Design First Walters fm qxd 2/26/04 7: 50 pm page I

27
Walters_01.qxd 2/26/04 7:20 PM Page 27

---

28
Walters_02.qxd 2/26/04 7:12 PM Page 28

---

29
SYNOPSIS
In America, the main battles for a sustainable urban
future will be fought in the suburbs, as they pose the
most difficult political terrain for design and environ-
mental improvement. Accordingly, a large part of this
chapter is devoted to untangling the interwoven
strands of suburban history and their influence on
present-day practice. The nineteenth century wit-
nessed a lot of cross-reference between suburban
development in Britain and America, and we review
this history in some detail to counter a prevailing
American misconception of the suburb as a particu-
larly American (and twentieth-century) phenomenon.
Suburbs developed first in eighteenth-century
England and the story of their origin and develop-
ment there and in America – first as a companion and
later as a rival to the city – is a complex one. It
includes many diverse sources of aesthetic inspiration
and many influences from the socio-economic condi-
tions and cultural values of various periods of Anglo-
American history since the beginnings of the
Industrial Revolution. Within this elaborate tale are
important reminders and examples that can help us
understand our present condition. Moreover, illumi-
nated by our renewed appreciation of the relevance of
traditional forms of urbanism to contemporary cities
and suburbs, this history contains vital precedents for
our most advanced urban thinking today.
Since World War II, suburbs in America have devel-
oped in a somewhat different pattern from those in
Great Britain, due in part to different cultural attitudes
about the development of private property and
restrictions on suburban growth. Whereas Britain
practiced (more or less) a policy of containment and
green belt preservation around towns and cities,
America countenanced no such restrictions, and what
began in the 1950s as an optimistic search for a conve-
nient, affordable, drive-in utopia, turned during the
1990s into a conflicted landscape of polarized opinion
about the burdens of growth – sprawl, congestion, pol-
lution and loss of open space. The second part of the
chapter examines this devolution of the American envi-
ronment from the positive connotations of ‘suburb’ to
the negative image of ‘sprawl.’ The problems associated
with spread-out, low-density development have led in
America to the rise of the ‘Smart Growth’ movement,
an important factor that we shall examine in Chapter 3.