Changing Suburbs

Foundation, Form and Function

Richard Harris,Peter Larkham

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781135814250
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Architektur
• Sous-sujet: Stadtplanung & Landschaftsgestaltung

The editors and contributors to this volume demonstrate how suburbs and the meaning of suburbanism change both with time and geographical location.
Here the disciplines of history, geography and sociology, together with subdisciplines as diverse as gender studies, art history and urban morphology, are brought together to reveal the nature of suburbia from the nineteenth century to the present day.

CHAPTER 1: Suburban Foundation, Form and Function

Richard Harris and Peter J.Larkham

INTRODUCTION

Polymorphous, like the cities of which they are a part, suburbs have offered almost everyone something to praise or, more usually, condemn. Suburbia—a term which, like many suburbs, has not aged well—has attracted attention from a very wide range of people. It has been treated as fair game by urban geographers and historians, by sociologists and political scientists, by makers of documentaries as well as writers of fiction. The result has been a minor academic and popular industry, to the extent that one writer began a review with ‘Not another book on suburbs’ (Gaskell, 1995)!

Suburbs are important enough for people routinely write books to clear up the myths and misconceptions that previous writers have purveyed (e.g. Wrong, 1967). Over two decades ago Masotti (1973, p. 21) pointed out that ‘much of the research and analysis of the sixties, especially the work of Herbert Gans (1959, 1972) and Bennett Berger (1960, 1961) can be interpreted as counter-myth; it served to untangle the web of mythology spun by the social critics of the postwar period’. The work of revision and clarification has continued to this day. For example, one of the present authors has recently offered a reinterpretation of the geography of North American cities and suburbs in the first half of this century (Harris and Lewis, 2000).

Two of the most pervasive, and influential, myths about suburbs are that they are a recent phenomenon and that they take the same form everywhere. Few people appreciate that suburbs have been around for a very long time. In Britain, the interwar suburbs are often viewed as both definitive and formative. In the United States, there is a popular perception that suburban development is essentially a post-war phenomenon, with the 1950s being the touchstone decade. Historians know that the history of suburbs is much longer, though their insights are rarely brought to bear upon contemporary debates. By bringing together the views of historians and social scientists, one of the purposes of the present volume is to underline the historical depth of suburban development.

If suburbs are widely seen as being of recent origin, they are also seen as generic in character. One of the most common criticisms of suburbs is that they all look the same, from city to city, and nation to nation. Almost all writers have assumed that the process and pattern of suburban development is essentially the same everywhere. At most, they have acknowledged the existence of minor variations, for example in the density of settlement between Britain on the one hand and Australia and North America on the other. The recent fashion for ‘historic’ architectural styles, sometimes drawing upon local or regional building idioms, has introduced superficial variety, but in the hands of most builders and developers even this new localism can appear somehow generic. But we believe that there are more important ways in which suburbs, and the meaning of suburbanism, have varied from place to place. By commissioning and collecting overviews of suburban development in Britain, Australia, Canada, and the United States, together with treatments of particular issues, we intend the present volume to highlight, and to raise questions about, national differences in the character and meaning of suburban development.

A HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE SUBURB

There is a perception that the history of suburbia is well understood. The situation in Britain is typical in this regard. Certainly, works such as Thompson’s classic edited volume The Rise of Suburbia (Thompson, 1982a) and Dyos’s early and detailed study of the growth of Camberwell (Dyos, 1961) are citation classics in this field. This historical tradition is more recently supported by Beresford’s work on Leeds (Beresford, 1988). Such works focus on the suburban development processes, from traditional perspectives and using the traditional data sources of the urban and economic historian. The view of this British literature is summarized by Thompson’s introductory remarks that

Suburbia rose between 1815 and 1939, an unlovely, sprawling artefact of which few are particularly fond. To be sure, there were suburbs long before the nineteenth century in the sense of places beyond city limits, the outskirts of towns hanging on to the central area physically and economically, for the most part composed of the ramshackle and squalid abodes of the poorest and most wretched of the town’s hangers-on and its most noxious trades. (Thompson, 1982b, p.2)

Although there is much truth in this view, the manner and language with which it is portrayed perpetuate another suburban myth.

In Britain, key studies of what is often regarded as ‘typical’ suburbia, principally the London fringe ‘Metroland’ of the 1930s, have been influential in shaping our understanding of the suburban land development and design processes leading to the characteristic location, growth, densities, street- and block-plans (Jackson, 1973); as indeed was Dyos’s pioneering work on Camberwell (1961), where he ‘was chiefly concerned to rescue the suburb from historical oblivion and to show that its reputation for insignificant and uninteresting anonymity was unwarranted’ (Thompson, 1982b, p. 3). Edwards (1981) has made a valiant attempt to set the design of suburbia in a necessary wider (but still suburban) temporal context, drawing together such earlier suburban forms as Victorian villa suburbs and their development into, for example, Bedford Park (London: Jonathan Carr, from 1875) through the classic inter-war speculative semi-detached suburbia to the changing space standards, uses, and architectural and plan forms of the 1960s and 1970s modernism.

But there are gaps in the wider academic understanding of the origins and development of suburbia. Too often is consideration limited temporally, and suburbia dismissed as a (relatively) recent phenomenon. Too often are the mechanisms and processes over-simplified; as, for example,

the first suburbs were created as a result of a growing antipathy amongst the entrepreneurial middle class to the threats posed to their respectability by the social heterogeneity and lack of order in urban culture. (Chaney, 1997, p. 142)

Too often are the aesthetics of suburbia, and the middle-class suburban lifestyle, derided by a cultural élite—often professional, well-educated and of upper-class origins— such as Osbert Lancaster’s well-known caricature of ‘Wimbledon Transitional’ and ‘By-pass Variegated’. Too rarely is the general satisfaction of suburban dwellers with their lifestyle adequately explored, as Ravetz and Turkington (1995) began to do in their wider survey of the British home: suburbia is, after all, home to the many, and a lifestyle to which many aspire. And the characteristics of UK interwar suburbia so well explored by A.A.Jackson (1973), Oliver et al. (1994) and others are not typical of other periods, nor of other countries with similar socio-cultural contexts, let alone of quite different national contexts. In short, and as Whitehand and Carr (this volume) note, the suburban experience is dominated by academic and professional myths, based in part on prejudice and in part on lack of knowledge.

SUBURBAN ORIGINS

It is clear that suburbs are not new (cf Thompson, 1982a). The term itself derives from sub urbe, beneath/below and therefore outside the urbs. The urbs is not necessarily the ‘town’ (a later interpretation) but the pre-urban nucleus, often fortified, sometimes a castle. So, in the Western European tradition, many post-Roman towns have suburbs of some form. These mediaeval suburbs sometimes show strong traces of planning in their layouts, as in the regular plots of Corve Street and Foregate Street, in the English towns of Ludlow and Worcester respectively.

These early suburbs were not wholly residential, at least not in the way that we now take for granted. There was functional segregation, with the suburban poor being unable to afford urban taxes and without benefit of urban facilities and the protection of fortifications. Ironically, though, successive waves of urban expansion do swallow up and incorporate previous suburban areas and landforms (a point returned to in a later context). Early suburbs were also (proto-) industrial, with noxious trades such as tanneries regularly banished to the outskirts by city ordinances. Other occupations requiring water access developed between fortification lines and rivers, for example in the Severn valley (Baker, 1997). Thus, in the mediaeval period, there were many thriving and diverse suburbs, as Lilley (1995) has shown in his wider study of Coventry.

The functional segregation of suburbs persisted into the early-modern and industrial period. With developments in city economies and the means of production, in addition to the well-known rural-urban migration, developing suburbs were more attractive than urban cores for residence—and, as Higgins (1995) shows in Newtown, Montgomeryshire, for business and industrial uses too. Higgins explores the ways in which the new built forms of industrial suburbs in the early-industrial period reflected changes in modes of production, and particularly the function of the family unit in the labour supply of early capitalist industrial enterprises.

A new type of suburb began at this point, with the flight of the wealthy from increasingly congested and unpleasant urban cores to the relatively distant semirural peace (Fishman, 1987). To show but one example from the English Midlands, in 1776 Arthur Young, having travelled through Wolverhampton from Birmingham, marvelled at the contrast in Tettenhall, which he considered to be ‘as retired as the Ohio’ (Young, 1932 edition). In 1812, the ‘delightful view of Wolverhampton and the adjoining country’ was used as a selling-point for a house on the sandstone ridge along which many such villas were springing up (advertisement in the Wolverhampton Chronicle, 23rd December 1812). By 1846, Tettenhall was described as

…daily more intruded upon by clumsy proprietors of scraps of ground, by imported shopkeepers, and by those architectural affectations, termed ‘country houses’, in which the hardware gentility of Wolverhampton carries on its evening and Sabbath masquerades, at a convenient distance of a mile and three quarters from the locks, nails, and fryingpans of the productive emporium. (Palmer and Crowquill,c. 1846, pp. 33–34)

The growing scale and importance of urban manufacturing, and the associated development of the Romantic movement, made suburban areas more appealing to increasing numbers of people. Bringing nature into the city, they offered ready access to the countryside. From this development arose the notion, commonly expressed and very generally felt in the present century, of suburbs as a sort of marriage of city and country. Ideally, however, they were seen a partial marriage which excluded the basic elements of the new urban economy. The planner Thomas Sharp’s critique of Town-Country is relevant here, although it was principally developed as a response to the Garden City Movement (Sharp, 1936, pp. 78ff). Some aristocratic estates were being developed for middle-class residential use, as in Edgbaston, Birmingham (Cannadine, 1980), albeit with considerable control over both form and use. The estates generally laid out streets and plots, and—in Edgbaston—restrictive covenants prohibited any business use, including ‘public strawberry-patches’! There was a social dominance of the developing middle classes in these suburbs, caused not least by the need for sufficient disposable income to afford daily travel costs to work in the city. The development of transport innovations was, clearly, fundamental to the growth of this type of suburbia.

Increasingly the suburb, ideally and then to many observers by definition, was purely residential. Indeed, it was a place to which those employed in the city might retreat when day’s work was done. Little recognition was afforded to those—almost entirely women—whose often unpaid work supported the suburban lifestyle. As suburbs acquired these specific, and more positive, meanings they attracted more prosperous families. It is widely supposed that, in Anglo-America, the first and definitive suburbs were those built for and occupied by the social élite (Fishman, 1987). According to many writers, the popular desire and opportunity to settle at the fringe came later. It is not clear that this was entirely true in any country. In Australia and North America, for example, it is evident that numerous working-class suburbs existed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Barrett, 1971; Harris and Lewis, 2000). In European countries (with the exception of England), cities retained their appeal to the élite, while suburbs were often relegated to the socially inferior (Hohenberg and Lees, 1995, pp. 306–307). Paris is a noteworthy case in point. If the reality was complex, however, the idealized conception was usually more simple: especially in the United States, by the beginning of this century, a suburb was a socially-desirable residential area, one which had developed at a relatively low density at the urban fringe.

The social trajectory of the suburb may be traced through changing usage, and in literary accounts. In Britain, Australia and North America the suburb has not always carried the associations of idyllic, quasi-rural and highly private life-style that are presently current in much of the English-speaking urban tradition. Along with ‘villa’, the term ‘suburb’ has changed markedly: but, while ‘villa’ has descended the social hierarchy from large upper-class mansions in extensive grounds to suburban industrial terraced housing (cf Slater, 1978), the connotations of ‘suburb’ have described a parabolic trajectory, from low to high, and then falling. In Britain, the first part of this movement occurred from the eighteenth century onwards.

In the seventeenth century the suburbs were sometimes equated with the prostitutes’ quarters of cities…by 1817…‘suburban’ was used to describe the inferior manners and narrowness of views then attributed to residents of the suburbs. Thereafter, with the onset of the industrial revolution and the later development of new methods of transportation, the meaning of ‘suburban’ appears to have evolved towards its current use and connotation of middle-class lifestyles. (Gray and Duncan, 1978, p. 297)

The Oxford English Dictionary’s survey of the term¹ begins in the 1380s, with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales writing of ‘in the suburbes of a toun…lurkynge in hernes and lanes blynde’, already suggesting a less than salubrious, but probably semi-rural, district. By 1593 Nashe wrote ‘London, what are thy Suburbes but licensed Stewes?’; while Shakespeare’s Henry VIII of 1613 mentioned the rabble of the suburbs, and Fletcher in 1625 derided ‘the suburban strumpet’. Many such references in English literature refer specifically to the disreputable condition and uses of the London suburbs. References are thus explicitly disparaging, and if anything grew worse with Dent, in 1601, using the imagery of ‘the suburbs of Hell’.

By the nineteenth century, however, the social status of the suburbs had improved considerably. This may be seen in the landscaper/designer J.C. Loudon’s description of London in 1824 where ‘the suburban villa…[is] of limited extent, but contains a small kitchen garden and stables… Such villas are occupied more by professional men and artists’. And, even in England, there are many precedents for the desirability of residing within easy reach of, but not inside, the larger cities: in 1855 Macaulay, in his History of England, wrote that ‘among the suburban residences of our kings, that which stood at Greenwich had long held a distinguished place’.

In this context, the massive growth of London’s suburbs in the late nineteenth century appeared to initiate a democratization of the suburbs, and a downward slide in their social status. By 1875, the fear of suburban growth was evident, with Helps writing ‘How this ugly lot of suburbs would join with that ugly lot, and that there would soon be one continuous street’. Shortly afterwards, the Law Times stated that ‘the speculative builder…has become the pest of suburban London’. Suburbs, then, have been around for a very long time; long enough, notably in the case of Britain, for their social status to have passed through several evolutionary phases. What, then, has endured? Indeed, what is a suburb? In addressing these questions it is helpful to adopt not only a historical but also a comparative frame of reference.

SOME SUBURBAN MYTHS

The task of addressing questions about the nature of suburbs is complicated by the development of complex and deep-rooted lay, professional and academic mythologies. Within each of the countries that are surveyed here, myths about suburbs have readily taken on a life of their own. The social image of the suburbs in the United States, and to a lesser extent Canada, is a case in point (Harris and Lewis, 1998). Throughout the twentieth century, North American suburbs have always been socially diverse. Those who studied them in the first quarter of the century were well aware of this diversity (Douglass, 1925; Taylor, 1915). Despite this fact, the popular and academic stereotype came to be that of the middle-class residential enclave. This stereotype was implied in the work of the Chicago sociologists in the 1920s and 1930s, and was perpetuated by the numerous critics of suburbia in the 1950s and 1960s. It was then applied retrospectively by suburban historians in the 1970s and 1980s. Selective historical studies of early, affluent suburbs then confirmed what everyone ‘knew’: that pre-war suburbs were for the affluent, and that it was only after the war that better-paid workers—a social group which, to Americans, still falls within the broad limits of the ‘middle class’—were able to buy into the suburban dream. This has been a powerful myth. It has imparted a strongly progressive image to the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), whose mortgage insurance programmes are thought to have been critical to the development of post-war suburbs. The fact that pre-war suburbs were socially diverse was then conveniently forgotten.

In the same way, suburban myths have also gained widespread acceptance in Britain. Here, the mythology is twofold, covering the production and consumption of suburbia. The pervasive production myths have emphasized the uniformity of suburban character, equating this with dullness, blandness and an impoverishment of the quality of life. Not only were these myths common during the formation of the archetypal suburb, the inter-war speculative ...

Table des matières

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• CHANGING SUBURBS: FOUNDATION, FORM AND FUNCTION
• STUDIES IN HISTORY, PLANNING AND THE ENVIRONMENT
• THE CONTRIBUTORS
• PREFACE
• CHAPTER 1: SUBURBAN FOUNDATION, FORM AND FUNCTION
• CHAPTER 2: BRITISH SUBURBAN TASTE, 1880–1939
• CHAPTER 3: BRITISH ‘CORPORATION SUBURBIA’: THE CHANGING FORTUNES OF NORRIS GREEN, LIVERPOOL
• CHAPTER 4: ENGLAND’S GARDEN SUBURBS: DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE
• CHAPTER 5: THE MAKING OF AMERICAN SUBURBS, 1900–1950S: A RECONSTRUCTION
• CHAPTER 6: SUBURBS OF DESIRE: THE SUBURBAN LANDSCAPE OF CANADIAN CITIES, C. 1900–1950
• CHAPTER 7: RUNNING RINGS AROUND THE CITY: NORTH AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL SUBURBS, 1850–1950
• CHAPTER 8: WHAT WOMEN’S SPACES? WOMEN IN AUSTRALIAN, BRITISH, CANADIAN AND US SUBURBS
• CHAPTER 9: ‘GLORIA SOAME’: THE SPREAD OF SUBURBIA IN POST-WAR AUSTRALIA
• CHAPTER 10: MAKING EDGE CITY: POST-SUBURBAN DEVELOPMENT AND LIFE ON THE FRONTIER IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
• CHAPTER 11: UNDERSTANDING SUBURBS AS HISTORIC LANDSCAPES THROUGH PRESERVATION
• CHAPTER 12: CONSERVATION AND MANAGEMENT IN UK SUBURBS