Page 32 RAIN Summer 1986 Suburban Renewal: The/ .... _ ........... .., Task Ahead J:n.§o 0 · · m11 .....··-· ·13l.---------~_H_H _ · FROM: Sustainable Communities I attended a workshop in 1983 where Sim Van der Ryn made a passing comment that the design chiillenge of the 1990s would be "suburban renewal"~edesigning the suburbs along more ecological lines. Given the pervasiveness of suburban development in recent years, it's clear that any vision of a sustainable society must come to terms with suburbs. Being a suburban-raised boy who had written off the suburbs as fundamentally anti-ecological and unconvivial, I was fascinated by the suburban renewal concept. However, it had remained only a vague desideratum for me until the recent publication of Sustainable Communities. In addition to strategies for suburban redesign, Sustainable Communities includes design and redeSign ideas for cities and new suburban development as well, complete with several case studies. Also included are essays by other writers, such as Paul Hawken, David Morris, and John Todd. The foilowing is excerpted by permission of Sierra Club Books from Sustainable Communities: A New Design Synthesis for Cities, Suburbs·and Towns, by Sim Van der Ryn qnd Peter Calthorpe, 1986, 238 pp., $2950 (postpaid) from: Sierra Club Store Orders, 730 Polk Street, San Francisco, CA 94109. -FLS by Sim Van der Ryn Suburbs have always been with us, but the modem idea of the suburb grew out of reaction to the ugly, crowded, in- . humane nineteenth-century cities and towns that quickly expanded to accomodate the dispossessed peasantry who became the industrial work force. The suburban city is a late twentieth-century version of the nineteenth-century frontier town 'b,uilt to e~ploit the bountiful resources of a theri virgin continent. Modem suburbs are truly 'pioneer' urban ecologies where little time or thought has been given to ·the ·subtleties of place, shared amenities, a sense of community, permanence, long-term costs, or sustainability. The emphasis is on speed ('time is money'), short-run profits, standardized products, mobility, and mass. England, with its tradition of modest villages and commons, individual gardens and cottages, spawned both the In- · dustrial City and the romantic reformist countermovement toward garden cities. The Garden City, with its curving streets, broad lawns, open space, and horiziontal form, was a guiding model for the earlier suburb. In the United States, where the primacy of the individual and family is held supreme, the miniaturized estate that suburbia promised held immediate appeal to the growing middle class. The earliest suburbs developed in the first several decades of this century, but real momentum and the extension of the ideal into the dominant urban form developed after World War IL The war probably had a lot to do with it. Millions of men experienced a mass-produced environment for the first time. Mov- · ing became a way of life, and one outpost was much like the last one, even though they were at other ends of the continent, or the world. National corporations and advertising media, fresh from their success in the war effort, (lSserted a new dominance over local and regional tradition. In the 1940s, American productive capacity and technological know-how were the mass-ind~strialized engine that won the war and rebuilt a devastated European economy. That capacity, coupled to the pent-up demand for hous- ing, the dollars saved by families during the war, and the formation of riew families, all came together to demand massive·amounts of new housing quickly. With generous government mortgage insurance programs and other forms of assistance, experienced builders and·new entrepreneurs entered the market, building vast communities almost overnight.
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