I was a suburban kid in Knoxville, Tennessee and Dayton, Ohio and didn’t see much wrong with my neighborhood. As someone who then grew up to write and teach about the history of cities and city planning, I’ve long been struck by the mismatch between high-brow scorn for “suburbia” and the everyday experience of people who live in suburban communities. This short book is an effort to show how the world became suburban and what that meant to people in the different corners of the world—and maybe to put in a plug for my suburban Meadow Hills and College Hill neighborhoods.
No other book has had a greater influence on the ways that planners have tried to create the perfect suburban community, from England to the United States, Finland to France, Brazil to Australia.
Howard published his ideas about how to create humane suburbs more than 120 years ago with the future of London in mind, but they still resonate around the globe. Google “new towns” and the hits may be overwhelming. That’s testimony to the power of a good idea.
By the way, if you live in Columbia, Maryland or Irvine, California, you’re living in a version of “Howardville.”
Is a picture worth a thousand words? Urbanist Dolores Hayden sure thinks so, providing a cheeky, even snarky, guide to the worst aspects of the contemporary suburban landscape.
Brightly lit aerial photographs (many are from the American Southwest) show big box interchanges, lollipop subdivisions, tower farms for the electronic world, and all the other ways in which sprawl chews up the American land. Leaf through the pages, then you get to choose: Do you weep or do you scream in outrage?
A Field Guide to Sprawl was selected by the urban web site Planetizen for its list of "Top Ten Books in Urban Studies" and by Discover magazine for its list of "Top 20 Books in Science." Features on the book appeared in The New York Times and the Boston Globe.
Duck, ruburb, tower farm, big box, and pig-in-a-python are among the dozens of zany terms invented by real estate developers and designers today to characterize land-use practices and the physical elements of sprawl. Sprawl in the environment, based on the metaphor of a person spread out, is hard to define.…
American suburbs are all tidy middle-class places like where I grew up, right? Wrong.
Do-it-yourself housing and shantytowns were never confined to the developing world. The fringes of Toronto and Cleveland and Los Angeles could look a lot like the fringes of Sao Paolo or Istanbul in the first half of the twentieth century.
My Blue Heaven is a revelation about DIY community building on the south side of Los Angeles at the same time high-end developers were creating Pasadena and Beverly Hills.
In the 1920s, thousands of white migrants settled in the Los Angeles suburb of South Gate. Six miles from down-town and adjacent to Watts, South Gate and its neighboring communities served as L.A.'s Detroit, an industrial belt for mass production of cars, tires, steel, and other durable goods. Blue-collar workers built the suburb literally from the ground up, using sweat equity rather than cash to construct their own homes. As Becky M. Nicolaides shows in My Blue Heaven, this ethic of self-reliance and homeownership formed the core of South Gate's identity. With post-World War II economic prosperity, the community's emphasis…
The improvised communities that ring the cities of Latin America have a bad reputation as squatter towns. Not so fast.
Look beyond the surface and you will see communities with strong social ties, systems of self-government, and residents who are as committed to their neighborhood as any American suburbanite. Janice Perlman has spent decades studying the Rio de Janeiro that lies behind its beaches, and gives a clear-eyed look at some of the self-built communities on the city’s edge.
Janice Perlman wrote the first in-depth account of life in the favelas, a book hailed as one of the most important works in global urban studies in the last 30 years. Now, in Favela, Perlman carries that story forward to the present. Re-interviewing many longtime favela residents whom she had first met in 1969-as well as their children and grandchildren-Perlman offers the only long-term perspective available on the favelados as they struggle for a better life. Perlman discovers that while educational levels have risen, democracy has replaced dictatorship, and material conditions have improved, many residents feel more marginalized than ever.…
Every country has its own way of naming its suburbs, and often more than one way. Do-it-yourself settlements in the desert around Lima, Peru were barriadas until the government decided that pueblos jovenes or “young towns” sounds better.
Turkish gecekondu for new neighborhoods translates as “built over night.” The bidonvilles of North Africa are literally “tin can towns.” I won’t kid you, the chapters are written by academics, but they take you on a tour of improvised settlements around the world.
'Borgata', 'favela', 'periurbain', and 'suburb' are but a few of the different terms used throughout the world that refer specifically to communities that develop on the periphery of urban centres. In What's in a Name? editors Richard Harris and Charlotte Vorms have gathered together experts from around the world in order to provide a truly global framework for the study of the urban periphery. Rather than view these distinct communities through the lens of the western notion of urban sprawl, the contributors focus on the variety of everyday terms that are used, together with their connotations. This volume explores the…
For the last two centuries, cities have spread outward at an astonishing pace. Whether in Seattle, Singapore, Sao Paolo, or Sofia, most urban residents live in housing that has been built on the urban outskirts in the last few decades. I survey the “Brady Bunch” suburbs of the United States but also improvised communities on the edges of Latin American cities and the high-rise suburbs of Eastern Europe and East Asia. Suburban development has often been a punching bag for novelists and intellectuals, but new communities on the edge have provided shelter, jobs, and community for billions of people.
The Valor of Valhalla series by Martin Kearns is a pulse-pounding dark urban fantasy trilogy that fuses the raw power of Norse mythology with the grit of modern warfare. Set in a world where ancient gods and mythical creatures clash with secret military organizations and rogue heroes, the series follows a band of unseeming heroes who are bound to an ancient prophecy. As they navigate a dangerous web of deceit, sacrifice, and violent combat, they must confront not only their own demons but also the growing threat of Ragnarök—the Norse apocalypse.
At its heart, The Valor of Valhalla blends high-stakes…
In a battle between two ancient evils, can one naïve young man become the last hope against powerful creatures of legend?
David Dolan thinks he's already got the world figured out. But when a collapsed bridge plunges him into the icy Hudson, he's pulled deep into the deadly realm that exists between life and death. And with his earthly form trapped in a coma, he's vulnerable to the horde of demons hell-bent on his utter destruction.
Traversing the road to the afterlife, David seeks the wisdom and skills he needs to fight the demonic forces reigning havoc on his allies…
