The Arcadian Dreamscape

This is a response for the collective set of posts on suburbs at the Ecotone Wiki.

I grew up in Kensington, California, just north of Berkeley, a little one-square mile municipality perched on hills with about 800 feet of relief from top to bottom of the town. I don’t think I considered it a suburb when growing—that was something you’d call Walnut Creek, or Fremont, or Hayward—after all it had plenty of secret places to explore—several creeks, a hidden garden at its heart, even a monastery. And it is a place that very much has its own identity: in a different county from Berkeley, up the hill from Albany, and much smaller than the city of El Cerrito to the north and west. But by most technical definitions it is a suburb, mostly of Berkeley but more generally of Oakland and San Francisco, significantly one whose early development was in the pre-war years.

For this post I just read American Dreamscape: The Pursuit of Happiness in Postwar Suburbia, by Tom Martinson. He writes in opposition to what he terms the New Urbanists, an intellectual tradition that is quite critical of suburbia, inveighing against their dependence on the automobile and promoting high-density housing, public transit, and centralization. The numbers are on his side: most people aspire towards suburban living, wanting to have their own little bit of space along with a house. He argues that the New Urbanist criticisms just don’t make sense to most people, who find the majority of their needs being met in the suburbs.

But Martinson, an architect, is critical of his profession, tracing a history of the Modernist architectural movement that led to a complete disinterest in residential design. Even contemporary estates for the elite in this society show little sense of design, “a hodgepodge of unrelated architectural features thrown together in a vain attempt to create visual interest”, as he puts it. Landscape architecture, vital once in the days of Frederick Law Olmsted in shaping our surroundings, has undergone even more of a decline in its importance, being relegated to specifying the choice of plantings in a development.

Martinson’s hope is that American society is overdue for a shift from rationalism to romanticism, and that there is a yearning now for what he calls an Arcadian suburb, with a concomitant attraction to smaller-scale dwellings and more natural environments. Sarah Susanka’s book The Not So Big House is an example of this, and at a landscape scale so is the work of the extremely influential planner Ian McHarg, author of the book Design with Nature.

Perhaps this is the reason why I get much more of a sense of place from my home town than the image I hold of the contemporary suburban development. Kensington dates from a late Romantic period in American landscape design. The layout of it as a development respects topography and the land. In the town I live in, Davis, growth, though inevitable, is fiercely contested. Maybe the contestants are missing the point. 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?