DLN Member Tim Slattery, Hart Howerton Partner, hosted a discussion around American Suburbia. This webinar focused on the causes, birth, migration to and development of the American Suburb over the history of our country, as well as where we are today and what the future of suburbia will look like. See some highlights below.
- America is a very large place – 1.9 billion acres in the continental US alone. In 1776, the total population was 2.5 million, and today it is over 320 million. Our population has grown throughout our history, but we still have the same amount of land. How do we settle and develop it? As it currently stands, about 4% of land in the US is developed.
- At the beginning, the “Founding Farmers,” Agrarianism and the Jeffersonian Grid as a result of the National Land Ordinance were early influencers of how our land was settled. Settlers were promised 40 acres and a mule if they “went West,” a la Manifest Destiny.
- Frederick Law Olmsted, father of landscape architecture and designer of Central Park, influenced many cities in America who all wanted their own version of a Central Park.
- 1872 saw the formation of National Parks, which was our first expressed understanding to protect our country’s great natural spaces.
- The 1902 book Gardens Cities of Tomorrow by E. Howard addressed how to get the positives out of both “town” and “country,” and influenced the design and development of many American cities. Around this time arose the first communities of uniform and sequential houses, resembling our modern idea of a suburb.
- As a result of political events like World War II, technological advances like the TV and refrigerator, and demographic shifts like the “baby boom,” we moved from the Garden Cities of the early 1900s towards our more modern definition of Suburban Development beginning in the 1950s.
- The culture of mass production caused by industrialization during WWII translated to home design, creating the idea of the home as a product and resulting in large homogeneous developments.
- The car caused a reversal in the reality of “escaping the city,” and it caused a loss of the idealism of the suburbs largely because of the large interstates and roads we built to support them. From this shift arose New Urbanism, starting around the 1980s.
- The focus of New Urbanism was on a slowly decreasing gradient of density, where dense areas were formed around parks, and homes sprung off from there (see examples: Celebration, FL and Palmetto Bluff, SC). The focus was on landscape first, with the houses subordinate to trees, etc.
- The present-day conversation around suburbia focuses on health and proximity to nature.