Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream
By Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck
North Point Press, New York, 2000, 256 pages

Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened
By Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen
Basic Books, New York, 2000, 298 pages.

Cynthia Martin, née Fabiano, and all 13 of her siblings live in the suburbs outside of Boston. They grew up in Stoneham, a typical middle-class town about 20 miles north of the city, where their late father, who was a nurse, brought them from Revere. Their Irish-American mother, also a nurse, still lives in the family homestead, providing an anchor for an increasingly extended family. Of Cynthia’s nine sisters and four brothers, four have stayed in Stoneham, and the others have settled in nearby suburbs in northern Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire, where they’re raising families of their own. They work as nurses, electricians, and shop owners. Cynthia holds down a job as a secretary at Harvard while studying to become a high-school teacher. For the Fabianos, Cynthia tells me, suburban life revolves around church and children‹a steady round of Sunday Masses, holy days, christenings, birthdays, first communions, and baby-sitting.

If you drove through Stoneham, you wouldn’t think much of it. And neither would Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, architect-authors of Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream. From Route 28, Stoneham looks just like a thousand other post-World War II American suburbs–a banal strip of parking lots, chain stores, fast-food restaurants, car dealerships, and gas stations. In the residential blocks east and west of the highway, you’d find standard-issue subdivisions–wide, quiet streets, colonial-style houses with driveways and two-car garages, neatly trimmed lawns and shrubbery. But while you might be unimpressed with what you see, Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck would see red. Stoneham is just the sort of place that the authors of Suburban Nation say is responsible for the decline of community and civic life in America.

Over the course of a sustained 256-page screed, Duany et al. make the astonishingly arrogant case that the postwar American suburb–home to millions of people, the locus of the most dynamic sectors of America’s boom economy, and by most measures the most successful achievement in housing a mass working- and middle-class population in world history–is nonetheless “detestable,” “debased,” and “soulless.” It is also, they maintain–between gratuitous potshots at motorists, fire marshals, home builders, football fans, shoppers, teenage television viewers, and “boorish suburban ways”–monotonous, placeless, alien, isolated, sterile, not functional, not efficient, not worth caring about, and, repeatedly, not “real.”

Not “real”? Inefficient, perhaps. Segregated, alas, yes–though this problem is not unique to the suburbs. Monotonous for sure. But not “real”? Does the presence of the Fabiano family and others like it over three generations mean nothing? Is “reality” strictly a function of the attractive arrangement of spaces and surfaces? Have worthy lives never been led in unhandsome places? In their passion for aesthetic ideals, Duany and company have gone blind to human beings.

This blindness is regrettable, because Duany and his colleagues have important things to say. As the leaders of a movement known as “Neo-traditionalism” or “The New Urbanism,” they have, over the past 20 years, established themselves as internationally renowned theorists and practitioners of an important new approach to community planning. They take their inspiration from traditional small-town centers and urban residential enclaves, both of which draw civic vitality from architectural density and the human interaction it encourages. Their bête noire is the sprawl of suburbia, and Suburban Nation their bill of indictment against it.

Dependence on the automobile, they argue, has resulted in suburban development that’s spatially diffuse, environmentally wasteful, and segregated by race and class. In its place, they call for intimate, diverse, pedestrian-friendly spaces oriented around public transportation. Where most suburbs have used short-sighted zoning regulations to separate commercial, civic, recreational, and residential areas, they advocate mixed-use zoning to reduce car trips, promote active and varied street life, and encourage civic involvement. They similarly reject the pervasive emphasis on detached single-family dwellings set back within large lots in favor of apartment buildings, townhouses, multi-family homes, home/work complexes, and bungalows with porches and stoops directly fronting the road. They insist on narrow streets to “tame” car speed, parking spaces hidden from view, and back alleys for trash and machinery.

While they see these principles as universal, Duany and his colleagues also stress the uniqueness of settings and local character in architecture, rejecting modernist abstraction in design. As architectural practitioners, they shape their plans with sensitivity to the surrounding environment–both natural and constructed–allowing for different styles to reflect different regional vernaculars. And they use design to promote feelings of community cohesiveness, always placing civic structures, for example, in the most prominent positions. They see careful planning as a way to reinvigorate civic values in an American society which seems to them dangerously fragmented, alienated, and indifferent. And by all accounts, the few communities they have successfully completed (most prominently, Seaside, Florida, the setting for The Truman Show) are exceptionally attractive, pleasant to walk in, and spatially coherent.

But in Suburban Nation, their urban-utopian vision turns Orwellian as the authors describe the steps necessary to ensure that every town in America meets these high aesthetic standards. Retail zones, they declare, should be rigidly regulated to the point of total public control. The “ideal” arrangement, they say, would be “centralized ownership of real estate.” Should the Supreme Court continue to cling to the apparently outdated notion that “property rights are more important than good planning,” municipalities may still ensure sound retail citizenship by establishing a thorough “urban code.” Conformity would be in the hands of “an agency legally empowered to coordinate hours of operation, security, maintenance, landscape, storefront design, and even the location and mix of stores.” Duany et al. leave nothing to chance. “Variety,” we are assured, “is achieved not through natural selection but through careful programming.”

The negative effects of suburban sprawl are becoming a concern to an increasing number of citizens and public officials. In the search for alternatives that make suburban growth more sustainable and more civic-oriented, Suburban Nation has much to offer. But we should pause for a long moment before taking up the agenda of a group that offers the Walt Disney Co.’s planned-from-scratch Celebration, Florida, as a model of community while scornfully dismissing the communities built over the last 50 years by millions of decent working-class and lower-middle-class suburbanites. Is there nothing to be learned from this historical context?

There is a rather ominous connection, it seems to me, between the authors’ affinity for “programming” and their contemptuous disregard for the actual historical reality of the people whose environments they propose to design and regulate down to the last detail. Haven’t we seen this movie before? Yes, but with an important difference. Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck seek not the political dictatorship of the proletariat but the aesthetic dictatorship of the upper middle class.

Rosalyn Baxandall’s and Elizabeth Ewen’s Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened provides an important corrective to Suburban Nation. Unlike the New Urbanist architects, who claim to have spoken to many suburbanites but never quote one, Baxandall and Ewen include the reflections of the residents themselves in an informative, even-handed, sympathetic, and altogether fascinating account of the emergence of suburban culture on Long Island after World War II.

Professors of American Studies who lived in Manhattan while teaching at a state university campus near Levittown, Baxandall and Ewen were initially blinded, like Duany and company, by snobbish notions of suburban vacuity: “Initially we didn’t understand that suburbia even had a history; we imagined it as an anesthetized state of mind, a no place dominated by a culture of conformity and consumption.” Conversations with students, however, awakened them to the hidden layers of Long Island’s history in the 20th century. Their attentiveness to the struggles and aspirations of working- and lower-middle-class people, especially women, helps to give Picture Windows precisely the human dimension that Suburban Nation so sorely lacks.

In New York, as in Massachusetts, the story begins in the middle of the 19th century with the arrival on America’s shores of more than half the population of Ireland. It continues in the early decades of the 20th century with the arrival of millions of Italians, Eastern Europeans, and Russian Jews. It is a measure of the extreme poverty of these groups, social historians tell us, that in the first generation, unlike previous immigrants to America, they rarely moved more than a mile or two from the docks of the Eastern coastal cities where they landed. They settled, for the most part, in slums such as New York’s Lower East Side or Boston’s North End. Following the traditional patterns of their agrarian past, these immigrants–like Cynthia’s parents, and my own–generally produced large families. Housing became an urgent problem. Numerous Progressive Era experiments notwithstanding, the situation steadily worsened, especially in the Great Depression, to the point that in 1937 Franklin Roosevelt spoke without exaggeration of “one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.”

The “soulless” subdivisions of which Duany and company complain were the solution to this crisis. In an exemplary instance of how well-conceived government policy can enlist the enormous dynamism and efficiency of the free market to advance progressive ends, Roosevelt’s Federal Housing Authority underwrote tens of millions of low-interest-rate mortgages just as shrewd developers like William Levitt were applying the principles of mass production to the making of inexpensive houses.

The result was nothing less than a social transformation. Countless children and grandchildren of immigrants, most of them veterans with little savings or family support, were able to purchase modest suburban homes. These new suburbanites may have missed the intimate street life of their old urban neighborhoods, just as their parents or grandparents missed aspects of the close-knit Old World village. But the immigrant ethic of sacrifice also taught them that most things worth having came at a price. The pains of uprooting were not too much to pay for newness, cleanliness, privacy, mobility, and, above all, healthy and comfortable space for children.

While these new homeowners did not generally possess the aesthetic sophistication of an Andres Duany, they understood the profound historical significance of owning their own homes. It signified a level of autonomy and self-respect of which their peasant forebears could only dream. As one former Levittowner said of her mother, “She came from a family that didn’t have any money, and so did my father, and there they were in their own house. It was a miracle to them… I think they saw it through the eyes of someone who was in love almost. They had found something, and they made it even better than it was.”

Undoubtedly something was lost in the long journey from European village to American city to American suburb–certain aesthetic traditions, perhaps, a certain communal orientation. It’s true that the contemporary suburban pattern of driving a car to and from a free-standing house set within a large lot with its own driveway and garage does not lend itself to the kind of spontaneous, informal exchanges upon which a vibrant civic life is based. Nor does driving to the mall and parking in a sea of asphalt and empty automobiles.

But the pretensions of planners aside, patterns of communal association are not entirely, or even primarily, determined by street layouts and building designs. Ethno-historian David Hackett Fischer has demonstrated how 17th-century immigrants from England carried across the Atlantic rich and elaborate folkways that they reestablished almost intact in the American wilderness. And it takes no scholarly credentials to observe that Irish and Italian Catholics, to name the two ethnic groups with which I am most familiar, have no less successfully retained their own communitarian religious and family practices in the modern American wilderness of parking lots, cul-de-sacs, and shopping malls.

It might well be more difficult to sustain a sense of community in a suburban context, but no one who has ever gone to a wedding or wake or even Sunday Mass in a predominantly Irish or Italian suburb can doubt that a great many people have managed to do so. The 14 Fabianos are not so far out of the ordinary. And similar family patterns are now increasingly being played out in poorer suburbs by first- and second-generation Hispanic immigrants.

As scholars like Baxandall and Ewen and novelists like Alice McDermott–whose tales evoke the intimacies of Irish-American family life in New York City and Long Island–have taught us, the reality of suburban life has little to do with the clichés of alienation recycled by movies like American Beauty or tracts like Suburban Nation. At its deepest level, the story of suburbia is the story of American promise, cross-generational immigrant striving, and the persistence of the instinct for community and connection–what McDermott, in Charming Billy, calls “the great, deep, tightly woven fabric of affection”–no matter how inhospitable the physical setting.

Neal Dolan, a native of Smithtown, Long Island, who now lives in Boston’s North End, is a lecturer in American history and literature at Harvard University.