In all of this it is important, regardless of the quality of outcome, to be mindful of
an ‘idealistic’ factor; that a clear majority of the immigrants to the New World
were attracted by ‘possessive individualism’ and wanted never again to be
obliged to integrate their domestic lives with others on a shared plot, in a shared
building, and on shared transportation. What bliss to possess a freehold plot, a
free-standing house, and for each adult to have discretionary use of a free-to-go-
anywhere automobile, although James Kunstler (1993: 173) notes a downside in
that the ever-questing ‘obsession with mobility, the urge to move on every few
years stands at odds with the wish to endure in a beloved place’.
The appealing image of suburban freedom has had to give way,
in the round, to a sobering conclusion – that just as environment
influences consciousness (Peter Jackson’s Maps of Meaning, 1989)
an atomized and socially sterile suburban ‘bedroom’ environment
induces a flawed social consciousness and an urban stasis. Such
after-their-prime suburbs are now redeemable only through
revival – a process of nucleation (rescaling) and land-use mixture
(variety) in association with the applications, where fitting, of
Transport Oriented Developments (TODs), Mixed Use Develop-
ments (MUDs), and the likes of Co-housing – examined and
explored later in this chapter.
The highest residential ambition for suburban living can be ascribed to the social
and design concepts consolidated around the turn of the twentieth century
by Ebenezer Howard and Raymond Unwin as the ‘Garden City’ ideal, along
with Clarence Stein’s identification (1929) of the ‘neighbourhood unit’. Unwin’s
planning-out-of-architecture designs included a middle-class division of home
access between the ‘visitor’ frontal façade and the ‘trade person’ rear access
shown in figure 5.1 as Radburn and Radburn rationalized.^6 Howard and Unwin,
both working in England, suggest British input to the take-up of the ‘bungalow’
(the North American ranch-style house), with Clarence Stein’s ‘Radburn’
principles (New Jersey: and at Sunnyside, Long Island) ascribed to American
origins.^7
The earlier inference of poorly delivered ‘blob’ planning has its origin in either
or both the ‘non-planning’ circumstance, or the ‘formulaic planning’ situation of
yesteryear, inducing replicated gridded and podded patterns. Indeed most of
today’s inherited suburban development was out of date at inception, often sited
in flood-prone or unstable locations, also costly to live in and service, resistant to
adaptation, and largely beyond redemptive redesign. Regardless of planning leg-
islation, planning personnel, zoning intent, shape of the landscape, or the inher-
ited agricultural soils, the dominant influences at the time of rural-urban crossover
were the already established landowner boundaries, entrenched developer pref-
erences, and a local political orthodoxy where, ‘at the developing edge the tradi-
tional model of zoning faltered badly’ (Porter, Phillips and Lassar 1991: 6).
Planning, as zoning, has not often played an initiating role, and has seldom har-
nessed the owner-contractor-councillor troika to good effect. These failings have
been authoritatively listed by Charles Haar and Jerold Kayden in their Zoning and
Urban Growth Management 191A listing of presumed
virtues for suburban
housing prior to World
War II would include:
affordable, safe and
secure, independent,
comfortable and
convenient, interesting,
novel and lively,
distinctive, individual
and personalized.