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Figure 2.2
Coolidge Corner, Boston, Massachusetts.
This mature suburban centre in Boston thrives around
a stop on the city’s elderly Green Line light rail
system. (Photo by Adrian Walters)
Figure 2.3
Riverside, Chicago, Frederick Law
Olmsted, 1869. A curving street sweeps alongside 
a park towards the local ‘town center’ designed
around the commuter railroad station with service to
central Chicago.
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was his deep philosophical preference for the virtues
of country living. Thus the garden suburb, with its
rural aesthetic and low density, seemed to embody
key attributes of American life. The city could be
kept at a distance, and the suburb embodied sound
real estate principles – making money by converting
cheap agricultural land to desirable residences. For
millions of Americans in search of the good life it
was, until recently, a near-perfect solution.
This evolution of the garden suburb had one other
important attribute: it presaged the creation of the
Garden City ideal at the end of the nineteenth century
that in turn catalyzed much urban and suburban design
theory and practice throughout the twentieth century.
However, as we have outlined, the romantic suburb was
a middle-class phenomenon, and there was another
important component of the nineteenth-century vision
of a Garden City arcadia: the development of model
industrial villages for the working classes.
Early industrial villages such as New Lanark,
Scotland (1793) Lowell, Massachusetts (1822), and
Saltaire in England (1851), illustrated a strain of phil-
anthropic concern by industrialists and their archi-
tects, and a growing sense of the need for socially
responsible planning and urban reform. Other indus-
trial villages such as Pullman (1880) outside Chicago,
and the English examples of Port Sunlight (1888),
Bournville (1895) and New Earswick, (1903) all con-
tributed to this ideology.
The social ideals of nineteenth-century reformers
John Ruskin and William Morris were influential in
this regard. Enlightened British industrialists Sir
Titus Salt, W.H. Lever, and the chocolate magnates –
Rowntrees and Cadburys – adopted these ideals in
their attempts to improve the desperate conditions of
industrial workers. These philanthropists constructed
company towns in the clean air and natural beauty of
the English countryside beyond the ‘corruption’ of
the city. Salt built Saltaire outside Bradford; Lever
constructed Port Sunlight outside Liverpool. George
Cadbury developed Bournville southwest of
Birmingham; and perhaps most importantly, the
Rowntrees created New Earswick north of York using
designs by Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin (see
Figures 2.4 and 2.5).
The planned communities of Port Sunlight and New
Earswick in particular demonstrate a picturesque archi-
tectural character in their buildings and an artful layout
of streets and public spaces. These features, together
with the reliance upon nearby cities, confirmed their
places in the lineage of romantic suburban settlements.
American examples like Lowell or Pullman, while
sharing many of the philanthropic intentions, or at
least, the enlightened self-interest of their British coun-
terparts, were composed of well planned but rather
severe urban dwellings, owing nothing to the growing
popular taste for romantic imagery. It wasn’t until
CHAPTER TWO
●
CITIES, SUBURBS AND SPRAWL