter, we’ll look at two neighborhoods that were built with these components in mind.

Paths, or corridors of movement, give a neighborhood form. These include streets, sidewalks, bikepaths, alleys, wildlife corridors, canals, and railroads. As we’ll see, there are many opportunities for upgrading paths in suburban neighborhoods, despite the fact that many were really engineered to serve machines, not people.

In successful communities, edges are physical/visual boundaries or transitions between distinct districts or neighborhoods. They could be creeks, open space, or higher-volume avenues.

Nodes are places within a neighborhood that are accessible by paths, and that are often traveled to and from for specific activities. They range from a well-used basketball hoop in a driveway to a local park or community building, and because they are a center of activity, they help create a neighborhood sense of place.

Landmarks are icons that create a sense of familiarity in a neighborhood. A large, stately tree, like a giant oak planted in a median strip, could be a landmark. A sculpture situated on a piece of donated front lawn could be a great neighborhood landmark, as could a community garden, an old schoolhouse, or a church.

The word district is a distinctly identifiable region, a concept that is more familiar in urban settings. However, districts may also be developed in suburban neighborhoods. For example, imagine a given neighborhood that had a well-landscaped, common parking area for both residents and customers, and several shops that specialized in musical instruments and small-stage concerts. In that musical district-neighborhood, streets might be “slowed down” with county-funded landscape features such as traffic circles, and trees might line either side of the street, creating a people-friendly atmosphere. Certainly, a neighborhood like this would have its own identity, and could be thought of as a little district.

We’ve included some key principles of neighborhood design to help you think about how a neighborhood can be remodeled.

Ten Basic Design Principles for Remodeling Neighborhoods

1. Human Scale. There are basic spatial relationships that can create resonance in a neighborhood, including focal points, a sense of transition, and a sense of enclosure in key places. Four hundred and fifty feet might be an ideal length for a neighborhood with its own sense of community, because at that distance it’s still possible to recognize individuals. Cohousing research indicates that an optimum neighborhood scale might include 30 to 40 houses, because that number could successfully share a common building and get to know each other well.

2. Resource Responsibility. A neighborhood that develops an everyday ethic that includes efficient household resource use, recycling, community gardening, shared transportation, energy generation at the neighborhood level, also stands a better chance of being economically and socially viable. Individual efforts to be sustainable can be greatly augmented by cooperation within the neighborhood.

3. Walkability. We’ve got legs, we just need good sidewalks, bikepaths, parks, and shops to use them. The five-minute walk is considered a good measurement of “walkability.” What destinations should lie within five minutes of the typical suburban front door?

4. Open Spaces. Whether in common backyards, on vacant lots, or in areas reclaimed from the car, open spaces can be used for picnics, community gardens, and places for conversation, reading and relaxation.

5. Public facilities. A neighborhood that becomes a “we” rather than a string of “me’s” will probably want to create a place where the neighborhood can gather. It could be in a neighborhood church or school, or it could be in a cooperatively purchased home that becomes a common building.

6. Streetscapes. By working with the city or county, neighborhoods can create public areas in and around streets that are well landscaped and people-friendly. The best time to plant a shade tree is fifteen years ago. The second best time is now.

7. Variety. Landscaping and house decoration have typically been the only tools for creating variety in subdivision neighborhoods. At Fox Run, featured in the next three chapters, variation and neighborhood color are created by adapting garages, planting a community garden and orchard, taking out driveways, creating gardens and pathways, and taking down fences.

8. Mixed Uses. Home businesses are becoming a large sector of the American economy. In Superbia, shops and neighborhood enterprises like composting, energy generation and daycare will begin to make suburban neighborhoods more lively and productive.

9. Coordination. This term means “architectural style,” including walls and fences, streetscapes, colors and materials. A neighborhood should co-design features to create a sense of harmony and resonance.

10. Maintenance. Public features should be designed with the future in mind, by using materials, technologies and plant species that won’t require large amounts of capital or time for maintenance.