The radical 'burbs: tracing the surprising roots of social experimentation - Culture and Reviews - 'Suburban Alchemy: 1960s New Towns and the Transformation of the American Dream' - Book Review

Reason, Jan, 2003 by Jesse Walker

Suburban Alchemy: 1960s New Towns and the Transformation of the American Dream, by Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 333 pages, $27.95

ONE OF THE most idealistic manifestos of the 1960s took the unlikely form of an intra-office corporate memorandum. "For many years," the mortgage banker James Rouse wrote in 1963, "I have lived uncomfortably with the belief that most planning and architectural design suffers for lack of real and basic purpose." Rouse felt ready to fill that gap. "The ultimate purpose, it seems to me, must be the improvement of mankind," he wrote. "There really can be no other end purpose of planning except to develop better people....An inspired, concerned and loving society will dignify man; will find the ways to develop his talent; will put the fruits of his labor and intellect to effective use; will achieve brotherhood; eliminate bigotry and intolerance; will care for the indigent, the delinquent, the sick, the aged; seek the truth and communicate it; respect differences among man."

Prior to this, Rouse was best known for having built some of the country's first enclosed shopping malls. Within a few years, he was better known as the father of Columbia, Maryland, a social experiment on par, in its way, with Robert Owen's New Harmony or Wavy Gravy's Hog Farm. His memo does not appear in Suburban Alchemy, Nicholas Dagen Bloom's informative account of what became known as the new towns movement. But Columbia does. Founded in 1966, Columbia is, if nothing else, one of the most resilient utopias of the '60s: It thrives today, with nearly 90,000 residents, many of whom are unfamiliar with the founding ideals of their town--and in some cases don't know that it had founding ideals to begin with.

American suburbia came into its own in the 1940s and '50s, as policy makers and entrepreneurs joined forces to make the suburbs a viable alternative to city and country life. As millions moved to the new communities, intellectuals complained that the emerging landscape combined too-tightly controlled residential districts with uncontrolled commercial sprawl, fostering a culture that was simultaneously conformist and disengaged. The same critique persists in only somewhat altered form today.

But in the 1960s, something odd happened. The critique was taken to heart not just by dissident philosophers and left-leaning planners but by private, profit-seeking developers. In Bloom's words, these businessmen "brought comprehensive planning back into contemporary suburbia. They fused older suburban community builder traditions with modernist styles and their own original ideas. Unique master plans, unconventional architecture, village and town centers, and landscape design gave definition to their suburban landscapes."

Bloom discusses three such communities: Columbia; Reston, Virginia; and Irvine, California. Though he rightly stresses these towns' ties to the suburban critique of the '50s, their roots go back further. Reston in particular owes a debt to the radical writer Ebenezer Howard, whose Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1902) called for suburban towns that would contain and be sustained by both agriculture and industry, with the land held in common by the residents. More moderate variations on this idea were soon built in England and elsewhere in Europe, while Lewis Mumford and his cohorts advanced similar proposals on the western side of the Atlantic.

In America the first tangible result was Radburn, an idealistic effort to build a self-sufficient garden city within two square miles of New-Jersey. Whether or not that plan had a chance of succeeding, the project was doomed: It was launched in 1928, and the stock market crash of the next year crippled it before it got far off the ground. The community is still there, with about 3,100 people governed by the private Radburn Association. But it stopped dreaming of meeting all its own residential, commercial, and industrial needs long ago.

In 1961 Robert E. Simon Jr.--a real estate broker and the son of one of the original Radburn investors--bought the land on which he would build Reston, a town he named after his initials. Reston is a private community, not unlike a condominium--except it has a population of 60,000. It is divided into villages, which are in turn divided into cluster associations (and contain condos, apartment buildings, and noncluster houses as well). Between them, these constitute a system of government that is part homeowners association and part community land trust. Residents whose property does not meet local standards can be penalized: The Reston Association has the legal authority, by voluntary covenant, to tow away cars, cut lawns, or otherwise compel errant homeowners to conform, and then to charge them for the work it has done. The same body is responsible for maintaining Reston's 1,000-plus acres of open space, which include lakes, parks, and nature trails.

As Reston was launched, the Rouse Company was secretly accumulating land in nearby Howard County, Maryland. As the natives realized that a single buyer was acquiring all this property, conspiracy theories started to circulate. Some worried that the Russians were trying to get a foothold near Washington, D.C. Some fretted that the Department of Agriculture was planning to use the county as a biological testing dump cum swamp. A few knew the truth: that James W. Rouse planned to build the "inspired, concerned and loving society" he had outlined in his memorandum of 1963. The result was Columbia.