For better and worse, the garden suburbs are what America came up with when presented with the chance to create its own ideal geography. One hundred years of confrontation with a vast, untamed frontier taught America the virtues of open space, while the subsequent hundred years of coping with the loss of that frontier forced lessons in getting along with the neighbors. The frontier period promoted individualism and self-reliance, and an expectation of freedom. The contemporary version of these is found in the millions of micro frontiers that make up suburbia. But what has been lost can also be laid to this new geography: the hoarding of this hard-won comfort has made the suburb the perfect embodiment of controlled individualism while the property lines trace out the spatial equivalent of the straightened individual in a society of similar spaces. The hysterical banality and parcelized imperialism of the tracts stand neatly for the conformity and small-mindedness its inhabitants are thought to exhibit.
At root the suburb is a compromise — between a rural ideal, with its implication of individual freedom, and the economic imperative to concentrate labor and the needs for infrastructure. Seething under the clichéd, placid surface is a complex confusion of competing forces and interests — economic, social, physical — and the compromise that set this in motion haunts all aspects of the continuing suburban dynamic. This is nowhere more evident than in Southern California where the suburb’s usual attractions are exaggerated by a boomtown economy, laid-back lifestyle and glorious beachfront setting with idyllic weather.
There is no natural order to the suburbs. Lot sizes and configurations were originally determined by the banks and developers according to what size mortgage they felt the average prospective homeowner could support, rather than considerations of light and air or human comfort or aesthetic criteria. The road systems were laid out in either picturesque winds that implied a topography that did not exist, or in grids that ignored the topography that did. Lush greenery sprouted in ordered patches of former desert or across ancient sand dunes. The power to ignore or invent nature in this way comes from the real estate engine, which in Southern California is totally hot rodded.
In Southern California real estate always appreciates. The certainty of rising land values creates a pressure to build that leads to revealing absurdities. In the established communities where sprawl is not an option, the unnatural effect of increasing property value in the suburb is decreasing space: not in the sense that it becomes solely a commodity for the rich, and so less is available to pass around to everyone else, but in the more literal sense that the land appears to shrink as it gets more expensive. This is because the economic pressures on the land do not translate into the increased population density, but into an increase in building density. There is less apparent space, and less effective space, because there is more, bigger stuff filling that space for the same number of people. The ruthless economy of speculation that has grown up to take advantage of this (un)natural law of appreciation is producing a second growth of super-sized suburban housing to replace the first utopian wave of bungalows that are now “undervalued.”
Despite its artificial nature (in both senses) and compromised genesis, the suburb is not really a bad place to live, as twenty plus million Angelenos would attest. But what is good about it is threatened by the aggressive expansion of the physical plant. The original structures, while small, were carefully tuned to the garden city ideal that made these tracts so attractive. Schindler, Neutra and the Case Study architects showed that the “California dream” is lived outdoors: at the beach, or around the pool in the back yard, barbecuing, or in the driveway, shooting baskets or washing the car. The canvas clad sleeping baskets of Schindler’s King’s Road House and sweeping terraces of Neutra’s Lovell Health House, as well as the broad picture windows and sliding glass doors of the Case Study houses, forced the occupants (for their own good) out into “nature,” known locally as the yard. The new growth of “pocket mansions” or “tract monsters” sacrifice even this small remnant of the garden city ideal to maxed-out zoning envelopes that leave no space for more than notional “yards,” forcing the residents back inside to the less salubrious pleasures of their TVs.
The greatest casualty of this creeping gigantism is the paradigmatic suburban concern for privacy — forcing a more urban inwardness onto the naturally extroverted suburb. The blank urban corridor and façade of anonymous windows serve a similar purpose as the suburban setbacks, landscaping and backyard fence, but what “works” in the city would be a disaster out in the suburb. And yet, the looming neighbors and reduced yard setbacks play havoc with the characteristic suburban balance, uniquely struck outdoors, between effective isolation and community display
The fences and yards that provide isolation also become signs of that desire, and as such engage the publicness of interpretation. The urban assurance of privacy through anonymity is counter to the suburban desire for status display. In the suburb privacy is maintained through subordination to the spatial ordering of the tract and conformity to its “norms.” This keeps the “other” in line by preventing the “other” from being unduly noticed, but still allows the registering of status in the degree of conspicuous consumption. The pressure to build bigger makes it harder to sustain this willful blindness, though, as the differences in degree hits the wall and other outlets are sought to assert prestige.
A result is the rise of Design Review Boards that enforce with “guidelines” what formerly was assured by peer pressure and spatial relief. The Design Review Board phenomenon grows out of the suburban obsession with property values. Where security in the city is related to personal safety, in the suburbs it means protection of stuff. Yet, the stuff must be on view, not hidden away. In the suburb stuff is secure if it’s on the lawn, in the driveway — beyond that all-powerful but invisible property line. The main thing on display is that property, though — the trophy lawn, the heroic driveway, not to mention the mediterranean/tudor/french provincial/ ranch castle overlooking these — and the security of this is achieved by embedding it within a robust system of value that makes those invisible boundaries have meaning. This meaning is itself derived from a respect for the possibility of individual dominion over a piece of land, and is established in the ability to walk around one’s house. And this is generally felt to be the essence of the suburb. As the land shrinks this essence evaporates.
The suburb is likely to continue to evolve under the pressure of the impossible economics, and the influence of the cyber and green revolutions will soon be felt as well. The computer revolution will promote an empowering decentralization, while greenness will encourage a contrasting population densification. These opposed tendencies will be magnified by the economic imperatives of the real-estate dynamic as they are played out within the context of the American dream and its California suburban version. Ironically, given their reputation, the suburbs are both the test market and final resting place of architectural innovation. The -‘burb’s complacent success makes them resistant to change, but also makes them the place where change finally becomes ratified after it has proven itself elsewhere.
The suburbs have been classically decentralized, but in a way that assumed the sanctity and primacy of the nuclear family unit — which has lately fissioned. The family is evolving into a mini society: the individual members at all ages are becoming more independent, economically and socially, and in the best cases are given greater freedom and responsibility for the definition of the family realm. Popular journalism has decried this as a negative result of an outwardly fragmented society and the loss of family values, but it is equally possible to explain it as a result of technology like the cell phone and credit card that provides security and power to even the youngest family members. This fragmentation has been reflected in the increase of the typical number of bedrooms and other spaces where family members can get away from each other. The real estate industry has seen this as an opportunity to proliferate ameliorative features and compensatory spaces that can be listed as amenities to drive up the price of the family house.
This fragmentation is pushed along by the advent of the internet, which encourages the individual escape into cyberspace. While it is probably too much to claim that the public space of the future will be electronic, and thus that physical public gathering space will no longer be necessary, it is true that this cyber realm will offer relief both for the individual from the family and for the family itself from the neighbors. This means that cyberspace will supplement the yard space in a sense, and that telecommuting will allow the worker to be located anywhere they wish — out of the city or in the bedroom.
The suburbs have been classically green, but paradoxically at a cost to the environment; to achieve their condition of artificial lushness they have sprawled over otherwise unspoiled territory, paving over the native soil or redefining it with the wonders of Miracle-Gro™ and Snarol™. Like a golf course, which idealizes the natural but purifies it to an abstraction that bears little resemblance to its model, the garden city suburb draws borders around its graded nature: fairways and rough, traffic islands and front lawns.