Good point. And I'm going to add "ChildrensPlace?" to our list. I was surprised too by the breadth of these latest entries. It seems there is also a theme of the loss of freedom, especially for children, that has occured as the suburbs have grown and anxiety increased. Is this partly due to the loss of longterm personal relationships that created a fabric of trust and security? Do anxiety and transience feed on each other? -- Beth
Nancy, I was noticing the same thing, memories of childhood that kept resurfacing and an almsot mournful lament for the poor suburban children of today who don't have what we did, but instead live super-scheduled, over-protected lives. Michael Moore lays the blame for the culture of fear (specifically fear of the African American male) squarely at the feet of the media, but I wonder too whether transience doesn't also make our society more likely to buy into it? I have to say I was in a couple of places recently where I was laughed at for locking the doors of cars--where nobody locks their car or their house, and it made me curious about what different elements in a place make it "seem" more safe. Scale is certainly one. A sense that a majority of people in this place have been there a LONG time. Also, I'm pretty sure, racial homogeneity. I think these places are not inherently safer than others, but there is the perception that they are. -- Alison
I just finished reading [Allan's post] where he asks "What if the tension over urban growth is not about traffic, or noise, or overburdened schools, but instead, at an archetypal level, is really about beauty?" I think he's onto something. The laments in the various posts over loss of rural childhood habitats, lack of freedom in suburban communities, loss of cicada song, hacking away at the understory of our yards, and even the lost feeling of safety all have aesthetics at their heart. The early childhood suburbs that I wrote about with some love and yearning are quite different from the suburbs of Irvine, California (largest planned community in the world) which I inhabited as a very unhappy teenager. That kind of suburb, where there truly is no beauty, no soul or opportunity for soul, are killers of imagination, stealers of the secret places children need, and without those, no child is safe. --Lisa
Ed Allen, one of the great teachers of architecture, argues that architectural taste is largely formed in childhood. The more I learn about architectural visions the more I think he is partly right, and partly...something else intervenes, and people raised in one sort of place discover a preference for others. Raised in stone-and-steel Manhattan, I turn out to have an unexpected sympathy with Japanese wood designs. A woman I know, raised in earthquake-prone, wooden Portland, Oregon, has a feeling for the arches, vaults, and domes of unreinforced masonry.
In discussing suburbs, it's important to distinguish between the pre-World War II US suburb and the post-WWII. Pre-war, suburbs were largely for the uppper-middle class. The primary transit technology was rail, a mix of trolley and commuter. The trolleys gave their name to the urban form; the "trolley suburb." The houses were often carefully designed by architects--names like Greene and Greene and Julia Morgan come to mind.
Post World War II suburbs were intended as housing for veterans. A number of financial and legal devices were put together to make it possible, for the first time, for large numbers of the US middle class to own a plot of land and a small house near a major city. The primary transit technology, pushed hard by automobile and oil industries, was the automobile. And the designs... The buyers--they didn't know what to ask for. How could they? So they got what the builders (who mostly didn't hire architects) gave them. It became all quite the mass manufacturing industry--the main difference between a suburban development site and a factory was that the workers moved from place to place, instead of the work coming to them.
More notes tomorrow, maybe. Meantime, here's some references:
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