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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
From "American Beauty" to the New York Times, those who satirize and celebrate the burbs seldom understand how they got the way they are.
Apr 13, 2000 | The suburbs are everywhere. From the presidential campaign -- now reduced to two nearly indistinguishable suburban dads -- to Hollywood to the newspaper of record, the traditionally anti-suburban cultural elite is now buzzing with talk about how the burbs aren't what we thought they were. Expect the New Yorker to publish a special Suburban Issue any week now. (OK, I can't resist: Every issue of the New Yorker is the Suburban Issue.)
Left unanswered in all this, however, is the question of what the suburbs actually are. In both the Oscar-laden "American Beauty" (a very fine film, in my estimation) and the April 9 issue of the New York Times Magazine, with its "Suburbs Rule" cover package, the issue is clouded by an understandable ambivalence as well as, perhaps, a lack of focus. The suburbs are liberating; the suburbs are confining. The suburbs have become just like the city, or maybe it's the other way around. The suburbs are full of minorities, immigrants, gays and lesbians; the suburbs remain small-minded bastions of fear and conformity. The ambivalence with which Americans regard suburbia is the same ambivalence with which they regard, well, America. On one hand, it's the home of the free. On the other, to paraphrase that great poet of the late-mid-suburban era, David Byrne, How did we get here?
For many years, one of the unspoken assumptions about the suburbs was that the people who live, work and shop in them -- most of the U.S. population -- must like them the way they are. With the late-'90s emergence of "sprawl" as a political buzzword, it became clear that things were not that simple. Those most concerned about the traffic-choked new malls and subdivisions sprouting in cornfield after cornfield, not surprisingly, were the people who lived next to them. Le Corbusier's vision of the future had come true: "The cities shall be part of the country; I shall live 30 miles from my office in one direction, under a pine tree; my secretary will live 30 miles away from it too, in the other direction, under another pine tree." What that vision omits, of course, is the 5 or 6 million people in between, each with his or her own pine tree.
There are some significant political and philosophical differences between "Suburban Nation" and "Picture Windows," but these two important new books agree that suburbia, as it exists today, was not the inevitable result of a seamlessly operating free market. Both sets of authors see the history of suburban development as a tragic story of greed, poor judgment and missed opportunity. Moreover, they are willing to buck conventional wisdom by suggesting that many suburban Americans would embrace a different, more community-based lifestyle if it were made available to them.
The world of suburban studies can seem topsy-turvy sometimes; at first glance it appears that the authors of these books must have switched agendas in a moment of "American Beauty"-style midnight weirdness. Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen are feminist academics who live in Manhattan -- precisely the kind of people who wouldn't be caught dead at the mall. Yet while "Picture Windows" may find the manner in which the suburbs were developed regrettable, it paints a nuanced and in many ways sympathetic portrait of life in suburbia. Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck, on the other hand, are prominent town planners (that is, people who actually design new suburbs). "Suburban Nation" is a furious jeremiad against a form of development that, they argue, is undermining the very nature of American citizenship, destroying the public realm and making virtual prisoners out of our most vulnerable citizens.
Although the authors of these two books may believe they have competing agendas (or at least Baxandall and Ewen think so), their concerns are quite different and they complement each other in fascinating ways. The apparent conflict between them, I think, is largely a matter of ideology rather than practical application. They disagree, for example, on the highly charged question of whether urban design can influence social behavior. (Many social scientists, scorched by the social-engineering debacles of Great Society public housing, have retreated to the position that it can't. The authors of "Suburban Nation" respond, quite sensibly, "One does not have to believe that front porches encourage sociability to accept that unwalkable streets discourage it.") And behind this lies an even more theoretical debate about the legacy of modernism, which neither book, frustratingly enough, engages head-on.
