My son Mike has become interested in local government and city planning. He lent me this book. It is interesting and briskly written. The author begins with a history of the development of suburbia from the late 1800’s, citing Llewellyn Park in South Orange NJ as the archetype of the suburb, but going further back to utopian communities in America and Europe. The core concept of the suburb is exclusivity. This often was a code word to exclude Negroes and immigrants. When the automobile took over as the favored means of transport, planners abandoned the street grid pattern, in favor of “superblocks” with dead ends and winding small roads traversed by arterial roads with high speed traffic. That created more reliance on cars, and lead to many cities eliminating street cars that had encouraged activity on the sidewalks. Jane Jacobs and her theories on urban life receive a good deal of coverage, and is the ideal that animates this book. The author lives in Montgomery County, MD, and was a director of the Action Committee for Transit that lobbied for the DC Metro Purple line, that is only now being constructed. It is very interesting to read about the local stories. The successes for smart growth are Portland OR and Arlington VA, where development around subway lines has created lots of street activity, and the activists hope the Purple line will do the same. The author is a great fan of light rail, not a fan of bus lanes and certainly against the automobile. I agree with the smart growth ideas in the book, and would live in a large multifamily building, but Ellen is dead set against losing her gardening. ( )

An absolutely fascinating book that dives into what has created the stereotypical American suburbia sprawl and offers some options into how we move forward to better fix the issues affecting our communities. My only criticism is that I wished it went a little bit more into specifics of city design, both good and bad, as it stayed mostly on the topics of policy and ideas. But a very great read that I highly encourage everyone to read, regardless of if you’re particularly interested in urban design like me. ( )

Where we want to live now

Dead End: Suburban Sprawl and the Rebirth of American Urbanism by Benjamin Ross (Oxford University Press, $29.95).

While some of the material in Benjamin Ross’s new book about the birth and growth of suburban sprawl is familiar—especially to readers of earlier works like James Howard Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere—his real contribution comes in an in-depth examination of the ways that suburban dwellers have tried to keep their social status intact through the use of zoning laws and covenants.

The section in which Ross discusses the original suburbanist movement as a means of “unslumming” leads to a discussion of the unintended consequences, from the obvious—the over-reliance on cars, for openers—to the less-acknowledged ways in which anti-residential zoning restrictions drive up rents. This is an excellent addition to the growing corpus of work on how to address the need to build a new urbanism.

Reviewed on Lit/Rant: www.litrant.tumblr.com ( )