In Defense of Modern Suburban Living

Tom Martinson is a worried man. Martinson is an urban planner with square miles of experience laying out cities, including the $15-billion “global city” of Bonifacio being developed within teeming Manila. In “American Dreamscapes,” a cranky and provoking critique of the anxieties in the making of American places, he worries how a pervasive anti-suburban rhetoric has taken the diverse places where a majority of us live and turned them into an unholy monolith called “suburbia.” Martinson has spent most of his life living and working in such places, and he thinks that their demonization is uninformed at best, if not downright foolish.

Many Americans would agree. A 1999 Los Angeles Times poll, quoted by Martinson, found that “people who live in the suburbs generally love their lives. And the farther they get from [the city center] the more they love them.” In completely centerless Orange County, 91% of residents are happy where they live, and in Minnesota, only 11% of the residents would choose a big city over a suburb or a small town.

That sort of satisfaction has provoked a strain of purist fury from those privileged Americans whom Martinson calls “gentry.” The line of contempt runs deep--from Peter Blake’s “God’s Own Junkyard” (1964), through James Howard Kunstler’s “Geography of Nowhere” (1993)--and surfaces most recently in “Suburban Nation” by Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, who are among the planners and architects who call themselves “new urbanists.”

Martinson yearns to write a rebuttal to “Suburban Nation’s” indictment of suburbia as a social and environmental failure, but unfortunately he hasn’t. “American Dreamscapes” is too schematic to be the revisionist history that suburbs deserve, but it’s still a refreshing act of resistance.

“Gentry” Americans--the ones privileged by their ordinary comforts and the convictions of an enlightened modernity--have always been anxious how they house themselves. Being caught in the middle, between real money and the working stiffs, is typically unsettling. When national prosperity hardens their anxiety into a moral crusade, these Americans worry even more vehemently how other less privileged people are housed.

Fearing ethnic contagion and labor radicalism, comfortable Americans at the start of the last century evoked slum clearance and suburbanization to solve the problem of working-class disorder. The “white city” (with everything that name implies) would be the purified engine of capital and culture. Around it, in acres of green, would lie suburban villages supplying the city center with manpower via efficient light rail.

It’s a little farfetched, but privileged Americans today, fearing environmental catastrophe and blue-collar conservatism, evoke such growth limits and “new urbanism” to solve the problem of an unruly working-class desire for a house and a yard in a place that is not exactly a city. “Smart growth,” meaning one thing to the well-off urbanist and something quite different to the angry NIMBYist, will be the barrier to working-class desires.

And it’s a little Orwellian: Within the growth-limited city, increasing density in blue-collar neighborhoods (but not at the affluent fringe) will wean working-class drivers from their cars and supply the city center with a work force via costly, subsidized light rail.

But less than the people, it’s the look of the suburbs that raises the hackles of the suburbs’ harshest critics who begin with public policy arguments and end with slogans: “No more subdivisions! No more shopping centers! No more highways!”

Martinson resists sloganeering: He wants to get to a place where planners will coax a “poetic” sensibility from the way a neighborhood rests on the landscape. He yearns for place-making that is a “physical manifestation of the American ideal”: simple, utilitarian, affordable and essentially romantic. He laments that so many suburban places are so much less than they could be, but he sees no way to coerce Arcadias or utopias from our habits, which have, after all, created places that look a lot like Orange County: a dispersed, moderately dense and complex metropolitan region in which a historic downtown functions as just another, more specialized “edge city.”

The contest for the soul of our suburban nation hinges on whether this constitutes enough to make a place where memories might be unblighted and desires assuaged. Is Southern California’s emerging metropolis of “infinite separate houses” enough? Are the efforts of “anti-sprawl” coalitions too much? When Martinson shows you Lombard, his childhood Chicago suburb, blanketed in lilacs in bloom, you may know (as I know) that there is no easy answer why some Americans will love the place from which they come with abandon and others will never be at rest.

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D.J. Waldie is the author of “Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir.” He lives in Lakewood, where he is a city official.