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Figure 2.10
The Barbican, London, Chamberlain,
Powell and Bon, 1954–75. This 40 acre (16 hectare)
development in the heart of London extended the
theme of separation of vehicles and pedestrians 
into the vertical plane. While this was a seductive
urban theory, in practice the results were often
inhuman. Streets were turned into dark service
tunnels or canyons, while the pedestrian upper 
levels became little more than wind blown concrete
wastelands. There is a pleasant urban space in the
middle of the development around the Barbican
Concert Hall, but this is small recompense for the
brutal mutilation of the city fabric.
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they were regarded as impediments to brisk traffic
movement, and figured as such in the transportation
engineers’ calculations.
Pedestrians became a rare sight in most suburban
areas in America. Odd as it seems to British eyes,
developers ceased to build sidewalks along residen-
tial streets even in the most affluent American
suburbs, with the consequence that any pedestrian
who did venture out was forced either to walk in the
street, sharing the road dangerously with passing cars
or to stride across other people’s front lawns. In an
increasingly car-based world, walking became
equated with suspicious behavior, practised only by
the poor or the deviant. Not until the late 1990s did
walkability become once again a sought-after
attribute of daily suburban life, and for millions of
Americans living in the suburbs that sprouted
around cities all across the country between 1960
and 1990, pedestrian convenience remains an
impossible dream.
American popular mythology tends to credit the
private sector with the phenomenal growth of the
suburbs after World War II. The design concepts that
underpin the suburban environment are often mistak-
enly believed to be a simple reflection of consumer
preference – the free market in operation. That’s not
quite true. While private development and construc-
tion companies did indeed produce the vast majority
of home designs for private buyers, the suburban
boom in America was largely promoted by actions by
the federal government. As early as the 1930s the
Federal Housing Administration (FHA) began to
develop a national planning code, resulting in the
FHA Minimum Planning Standards. With input from
the social planner Clarence Perry (whose work on
neighborhood design we shall discuss in Chapter 3)
the code was based largely on the ideas of architect-
planners Clarence Stein and Henry Wright, best
known for their work at Radburn. Given the planning
concepts of Radburn, it’s not surprising that Stein and
Wright’s influence led to the belief, institutionalized
by the new government code provisions, that the tra-
ditional grid-iron form of the American town could
not accommodate the automobile (Solomon, 1989:
p. 24). Instead, the 1930s code imposed a pattern of
separated curvilinear enclaves that held some mini-
mum evocation of the nineteenth-century Romantic
Garden Suburb together with a pared-down diagram
of Radburn’s cul-de-sac planning.
As we have noted earlier, car-orientated planning
became the dominant philosophy that guided private
development from the 1930s onward, characterized
by large enclaves of housing separated from each
other and linked only by arterial roads catering solely
to the movement of vehicular traffic. Radburn’s com-
pensating network of connecting green space was
quickly deleted; it used up too much profitable land.
The mass-market suburbs of the early 1950s like
Levitttown, simply featured large blocks of curving
streets with the number of connecting cross-streets
reduced to save cost. This framework of reduced con-
nectivity set the pattern for the present day whereby
layouts since the 1980s have been dominated by a
myriad of dead-end streets branching off a series of
artlessly meandering ‘collector streets’ that connected
the housing subdivision to the larger arterial road-
ways. Needless to say, these few streets that did con-
nect became over-burdened by traffic from all the
cul-de-sacs, leading to increased congestion, driver
frustration and longer journey times (Southworth
and Ben-Joseph, 1997: p. 107).
The impact of these federal Minimum Planning
Standards was felt across America after World War II,
when the great suburban expansion of the 1950s and
1960s was fuelled by a surge of home ownership by
returning servicemen and others financed under the
provisions of the Federal GI Bill. Federal Mortgage
Insurance – a means of changing the lending
practices of financial institutions to bring home-
ownership within the reach of millions of less
affluent Americans – was available only on homes
and subdivisions that complied with the govern-
ment’s Minimum Planning Standards. This linkage
soon led to a standardization of housing layout from
coast to coast.
The production of individual houses had already
become much more uniform. Starting in the 1930s, in
an effort to reduce costs so as to compete better in the
reduced housing market after the Depression, the
housing industry streamlined itself in terms of mass-
produced designs and developer financing. This
process accelerated in the late 1940s and 1950s as the
housing industry, capitalizing on the experience gained
from mass-production techniques during wartime,
rushed to meet the new demand for inexpensive hous-
ing. Developers and builders were able to borrow large
sums from savings and loan institutions (akin to build-
ing societies in England) to finance large subdivisions
of nearly identical houses. They achieved considerable
economies of scale by this process, enhancing their
own profit margins, and enabling them to build yet
more subdivisions to the same standardized formula.
The American author spent her early years in a house
in one such development in the 1950s, and while it’s
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easy to criticize the design of these houses from a
contemporary perspective, there’s no doubt they once
represented a substantial increase in the quality of the
domestic environment available to first-time home-
buying families (see Figure 2.11).
This suburban boom, seen as an unreservedly
good thing by earlier American generations, now, in
the early years of the twenty-first century appears
laden with problems, especially in its land-consuming
patterns of low-density uses and related environmental
and social consequences. Our current epithet of
‘sprawl’ signifies our society’s growing distaste for this
suburban phenomenon, and we must now turn our
attention to examining this transformation.