residential areas, a bleak situation that only increased
the rate of business relocation to the suburbs. This self-
reinforcing cycle of decay and depression remained
largely unbroken until the 1980s, when many of
these centrally located
housing areas began to be
reclaimed by the pioneering members of the middle
class who had grown increasingly dissatisfied with
their suburban lifestyle.
During the decades of this suburban building
boom, the attention of most architects was not
focused on the decaying inner cities, or on the single-
family houses and the commercial strips of the sub-
urbs. Most of the everyday fabric of America’s
suburbs was constructed with very little thought
to design except in the most superficial ways. The
profession generally concerned itself with the more
upscale suburban
building types of enclosed
shopping malls and office parks. Here buildings
stood alone as objects in (sometimes) landscaped
space, each trying to outdo its competitors in terms
of external appearance and visual gimmicks. As in the
residential subdivision, the public realm of shared
pedestrian space disappeared by neglect and omission
(see Figure 2.12).
The exception to this decline of the pedestrian
environment was the
much-examined transforma-
tion of the American Main Street into the pedestrian
space of the suburban shopping mall. Leading this
transformation was the Austrian-American architect
Victor Gruen, the person generally credited with
inventing this new building type in the late 1950s
and early 1960s. Gruen’s initial vision was a recre-
ation of Main Street without the cars, but with the
inclusion of civic facilities such as post offices and
community rooms. He
was eager to carry forward a
wider spectrum of social activities than simply shop-
ping into the new suburban environment, but by the
early 1970s, Gruen admitted that the market forces
that drove the allocation of money-making space in
malls made the incorporation of non-retail, civic
functions all but impossible (Gruen: p. 39: Kaliski:
p. 92). Shopping was, by this time,
an activity increas-
ingly divorced from the other functions of daily life.
Only in the late 1990s has this begun to change with
the design and development of a new generation of
mixed-use ‘town centres’ (Bohl, 2002).
American society was slow to recognize the trans-
formation of the good life in the suburbs to the perils
and problems of sprawl. Jerry Adler’s article ‘Bye-Bye,
Suburban Dream: 15 ways to fix the suburbs’, in
Newsweek
(May 1995) was followed by James Howard
Kunstler’s cover story ‘Home from Nowhere’ in the
Atlantic Monthly
magazine in September 1996. These
populist polemics against the prevailing suburban
lifestyle and its spatial pattern reached a wide audi-
ence and
opened up a national debate, but several
social scientists, geographers, environmentalists and
architects had been pulling together various critiques
of urban and suburban conditions in America dating
initially from the 1950s and reemerging again in the
1980s (Riesman, 1950; Whyte, 1956; Gans, 1967;
Clawson, 1971; Krier, 1984; Spirn, 1984; Baldassare,
1986; Cervero, 1986; 1989; Whyte, 1988; Kelbaugh,
1989; Putnam, 2000).
These and other analyses
illustrated the major
changes on urban form since 1950 as a result of
ideological, technological, and economic forces. As
we have seen, from the 1950s onward, rising car
ownership, combined with population increases,
extended America’s urbanized areas further, faster and
at lower densities than previous decades. Riesman,
Whyte and other researchers categorized suburbia as
being boringly homogenous
and a place lacking in
individuality and rich human experience, while
Gans, in his study of the superficially homogenous
community of Levittown, strongly refuted these
assertions. The debate continues to rage on to this
day, informing such 1990s Hollywood movies as
The
Truman Show
and
American Beauty
.
This dissolution of the American urban fabric
begun in the 1950s increased during the 1980s and
DESIGN FIRST: DESIGN-BASED PLANNING FOR COMMUNITIES
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