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

Figure 2.1
Office towers and adjacent surface
parking lots, Charlotte, NC, 2003. In a new plan for
this part of the city, this area is being reclaimed to
become a two-block park over four levels of
underground parking. The park will be framed with
mid-rise housing, offices and shops. A new light rail
line is being constructed immediately adjacent to
this area.
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CHAPTER TWO
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CITIES, SUBURBS AND SPRAWL
31
provides the etymological definition, but we can
trace the history of suburban retreats for wealthy
citizenry even farther back, to sixth century 
BC
Babylon. However, it was during the Middle Ages in
Europe that extensive suburban settlements accrued
around most cities, often in poor areas outside city
walls where inhabitants were unable to avail them-
selves of city services and protection. At this time 
the sense of ‘suburban’ changed; a definition in
the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary shows that 
as late as 1817, ‘suburban’ meant ‘having inferior
manners, the narrowness of view attributed to residents
in suburbs’. Another dictionary definition deflates the
suburb as ‘a place of inferior, debased, and especially
licentious habits of life’. In contrast, ‘urbane’ retains
its meaning of being sophisticated, refined and
elegant.
The more immediate origins of modern suburbia
lie in the late eighteenth century at the beginning of
the Industrial Revolution, in the countryside to the
south of London. This new development marked a
return to the original, positive connotations of living
outside the city. Elite merchants in the British capital,
echoing the Roman tradition, conceived the notion
of a rural preserve where families could escape the
increased congestion and pollution resulting from
the early stages of London’s transformation to an
industrial metropolis. From these beginnings, the
physical and social form of the suburbs evolved under
the impetus of transportation technologies, and dur-
ing the latter half of the nineteenth century trams
and urban railways extended the suburbs into a literal
and metaphoric ‘middle landscape’ between city and
country for the wider middle class.
We shall examine the development of the modern
suburb in Britain and America around three themes.
The first traces the development of the suburb as an
element of the changing form and patterns of the
city, due in large part to rapid developments in trans-
portation technology and other technical advances of
the Industrial Revolution. This technical capacity for
urban expansion combined with the opportunities
for developers to make large profits on the conversion
of cheap rural land to urban uses, thus accelerating
the trend. The second theme focuses on the upsurge
of a new ‘romantic’ aesthetic that gripped the public’s
imagination; and the third concerns changes in the
values and structure of family life during the late
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Together, these
forces engineered a revolution in the whole metro-
politan structure, and in the relationships between
city and countryside.
In divergence to the unflattering definitions of an
earlier time, during the late eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries the term suburbia came to mean a
high-quality, low-density environment characterized
by a preponderance of single-family middle-class
homes in a park-like setting. It excluded industry,
most commerce, and all lower classes except for
servants. In contrast to this exclusivity, the core of the
eighteenth-century city comprised a dense mixture of
uses and classes. A basic principle of a city like
London, and the early American settlements in the
British colonies along the eastern seaboard, was that
work and home were naturally combined within each
house, and the house was located in a place that was
good for business. For most urban occupations, this
meant being in the bustling center of town.
The concept of single-use districts, so basic to our
design of the twentieth-century city, was unknown in
the premodern city. Most middle-class commercial
enterprises were extensions of the family, and so the
businessman lived above his office or shop, stored his
goods in the cellar, and often housed apprentices and
trusted employees in the attic (Fishman, 1987: p. 7).
Moreover, the dwellings of the wealthy were often
cheek-by-jowl with the tenements of the poor.
Wealthy families occupied large town houses that
fronted the principal streets, and the poor crowded
into the alleyways and courtyards to the rear
(Fishman: p. 8). The inhabitants of these inferior
dwellings were usually the servants of the upper
classes or the workers in the multitude of small work-
shops that clustered around the houses of the
merchants who dealt in their products.
To understand this sharing of public space by 
people of widely disparate character, it is important
to remember that English society of this time, just
before the onset of the Industrial Revolution in the
mid-to-late eighteenth century, was still very much a
caste system. The ‘social distance’ between upper and
lower classes was so clearly understood by all
concerned that the privileged elite felt little need to
separate themselves from the poor by physical dis-
tance. The poor occupied the same public spaces as
the rich, but were simply ‘invisible’ to their wealthy
betters until they were needed to perform menial or
commercial tasks.
This situation seems strange to our contemporary
social mores, where urban spaces, particularly in
America, tend to be separated by use, race and eco-
nomic class. It illustrates how much our modern sub-
urb is the product of nothing less than a complete
transformation of urban values. At a fundamental
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DESIGN FIRST: DESIGN-BASED PLANNING FOR COMMUNITIES
32
level, established meanings of the city center as the
fashionable focus of wealth and the urban edge as the
place of poverty have been inverted. Only recently
during the 1990s have some city centers begun to
enjoy a renaissance of urban life and activity.
‘Family values,’ one of the most clichéd phrases of
modern society, have also been redefined. In the late
1700s, all members of a middle-class family played
an important role in business affairs, living, working
and sharing the same spaces. This integrated model
progressively fragmented to a condition where busi-
ness in the city became the exclusive province of
men, and child rearing became the responsibility of
women in the suburbs. This paradigm shift was
spurred by two sets of forces – one economic, the
other, religious.
Before the Industrial Revolution, the structure of
the middle-class family was often an economic one,
based on these shared business responsibilities
between fathers, wives, sons, daughters and other
extended family members. However, the developing
capitalist economy increasingly redefined work less as
a collaborative effort and more as a set of specialized
tasks, and this separation of roles combined with
emerging Evangelical religious ideas that defined indi-
vidual holiness as a function of a morally virtuous
family life. Over the course of several decades strad-
dling the turn of the eighteenth century into the nine-
teenth, these changes gradually led to the replacement
of extended family ties based on economic coopera-
tion by ones based more on emotional attachment
around the nucleus of husband, wife and children
(Fishman: p. 33–5). As noted above, the husband and
wife performed newly defined roles; the man became
the sole breadwinner and the woman assumed total
responsibilities for bringing up the children to the
extent that it took her out of the urban workforce.
This model of middle-class family life became so
ubiquitous during the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies that it assumed the status of a fundamental
principle of Anglo-American culture. Only during the
1980s and 1990s did this spatial gender gap began to
close, with the reintegration of women back into the
urban (and suburban) workplace as part of a more
general demographic shift away from the nuclear
family stereotype, and (in America) as a matter of
economic necessity due to the increasing cost of
maintaining a suburban lifestyle.
As these new nuclear families evolved in the early
1800s, their members focused less on extended
economic familial connections, and more on their
own emotional relationships within the small group.
To this end, families sought to separate themselves
from the workplace – and from the intrusions of that
working environment into the home. The idea of the
family dwelling came to be conceived as a wholly
domestic environment, insulated from other pres-
sures, and to meet these new demands the traditional
city house – what we would now refer to as a ‘live-
work unit’ – was no longer suitable. There was little
or no space for the middle-class family to nurture the
growing bonds of intimacy in a dwelling that was
open to customers and the commercial activities 
of city business, storing goods, and even housing
employees. These merchants and bankers however,
had in their grasp the financial resources and ambi-
tion to reorder the physical patterns of the city to
meet their new needs.
And so they did, building new houses near the
villages that surrounded London. Wealthy bankers
and merchants created a new type of living in these
villages that reflected their changing values. To the
educated minds of the eighteenth century, a renewed
appreciation of nature and the man-made landscape
became a hallmark of sophisticated taste, and instead
of a place of rural poverty, the countryside was seen as
a charmingly picturesque setting, ripe for new homes
within easy commuting distance by private carriage.
But the city bourgeoisie could not emulate the
landed gentry living in their country estates far from
urban centers; middle-class merchants and bankers
were tied to the city’s web of commercial operations
where they earned their living. The first suburban
homes were thus regarded as weekend places for the
family to escape the pressures of intrusive city life,
much like the Roman