{"product_id":"building-suburbia-isbn-9780375727214","title":"Building Suburbia","description":"\u003cb\u003eA lively and provocative history of the contested landscapes where the majority of Americans now   live.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e From rustic cottages reached by steamboat to big   box stores at the exit ramps of eight-lane highways, Dolores Hayden defines seven   eras of suburban development since 1820. An urban historian and architect, she portrays   housewives and politicians as well as designers and builders making the decisions   that have generated America’s diverse suburbs. Residents have sought home, nature,   and community in suburbia. Developers have cherished different dreams, seeking profit   from economies of scale and increased suburban densities, while lobbying local and   federal government to reduce the risk of real estate speculation. Encompassing environmental   controversies as well as the complexities of race, gender, and class, Hayden’s fascinating   account will forever alter how we think about the communities we build and inhabit.\u003ci\u003ePreface and Acknowledgments \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003ePart One \u003c\/i\u003eTHE AMERICAN METROPOLITAN LANDSCAPE\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne:  The Shapes of Suburbia \u003cbr\u003eTwo:  The Suburban City \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003ePart Two \u003c\/i\u003eHISTORIC PATTERNS IN THE LANDSCAPE\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThree:  Borderlands \u003cbr\u003eFour:  Picturesque Enclaves \u003cbr\u003eFive:  Streetcar Buildouts \u003cbr\u003eSix:  Mail-Order and Self-Built Suburbs \u003cbr\u003eSeven:  Sitcom Suburbs \u003cbr\u003eEight:  Edge Nodes \u003cbr\u003eNine:  Rural Fringes\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003ePart Three \u003c\/i\u003eTHE NEXT SUBURBS\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTen:  Nostalgia and Futurism \u003cbr\u003eEleven:  The Importance of Older Suburbs \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eNotes \u003cbr\u003eSelected Bibliography \u003cbr\u003eIndex\u003c\/i\u003ePraise for Dolores Hayden’s \u003ci\u003eBuilding Suburbia\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“An engaging and richly illustrated account [that] makes a landmark contribution to this literature.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Nation\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Important. . . . Inviting and lucid. . . . [Hayden] shows us that it was not inevitable that our space turned out quite this way.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003eNewsweek\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Provocative. . . .   Well worth reading.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003eDetroit Free Press\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A rich and rewarding book with new and original material and surprising insights. . . . Beautiful and accessible writing . . . fascinating historical narratives. . . . Unlike most commentators, Hayden goes beyond analysis to propose solutions. . . . A welcome and significant addition.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003eConstructs\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A lively and informative overview of the American mania for suburban living. . . . Fascinating.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003eAudubon Naturalist News\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A fascinating book, as well as an important one.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003eTulsa World\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eDolores Hayden, urban historian and poet, is professor of architecture, urbanism, and American studies at Yale. She is the author of several books on the American landscape, including \u003ci\u003eThe Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History, Building Suburbia, \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eA Field Guide to Sprawl. \u003c\/i\u003eA former president of the Urban History Association, Hayden is the recipient of a Radcliffe Graduate Medal, an American Library Association Notable Book Award, two awards for Excellence in Design Research from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honors. She is also the author of two poetry collections, \u003ci\u003eAmerican Yard\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eNymph, Dun, and Spinner\u003c\/i\u003e.Chapter One\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTHE SHAPES OF SUBURBIA\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe're in the American Dream business.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e-advertisement for Fannie Mae\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFlying across the United States, airline passengers look down on  dazzling, varied topography, yet from Connecticut to California,  monotonous tracts of single-family houses stretch for miles outside  the downtowns of major cities. Subdivisions interrupt farms and  forests. They crowd up against the granite coast of Maine and push  into the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Next to residential areas  lie highways, shopping malls, and office parks. They overwhelm small  town centers. More Americans reside in suburban landscapes than in  inner cities and rural areas combined, yet few can decode the shapes of these landscapes or define where they begin and end.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDemographers still describe suburbs as \"the non-central city parts of  metropolitan areas,\" a negative definition, but suburbia has become  the dominant American cultural landscape, the place where most  households live and vote. Describing suburbia as a residential  landscape would be wrong, however, because suburbs also contain  millions of square feet of commercial and industrial space, and their  economic growth outstrips that of older downtowns. Most confusing of  all, suburbia is the site of promises, dreams, and fantasies. It is a  landscape of the imagination where Americans situate ambitions for  upward mobility and economic security, ideals about freedom and  private property, and longings for social harmony and spiritual  uplift.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor almost two hundred years, Americans of all classes have idealized  life in single-family houses with generous yards, while deploring the  sprawling metropolitan regions that result from unregulated  residential and commercial growth. With no national land use policy  in the United States, single-family housing has often driven suburban  planning by default. Between 1994 and 2002, real estate developers  completed about 1.5 million new units of housing every year, most of  them suburban single-family houses. The production of millions of  houses-involving massive mortgage subsidies by the federal  government, huge expense to individual families, and extraordinary  profits for private real estate developers-has largely configured  Americans' material wealth and indebtedness, as well as shaped  American landscapes. The metropolitan building process holds the key  to many aspects of American culture, yet few know its social and  spatial history.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis book is an account of suburbanization since 1820, exploring how  entrepreneurs and residents have transformed fields, meadows, and  woods into habitable space. The speed and spatial scale of land  development have increased with each decade. In the earliest years of  mercantile capitalism, a few suburban entrepreneurs launched isolated  experiments in subdividing property and building new communities with  the help of family and friends. Some real estate developers and  boosters began to work together, forming political alliances called  \"growth machines.\" Between 1870 and 1920, at the height of industrial capitalism, developers extended their reach and promoted urban  peripheries systematically, often working in partnership with transit  owners, utilities, and local government. After the rise of a powerful  real estate and construction lobby in the 1920s, the federal  government took a major role-largely through tax, banking, and  insurance systems-in subsidizing private development of residential  and commercial property on a national basis. By the mid-1950s,  federal tax supports for commercial developers and direct federal  support for highways provided incentives for unchecked growth on a  scale that earlier entrepreneurs could never have imagined. By the 1980s, state and local governments also frequently supported private commercial development with direct subsidies.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe history of suburban construction can be understood as the  evolution of seven vernacular patterns. Building in borderlands began  about 1820. Picturesque enclaves started around 1850 and streetcar  buildouts around 1870. Mail-order and self-built suburbs arrived in  1900. Mass-produced, urban-scale \"sitcom\" suburbs appeared around  1940. Edge nodes coalesced around 1960. Rural fringes intensified  around 1980. All of these patterns survive in the metropolitan areas  of 2003. Many continue to be constructed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEach pattern is defined by characteristic development practices,  building technologies, marketing strategies, architectural  preferences, and environmental attitudes. Despite some  mid-twentieth-century claims that suburbia is a classless place, in  each era of suburban life, economic class has affected residents' employment options, commuting choices, lot sizes, and house sizes, as  well as favored shapes for houses, porches, and yards. There are working-class, middle-class, and upper-class configurations  intertwined with the seven suburban patterns.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMost previous accounts of suburban history have been organized around  improvements in transportation technology, and explicitly or  implicitly the authors suggest that transportation technology made  residential growth inevitable. Categorizing places by commuters'  choices-railroad suburb, streetcar suburb, automobile suburb-also  leads to a focus on middle-class and upper-class male breadwinners  and their housing. In contrast, this book highlights the complex  relationships between real estate entrepreneurs and a wide range of  suburban residents and workers. It explores the interplay of natural  and built environments, considers women's and children's lives as  well as men's, discusses working-class houses and yards as well as affluent ones, and explains why suburbia has been of great interest  to political lobbyists.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMany different kinds of visual source materials reveal the precise  shapes of suburbs, including maps, plans for towns, designs for  houses, and photographs of households. The built places themselves  provide material evidence used throughout the book, documented in  both architectural and aerial photography. Low-level, oblique-angle aerial photography is especially useful for capturing the scale of  recent developments in relation to older patterns.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Triple Dream and The Growth Machines\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe \"American Dream\" is embedded in these seven evolving patterns of suburban development. Unlike every other affluent civilization,  Americans have idealized the house and yard rather than the model  neighborhood or the ideal town. From the beginning, the dream  conflated piety and gender-stereotyped \"family values.\" The ideology of female domesticity, developed in the United States during the same  era when suburban borderlands were first attracting settlers,  elevated the religious significance of woman's work, defined as  bearing and rearing children in the strong moral atmosphere of a  Protestant home set in a natural landscape. The single-family house  was invested with churchlike symbols as a sacred space where women's  work would win a reward in heaven. Catholic and Jewish immigrants  also tied domesticity to religion.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe ideology of female domesticity, popular since the 1840s, was wedded to a cult of male home ownership, extended to include  working-class men around the 1870s. Over the years, developers  embellished the religious imagery. In 1921 an editorial writer for  the National Real Estate Journal told readers that the Garden of Eden  was the first subdivision. While Eden also took the fancy of the  editors of American Architect and Building News who claimed that Adam  and Eve built their home in Short Hills, New Jersey, a perfect town,  many more developers have sited their new houses in heaven. An angel  with a sword of justice delivered developer Samuel Gross's \"home at  $10 a month\" to a Chicago workman. A New Yorker cover showed a new house floating on pink clouds, above a husband, wife, and child  ascending into the sky in 1946, holding their blueprints. (The  artist, Constantin Alajálov, included one sharp detail: outside the  back door of this upper-middle-class house, an African-American cook  chats with a Fuller Brush salesman.) More recently, heavenly notes  were sung by architects Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk when  they announced \"The Second Coming of the American Small Town\" at  Seaside, Florida. A memoir by D. J. Waldie evoked Lakewood,  California, as Holy Land.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOccasionally, developers have relocated the sales pitch for heaven in  the secular landscape of happiness. William F. Chatlos built one  thousand \"Happiness Homes\" in Williston Park, Nassau County, Long  Island, in the 1920s. His three-bedroom Tudor and Dutch Colonial  houses occupied an alphabetical grid of streets named for prominent  colleges and universities, including Amherst, Brown, and Cornell. In  the 1940s, advertising copywriters for General Electric promoted  purchasing a home as \"an adventure in happiness.\" Listing many  electrical appliances, GE told veterans, \"It's a promise!\" Most  Americans want to believe in a \"Happiness Home.\" In the 1990s many  flocked to buy houses in \"Celebration,\" a real estate development by  The Walt Disney Company, previously known for building theme parks  advertised as \"the happiest place on earth.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut for women, especially, the single-family suburban house implies  isolation, lacking physical and social context. For women, the dream  is house plus neighborhood sociability. Others have proposed a  different double dream, a house set in unspoiled nature. The result  is a triple dream, house plus land plus community, the kind of  neighborhood space represented in Phyllis McGinley's charming poem  about Larchmont, New York, \"I Know a Village,\" \"where all the streets  are named for trees \/ and people visit on their porches.\" This triple  dream encompasses both the private and public pleasures of peaceful,  small-scale residential neighborhoods.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor the most part, the physical realization of this dream has been in  the hands of developers trying to turn a profit through suburban  growth. Conflict has characterized every era of development, as green  fields have attracted residents to the peaceful outskirts of cities  but also drawn promoters. In addition to those directly involved in  the building process, the boosters of growth have included lawyers,  owners of suburban transportation companies (including ferries,  railroads, and streetcars), owners of utilities, and owners of local  newspapers, supermarkets, and big-box stores. They have handled house  purchases, punched commutation tickets, generated electricity,  increased total circulation, marketed cornflakes, and sold  screwdrivers. Once a suburban area is established, growth promoters  usually seek greater and greater levels of density. The residents'  hope of unspoiled nature fails because open land vanishes with  increased development. Their hope of community is betrayed when  tracts of houses, hyped as ideal \"communities,\" lack social and  economic centers, parks, schools and necessary infrastructure.  Contestation-between residents who wish to enjoy suburbia and  developers who seek to profit from it-lies at the heart of suburban  history.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eChapter Two\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTHE SUBURBAN CITY\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt is the city trying to escape the consequences of\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ebeing a city while still remaining a city. It is urban\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003esociety trying to eat its cake and keep it, too.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e-harlan douglas, The Suburban Trend, 1925\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen kenneth t. jackson published his prize-winning history of  suburbs, Crabgrass Frontier, in 1985, he concluded, optimistically,  that the United States was turning away from suburbia. He suggested  that \"the long process of suburbanization . . . will slow over the  next two decades.\" He predicted that rising energy and land costs  would lead people back to urban centers. Instead, in the last two  decades, Americans have settled on the distant fringes of  metropolitan regions faster than ever before, while older downtowns  have lost population, jobs, and economic vitality. Downtowns with  offices, stores, museums, and entertainment drew Americans from the  1870s to the 1950s, but a suburban trend in the mid-1920s became a  suburban tide in the 1950s. By 1970, more Americans lived in suburbs  than in either central cities or rural areas. By 2000, more Americans  lived in suburbs than in central cities and rural areas combined. The  United States had become a predominantly suburban nation. Although  inner cities still housed certain institutions important to  metropolitan regions, many key economic and cultural centers such as  corporate headquarters and regional theaters had relocated to suburbs.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAfter almost two centuries of steady growth, suburbs have overwhelmed  the centers of cities, creating metropolitan regions largely formed  of suburban parts. In the suburban city of 2003, all seven historic suburban landscape patterns continue to exist. Most  political entities include the fragments, overlays, collisions, and  erasures of more than one pattern, because suburban growth has been  constant across the political boundaries of states, counties, cities,  towns, and villages. Metropolitan regions reveal what critics call  suburban sprawl, the lack of land use controls or environmental  planning. They also reflect a culture of easy obsolescence, where  yesterday's picturesque enclave may be sliced by today's new highway  leading to tomorrow's edge node.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere have been many efforts to rename the spread-out suburban city.  \"Galactic metropolis\" taps a word from outer space. \"Regional city\"  combines spread and center. So does \"sprawl city.\" \"When Suburbs Are  the City,\" the title of a paper by historian Sam Bass Warner, Jr.,  captures the problem in words that everyone understands.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the spaces of the suburban city lie metropolitan complexities.  American suburbia has always been physically and socially diverse.  The outskirts of mid-nineteenth-century cities housed noxious  industries like slaughterhouses and glue factories, social reform  establishments such as poorhouses, orphanages, contagious disease  hospitals, and prisons, plus temporary sites for camp meetings and  traveling circuses. There were suburban temperance communities, as  well as squatters on marginal land. Although the history of the  suburbs includes countless examples of exclusion implemented through  developers' deed restrictions, bankers' red-lining, realtors'  steering, government lending policies, and other discriminatory  practices not all nineteenth-century suburban residential areas were  white, Protestant, and elite. From about 1870 on, many working-class  and lower-middle-class families were attracted to the periphery of  the city, where land was cheap and houses might be constructed with  sweat equity. While nineteenth-century immigrants often spent time in  inner-city tenements before moving out to streetcar suburbs, today  some new immigrants to the United States head straight to the suburbs  to live where jobs are easier to find.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSome affluent suburban communities remain almost entirely white and  Protestant, but there are also Irish-American suburbs,  African-American suburbs, Polish-American suburbs, and  Chinese-American suburbs, as well as older streetcar suburbs like  Boyle Heights in Los Angeles, a place that has welcomed successive  waves of new immigrants from Mexico, Russia, and Japan.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSometimes the impact of ethnic diversity can be seen and heard in the  suburban landscape. New Haven's Italian-American neighborhoods reveal  gardens of basil, tomatoes, and oregano, as well as yard shrines  honoring the Virgin. Latino families in East Los Angeles decorate their front yards with traditional nacimientos. Sikhs have  renamed a street in Fremont, California, for their Gurdwara Temple.  Polish-Americans have established talk radio in Polish from suburban  Pomona, New York; Chinese-Americans offer news and entertainment in  Chinese out of Freeport, Long Island; and Indian immigrants broadcast  from a radio station in Metuchen, New Jersey.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe diversity of suburbia is evidence of assimilation and a source of  conflict. Suburban residents from different ethnic backgrounds have  purchased older single-family houses and yards only to use them in  new ways. In Silver Spring, Maryland, planners are reexamining the  term \"household\" to deal with perceived overcrowding by extended  families from Latino backgrounds. In Fairfax County, Virginia,  Vietnamese, Indians, Arabs, Pakistanis, West Africans, and East  Africans have joined Latin Americans looking for affordable shelter  near their suburban jobs. Many households are large,  multigenerational groups, with aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters,  cousins, and grandparents helping to pay the rent or make the  mortgage. Their cars crowd small driveways. Dozens of these immigrant  families have paved over their front lawns to make it easier to park,  offending their neighbors. In June 2002, Fairfax County passed a  controversial regulation forbidding homeowners to pave their front  yards.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303698583781,"sku":"NP9780375727214","price":22.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375727214.jpg?v=1767723172","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/building-suburbia-isbn-9780375727214","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}