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FROM SUBURB TO SPRAWL: THE
DEVOLUTION OF THE AMERICAN
ENVIRONMENT
The federally supported suburban house building
boom in America during the 1950s and 1960s was so
enormous that the mass migration of those able to
afford a new home in the suburbs sent the central
areas of cities into a decline. This explosion of
suburban development, and the parallel decline of
American city centers during that period and
subsequent decades is a very well researched and
documented phenomenon (Jackson, 1985; Fishman,
1987; Rowe, 1991; Kunstler, 1993; Langdon, 1994;
Kay, 1997; Duany et al., 2000). An underlying trend
of this phenomenon was the shift in racial demograph-
ics often referred to as ‘white flight,’ indicating the
increasing polarization of mainly white, wealthy sub-
urbs and the poorer, predominantly black inner cities.
This movement of the more affluent sections of
society to the periphery, leaving the poor in the center
was not new in the history of the Anglo-American
city. We noted in the first section of this chapter how,
from the late eighteenth century onward, in England
and America, it was first the upper classes and later
the middle classes who moved to the suburbs, leaving
the poor trapped in the inner city. The urban exodus
after World War II simply continued this pattern, but
with one important difference: the city center jobs
that the poorer classes relied on, together with the
downtown stores and other activities, gradually
moved out to the suburbs, too, leaving the centrally
located, low-paid workers with reduced access to
employment, shopping and recreation.
Demographically the new suburbanites of the
1950s and 1960s were almost all middle-income
families, the vast majority of them white, and these
predominantly young families who ‘joyously moved
into the new homes’ were pursuing their own
dreams, and, understandably, not worrying much
about the problems they left behind ( Jackson: 
p. 244). The financial deals and easy payment terms
available on new houses in the suburbs made moving
out to new subdivisions so much more attractive than
staying in the center and renovating older properties,
where financing was much harder to obtain.
Accessibility and distance were not problems in the
new periphery because of the big increase in personal
car ownership, and petrol was very cheap. Increasingly,
commercial enterprises of all sorts constructed new
buildings next to the new suburban highways for
better access, and offices and shopping centers relo-
cated in the suburbs to be near their white-collar
workforce and consumers.
The evacuated housing areas around the inner
city were thus starved of investment, and quickly
declined in property values. This low cost housing
was thus occupied by poorer individuals and families,
often renting from absentee landlords who picked up
swathes of formerly decent housing very cheaply.
These older housing areas and their lowly paid or
unemployed residents thus began their combined
spiral of physical, social and economic decline, and
the central business districts of many American cities
found themselves surrounded by newly decaying
CHAPTER TWO
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CITIES, SUBURBS AND SPRAWL