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villa suburbana
. These classical
antecedents went hand-in-hand with the other major
element of the new aesthetic taste: the affection 
for landscape, and in particular, the picturesque 
landscaped garden. This sensibility had its roots in the
large-scale reconfiguration of country estates during the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by designers
and tastemakers such as Capability Brown, Humphrey
Repton, Payne Knight, and Uvedale Price.
In contrast to the French tradition of landscape
gardening based on clear formal geometries (e.g.
Versailles) English taste in the late eighteenth century
evolved to the ideal of seeking visual pleasure in the
landscape by subtle man-made improvements that
looked ‘natural.’ The idea was empiricist – to stimu-
late emotions in the viewer by appealing to his or her
senses – and to this end a certain irregularity or
‘picturesque roughness’ in the composition was to be
preferred over ‘symmetrical beauty.’ Because this new
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CHAPTER TWO
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CITIES, SUBURBS AND SPRAWL
33
fashion in landscape design had little precedent,
designers often turned to the paintings of Claude
Lorrain(1600–82) and Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665)
for inspiration. Evocative landscapes with scaled-
down crags, pastoral scenes ready-made for sheep and
shepherds, and romantic ‘follies’ of ruined classical
temples and gothic fragments became the environ-
ments of choice for the British aristocracy.
Following this elite aesthetic, a group of villas 
was constructed during the decade 1790–1800 at
Clapham, south of London, around a common open
space that became a picturesque park in miniature,
thus creating the first true proto-suburb (Fishman: 
p. 52). Public space blended seamlessly with private
gardens to create surrogate Gardens of Eden as settings
for new modes of family life.
It wasn’t long before these weekend retreats became
full-fledged homes, where wives and children stayed
while husbands commuted each day into the city by
private horse-drawn carriage. This cultural shift was
aided and abetted by a strong economic incentive.
Suburban residential expansion beyond the normal
boundaries of the city transformed cheap agricultural
land into profitable building plots. Suburbia was a
good investment as well as a good setting for family
life (Fishman: p. 10).
The image of the middle-class suburb as a romantic
garden where the virtues of the city merged with those
of the countryside became the dominant model on
both sides of the Atlantic for development beyond
established city boundaries. English precedents such as
John Nash’s Regents Park, with its surrounding terraces
and adjacent Park Village, in London (1811–41) and
Decimus Burton’s Calverly Park in Tunbridge Wells,
(1827–28), are important in this regard.
American designers traveled to England during
the first half of the nineteenth century to see these
and other examples that predated any similar devel-
opments in the USA (Archer, 1983: pp. 140–1). It is
important to note that these changes in taste and
values, and the transatlantic exchanges of informa-
tion, both predated the technologies of mechanized
public transportation. The cultural template for
suburbia had been created by 1830; the role of the
railway was to bring this new style of life within
reach of the whole spectrum of the middle class, and
ultimately sections of the working classes too.
Typical early examples, well known to American
experts, were Victoria Park in Manchester and
Rock Park Estate in Cheshire, across the River
Mersey from Liverpool (Archer: p. 143). Dating
from 1837, both these designs featured detached
and semi-detached (duplex) houses, landscaped
parks, and curving roadways.
The new suburban lifestyle of the first half of
the nineteenth century soon established a coherent
physical expression of building form and land use. To
create an attractive and profitable enterprise, new
developments generally applied four planning princi-
ples that are still relevant today, and could describe
most suburban residential developments built in the
USA since 1950. These were: a uniformly low density
of development enhanced by open landscaped areas;
a homogeneous single class population for economic
and social stability; the availability of convenient but
carefully screened and segregated commercial areas;
and lastly, the creation of a plan in a coordinated
manner by a single developer (Archer: pp. 141–2).
The scope and location of this type of develop-
ment were vastly extended by the growth of mass
transportation that was part of the progressive indus-
trialization of society during the nineteenth century
in Britain and America. In the USA in particular, this
growth gave rise to what became the dominant
model of suburbia until the 1920s – the middle-class
commuter suburb organized around a train station or
streetcar stop. The railway station was normally
located centrally in the plan for obvious reasons of
convenience, and commuters walked back and forth
between home and the station every day, thus giving
rise to a compact urban plan.
This is the precise concept that drives the design 
of new Transit-Oriented Developments (TODs) in
America today. In both historic and contemporary
examples, a network of clearly organized and connected
streets leads to the train station, and development 
is clustered within the radii of five- and ten-minute
walking distances. In the USA, this arrangement has
become a near-binding typology in its own right (see
Figure 3.5). This spatial principle of a short walk to
transit was also evident in the design of the American
railroad suburbs’ junior sibling, the streetcar suburb
of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
This smaller scale technology provided more fre-
quent stops and allowed more flexible layouts varying
between a clustered center and a looser and less dense
plan form as illustrated in Figure 2.2.
As we have noted, the concept that the suburb
combined the positive values of the country and the
city was one of its founding assumptions from the
late eighteenth century onward, and this sensibility
expanded quickly during the nineteenth century. In
1847, the New York architect William Ranlett pub-
lished the first American design for a suburban village
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layout that incorporated detached villas in a
picturesque landscaped setting after the English
fashion (Archer: p. 150). Three years later, in 1850,
the American architect A. J. Downing described in
his influential essay ‘Country Villages,’ a design for
an ideal suburb with a central landscaped park and
wide, curving, tree-lined streets. Downing’s concepts,
gleaned from travels to many English examples, pre-
figure several important American suburbs during
the next 20 years, including most notably Llewellyn
Park, New Jersey (developed from 1853 onwards by
Llewellyn Haskell, a New York businessman, and
designers Alexander Jackson Davis and Howard
Daniels); and Riverside, just south of Chicago (1869)
by Frederick Law Olmsted (see Figure 2.3).
By the time Olmsted was commissioned to design
Riverside, the blending of picturesque aesthetics with
the new conceptual synthesis of city and countryside
was firmly established as a key planning principle for
suburban residential development on both sides of
the Atlantic. Riverside, designed with direct rail
access to Chicago, promised to provide a better life
than the middle class found in the city, with homes
set amidst attractive landscape. This proved a win-
ning combination, and Olmsted’s creation became a
model development and a precedent for innumerable
subsequent suburbs, influencing design not only in
the USA but also exporting this influence back to
Britain, the original source of many of its attributes.
This suburban impetus throughout the nineteenth
century can thus be thought of as a combination of
the ‘pull factor’ of the countryside and the ‘push
factor’ of the overcrowded industrial cities. The raw
energy of the Industrial Revolution generated large
population increases in the major industrial cities in
Britain and America, but the concentration of
commercial operations within the urban cores made
the land values too high and the environment
too polluted for superior residential development.
The poorer classes, with no resources to relocate or to
pay for suburban transportation, were trapped in an
inner ring of unsanitary and overcrowded slums within
walking distance of the mills and factories at the urban
core. By contrast, the more affluent bourgeoisie moved
as far from the center as their means and transporta-
tion options would allow, settling in new suburban
communities. Here they could enjoy countryside
amenities yet still travel to work in the city with rela-
tive ease. One of the very first American examples of
this new commuter suburb was New Brighton, laid
out on Staten Island in New York Harbor in 1836,
and bearing a marked resemblance to the resort sub-
urb of the same name near Liverpool, England, built
four years earlier in 1832 (Archer: p. 153).
While due attention is paid to the importance of
English origins and prototypes for the garden suburb,
it is important not to underestimate the indigenous
American influences of the New England villages,
and the Jeffersonian ideals of the individual gentle-
man farmer and democratic land development. The
American president’s distaste for the city as the prime
venue for American society was well documented, as
DESIGN FIRST: DESIGN-BASED PLANNING FOR COMMUNITIES