population into more, smaller households as it
increased (a factor with many implications that we
will examine in more detail later). By the 1980s and
even more so during the 1990s, the traffic demands
imposed by these unforeseen numbers of households
far outpaced the ability of hierarchical road systems to
cope with the increased load.
Despite all the evidence of traffic congestion on the
few connector streets, and the access problems of subdi-
visions with only one way in and out, the return to the
traditional network of connected streets has been slow
and difficult. Cul-de-sac layouts have been enshrined in
American highway engineers’ design manuals for
several decades and only in 1994 did traditional models
of gridded and connected layouts receive provisional
official backing by the Institute of Transportation
Engineers’ report on
Traffic Engineering for Neo-
Traditional Neighborhood Design
.
No analysis of suburban precedents is complete
without mentioning Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre
City (1935). In a (successful) attempt to reingratiate
himself with an American society that had marginal-
ized him during the 1920s as a talented genius too
difficult to work with, Wright prepared designs for a
city based on his perception of truly American princi-
ples. In this polemic contrast to the European ideas
of Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Ludwig
Hilbersheimer, Wright also explicitly rejected the
American tradition of the romantic garden suburb
with its curving streets and history of public transit.
Instead, Wright established a regular square grid on a
flat prairie landscape divided by high-speed roads.
Railroads and streetcars were abolished; in Wright’s
vision, every American adult was entitled to one
automobile.
Within this grid, most inhabitants lived in single-
family houses on an acre of land. If Wright’s low-
density design layout was prophetic of post-World
War II suburbia in America, so was his Usonian
housing prototype, a private family space focused
away from the public realm of the street. This rejec-
tion of the shared world of the pedestrian street was
prophetic of American suburbia several decades later,
where the private automobile that Wright construed
as a liberating technology for American families now
controls the American domestic environment. Today,
houses lurk behind garage doors that dominate the
streetscape to the exclusion of pedestrians.
Some individual pieces of Wright’s vision have
become generic features of the American landscape,
including clusters of service stations, grade separated
highways, towers rising amidst open space, and ubiq-
uitous low-density housing. But the suggestion that
Broadacre City was the precursor to contemporary
suburbia is overstated. Taken as a whole, Broadacre
City differs from suburbia in several fundamental
aspects (Alofsin, 1989). Wright’s plan integrated many
different uses: farms, manufacturing and industry, a
variety of housing types and open space, together with
communal markets, schools and places of worship
were all dovetailed into an inclusive framework. In
this regard, it established almost the opposite of the
segregation of uses and classes common in American
suburbia today.
The modernist designs of the city and the suburbs
mentioned here and in the previous chapter share
one thing in common: the extensive use of large
highways to structure movement and shape the city.
Until the late 1990s, highway engineers exerted the
most determining effect on the form of American
cities (and most British cities, too). In America, the
public realm of streets and sidewalks began to vanish
as car-based spatial formulas drove decisions in urban
design plans, from the scale of regional road networks
to individual site plans. Criteria for roadway design
had everything to do with the efficiency of vehicle
movement and almost nothing to do with the needs
of pedestrians. If pedestrians were considered at all,
CHAPTER TWO
●
CITIES, SUBURBS AND SPRAWL
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