Day: March 11, 2020

Suburban life in America is so common:  52% of us live in suburban developments.  Many of us would recognize the cookie-cutter houses and neatly maintained lawns as “home”, but what many don’t know is how they came to be.  Suburban areas were a response to an objection of urban life.

Many people didn’t like how crowded the city was.  One single park in the middle of a metropolis wouldn’t change the unhealthy living conditions children were growing up in.  It was decided that the city was no place to raise a family, especially with the crammed living space, economic struggle, and the mentally taxing nature of the two combined.  The suburbs would be characterized by being a commuter county (still reliant on city), with a rich residential life featuring houses with ample space in between and lots of green space for outdoor life.

One suburban community worth mentioning is Riverside, Illinois.  It was designed by the famous Frederick Law Olmsted, landscape architect of Central Park, and Calvert Vaux, a British architect and landscape planner.   The amoeba-like shape of the neighborhood juxtaposes the straight railway connected it to the city in order to emphasize the informality of the suburbs compared to the city.  Such organic shape also allows curved roads that give a sense of ease rather than business.  To diminish the presence of roads, houses are set back, roads are sunken, and there are no sidewalks, as everything must be clean.  Lastly, public green spaces are stretched out to accommodate increased outdoor life.

Another interesting suburban development is Radburn, New Jersey.  The goals of this project were to #savethebabies from the automobile usage that increased greatly in the industrial revolution.   This community was also the spawn of a failed Garden City (read my last post on City Reform); there was not enough space for an agriculture belt and therefore crashed the stock market due to lack of industry base.  The Radburn prototype featured cul-de-sacs that consisted of houses facing inwards towards a common green space in order to provide easy access to verdure, and shifted focus from roads and cars to home and green.  In essence, this design promoted a green community through interstitial spaces.

Both of these developments strive to improve the well-being of citizens through community-oriented outdoor life.  As someone who grew up in the suburbs, I can attest that suburban life definitely has advantages over city life.  I am a 5-minute walk from two beautiful parks, and we are close with neighbors who also frequent the surrounding green spaces .

This week, we will take a look at three different historical approaches to city planning that each aimed to addressed different issues and inevitably had drastically different outcomes: the City Beautiful Movement, the Garden Cities of Tomorrow, and the City of Towers.

The City Beautiful Movement was greatly inspired by the 1893 World’s Expo in Chicago, which built upon the city’s neo-classical architecture to create white facades that would hide the lesser attractive reality of the city’s state.  In this period of American history, there was an influx of people moving into cities, resulting in dirty, crowded placed that made living conditions unpleasant.  With the increased population came the decrease of public spaces for people to enjoy.  Hence, the City Beautiful movement introduced a network of green spaces, a railway to improve circulation and connectivity, and roads extending from a civic center.  Though effective in addressing aesthetic appeal and physical needs of a city, this movement failed to address social and economic issues that would arise in the future.

The Garden Cities movement was established by Ebenezer Howard, a British urban planner.  It aimed to provide a place to work, live, and play by combining the advantages of both town life and country life.  In essence, it would be a self-sustaining community.  An ideal Garden City would limit its size in order to reduce the density often found in towns, and it would be connected by train to ensure economic success. Additionally, a sense of place would be emphasized through neighborhood and community pride.  This would also be encouraged by the many spacious parks meant for the community.  The downside of this approach was that it was not applicable to existing cities; it was a model that could easily be replicated, but would mean relocation or square one for many.

The last city reform movement we’ll look at is Le Corbusier’s City of Towers.  Le Corbusier was a French-Swiss architect famous for what we consider now as modern architecture.  His idea of the City of Towers stems from the human need for three things: sun, space, and verdure.  With the advance of technology that allowed the construction of skyscrapers, le Corbusier suggested that the “towers” be set on stilts so that the ground had more room for green space.  The criticism he faced surrounding this fell heavily on the need to remove low-income area housing or “diseased quarters” as they called it.  This raised debate surrounding who gets to decide on affairs that would displace people.

Evidently, city planning is more complex and multi-faceted than one would initially think.  Each of these movements, though benign in intent, had set backs that would not allow their development.  Even today, it is difficult to find existing or future solutions to city planning that address all concerns for all people.