July 10 , 2000


The End Is Near
BY RICK ROCKWELL
Can the Mexican opposition topple the PRI?

Temp Slave Revolt
BY DAVID MOBERG
Contingent workers of the world unite.

Locked Down
BY KRISTIN ELIASBERG
Prison cutbacks leave inmates hopeless.


News & Views

Editorial
BY SALIM MUWAKKIL
Just say no to the war on drugs.

Forgotten America
BY JUAN GONZALEZ
Enemies of the state.

Appall-O-Meter
BY DAVID FUTRELLE

A Terry Laban Cartoon

Bully Culprit
BY JAMES B. GOODNO
Estrada is leading the Philippines into crisis.

Three's Company
BY JOHN NICHOLS
Third parties strategize for the November elections

Don't Drink the Water
BY ERIK MARCUS

Did a factory farm cause a deadly E. coli outbreak?

Eight Is Enough
BY DAVE LINDORFF

Judge restricts freedom of anti-death penalty activists

Pass the Petition
BY TED KLEINE

In Michigan, a Republican leads a campaign to legalize marijuana

Profile
BY TRAVIS LOLLER

Irina Arellano: on strike and in style.


Culture

Botched Burbs
BY SANDY ZIPP
BOOKS: How the suburbs happened.

Harrington's Way
BY KIM PHILLIPS-FEIN
BOOKS: The Other American.

Slaughterhouse Live
BY JEFF SHARLET
BOOKS: Absolute oral history

Shakespeare Inc.
BY BEN WINTERS
FILM: Something is definitely rotten in Denmark.

Post-Feminist Smackdown!
BY JANE SLAUGHTER

 
Botched Burbs

By Sandy Zipp

Suburban Nation: The Rise of
Sprawl and the Decline of the
American Dream
By Andres Duany, Elizabeth
Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck
North Point Press
256 pages, $30

Picture Windows: How the
Suburbs Happened
By Rosalyn Baxandall and
Elizabeth Ewen
Basic Books
298 pages, $27.50

What has happened to the American suburb? Once the utopian locale where city and country met, where nature and culture were brought into polite conversation, the suburb is no longer a pastoral borderland or even the mundane stage - set for middle America's sit-com fantasies.

Only a few generations since the heady days of postwar triumphalism, the friendly suburb has mutated into sinister sprawl. As Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck report in their recent manifesto Suburban Nation, those cheerful ranch houses arrayed in spotless, assembly-line rows on idyllic virgin land have mutated into swirling viruses of McMansions, garage-fronted stucco shacks and cul-de-sacs pushing their way relentlessly into imperiled wetlands and forest belts.

These much-heralded - and much-derided - pioneers of "new urbanist" architecture are confident that they have a popular antidote to sprawl. They are no doubt on to something, having made very successful careers out of stumping for a return to the "traditional neighborhood." They claim this buried, longed-for tradition was the dominant form of Western habitation before the mid-20th century, originally evolving, they write, "organically as a response to human needs" in the form of "mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly communities of varied population, either standing free as villages or grouped into towns and cities."

But reading Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen's new history, Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened, next to the architects' impassioned plea is instructive. In the hands of these historians, the suburb becomes not an anesthetized state of mind but a flawed and tragic chapter in the noble story of "America's attempts to provide housing to all of its citizens." If the new urbanists find suburbs wanting for "a physical framework conducive to public discourse," Baxandall and Ewen counter with the suggestion that postwar suburbs never truly provided an easy escape from the cacophony of civic life. Using Long Island as an historical laboratory, they trace its development from farmland to leisure-class retreat to mass-marketed worker's paradise, stressing throughout the struggles over race and class that transformed the landscape of Walt Whitman's Paumanok into Levittown.

 

 

 


In These Times © 2000
Vol. 24, No. 16