Building Suburbia
We Built This Suburb: A Yale Professor Examines the Makings of Our National Landscape by Carey Seal
Dolores Hayden, a professor of architecture and American studies at Yale and a leading historian of the American built environment’s relationship to its political integument, offers in Building Suburbia an explanation of how the now-characteristic forms of that environment took shape and of why the problems they cause have proven resistant to amelioration…
Building Suburbia takes us beyond the familiar story of General Motors’ purchase and evisceration of the country’s electric trolley lines to show the regularity with which the influence of business interests, acting individually or collectively, has shaped transportation and development policy at all levels of government…
The emphasis Hayden places on the economic and political reasons for the present form of American suburbia throws into relief the superficiality of several of its other prominent critics. [James Howard] Kunstler, for instance, has made a career out of sledgehammer attacks on the vulgarity and stupidity of American suburban building and planning without managing to acknowledge that the problems he identifies are anchored in the nature of American economic and political life…
The ways in which the effort to build real communities, planned for social rather than simply individual need, falls short of its goal point up the basic incompatibility of such goals with the economic environment in which the projects are attempted… The contradiction between New Urbanist objectives and the profit imperatives ruling the Darwinian world of commercial development shows the usefulness of Hayden’s account of the structural exigencies under which the suburbs took shape.”