On lectures in history, James MadisonUniversity Professor evan friss teaches a class about the evolution of the suburbs from the early 1900s until the present. He talks about how changes to home on policy loan policy and the rise of automobiles helped great an alternative to urban living. His class is about an hour. Mr. Friss today we are talking about the suburbs. How many of you grew up in the suburbs . Almost all of you. What kind of adjectives would you use to describe the suburbs . Proud. Mr. Friss perhaps an unusual choice. Like being from nowhere. Mr. Friss good. Other descriptions, characterizations . Safe. A utopia. Mr. Friss a utopia. Family oriented. Mr. Friss family oriented. Nicolas, were you going to Say Something . Drew . I love this. [laughter] mr. Friss good. Some people, utopia, maybe this is a different generation. I thought people were going to say lame and boring, which is why i picked this very lame typeface. I thought we would start with an image of contemporary suburbia. This is an engagement shoot. A young couple taken to the suburban street for their engagement. People get married, they take engagement photos. This went around the internet for a while and lots of people, including myself, left laughed at it. What is so weird about that . Why does this image what is the disconnect . You would think it should be a scenic place like the woods, this is in a neighborhood. Mr. Friss someplace may be scenic or natural. Usually has a romantic feel, not random cars everywhere. Mr. Friss romantic. People might take them in nature or the city, places that seem exciting. Young couples, we do not usually associate with suburbia. But, what we think about suburbia has changed over time. Today we will spend the class thinking about how the notion of a suburb, and it is a notion, what we think about suburbs have changed over time. It depends where we are talking about and who we are asking. We will think about suburbs as a historical construct and what they mean. But i think somebody, maybe nicolas, said it is kind of nowhere. But by definition, it is relative. Suburbs only exist, though word suburb is beneath the city. It is related to the city. It is seen as a nowhere land between the city and rural. I was thinking about this the other day. We think about culture as maybe being urban or rural. Jazz music, hiphop. Those are historically very urban forms of art. And maybe Country Music or folk art, we think of Rural America as having a culture that is very obvious to us, one we would recognize. What is suburban music . Suburban art . Suburban culture . These kinds of things. It can be hard to identify. People who are from the suburbs, maybe not those of us who think they are utopias or drew, who loved growing up there. But people are often embarrassed to be from the suburbs. I say this because at the beginning of the semester i often ask students where they are from. Somebody will say baltimore. And i will say i know baltimore, what neighborhood . And it turns out they live in a podunk town 25 miles outside of baltimore. There are 8 Million People who live in new york city. Probably 30 million or 40 Million People who you ask and they will say they live in new york. No one wants to admit they are from new jersey, i guess. [laughter] mr. Friss they do occupy this strange space. We will go back in time and focus on the 20th century and the mid 20th century, in particular. We will have a early prehistory to think about how suburbs came to be. Although the word existed all the way back in the 14th century, the suburban ideal, the concept of suburbia, began in the 19th century. Particularly in the second half of the 19th century. It has a lot to do with cities. We talked about in class how cities are growing, becoming more industrialized. Over time, cities become associated with chaos, disorder, poor health. As a consequence, people are seeking the tonic of nature as a prescription for better health. People are wanting to escape the city. One of the ways theyre are able to do that before they build suburbs are with urban parks. Here is an example from central park, construction begins just before the civil war. The idea was, if you cannot live outside the city, at least you could get a taste of the country. So they may live in these its, dirty, crowded city, but they can have the benefit of fresh air, scenery flora and fauna, most of which was imported but nevertheless, seemed very natural. Wealthy folk could enjoy the curved path that stood in stark contrast to the gridlike streets of manhattan. As of the 19th century continues and cities become larger and more industrialized, the notion that cities were deceased d iseased, filthridden, perverted places to live, only grows. Some doctors begin to coin medical conditions, one is new yorkitis, that makes people morbid and disturbed by virtue of living in the crowded, chaotic city, with the cacophony, the noise, and all the people. So late in the 19th century, there are a lot of remedies for this. People fleeing the city, maybe farther than central park. There are other natural landmarks. A lot of people are riding bicycles as a way to escape the city. And have some sense of nature outside. So the suburban style takes off after the civil war. People start to emphasize having a detached home, a cottagestyle house, having fresh air accessible, space, i yard, a a yard, a garden. Some of you mention this notion of suburbs being safe and familyoriented. That idea begins to take off in popularity, as well. We talked earlier in the clouds, class, Harriet Beecher stowe, her sister becomes one of the leading proponents of suburbia, in terms of thinking about these spaces as ideal for family to raise a family and encourage domestic feminism. The suburban aesthetic is seen in a number of ways. We will see one example here from new york. This house was designed by calvert fox, one of the people that designed central park. This is a big house, 5000 square feet. Eight bedrooms, only one bathroom. The idea that epitomized here, and a lot of suburban architecture was to emphasize nature, and its relationship to nature. They built this house for mr. Warren, the treasurer of a railroad company. They built it purposely on the hudson river to take advantage of this beautiful view, the natural splendor. And, situated the house in such a way it was opening up to the river view. The big parlor rooms inside the house were at the back of the house so they could see the water. There was a big, giant porch on the back where they assumed the residents would spend their summer enjoying the breeze and taking in the breathtaking views. You can see there is a garden, i a yard, emphasizing the space that could be had in the suburbs. In much bigger house fan most people were living in in the city. One that was supposed to blend in with nature. Vaux was concerned about the house not sticking out so much. , youthough it was large can see the cables make the house appear very tall. But in the rear, the gables are not there. Instead, there is a hipped roof to deemphasize the verticality. There is also a lot of ornamentation. The idea was that these houses could express the emotions of the owners. These window hoods on the firstfloor windows, elaborate trim along the gables, as a way to stand out, as a way to have these ornamental flourishes, to be part of this suburbanstyle architecture. Which was very much intended for wealthier folks who could escape the suburbs. This is interesting to see what the house looks like today. This was a couple years ago. Nicelooking house. It was on the market for 285,000. Pretty cheap. But it remains a kind of signal of this earlier, impressive era. While some people like vaux were building these suburbanstyle cottage houses, others or thinking about creating the first suburbanplanned community. A couple of examples. One is Llewellyn Park in new jersey, that sat 12 miles outside new york city. The other, riverside in illinois, which was pretty close, about nine miles from chicago. The idea here was not to create these nice, cottage style homes with their own yard in guarding, yard and garden, but an entire community were similar folks could come and develop these suburban developments, these neighborhoods. These planned communities. You can see in both of the plans here, they are emphasizing nature, the roads are curved. They bring in lots of flora and fauna. In Llewellyn Park, the lot sizes are quite large and they do not allow fences. The idea, there would be a shared, open space, where any individual owner could roam in this big, public nature grounds. They are kind of interesting examples for several reasons. One of which, in the Llewellyn Park there is a gatehouse, which they used as a way to promote the idea of privacy, security, these fundamental features of suburban life that we think of today. But also, they suggest as exclusivity. These were in fact, Country Homes for very wealthy city people. Later in the 19th century we have the origins of streetcar suburbs that had houses that are often a little less elaborate, but interesting, nonetheless. Streetcars become popularized in the late 19th century because they become electrified and are able to travel faster. This is an image of pittsburgh. You can see all of the bridges between pittsburgh crossing the rivers around it. These bridges are not carrying automobiles, but rather, pedestrians, railroads, and primarily streetcars. All around pittsburgh, new, suburban streetcar suburbs are developing. Also, squirrel hill, where managers and businessmen can live in these nice, more bucolic spaces, but still manage to get to the city pretty easily. We think of suburbs primarily as a residential. But they are also industrial suburbs. Homestead, pennsylvania, about seven miles outside pittsburgh, is an example of one of these industrial suburbs, and a streetcar suburb that is connected to pittsburgh via this bridge that was erected in 1895. This is not a zoomed in look. What do you find striking about this particular suburb . How does it maybe look unusual . Unlike the others, the streets are very straight and there is no attempt to incorporate nature. Mr. Friss there is a very linear street pattern. They often follow the Railroad Tracks or streetcar tracks, where development is following transportation. It looks like they are close to factories. Mr. Friss good, there is a great deal of industry here. This is the homestead steel works which are eventually purchased by andrew carnegie, which became infamous for a labor strike. This is the center of industry. More than half the People Living here eventually worked for the steel company. We are not going to spend so much time thinking about these kinds of suburbs. But it is important to remember that manufacturing does often move to the fringes of cities. And there are all kinds of different suburbs. I wanted to talk about some of the things that precipitate the modern suburban movement in the mid1950s. Some of that stems from the new deal policies we talked about earlier. In particular, the creation of the homeowners loan corporation, a new deal by product that was trying to help people afford homes. As we discussed a couple weeks back, the Great Depression produced tremendous homelessness, foreclosures, etc. Part of what the new deal wanted to do was create a boom in the Construction Industry and provide homes for people who needed them. This holc was an effort to provide mortgages for people. In the 19th century, most buyers either built their house, or they paid cash for it. Mortgages were just beginning to become a thing. They were often very short term. You would have to refinance. So that holc offered a longerterm mortgage with a lower monthly payment. One of the interesting things about the holc, they did not want to give out loans that would not be paid back. So they had a very intricate process of assessing neighborhood value. They did not want to give loans to neighborhoods they thought would be in decline. So they created a very detailed system where individual assessors would go to a neighborhood, look at the kind of housing. They would look at how old the housing was, if it was in good shape, to determine if it was a good neighborhood that would hold its value, or a neighborhood that was on decline. And they made these maps with colors and letters to denote a were the best neighborhoods, and b, c, and d. But as we see from this map from 1937 richmond, virginia, the most salient feature in the assessors reports had to do with race. In this case, white neighborhoods tended to be shaded in green or blue, which was the highest ratings. If a neighborhood was populated heavily by africanamericans, it would almost always received a d, or red rating. That was certainly the case in this neighborhood we will look at in a minute. Which today is randolph. It had an effect on neighboring neighborhoods. You can see just to the side of this neighborhood is a yellow grouping, that is currently bird park in richmond. The report for this neighborhood said it would have been higher, would have gotten a blue rating, a b rating, but was downgraded because it is next to an africanamerican neighborhood. And there is a park on this side of the neighborhood. So, africanamericans are walking through this neighborhood. Thereby, supposedly, devaluing. When the assessors wrote reports like this, in other neighborhoods they included all sorts of detailed information. Maybe you cannot see, but under inhabitants, it would often say salaried workers, managerial class, to define the kind of people that worked there, as a way to understand how much money they made, as a way to understand if this neighborhood would become prosperous or maintain itself. But a neighborhoods dominated by africanamericans, the assessor usually just listed negro, and that was enough to designate a red designation. And this is part of the origin of the term redlining, discriminating against groups by withholding government services, etc. There is been some debate about how much of these ratings mattered in terms of lending practices. But there is no doubt there is certainly a sign of how new deal benefits were being meted out disproportionately. It is perhaps not also a surprise there is a correlation between these maps and poverty rates today. This is an overlay, a map of the original holc map from 1937. The areas shaded in red underneath it show a poverty poverty rate of more than 20 . Perhaps the government was good at predicting the future and these neighborhoods were really in decline. Or more likely, the government helped cement the fate of these neighborhoods. So what does it have to do with suburbanization . You notice the areas in red in richmond are at the center, the core of the city. That was often the case. This is a map of chicago. Another from cleveland. And finally, in oakland. All of these from 1940, or 1937. You notice the red is that the city center, the core of the city. The government started to promote by giving loans and incentivizing in other ways, development at the fringes of the city. Which happened at the expense of the city center. It also began the process of associating inner cities, city centers, as the neighborhoods of decline. And similarly that those , neighborhoods of decline where were the neighborhoods in which africanamericans disproportionately lived. And these ideas would become linked in a way that would be hard to untangle for a very long time. Following up on the homeowners loan corporation, a bigger and more important new deal fha, whichwn as the becomes a huge part of the postwar suburban boom that incentivizes suburban building by making home loans much more affordable. And goes even further than the holc in ensuring private loans that will provide longterm loans, with very little down payments. Often less than 10 was needed. This similarly operated and a way that promoted discrimination. The sag fha was more likely to ensure new Housing Development rather than reconstructing or rehabilitating old development, which meant new housing was likely to be built outside the cities. They were more likely to insure mortgages for singlefamily houses, the kind that would be very popular in the suburbs. And appallingly, many that they subsidized, they promoted the idea of restricted covenant. An agreement that the suburbanites then moved into these neighborhoods would be held to, that made sure they would never sell their house to somebody that was not white. Excluding very explicitly africanamericans. These covenants would eventually be ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1948 in shelley versus kramer. But discrimination managed to continue in a variety of other ways. These programs are in place before the war. But once the war begins to die down, soldiers are returning home, the g. I. Bill is enabling economic growth. We have postwar, suburban boom that follows world war ii. During the war, towards the end in 1944, there were about 144,000 new houses built in a single year. By 1950, there would be roughly 2 million houses built in that exact year. By 1950, the rate of suburban growth was more than 10 times that the rate of the city center. These new suburbs were often much less dense. The houses looked very similar, and so did the people. The most famous and largest example of the postwar suburbs was in levittown in long island, 25 miles east of new york city. Where Abraham Levitt and his two sons bought 4000 acres of potato farm in 1946 and eventually build 17,000 houses. They do so in a way that is reminiscent of mass production. As you can see here. Nonunionized workers would go from house to house and do the same task, often times very minute, over and over again. They really helped revolutionize the building process. As you can see from this aerial image, they had precut lumber that came from the levitt farms. They made these concrete slabs dont cashrt and dumped the material out and they would quickly build a house. They were able to build a house at a rate exceeding 150 per week. The result is that the houses were very affordable because they were built so quickly. The earliest model sold for 7,900. It is hard to do economic comparisons to today, but it would probably be Something Like 85,000, 90,000 in todays money. It became very affordable for people in the middle class. People start moving in in 1947 to houses that look like this. This is one that is still , but the original cape cod style and floor plan. What do you make of this particular house, compared to other suburban houses . What is interesting . Good, it is one floor. It is very basic, it is simple, compact. These cape codstyle houses were only 750 square feet. They only had one bathroom, they were two bedrooms. These seem pretty small to us and our suburbs today. But at the time, it seemed pretty spacious. And roomy. And had a lot of exciting features for people. Most notably, it was your own house. It was detached, it was separate, you had a yard. The house conveyed a sense of family. There were very few private spaces. Instead of formal dining rooms, there was a public, much more open kitchen, that was designed so mothers working in the kitchen could look out the front window and watch their children playing in the front lawn. There is no porch, which is often seen as the connection to the public, the link between the public street and the private house. People hanging out on their porch, a sense of community, things suburbs would be ridiculed as lacking later on. There were no stereotypically male spaces. There is no den, libraries, billiard rooms. In fact, these suburban houses reflect a new male domesticity where men were expected to spend time with their family instead of just hanging out with other male friends. Speaking of the community, there are of course, no bars or saloons where men or other people are hanging out. At first there were no swimming pools, parks, or playgrounds. This was really all about the house. Eventually those things are built, but it comes much later. This is only one of the house types. Eventually they develop a ranch style. But there are basically only two kinds of houses and they all look very similar. Some people which adjusted helped create a lack of diversity in terms of the architecture. Suburban architecture tends to look similar, whether it is in long island or somewhere else. Perhaps the more important critique is that the People Living in levittown all looked fairly similar, as well. In terms of them all being white. By 1960, when 82,000 people are living in this very popular suburban community of levittown there is not one africanamerican included, and they are purposely and explicitly excluded. So, this issue of diversity is one of the critiques of suburbia. But there were many others, even at the time back in the 1940s. And the 1950s and 1960s as they are exploding in popularity. You said something about red lining and restrictive covenants. When was blockbusting introduced . I know a lot of white families were selling their homes. Mr. Friss good. Although restrictive covenants are ruled unconstitutional in 1948, they put a waiting period on it so new communities could create them and they do not negate existing ones. Then what happens after those are put in place, there are a variety of ways, mostly real estate agents, working to make sure africanamericans do not purchase any particular neighborhood. Purchase in a particular neighborhood. The fear was that Property Values would go down. There are ways of doing this, not Just Real Estate agents steering people in a particular direction, but how you present the community. Think about here in virginia. Some of you may see suburbs, neighborhoods called the jones plantation. What does that signal to a particular group . I do not know if any of you go pumpkin picking . Anybody go pick pumpkins . If you go in town there is a nice place to pick pumpkins that i take my family to every year. But you have to drive through this little suburban development called battlefield state. You drive on confederacy lane. These are names that signal something to certain people. But what eventually happens, which we are not going to talk about too much today, the city populations decline, and a great impetus for people to move to the suburbs. Families, the socalled white flight, where neighborhoods are going from white to black. People are trying to defend their neighborhood to make sure they stay white, and do so through all sorts of ways. That is when we have blockbusting and neighborhoods rapidly changing. This is predominantly in the 1950s when you see that as happening much more so. Good question. While people are boosting suburbia, real estate agents, developers, banks, mortgage insurers, construction companies, are boosting the notion of suburbia while Popular Television shows are romanticizing a kind of inaccessible suburban ideal. Plenty of people are beginning to question whether or not these are actually utopias. And great places to live. Part of that critique is about sameness. There was a mass culture that is developing where people are replicating one another, and it this concern that the houses all look the same, the pieces all at the same, and we will have a boring, staid culture that is antithetical to what we want. Especially in terms of culture. There are unique problems in terms of women, and the notion of a suburban housewife, and what that does in terms of isolation and female oppression. And women across the country, whether in cities, suburbs, or rural areas are facing challenges all their own. But to get to the idea of the housewife, the suburban housewife, i thought it would show a brief clip from a newsreel of the 1951 miss america pageant. Pay attention, what miss america is expected to do. [video clip] a quest for mrs. America. She has to cook as well as look. They show they know potatoes have to be peeled. The cooking contest goes to miss new york city. Bed making comes next. Mrs. New yorks by city. Feels comfortable. But it is the body beautiful that is the criteria for the wellrounded miss america. The when it is mrs. New york city. Yes, white can be beautiful. End video clip] mr. Friss those women are rated on how well they can peel potatoes, how well they make beds. The men come in to test them, i do not know what they are testing for. Theyre testing the beds. Then they have to look good in a swimsuit, to boot, on top of it all. Women in suburbia are facing this prevailing image of what a suburban housewife should be and have to do. Their lives are quite challenging. This is one example of a woman, marjorie, from the late 1940s that lives in a suburb 20 miles outside new york city. She is talking about how difficult and how busy her life is. She does not have a job in the typical sense of the word, but her schedule, she wakes up at 6 30 in the morning, she had three kids, a fouryearold, 2yearold, and the baby. She wakes up, she dresses the two boys, makes breakfast. Her husband goes to work. She washes dishes, clean downstairs, kids are out playing. She bathes the baby, cleans up the stairs, nurses the baby. Makes lunch for the kids. Husband comes home. Kids take a nap. She washes the dishes. Baby, wakes up the kids, gardens, mens clothes, fixes the clothing. Then she dresses for dinner with her husband. As a cocktail with her husband, makes dinner, washes dishes, nurses baby. Kids go to sleep, and at 11 00 she goes to bed. In the article she talks about how they wake up in the middle the night, too. It is a never ending cycle. It is a lot of work for someone who was not working. Surely, some of you grew up in households where one of your parents stayed home and you may have unappreciated how much they did. My wife stays home with our two boys and her schedule looks Something Like this. But she does not dress up for dinner, i will have to say. [laughter] mr. Friss ask her about that. These people working really, really hard. You do not think of them is working. But they have tremendous economic value. Because of they were working outside the home, somebody would have to be doing these tasks. Of course, daycare is more common today, but there is real value here. This photograph is symbolizing one weeks worth of her work. She makes in a given week, 35 beds, washes 750 items of glass and china, washes fortitude 400 pieces of silverware, prepares 175 pounds of food, does 250 pieces of laundry in a given week. In the article accompanying the photograph she talks about her many roles. She is a driver, a seamstress, i id, a cook, a nurse, and her husbands glamour girl. And she has all of these modern appliances and people think by the time we get to the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s, but a that a washing machine and a dishwasher makes life easy. But in fact, even by the mid1960s, women are spending just as much time on housework as they were 50 years earlier. But for marjorie, part of the extra burden is that she is living in the suburbs. And it is isolating. She has to drive her family around all over the place. Her aunts, her cousins, they do not live with them. Her neighbors are more distant. She does not see people walking in and out of the building, and it can feel, and does feel for her, very isolating. That is another critique. Yet another is the idea of consumption. That suburbia is driving american consumption to even greater levels. We have talked about it over and over again in this class, how markers of class and status are not based on somebodys income, but rather based on what they buy, what they consume, what they wear, what they drive. Nothing becomes more important in terms of class than ones home. In terms of achieving the socalled american dream, by being a property owner. That idea is portrayed in this magazine cover from the late 1950s in which a young couple is imagining their future, imagining a ranch home and all the stuff inside of it, all the appliances. By the 1950s, americans by uy Something Like three quarters of all the appliances in the entire world. One of the more lasting critiques of suburbanization is in terms of its affect on the environment. There is an irony here the people are moving to the suburbs to get close to nature. But in the process, they are helping to destroy it. What might have been more Natural Landscapes are being bulldozed, topsoil replaced with houses and lawns. Air pollution, gasoline consumption, energy consumption, trash, all of these things are creating great waste. And is a suburban nature even really nature . If you think back to the levittown houses and many suburbs you grew up in, people have pieces of rectangular grass. What is up with that . They water it in the summer, they fertilize it with chemicals, they mow it all the time. What would the grass look like if it was just kept more natural . And the kinds of grass and that are growing are not even native to the area. So it is strange. And people are pruning their trees and hedging their lawns to make these perfectly rectangular angles. People have bushes. Just today on my way to campus i walked by a house i never noticed before. It had a bush in the shape of a dog. A little dog. Woof woof. [laughter] mr. Friss i was about to take a picture and include it but the people saw me standing in front of their house. I did not want to be creepy. [laughter] mr. Friss it is weird, everybody pruning their trees. This time of the year, everyone is raking their leaves and putting them in plastic bags and putting them on a truck. Is that natural . Or the guys outside our building with their machines blowing the leaves everywhere, it is kind of weird, if we think about it. This natural element. And a lot of the environmental critiques have to do with automobiles. And one of the developments in terms of suburban architecture is in terms of the garage. You may have noticed the levittown buildings in the 1940s did not have garages. We talked about automobiles earlier in the class, but they are very rare until the 1920s. People are parking them maybe in stables. By the 1930s and 1940s we have driveways. It is not until the 1950s and 1960s that garages become integrated into the house. You can see from this floor plan of a model of the house from 1963, the garage is enormous. It takes up more than 25 of the entire Square Footage of the house. It can fit two cars and a whole bunch of junk. This becomes a staple of suburban architecture, these dominant garages. You may remember the first image we showed in class, the most striking architectural feature of suburban houses were these protruding garages. They are called, pejoratively, snout houses. Like they have big noses. People were critical of them because they elevate the car. But they also distanced the house from the public. It is often hard to see the front door and the connection to the people. Garages are weird. They are an entire house just for your car. You can drive your car into your house. You do not have to feel the weather or see your neighbors, you just drive into your house, in this little house, just for the garage. They are not so little. These garages have become bigger and bigger, even as the cities have. Alluding to ashleys question earlier about what is happening in the cities, a lot of people are becoming autocentric and desire having a car, which propels them to move to the suburbs. Some cities are trying to promote auto mobility within the city and create drop garages. This is a famous example of a residential skyscraper in chicago from 1964, called marina city. It is a little hard to tell, but at the bottom of this giant building, is this manystoried tall, 900 space, valeted garage where people can park their cars. This was done to stem white flight and encourage people to not move to the suburbs. You can have it here in the city, too. This is what it looks like today. They are all backed in by a valets, you cannot drive it your self. Elevating the idea of the car. We already talked about in our last class, the highway act that creates all of these roads in the mid1950s. But in terms of their effect on the urban and suburban landscape, we should not forget about that. Just think about the size, the gravity, the effect of these highways, this is from los angeles, the i10 and 110 exchange. It shows you the immense nation are nature of the highways. They were to funnel people out of cities, into the suburbs. Still allowing them access. Where these highways were built inside the city or on the periphery was determined by the political will of a certain community, how welloff and affluent the community was, and often times the racial makeup of neighborhoods near the highways, they cut through neighborhoods of people of color. That happens down the street even here in harrisonburg. This is a photograph of eastgate street in 1957. The neighborhood called newtown filled with many africanamericans. And harrisonburg, begins to think about suburbanizing the city, making it more car friendly. Widening the roads, creating Retail Shopping centers. You can to the giant hole here is what used to be the neighborhood. If you want to know how beautiful it is today it is this wonderful parking lot and Shopping Center that nobody goes to. Kind of ugly. The are these suburban elements that creep into the city. Remnants are felt today every time the city considers some new project. People always go to city council to voice their concern about loss of parking. There is a great concern about how much parking there is. One of the things the highway do es is enable sprawl, which is unplanned, scattered bit of the city that is spread across. Los angeles is the most famous example. You can see in the very distance is downtown l. A. All of this lowdensity housing and commercial districts leading toward los angeles. In reality, l. A. Is more dense than many other places, but you still get the idea. Perhaps a more striking example from nevada, a subdivision created in the middle of the desert. Where do these people go Grocery Shopping . Where do they work . Where do they play . They have to drive everywhere. And it is completely separate. To think about the environmental consequences of this is obvious. There were a number by the time we get to the 1960s, these critiques of suburbia have blossomed enough that a number of innovators were trying to do Something Different and created a series of new towns like irvine, california, and columbia in maryland. It was started by a guy named james row who was concerned about sprawl between washington and baltimore. He treated the city of columbia in between these two cities. He was afraid the current housing represented where people were living, they would eventually swallow columbia, but everything between baltimore and washington would be ugly, sprawling, unplanned mess. He took this opportunity to buy 14,000 acres of land, which was then pretty rural from farmers and small tracks, milking cows and picnic lunches. He decided to section off this place to create a new kind of suburb. One that explicitly deals with the limitations and problems of existing in the suburbs. He secretly buys all this land and eventually creates this new city. A lot of people were happy to hear that because there were rumors being spread that someone was buying up all the land to create a garbage dump for baltimore and washingtons trash. People thought this was perhaps a better idea. His idea was to create a new city from scratch. And the symbol of this new city was this tree, the people tree. He had a corny phrase that he wanted to create a garden to grow people. What are the ingredients of the what soil . What do you need to create the best kind of community to create the best kind of people . His solution was to break down the city into smaller bits. You can see that on this plan here. The idea was to have a town center. Some kind of downtown, but to have a series of nine villages that people felt more comfortable in small town america. The suburbs could be a hybrid of smalltown america with a villages and their own main street Shopping Center, but also have a bustling downtown with industry and commerce, an urban pulse. He is thinking about existing problems with suffered suburbs, bedroom communities where only people live. He wants to counter that with industry and commerce. He is thinking about suburbs that are all white, and goes to Great Lengths to create a much more diverse community. There are many examples we will see in a moment. In these villages, the blue dots represented the town center where the community could supposedly come together. This is a rendering of what it might look like, the first village was known as wilde lake. You could see trademark elements. One, there was a lake. And the idea that the suburb would respect nature instead of run over it. It was also broken down into several smaller neighborhoods, each of which had its own elementary school. The understanding was that school was at the center of community and each of these neighborhoods would coalesce around a particular school. This set of building says churches, but in reality they created what they called Interfaith Centers where they forbade churches, synagogues, and mosques from being created, but instead had Interfaith Centers where christians, jews, muslims, and others would worship under the same roof to hopefully promote a sense of community and understanding. Along the same lines, there was a community pool. People were not allowed to have their own pool so they would be forced to go swim with other people. They could not have fences. Nobody had their own mailbox, instead of theire were Community Mailboxes so you had to get out into the street and see your neighbors and think about this sense of community in a very real way. Some interesting smaller details. They named the communities in and the streets after american poets and writers as a way to instill creativity and foster a sense of intellectualism. Columbia was created in this time of cars, but there was also the hope it would not the as autocentric. His plans are hard to see, but all of these shaded lines are bike paths that link the schools to people and community to community that he imagined would foster another way of moving around this kind of new city. Again, an antithesis to the existing suburbs. That all of this would combine with the kind of Downtown Center that would really provide the center of activity and culture. And the excitement. But instead of building a traditional downtown with a series of intersecting streets and restaurants and public facilities in downtown columbia, which was a new concept at the time, the downtown became a mall. Built in 1971, the Columbia Mall was only the 16th mall in the country. They called it a galleria at the time. It became emblematic of what new suburbs were going to look like, where commerce was going to be insulated in these kinds of strange structures. The mall, which is very autocentric. You can see them all surrounded by a moat of parking spaces. This makes it inaccessible for people who do not have cars and helps control the kind of people who shop there. Malls are like suburbs themselves. There is supposed to be a mix of urban. You can see the space frame geometry on the roof of the mall signals this urban, geometric grid. There are brick pavers that make it feel like an outdoor plaza. There are shadows coming in, vendors, kiosks where people sell you monogrammed sweatshirts or cell phone plans. Streetlights to make it look outside when you are inside. There are always birds in these places, i do not know if they put them there or they get in