In 1868 Frederick Law Olmsted published his landmark plan for the picturesque garden suburb of Riverside, Illinois, eleven miles west of Chicago. (fig. 1.2.1) He found it necessary to emphasize, “The present outward tendency of [urban] population is not so much an ebb as the higher rise of the same flood.…”1 For him, the “flood” was the increasing concentration of a modern society’s population in cities, a process that he believed was synonymous with the advance of civilization itself. Suburbanization, he argued, was not a rejection or “ebbing” of urbanization but rather “the higher rise,” that is, the extension and intensification, of metropolitan growth into new districts that could potentially combine the best of the urban and the rural. To generalize Olmsted’s point, we might define the suburb as the form that urban expansion takes—the place where the density and dynamism of the city encounters and transforms the still-rural periphery.
The specifics of suburban form vary radically, as different cities and cultures make fundamentally different choices for how the relatively cheap land at the edge will be used. If Olmsted’s magnificently landscaped “bourgeois utopia” for the upper-middle class represents one end of a social and design continuum, the informal settlements for rural migrants at the fringe of so many megacities of the developing world represent the other. Whether a specific suburb is a landscape of exclusion defined by privilege or a landscape of poverty to which the excluded are relegated, all suburbs nevertheless embody that flood tide of urbanization that has transformed the world. From ancient to eighteenth-century cities, urban growth had been severely constrained by limitations inherent in premodern society itself: the inefficiency of agriculture that required 80 percent or more of the population to labor on the land; the inefficiency of transportation that made supplying a large city virtually impossible; and the inability to manage density that made cities synonymous with disorder, fire, disease, and early death.
Eighteenth-century London was arguably the first city to overcome enough of the constraints to growth to transform its poor, not yet policed, and unregulated suburban edges (called “liberties”) into crucial sites for sustained urban expansion. In London’s growth, we first see the fundamental transformation of human life that is now reaching its climax in the cities of the developing world. An agricultural revolution in the countryside increases productivity while rendering much of the peasant population redundant; the city’s access to increased food supplies promises survival and perhaps a better life than the village offers; the more complex division of labor in cities somehow absorbs the migrants and creates new work and higher productivity for an ever-increasing population. In this rolling crescendo of urbanization, the land at the edge becomes the key strategic site for expansion. The core might provide a city’s identity, but it is the periphery that is crucial for growth: relatively cheap, close enough to the core to be part of the larger urban economy, and open enough to support rapid building and expansion. The suburb thus becomes the key strategic terrain for the “age of great cities” that runs from the eighteenth century to the present, with an urban domain that now extends from London to cover the whole globe.
The protean forms of the evolution of the modern suburb might be expressed as a single narrative that organizes the vast variety of suburbs into three stages, with each stage characterized by a binary opposition. In the first stage, which covers roughly the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the basic opposition was between the early Anglo-American suburbs where the upper-middle class seized the land at the edge of the metropolis for their bourgeois utopias, versus Baron Haussmann’s Paris (and the European Continent more generally), where the wealthy stayed at the core and pushed the poor to the working-class and industrial suburbs at the edge.
The second stage emerged in post-1945 North America and Western Europe, where suburbanization became a strategy for social democracy, using the cheap land at the edge of the great cities to create a new social environment of mass prosperity. In the United States and Canada, this new environment was formed by the mass ownership of detached, single-family houses as exemplified by D. J. Waldie’s Lakewood. But Western Europe chose a more socialist model of planned, transit-based communities with high-rise or townhouse-style cooperative rental housing, exemplified by the Swedish new towns and the French grands ensembles.
Today we have reached a third and climactic stage of suburbanization in the flood tide of peripheral expansion in the cities of the developing world. As in the previous two stages, we can see a fundamental binary opposition in suburban form. The dominant form is the informal settlement at the periphery. As authorities in most of the exploding megacities have lost control of their periphery, the great flood of migrants from the countryside have been forced or permitted to house themselves, much as they have been forced or permitted to employ themselves. But the informal settlements have their binary opposites in the highly planned East Asian new towns. Derived from the post-1945 European new town but dramatically larger in scale, the East Asian new towns from the island of Singapore to the periphery of Seoul are as strict and regular in their form as the informal settlements are anarchic and ungoverned. Taken together, the informal settlements and the East Asian new towns will define the basic challenges of urbanism in our “century of cities.”
These three stages and their characteristic binaries are all, of course, “ideal types” in the sense that Max Weber used the term: deliberate simplifications and accentuations of a highly complex reality.2 In fact, nothing is more hybridized—indeed, chaotic—than morphology and land uses at the edge of a rapidly growing city. Not only does rapid urbanization clash with still-rural survival, but both ends of the social spectrum are simultaneously drawn for different reasons to the cheap land at the edge. This was true in the nineteenth century in England and in America, where picturesque bedroom-suburbs were often bordered by factory towns and workers’ housing. It’s also true today in Latin America, where a highly securitized gated suburb of privilege might be surrounded by informal settlements, and in China, where masses of middle-class apartment blocks often surround an “urban village” where recent rural migrants are packed into low-rise tenements.
The suburb, in both its wealthy and underprivileged forms, was historically not only the expression of urban expansion but also the paradigm for the divided metropolis, the imposition of class divisions on what had been relatively hybridized premodern cities. Cities and their citizens resisted and continue to resist these divisions. Nevertheless, the clarity of the ideal types permits us to distinctly see the underlying forces at work.
One more ideal type—although not in the Weberian sense—is the utopian model for peripheral development. Thirty years after Olmsted’s Riverside, the English reformer Ebenezer Howard put forward his own ideal for suburban expansion, the garden city, which was both a critique of previous development at the periphery and a prescription for future growth. Like Riverside, the garden city was designed to combine the best of the city and the countryside. The expanding metropolis, in Howard’s vision, would not simply extend indefinitely as a dense mass into the countryside, nor would it peter out in scattered development. Instead, metropolitan expansion would form a complex pattern, where newly built garden cities would be set in perpetual greenbelts of farms and other open space. These garden cities, moreover, would not be exclusive refuges for the elite, or dumping grounds for the poor, but mixed-income communities where careful planning would provide for genuine urban diversity, including a range of jobs as well as housing. The garden cities would be dense enough to be walkable and urbane, but limited enough in size to maintain a sense of community and to keep open countryside within easy reach.3 (fig. 1.2.2)
Howard himself founded two would-be garden cities outside London, and his followers would subsequently found or influence literally hundreds of new towns throughout the world, but we might question whether any of them truly embody the ideal. Nevertheless, Howard’s garden city ideal will serve as a point of reference throughout this chapter against which to measure the social impact of extant patterns of suburban development.4
Two centuries ago, the middle classes in the two great Western European cities, London and Paris, faced a crisis provoked by the traditional middle-class pattern of a city core of row houses that combined workplace and residence. Massive in-migration from the countryside made these core neighborhoods dangerous, overcrowded, and unhealthy. At the same time, new ideals of family life in both England and France pointed toward homes that enjoyed a degree of privacy and emotional focus unattainable in “live-work” environments where the workplace and the home were fundamentally intertwined.
The English bourgeoisie responded first to this challenge by radically redefining their relationship to the city. As early as the mid-eighteenth century, leading London merchants and bankers began to separate their homes from their workplaces. The family business was continued in the heart of the city in houses that were now only shops and offices. And, influenced by the Evangelical movement that emphasized the religious purity of women and children over the sinful amusements and pollution of the city, these families established their home life in the healthy, uncrowded, unspoiled villages at the edge of the expanding metropolis.
The upper-middle-class elite that built large, comfortable houses around the parklike Clapham Commons to the south of London or the similarly open Hampstead Heath to the north (commuting back to London by private carriage) set in motion a revolution in urban form that continues to reverberate to this day. They redefined the edge as a place of privilege and redefined the middle-class home as a refuge from the city in the midst of nature. And, through projects like John Nash’s 1823 Park Village, they created a new design language for these settlements that placed detached, single-family houses, usually of historicist design (“the village”) in the midst of a picturesque landscape of lawns and trees (“the park”).5
Although the French bourgeoisie would largely reject these innovations, the new suburbia spread widely through the Anglo-American world in the course of the nineteenth century. Suburbia both reflected and reinforced the divided metropolis of the Industrial Revolution. Working-class factory districts remained relatively close to the urban core, while the capitalist middle class was able to escape the smoky, polluted city—that they themselves had created—by using their wealth to purchase homes in the green and healthy garden suburbs at the edge. The Anglo-American industrial city thus came to possess a clear spatial logic, as innovations in transportation reinforced patterns of land use. The need to settle within walking distance of the first horse-drawn streetcar lines, and then of trolley and rail lines, meant that suburbs had a distinct center and an edge, with ample greenbelts preserved between transit lines running out from the core.6
The binary opposite of this Anglo-American suburbia of privilege was the French suburb, or banlieue, as it took shape in the middle of the nineteenth century around Paris. The core of the French capital was at least as overcrowded and unhealthy as any English or American city, but the French bourgeoisie never shared the Evangelical reaction against urban pleasures that characterized their Anglo counterparts. Perhaps more important, Paris in the 1850s and 1860s was governed by the authoritarian regime of Louis Napoleon and his famous Prefect of Paris, Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann. Louis Napoleon and Haussmann were determined to remake the center of the city to make it a showplace for the regime and an exemplar of the regime’s alliance with the bourgeoisie. Their favored urban design paradigm was the grand boulevard that cut through the fabric of the old city to knit together the disconnected parts of the metropolis (and also to open the city to troops in the case of insurrection). Bordered by magnificent apartment houses, the grand boulevards were multipurpose infrastructure: linear parks above that also accommodated water, and sewerage below. The boulevards and apartment houses thus provided the French bourgeoisie at the center with the privacy, health, and greenery that their English counterparts could find only in the suburbs.
The massive condemnations that the boulevards required meant the destruction of housing for the poor, who were forced to seek cheaper accommodation at the edge of the city. This was “a feature[,] not a bug,” because it established middle-class dominance at the core and marginalized (literally) a potentially revolutionary population. Suburbanization in France thus came to mean something very similar to what we call “informal settlements” today. The Parisian banlieue consisted of self-built housing without firm title to the land, and without the water, sewers, paved roads, lighting, or other modern services that Haussmann had provided to the boulevards at the core. But compared to the remaining central slums—the notorious îlots insalubres (unsanitary islands)—the banlieue provided a version of the community and informality of the rural villages that the migrants had left behind.7 (fig. 1.2.3)
The process of “Haussmannization” thus established a very different dynamic of suburbanization and urban expansions than the Anglo-American patterns. In Paris and the many cities in Europe, and eventually in the rest of the world that followed Paris’s lead, the core was the place of privilege and exclusion; migrants from the countryside were kept at the edge to self-build their informal villages of poverty. For the Anglo-American suburb, by contrast, migrants from the countryside were fed into the most crowded and polluted factory districts just outside the business core; skilled workers and the lower-middle class occupied better neighborhoods farther out; and the well-to-do at the suburban fringe enjoyed the benefits of extensive cheap land, ever-improving transportation to the core, and the health, beauty, and prestige of their garden suburbs. But both the Anglo-American and Parisian dynamics expressed a single underlying theme: the divided metropolis.
The great task and the ideal of twentieth-century suburbanization was the attempt to overcome the divided metropolis that had been inherited from the nineteenth century, and to create a new, (relatively) classless world of modern housing at the edge, where mass production techniques would ensure health and comfort for all in a setting of greenery and generous public spaces. This social-democratic suburbia could not be attempted until post-1945 prosperity replaced the terrible years of war and depression for both North America and Western Europe. Moreover, social-democratic suburbia depended on a postwar consensus that the state had a vital role in planning, and especially in home finance. The social-democratic era in suburbia lasted only from about 1950 to about 1980, before changing conditions led to very different patterns and results. But those three decades were sufficient to permanently redefine suburbia and to provide important legacies for the emerging megacities of the rest of the world.
Social-democratic suburbia, like its nineteenth-century predecessors, took two very different forms, one in the United States and the other in Western Europe. Postwar mass suburbanization in the United States was fundamentally shaped by the experience of the Great Depression and the New Deal’s response to the collapse of the housing industry in 1929. Suburban developers in the 1920s had hoped that the automobile would open up cheap land in the vast peripheral territories between railroad or streetcar lines for mass suburbanization. But continued reliance on expensive, small-scale building techniques and even more expensive and wasteful high-interest, short-term mortgages meant that the single-family suburban house was still out of reach for the mass of households.
To revive the Depression-devastated building industry, the New Deal’s 1934 Federal Housing Administration (FHA) revolutionized both housing construction and housing finance in order to maximize affordability. In contrast to more radical reformers who pushed for multifamily rental housing as the only modern form, the FHA very intentionally kept the model of the single-family house on a generous lot financed by an individual mortgage. But the FHA completely redesigned (and shrank) the typical middle-class suburban house so that it could be mass-produced, insofar as possible, from factory-processed lumber and other materials. The FHA also completely reengineered the home financing system to lower monthly payments by providing federally guaranteed long-term, low-interest, lowdown payment, self-amortizing mortgages through federally supervised thrift institutions. The seemingly minor ability to grant (or withhold) federal mortgage insurance gave the FHA tremendous power over the design, locale, and pace of suburbanization.8
These innovations had relatively small effects in the 1930s, but suburban housing after 1945 entered a classic virtuous cycle, as mass production brought down costs for a broad middle and working class whose growing incomes meant ever-increasing access to the American dream house. This virtuous cycle was most dramatically demonstrated in three key projects that embodied the scale and the designs favored by the FHA: Levittown, Long Island; Park Forest, Illinois; and Lakewood, California. (fig. 1.2.4) All three used neighborhood unit planning that attempted to create walkable neighborhoods that included an elementary school and a small shopping center. Indeed, these early postwar suburbs came surprisingly close to the Howard ideal of the garden city. As Greg Hise has pointed out, they were often located near aircraft plants and other new industries that provided jobs for their residents.9 And, as D. J. Waldie observes of Lakewood, the postwar suburb provided a uniquely democratic mix of working-class and middle-class households.10
If the social-democratic aspect American suburbanization consisted of building a democratized and streamlined version of the bourgeois utopia, European social-democratic new towns represented a more radical reimagining of the former banlieue. The model here was Sweden’s People’s Home movement that, like the New Deal, dates back to the 1930s. Swedish Social Democrats sought to relieve the terrible overcrowding of the slums of Stockholm with highly planned new towns to be built at still-rural stops at the end of commuter rail lines leading out of the city. As opposed to the New Deal, the Swedish model emphasized the collective both in design and in finance. The Swedish government made large, low-interest loans to nonprofit building societies that erected mid-rise rental apartment blocks and garden apartments in accordance with the larger plans. Although these rental apartments were certainly austere, even in comparison with the typical downsized postwar American tract house, the public spaces and parks of the Swedish new towns were relatively generous, and the apartments themselves designed according to the best standards of Swedish modernism.11
This Swedish model, an even closer approximation of Howard’s ideal than American mass suburbia, had deep appeal to the generation of planners and architects who held strategic positions in Western European social democracies comparable to the role of the Levitts and other private developers in the United States. The Swedish model was adopted not only in the northern social democracies (Demark and the Netherlands) but in the British new towns, and especially in the French grands ensembles—high-rise housing projects—around Paris. As late as the 1950s, Paris was surrounded by a banlieue of poorly built villas and out-and-out shantytowns, occupied by recent French migrants from the villages or by North African immigrants. The grands ensembles that replaced them were certainly the largest-scale efforts yet at redefining the Western European suburb, combining the monumental scale of modernist high-rise construction with the promise of a new life beyond the squalor and class divisions of the past.12 (fig. 1.2.5)
After what the French called les trente glorieuses, the thirty glorious years from 1945 to 1975, when all the Western economies experienced both a rapid rise in household incomes and rapid suburbanization, the two modes of postwar social-democratic suburbia then followed two very different trajectories. American postwar suburbia was, if anything, too successful. The spectacular growth of the early large projects led to a speculative land market where the neighborhood unit ideal was replaced by the reality of leapfrog development: scattered subdivisions connected by congested roads to strip developments, shopping centers, industrial parks, and office parks. The suburbs necessarily urbanized as their automobile-dependent population lost touch with their central cities, leading to an urban crisis, especially for black households that were not allowed to join the suburban exodus.
After 1980, incomes stagnated for most American households, but rose dramatically at the top. The metropolitan fringe segmented into highly privileged districts, often the well-preserved bourgeois utopias of more than a century ago, and a struggling, sprawling mass suburbia. By contrast, Western European planners were careful to maintain transit, and with it the dominance of central city shopping and office districts. Moreover, the European city was always a formidable competitor of the suburbs for elite residence. More seriously, the postwar new towns increasingly lost the loyalty of a middle class with growing incomes and affluent lifestyles that were no longer reflected in the aging modernist apartment blocks. This contrasted with the United States, where the individually owned frame houses could be enlarged and upgraded to reflect greater affluence, while the European rental apartments resisted change. Too many European architects and housing bureaucrats lost their idealism but continued to be obsessed with mass production, designing ever-larger and more standardized housing complexes that were never fully occupied.13
Only in Italy did the Ina-Casa program of social housing, conceived not simply as an employment program but also as a housing program, produce imaginative and human-scaled projects that have held their value.14 Elsewhere, the Western European middle class opted for their own (somewhat reduced) versions of American postwar suburbia, with privately developed townhouses and condominium apartments, or for gentrified districts in the urban core or inner suburbs. Meanwhile, the social-democratic towers at the edge have increasingly been occupied by immigrants, isolated not only physically but socially from the gentrified cities and middle-class suburban developments. Haussmann’s divided metropolis is back in a modernist form.
If suburbia is, as I have argued, the form that urban expansion takes, then the historic process of suburbanization is now reaching its highest pitch of intensity in the rapidly growing megacities, as well as in the smaller cities of the developing world. None of the previous movements of population from the countryside to the cities can match the climactic force of the present migrations that are shifting the human race decisively toward urban life. As world population increases over the next thirty-five years from 7 billion to an estimated 9.6 billion, the planet’s urbanized population will increase from 3.9 billion today to 6.4 billion in 2050. Whether they settle in the megacities of twenty million or in the multitude of cities of 500,000 to a million people (that are in fact projected to grow even more rapidly than the megacities), these 2.5 billion additional urbanites will inhabit places that are sure to be among the most crowded and chaotic environments in human history.15
Yet the logic that first propelled London above the million mark in the early nineteenth century still applies today. Agrarian innovation renders the bulk of village workers superfluous, and the cities seem impossibly overcrowded. And yet somehow, within the complex division of urban labor, the migrant finds a place in the lowest reaches of the bazaar economy, in export-oriented industries, or in marginal services, such as the dabbawallas of Mumbai who deliver hot lunches from middle-class suburban homes to office workers in the core.16 The constant flood of new migrants helps to propel others a little better established into a precarious middle class.
The most characteristic form of developing world suburbanization is the informal settlement, a direct successor of the banlieue of Haussmann’s time, but now scaled up to reflect the enormousness of contemporary migration. As in Haussmann’s Paris, the urban core constitutes a zone of modernity and relative order to which the middle class clings. Beyond the core, the urban governments lose control of even the most basic functions of planning, services, and infrastructure. The result is Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums, but one must also note that the anarchy to some degree liberates the poor and powerless from ineffectual and corrupt bureaucracies. The insecurity of land tenure also holds down land values at the edge, minimizing the transfer of wealth from the poor to wealthy landlords that was so much a feature of the slums of the past. Self-building in the informal settlements is counterpart to the micro-level self-employment that is the mass basis of the urban economy, particularly in megacities.17
As in our two previous stages of suburbanization, this third stage is binary, in that there is a clear alternative to the informal settlement as the basic form of peripheral growth. This is the East Asian new town, as seen first in Singapore and now in Korea and especially China. Here, an authoritarian government seizes and keeps control of growth at the edge, with carefully—indeed obsessively—planned developments of high-rise towers whose form owes much to the European new town tradition, but whose unprecedented scale and uniformity make even the French grands ensembles seem intimate.
This model first emerged in newly independent Singapore in the 1960s, when that city-state was in the throes of a transition from one of the poorest places on earth to becoming a thriving economic power. At independence in 1959, an estimated half of Singapore’s million citizens lived either in squatter settlements or in dangerously overcrowded “shop-houses” near the core. A Housing and Development Board (HDB) founded a year later made publicly built housing an integral part of a highly capitalist development strategy. The HDB initiated what became twenty-two high-rise new towns, each with average populations of over 250,000 people, erected on land obtained cheaply by eminent domain powers that ruthlessly cleared away the shantytowns and small farms. But with the HDB keeping housing costs low in the new towns, Singapore’s workers could improve their living standards on modest wages, spurring further economic development. The new towns, moreover, were carefully planned to include a mix of income and ethnic groups, as well as generous public amenities surrounding the tower blocks.18
Today, the squatter settlements are gone and the remaining shophouse districts are tourist attractions; nearly 84 percent of Singapore’s present 5.47 million people live in housing built by the HDB, now mostly condominiums rather than rental units. Although no other country has been able to match this radical upgrading of suburban housing stock, Singapore has made a deep impression on the other Asian Tigers, most notably Korea. There, a ring of Singapore-style new towns surrounds Seoul. China, though less neatly organized, has largely followed Singapore’s model, with immense districts like Huilongguan, some twenty miles north of central Beijing, organized in endless superblocks around transit stations.19 (fig. 1.2.6)
The massive suburbs of the contemporary megacity seem to alternate between extremes of disorder, such as the ubiquitous favela, and order, such as the East Asian new towns. At worst, we are now seeing a kind of negative synthesis of suburban order and disorder that combines the most socially regressive features of the historic Anglo-American and French models: a periphery that consists of gated communities for the wealthy surrounded by informal settlements for the poor. The Haussmann model of pushing the poor to informal settlements at the edge had at least provided for a magnificent core that would serve as a showplace of modernity and affluence and provide impressive public spaces for the city as a whole. But as failed states lose control of both the informal settlements at the edge and the urban core, the public spaces and elite apartments at the core become too dangerous, unstable, and unhealthy to serve as a true center. So, as in the Anglo-American model, the elite use distance to remove themselves from the stresses of the exploding city.
But since the periphery of these cities is already largely dominated by informal settlements, this means in practice creating highly securitized “gated communities” at defensible spots at the edge. As in Sao Paulo’s “Alphaville,” these gated communities provide not only security but reliable electricity, water, sewage, and other utilities; good schools and landscaped parks; access to high-end shopping; and the illusion of freedom and security behind gates and fences worthy of a medieval fortress town. These islands in a sea of informal settlements constitute a kind of archipelago of affluence and modernity that connect, however precariously, to each other and replaces for the wealthy the now derelict public space of the city.
In such cities, the informal settlements then constitute a poverty-stricken reverse image of the spaces of affluence: a vast sea of poverty without even minimal services interrupted only by gated communities and securitized enclaves whose zones of modernity remain strictly off-limits to the vast majority of the population. These “monstrous hybrids” of the French and Anglo-Saxon models of suburbanization represent an even more devastating inscription of class divisions on the metropolis than even the worst-divided cities of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (fig. 1.2.7)
Nevertheless, there is some evidence that a more complex pattern will somehow prevail, combining the human scale and spontaneity of the informal settlement with the modern services and efficient planning of the East Asian new towns.
For example, in Sultanbeyli, an informal settlement with over 250,000 people dating from the 1960s at the edge of Istanbul, a reforming mayor used modest property tax assessments to give a kind of legitimacy to informal occupation. This initiative not only provided funds for basic city services but gave the settlers enough security for them to finance significant improvement to their homes.20
Sultanbeyli thus might be seen as embodying a Turkish version of what Jane Jacobs in 1960s New York called “unslumming,” a process of gradual improvement initiated and financed by the residents themselves that Jacobs hoped would replace the cataclysmic clearances of urban renewal.21 Unfortunately, the urban renewal mentality still seems as dominant throughout the developing world as it was in Robert Moses’s Manhattan. Informal settlements, such as Badia East in Lagos, that occupy desirable sites are frequently slated for total clearance and replacement by planned middle-class districts.22 Only a few cities—such as Medellín, Colombia, with its famous public escalator to the informal settlements—are attempting infrastructure investments to support rather than supplant the unslumming process.23 And yet, as slow and chaotic as this process might be, the unslummed informal settlements might prove in the end to be more humanely habitable than the regimented suburbs of the East Asian model.
If hybrids such as Sultanbeyli take hold, they will embody some of the more positive hybrid aspects that characterized the suburbs of the past. The modern suburb that emerged in the nineteenth century was a hybrid of the village and the city, preserving through conscious design (as in Riverside) or informal practice (as in the French banlieue or Sultanbeyli) the qualities of a village that is nevertheless an integral part of the larger dynamism of the city. Olmsted’s vision of suburbia as the site of urban expansion—the place where the city transforms the edge—still remains true, and perhaps serves as the very definition of suburbia, then and now.
The garden city tradition itself might be seen as a more thoroughgoing attempt at planned positive hybridization, not only in its mixture of classes but also in the environmental interplay of a relatively dense settlement with its greenbelt. So it is appropriate to give the last word on the subject to Ebenezer Howard, who wrote in 1898, “Town and country must be married, and out of this joyous union will spring a new hope, a new life, a new civilization.”24
2 Max Weber, Basic Concepts in Sociology, trans. H. P. Secher (New York: Citadel Press, 1962), 14.
3 Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965).
4 Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier (New York: Basic Books, 1977), chaps. 2–3.
5 Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic Books, 1987), chaps. 2–3.
6 Sam Bass Warner Jr., Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962).
7 Norma Evenson, Paris: A Century of Change, 1878–1978 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979).
8 Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
9 Greg Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997).
10 Donald J. Waldie, Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996).
11 Peter Hall, Cities in Civilization (New York: Pantheon, 1998), chap. 14.
12 Brian W. Newsome, French Urban Planning 1940–1968: The Construction and Deconstruction of an Authoritarian System (New York: Peter Lang, 2009).
13 Evenson, Paris: A Century of Change, 232–64.
14 Stephanie Zeier Pilat, Reconstructing Italy: The Ina-Casa Neighborhood of the Postwar Era (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014).
15 United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, World Urbanization Prospects: The 2014 Revision; Highlights (New York: United Nations, 2014), 1, 16.
16 Saritha Rai, “In India Grandma Cooks, They Deliver,” New York Times, May 29, 2007, accessed July 30, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/29/business/worldbusiness/29lunch.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.
17 Robert Neuwirth, Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World (New York: Routledge, 2005); Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006).
18 Manuel Castells, Lee Goh, and Reginald Yin-Wang Kwok, The Shek Kip Mei Syndrome: Economic Development and Public Housing in Hong Kong and Singapore (London: Pion Limited, 1990).
19 Thomas J. Campanella, The Concrete Dragon: China’s Urban Revolution and What It Means for the World (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008).
20 Neuwirth, Shadow Cities, 152–60.
21 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1962).
22 Alexis Okeowo, “Lagos Must Prosper,” Granta, April 2015, accessed July 30, 2015, http://granta.com/lagos-must-prosper/.
23 Jon Henly, “Medellín: The Fast Track from the Slums,” Guardian, July 13, 2013, accessed July 30, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/medellin-colombia-fast-track-slums-escalators.
24 Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965), 48.
