Mark Oppenheimer, author of a Jane Jacobs-inspired recent New York Times Magazine cover article about livable streets in New Haven, poses the question in the New Haven Review literary magazine (which has now attracted many comments). An excerpt:
A good deal of the literature — by people including New Havener Philip Langdon, whose A Better Place to Live has given me a whole new outlook on what makes a space a happy one in which to dwell — boils down to this: don’t depend on cars. People are happier when they can walk to see neighbors, ride their bicycles, and live close enough to their neighbors that they know them....
But what I don’t have are good sympathetic non-fiction books about life in suburban sprawl. For every book critical of that way of life — Langdon’s book, Duany et al.’s Suburban Nation, Ray Oldenburg’s The Great Good Place — there seem to be exactly zero books about why it can be pleasurable to grow up in spaces that are, after all, safe, predictable, and quiet, which are all good things.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Any Sympathetic Narratives About Life in Suburban Sprawl?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Most Popular DNH Posts
- 1. Northland Chosen for New Haven Coliseum Site: Details on the RFQs
- 2. 500-unit Shartenberg Mixed-Use Development Begins Construction
- 3. Study at Yale Boutique Hotel Launches Ad Campaign; Opens to NYT Fanfare
- 4. New Materials in New Haven Architecture
- 5. RAMSA Selected for Yale's $600 Million New Dormitories
- 6. Lord Norman Foster Unveils "Svelte" Glass Design for Yale School of Management
- 7. New Haven Groundbreaking for $5,000 Per Month Apartments; Condon Argues for Doubling Size of Downtown
- 8. Cycling Activity vs. National Gas Prices
- 9. Proposals Are In for Route 34 Boulevardization
- 10. Shaw's Plaza Downtown: Street Design Worse Than A No-Man's Land Target?
- 11. Help Bring an Apple Store Downtown!
- 12. Complete Streets Legislation Passes New Haven Board of Aldermen
3 comments:
I think the lack of this kind of literature is due to a factor that Ray Oldenberg deals with in his book, which is the fact that these places are designed for parents with young children. As a young child, I loved living in our big exurban house with its enormous field (yes, my backyard was 15 acres of field. On my driveway I saw deer and wild turkeys, and until I was in middle school the lot next to us was empty and you could really see the stars. I am still a world-class lightning bug-catcher. But then you grow up, and by what they now call the pre-teen years, I was disenchanted. I wanted to live somewhere with more people, with a social life. I loved cafes and bookstores. As a teenager, my dream became living in New York City working as an actor. As an adult, I have figured out how much I'd hate living in NYC. (Although I love to visit, and my two best friends from high school live there now.) But at my parents' house, the only way to visit someone is to drive. So until I was 16, I was extremely frustrated. Even then, I had to drive 30 minutes to get near anything but a Wal-Mart and a one-screen movie theatre (which I didn't know were rare at the time).
Robert Bruegmann wrote a pro-sprawl book called Sprawl. However, he mis-defines sprawl from the outset, so the whole book is pretty much irrelevant. I can't say I'd recommend bothering to read it.
I do agree that there are some nice things about sprawl though:
1. Almost everyone has a yard they can use for gardening or kids can play.
2. Neighborhood streets usually have low traffic volumes, making parents feel safer letting their kids play in the street or bike around.
3. Ample free parking pretty much everywhere.
4. Low congestion outside of peak hours since the roads have been over-designed to accommodate the congested periods.
There is actually quite a bit of push-back to the traditional anti-suburban screed. I'm working on a manuscript on the origins of the modern suburban imagination in 19th century Britain. A number of titles have come my way that are relevant here. Here are just a few:
The Village in the City - by Nicholas Taylor, published in 1973, is a trenchant and impassioned critique of the anti-suburban 'bias' in planning and architecture at the time in Britain. It provides page after page of defenses and promotions of traditional, natural suburban living patterns.
Margins of desire: the suburbs in fiction and culture, 1880-1925 (2005) -- by Lynne Hapgood, this is a study of Victorian and early 20th century literary texts (again British) that deal with the suburban. She reads both high and (often very) low novels. Her argument is both literary critical and and socio-cultural defense of suburban space as a new venue for egalitarian politics, a supposedly classless domain outside the urb.
Google 'suburban myth' -- there are at least two books that use this title and aim to debunk the stereotypical account of the suburb's sterility.
Another really nice article on the suburban and its experience is John Plotz's article "Virtually Being There: Edmund Wilson's Suburbs." published in the Southwest Review 87. (2002): 10-28. He has some nice analysis of the odd and special temporal and historical effects that crop up in our thinking about the suburban experience (he references both Wilson's literary work and more contemporary films, etc.)
- Justin
Post a Comment