by Joel Kotkin
Once a nation of farms and cities, America was being transformed into a primarily suburban country. No longer confined to old towns or “street-car suburbs” near the urban core, suburbanites increasingly lived in ever more spread-out new developments such as Levittown, which arose out on the Long Island flatlands in the late 1940s and early 1950s.2 New York planning czar Robert Moses, who helped devise the road system that made developments like Levittown viable, understood the enormous appeal of these new communities:
The little identical suburban boxes of average people, which differ only in color and planting, represent a measure of success unheard of by hundreds of millions on other continents. Small plots reflect not merely the rapacity of developers but the caution of owners who do not want too much grass to cut and snow to shovel—details too intimate for historians.3
The suburbs, noted the historian Jon C. Teaford, provided an endless procession of lawns and carports, but also “a mixture of escapism and reality.”4 They offered a welcome respite from both crowded urban neighborhoods and old ethnic ties. There one could make new friendships and associations without worrying about old social conventions. And with their ample yards, new schools, and parks, noted the novelist Ralph G. Martin, the suburbs seemed to offer “a paradise for children.”5
THE “SLEEP OF DEATH”
Clearly the preference of millions, the suburbs won few admirers among the sophisticated social critics and urban scholars of the time. The new peripheral communities were decried for everything from scarring the landscape to being cultural wastelands. Over the last half of the twentieth century, suburbs were held responsible for turning America into “a place-less collection of subdivisions,” for “splintering” the nation’s identity, and even for helping to expand the nation’s waistlines.6 As the poet Richard Wilbur wrote in the mid-twentieth century:
In the summer sunk and stupefied The suburbs deepen in their sleep of death.7
As subdivisions ran into old, established communities, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest, they often undermined long-standing economies and ways of life. One observer wrote about an old Connecticut mill that, once the center of the local economy, had been shut down and now sat mute, “intimidated by the headlights of commuters as they race up and down the valley, weary from the city and hungry for home.”8
The harshest critics tended to be dedicated urbanists and impassioned city dwellers. Lewis Mumford identified the suburbs as “the anti-city,” sucking the essence out of the old urban areas. As more residents and businesses headed for the periphery, he argued, the suburbs were turning cities from creative centers into discarded parcels of “a disordered and disintegrating urban mass.”
Perhaps the most telling criticism of suburban migration focused on an expanding racial divide between the heavily white suburbs and the increasingly black inner cities. Clearly, some new suburbanites, and the developers catering to them, shared a deep-seated racism: In 1970, nearly 95 percent of suburbanites were white. “In some suburbs,” complained the author William H. Whyte, “[you] may hardly see a Negro, a poor person, or, for that matter, anyone over fifty.”9
Long concentrated in the rural South, African Americans now dominated the populations of many large cities, particularly in the North and Midwest. By the 1960s, more than 51 percent of African Americans lived in the inner cities, compared with only 30 percent of whites.10 This pattern was most notable in industrial cities such as Detroit, Newark, St. Louis, Cleveland, and Oakland, California.11
The ensuing social crisis caused by the growing gap between the city and the suburbs threatened to tear the nation apart—and devastate the urban cores. In 1968, Lewis Mumford could write convincingly about the “progressive dissolution” of American cities.12 At the time, many cities seemed consumed with social pathologies, from illegitimacy to crime and drug addiction.13 “Social disorder,” The New York Times complained in 1968, “is rampant in New York.” 14 In contrast, the suburbs appeared to many whites as a welcome refuge from high crime rates in the inner city.
SKYSCRAPERS AFLAME
Faced with both a rising suburban tide and increasing rancor among their largely impoverished residents, the central cities worked with increasing desperation to secure their historic primacy. New technology, some suggested, now made possible not only sprawl, but an unprecedented degree of urban concentration. The old city centers could be saved, they insisted, if only the encumbrances of the past were swept away and replaced with something more thoroughly modern.
In the Swiss-born architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known more widely as Le Corbusier, this viewpoint found its most articulate advocate. Le Corbusier looked with disdain on the contemporary city’s hodgepodge of cottages, small apartments, and tenements. In its stead, he envisioned vistas of sixteen-story apartment blocs, amid massive towers set aside for commerce. His ideal—published in his La Ville radieuse— separated the functions of housing, commerce, recreation, and transport and provided ample green space for the enjoyment of city residents.
Le Corbusier detested the ornamentation of previous cities as wasteful and antimodern. To secure the future, he urged cities to demolish their past. He even supported the efforts of planners in the Soviet Union—whose postwar construction of superblocs reflected his ideas— to demolish much of historic Moscow.
New York’s old brownstones, downtown narrow streets, and eclectic mix of architectural styles possessed no more appeal to him than the onion spires of the Kremlin. He was appalled by the squalor of the city’s vast tenement complexes, the disorder of the teeming crowds jostling in the subways. What excited him were the possibilities suggested by the yawning bridges and high-rise towers of Manhattan, where, he wrote, “as twilight falls the glass skyscrapers seem to flame.”
In his vision, New York reached even farther into the sky. Le Corbusier saw a city where “glass skyscrapers would rise like crystals, clean and transparent in the midst of the foliage of trees.” Le Corbusier’s idealized New York would be a “fantastic, almost mystic city . . . a vertical city, under the sign of new times.”
Although he desired Europe to reassert itself as the leader in urban design and build on a “magnificent ripening” of its civilization, 15 Le Corbusier’s notions did not appeal much to Europeans, who were largely satisfied with the continent’s nineteenth-century legacy. Yet aspects of his thinking over time would find adherents elsewhere, not only in the United States, but in the burgeoning cities of the developing world—in Brazil, South Korea, Japan, China, Malaysia, and Singapore.
“GRAND ACHIEVEMENTS” AND THEIR LIMITATIONS
The soaring modernist vision espoused by Le Corbusier also left a powerful imprint on America’s cities. Between 1960 and 1972, office space in central Chicago expanded by 50 percent, while New York’s soared an astonishing 74 percent, creating skylines that the British author Emrys Jones described as “always dramatic and sometimes awe-inspiring.” Huge towers also arose in cities such as Boston, San Francisco, Houston, and even Los Angeles.16
Such massive buildings, suggested Minoru Yamasaki, one of the world’s premier modern architects, reflected “a society such as ours, which is one of large-scale and grand achievements.” 17 Yet these “grand achievements” of concrete-and-glass structures also exacted a terrible price in already existing urban neighborhoods. Yamasaki’s ill-fated World Trade Center, constructed between 1966 and 1977, not only displaced thousands of small businesses centered around the old electrical district, but essentially cut off whole sections of New York’s West Side from one another.18
Clearly, such massive redevelopment failed to halt the migration of people and businesses to the periphery. Indeed, as the noted urbanist Jane Jacobs suggested, they may instead have accelerated dispersion. As the nation’s population rose by over 60 million in the last decades of the century, that of the central cities stagnated and in some cases continued to drop. By 1990, even New Yorkers seemed to have lost their faith in the cult of urban grandiosity; roughly six in te
n told surveyors that they would live somewhere else if they could.19
THE FINAL AGONIES OF THE INDUSTRIAL CITY
By millennium’s end, for every two of the world’s major cities that were adding population, as many as three were losing people. The greatest declines took place in the old industrial cities—St. Louis, Manchester, Leipzig—that a century earlier had stood at the cutting edge of urban development. In some cases, not only did the inner core hollow out and the surrounding neighborhoods decline, but the city’s very sense of identity eroded beyond recognition. 20 Writing of his hometown, the novelist Jonathan Franzen asked:
What becomes of a city no living person can remember of an age whose passing no one survives to regret? Only St. Louis knew.21
The identities of America’s other world-powerful manufacturing centers—Newark, Cleveland, St. Louis, and Detroit—were now overrun by images and ideas from New York and, if not from there, sprawling upstarts like Los Angeles or Silicon Valley. Although their suburbs often remained relatively healthy, these no longer constituted major urban centers. Midwestern cities, noted the historian Jon Teaford, had been transformed into a “cultural colony . . . down at the heel dowdy matrons, sporting last year’s cultural fashions.” Once proud and independent urban beacons, they had evolved into “vast conurbations defying definition.” 22
This drift toward oblivion reflected a worldwide phenomenon. In Japan, Osaka, Nagoya, and other manufacturing-oriented cities lost their most talented citizens and much of their distinctiveness to Tokyo. Similarly, once world-leading industrial powerhouses such as Manchester fell to relative insignificance against London, with its world-class cultural institutions, global connectivity, and concentration of advertising agencies. Other old European industrial centers such as Turin and Düsseldorf also stagnated and declined.23
THE “UNIVERSAL ASPIRATION”
Suburbia, triumphant in the world’s leading economy, also swept successfully through virtually every part of the advanced industrial world. Compared with the option of living closely packed in apartment complexes, most human beings seemed to define their personal “better city” as a little more space and privacy, and perhaps even a spot of lawn. Noted Edgardo Contini, the prominent Los Angeles urbanist and an Italian immigrant:
The suburban house is the idealization of every immigrant’s dream—the vassal’s dream of his own castle. Europeans who come here are delighted by our suburbs. Not to live in an apartment! It is a universal aspiration to own your own home.24
ARGENTINA AND AUSTRALIA
This “universal aspiration” emerged early in former colonial cities in Argentina and Australia. Urbanites in these land-rich countries were quick to take advantage of peripheral locations. By 1904 Buenos Aires had spread out so far that, as one Spanish observer commented, it “was not a city, but a combination of adjoining cities.” This trend would continue throughout the rest of the century.25
Much the same occurred in Australia. As the rural population dropped precipitously after 1930, the suburbs around the great Australian cities, notably Melbourne and Sydney, grew as rapidly as in the United States. Like their American counterparts, Australian intellectuals generally despised the suburbanizing trend, but the population still gravitated to these less than culturally effervescent places, which, as one writer charitably observed, appealed to “the Australian’s concentration on his home and family.”26
BRITAIN AND THE MODERN “GARDEN CITY”
Following the devastation of World War II, British planners consciously sought to move both industry and population out of the crowded core of London to the periphery. The Abercrombie Plan, first unveiled in 1943, placed great emphasis on the development of “new towns,” surrounded by green space, that would expand the capital’s periphery.27
The plan was only partially implemented, but in ensuing decades the increased use of automobiles, as elsewhere, accelerated the shift to the suburbs. Between 1980 and 2000, the built-up area of Britain more than doubled, even though the rate of population growth was slight.28 Perhaps more revealing, some 70 percent of those still dwelling in the urban centers in 2000 told surveyors they’d prefer living somewhere else.29
Nowhere was this trend more marked than in London, the first great global city and still a major financial capital. In the postwar era, the city’s outer rings offered many middle- and even working-class residents what was impossible to achieve in the core—the opportunity to own a house. Over 60 percent of outer London residents were property owners, more than twice the percentage for those living closer to the city.30
This search to fulfill “the universal aspiration” altered the basic geography of the region. After 1960, central London began to lose population while the overall region, particularly the outer fringes, experienced considerable growth.31 As H. G. Wells had predicted a century earlier, much of southern and even central England was rapidly becoming a vast, dispersed suburb of London. Even once distant rural areas such as Kent and Cornwall felt the vagaries of London’s housing market. Not all heading to the country were daily commuters; some headed in two to three times a week while working at home or in a satellite office.32
SUBURBANIZATION IN WESTERN EUROPE
Similar patterns could be seen in Western Europe’s other cities, despite powerful regulatory biases against suburban growth and low rates of population growth.33 In the 1980s, populations in such cities as Madrid and Düsseldorf fell even as the outer ring expanded dramatically. 34 Germany, which had the largest economy in Europe, displayed this trend in convincing fashion. This occurred despite German planners’ general inclination toward neighborhood-centric “urbanity.”35
Between 1970 and 1997, Frankfurt, the nation’s financial center, saw its core population drop while the less densely populated suburban periphery, now extending as much as thirty to fifty miles away, surged dramatically. Employment followed, dropping in the city while growing in surrounding areas. Hamburg experienced a similar pattern.36
As in Britain or America, this outward movement reflected the “universal aspiration” for home ownership, which increasingly could be achieved only in new housing developments on the periphery. The home in suburbia was not so much a rejection of the metropolis, noted one German scholar, as a step “forward to a happy life.”37
THE GHETTOIZATION OF EUROPEAN CITIES
Negative factors, notably fear of crime, also began to accelerate in the dispersion from Europe’s major cities.38 In some cities, this growing sense of insecurity stemmed in large part from an influx of immigrants, mainly from Africa and the Middle East. These newcomers had been recruited to Europe during labor shortages in the 1950s and 1960s, but many remained, increasingly underemployed or out of work, as the continent’s economy stagnated. 39
In several places, such as Rotterdam and Amsterdam, where immigrants accounted for as much as 30 and 40 percent of the population, they represented an increasingly angry and sometimes violent element in what long had been remarkably peaceful urban areas.40 As the immigrants increasingly dominated large parts of the inner city, many native-born Netherlanders began moving out to prosperous suburban developments in the periphery.41 A similar pattern of suburban migration and increasingly immigrant-dominated inner cities also evolved in nearby Brussels.42
EVEN IN PARIS
Even Paris, long the bastion of urban centralization, began to experience an outward movement. Despite the assumption that Parisians are “addicted ” to dense living, many now seemed as anxious as Americans for a suburban lifestyle. Throughout the last decades of the twentieth century, middle-class families, as well as employment, headed out of the core city for the grande couronne far outside the capital, skipping over the poorer, heavily immigrant suburbs closer to the center.43
JAPANESE “GARDEN CITIES”
Before World War II, Japanese planners had been attracted to the British ideal of the “garden city,” although the effort dissipated amid the demands of the wartime economy. Once the economy recovered from the
war, there ensued a marked shift of residents, and some business, to the periphery, where land prices were lower and space for new development available. By the mid-1970s, Osaka, the nation’s second largest city, was already beginning to lose population, while peripheral communities grew rapidly. More heavily industrialized smaller cities suffered far more rapid loss, paralleling the experience of their European and North American counterparts.44
Tokyo, by the 1970s the advanced world’s largest metropolis, also expanded outward in dramatic fashion. The first step was to relieve pressure on the historic core by constructing new subcenters such as Shinjuku, Shibuya, and Ikebukuro. These megadevelopments initially followed the basic precepts of Ishikawa Hideaki, whose decentralist ideas also included the creation of a greenbelt around the capital.
Over time, these and other subcenters would evolve into vibrant parts of the metropolis, housing many of Japan’s tallest buildings, including the Sunshine Tower and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building.45 Plans to develop more green space farther outside the core city did not fare nearly as well. Like the Olmsted plans for Los Angeles, Hideaki’s “garden city” aspirations fell victim to economic expediency and the political power of landowners.46