U.S. cities have been growing at their edges for a century and a half. Country living of the Windy Corner sort evolved into the “streetcar suburbs” of the early 20th century, offering a comfortable life just a carriage ride from town. After World War II, mass-developed subdivisions followed, compelled by a housing crisis and emboldened by racist government-housing subsidies, white flight, and the sheer size of the North American continent. Like pornography, you know a suburb when you see it: large expanses of low-slung buildings, where residences are separated from commerce, where industry is mostly absent, where family life thrives inside detached homes that stipple meandering streets flanked by lawns and dotted with mailboxes. More than half of Americans, 175 million of us, live in communities like these now, most for the same reasons as our forebears.
Or we live in a slightly more urban version of them, because now, everywhere is the suburbs. Eighty-four percent of Americans live in cities, but most of them don’t live in the dense, modernist urban spaces that the name conjures—places like New York or Hong Kong. Instead, they occupy the greater metropolitan areas of Houston or Atlanta or Denver, which extend far beyond the city limits. All told, roughly three-quarters of the population live in single-family homes, a reminder that even the urban cores of big American cities, such as Dallas or Phoenix, wear the trappings of suburbia.
For decades, urbanists have sought to end America’s long marriage to sprawl. The architects Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson have identified characteristics of suburban form worthy of retrofitting, including the dominance of low-density buildings, an emphasis on private spaces instead of public ones, the reliance on single-use rather than mixed-use zoning, an almost complete dependence on the automobile, and dead-end roads that make street networks less useful.
But after the anxious spring of 2020, these defects seem like new luxuries. There was always comfort to be found in a big house on a plot of land that’s your own. The relief is even more soothing with a pandemic bearing down on you. And as the novel coronavirus graduates from acute terror to long-term malaise, urbanites are trapped in small apartments with little or no outdoor space, reliant on mass transit that now seems less like a public service and more like a rolling petri dish. Meanwhile, suburbanites have protected their families amid the solace of sprawling homes on large, private plots, separated from the neighbors, and reachable only by the safety of private cars. Sheltered from the virus in their many bedrooms, they sleep soundly, dreaming the American dream with new confidence.
Or we live in a slightly more urban version of them, because now, everywhere is the suburbs. Eighty-four percent of Americans live in cities, but most of them don’t live in the dense, modernist urban spaces that the name conjures—places like New York or Hong Kong. Instead, they occupy the greater metropolitan areas of Houston or Atlanta or Denver, which extend far beyond the city limits. All told, roughly three-quarters of the population live in single-family homes, a reminder that even the urban cores of big American cities, such as Dallas or Phoenix, wear the trappings of suburbia.For decades, urbanists have sought to end America’s long marriage to sprawl. The architects Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson have identified characteristics of suburban form worthy of retrofitting, including the dominance of low-density buildings, an emphasis on private spaces instead of public ones, the reliance on single-use rather than mixed-use zoning, an almost complete dependence on the automobile, and dead-end roads that make street networks less useful.
But after the anxious spring of 2020, these defects seem like new luxuries. There was always comfort to be found in a big house on a plot of land that’s your own. The relief is even more soothing with a pandemic bearing down on you. And as the novel coronavirus graduates from acute terror to long-term malaise, urbanites are trapped in small apartments with little or no outdoor space, reliant on mass transit that now seems less like a public service and more like a rolling petri dish. Meanwhile, suburbanites have protected their families amid the solace of sprawling homes on large, private plots, separated from the neighbors, and reachable only by the safety of private cars. Sheltered from the virus in their many bedrooms, they sleep soundly, dreaming the American dream with new confidence.
by Ian Bogost, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Celina Pereira
