I feel like “gated community” is closer in meaning than “suburb”, in the contemporary U.S. at least.
> [Samuel Brooks] bought 60 acres of land[,] surrounding it with a high wall (parts of which can still be seen on Upper Chorlton Road). To keep the city at bay he employed his own private police force and set up toll gates, which is where we get the name Brooks Bar.
Also, people have been doing this for years. Versailles is where it is to escape the busy city. Union Square in Manhattan started as a residential area in the 1830s.
I think the thing that truly makes the modern suburbs suburban, is copy-pasting of common styles and uniform lots.
The author may be backprojecting salient features of the postwar bedroom suburb onto early waves of low-density urbanization as though his were _the_ salient features of the whole family tree.
I think he admits as much by claiming that the essence of the Manchester pattern was the "complete break" between the urban core and desirable residential addresses. I don't find that he can establish his case that this is what this or all suburbanization essentially amounts to, so I disagree he shows that what happened here was what "the world copied."
It does look like probably a lovely place to live.
The garden suburb "first emerged in England in the 1830s" per David Fishman [NB: not the same scholar as Robert Fishman] Bob Stern, and Michael Tilove's book "Paradise Planned," but garden suburbs are just one of the forms that subsequent waves of suburbanization have taken; earlier waves were also going on, and have continued to as well.
The Georgian (1710s-1820s) squares of many cities in England, for example, didn't have estate-style lawns nor walls around the neighborhoods, but they often had locked fences all around the garden. These private parks were known as squares, yes, but had little in common with cobblestoned market squares; the houses were sometimes even low-rise fashionable villas (among them Lloyd Square -- near the Angel of Islington -- a development which is still intact in Inner London). The fancy Clifton area of Bristol is at a higher elevation than the old port city but I disagree that separation from the core or social desirability are really what define a neighborhood as being suburban. Lloyd Square is a little unnervingly low; its buildings struggle to effectively amplify the space or create "positive space" because architecturally they can't anchor or confine it. So one perspective on suburban environments is this: they all exhibit urbanization processes where the spaces between buildings frequently do not even register primarily as "spaces between buildings" but as horizontal visual landscapes unfolding in various directions. I may have gotten this notion from the townscape studies movement.
Canal and waterfall mill workforce neighborhoods on both sides of the Atlantic significantly predate Fishman's and this author's wave of lower-density higher-skill suburban growth.
The arrival of more than ten thousand relatively skilled French Protestant families of mostly weavers to Spitalfields and Bethnal Green and the surrounding area east of the London wall between 1585 and 1587 caused rapid development of a pretty comparatively suburban character. For a more planned version, the architect Inigo Jones' Covent Garden specifically attracted wealthy homeowners in the 1630s and 1640s when future Soho Square was still undeveloped and the West End was not a business center. For a less planned and more-exurban growth pattern I think of Quakers moving between the City of London and the more bucolic area of Stoke Newington north of town.
> This was simply how cities worked: the elite in the centre, the poor on the outskirts.
That checks out today as well - at least in Europe. Difference being that we have mass transit now, so everything close to stops is also more expensive.
What you may be missing is that in the US starting around 1950s, suburbanization inverted this millennia-old globally-generalized pattern. It was called "white flight" [1] at the time, because richer mostly white workers moved their tax revenues out of the city limits. Because so much infrastructure and social structure (like schools) was funded largely or even entirely from the local tax revenue, it hollowed out the "inner cities" and the feedback loops were devastating. That's why New York City became the murder capital of the world in the 1970s. Colloquially, in the US, "inner city" [2] came to mean a low-income and mostly minority neighborhood full of crime, not anything specific to its geographic location.
Definitely (I’m an African American who grew up in “inner-city” Sacramento). There’s been a reversal of this trend during the 2010s, where the inner city has seen an influx of higher-income residents seeking lower home prices and shorter commutes. Places in San Francisco like the Mission District and Hunter’s Point have undergone significant gentrification. However, low-income renters in the inner city have been unable to keep up with rent increases, which has resulted in an exodus to exurbia or to entirely different metro. I have relatives who moved from Sacramento to Bakersfield for a lower cost of living. There has been a “reverse Great Migration” of African Americans from the inner cities of the North and California to large Southern metro areas such as Atlanta. Some of my relatives have “returned” to the South after three generations in California, albeit not to the same Southern communities or states their grandparents lived.
it's also worth noting that one big contributor to white flight was the desegregation of schools.
Big city school systems would now have to integrate people of color with white children. There were plenty of people who did not want this, and unscrupulous realtors would use blockbusting to generate huge profits, where they basically scared white people into fire selling by telling them minorities would come into their neighborhoods and integrate their neighborhoods, and then turning around and selling to minorities at inflated prices. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting
Suburbs were effectively havens for white people since most minorities could not afford to move into suburbs, and their separate school systems became effectively all-white as a result.
The situation in the San Francisco Bay Area is similar. While there are still low-income communities in and near the urban centers (e.g., East Oakland, Richmond, Bay View/Hunter’s Point in San Francisco), there are many low-income and middle-class people who endure 4-6 hour round-trip commutes via car from places like Stockton, Modesto, Los Banos, and Salinas. I find my 45-minute commute from San Ramon to Fremont difficult (sadly I can’t afford to move to Fremont on my current salary without downgrading my apartment); I can’t imagine having to drive five days a week from Stockton to Fremont, but thousands of commuters do this.
Hello! Stocktonian here! I currently commute from Stockton on the ACE train instead of driving.
Many students, tech workers, and other kinds of workers also commute on it.
I would definitely find my commute unbearable if I had to drive every day instead.
While there are lots of commuters from Stockton to the Bay, I think it's better attributed to Tracy and Mountain House and Lathrop+Manteca a bit less, since those are more like bedroom communities.
There is a rail line that goes from Sacramento into the South Bay (ACE Rail) which is what you'd probably try to use if you could. Still takes 2.5hr one-way (which doesn't include last-mile parts), but at least you don't drive.
I used to take it going from Pleasanton to Santa Clara, and I remember there was lots of revelry on the way back home.
I haven’t ridden the ACE train before, but this can be a major benefit for those commuting from the Outer East Bay and San Joaquin County. Plus, I heard the seats are like Caltrain’s, which means it’s possible for commuters to get work done on the train.
There’s also the Amtrak Capitol Corridor for those living annd working along the 880 and 80 corridors. I’ve taken this a few times before during my college years, and it’s a nice, comfortable ride.
Out of curiosity I checked some of those locations and it turns out I used to have a commute of roughly the same length as you have now. Bearable, but on the very edge of tolerance.
Meanwhile travelling on a daily basis from places like Stockton or Modesto is, to me, just extreme. I knew a doctor who travelled this far three times a week and he was already perpetually exhausted.
Sometimes I can't help but think that all those RTO policies were enacted only so that we would keep renting all those overpriced, cramped apartments.
"""
developers were coming in with proposals to demolish the Victorian villas in the area so that they could build apartments. We decided to designate it as a conservation area so that nothing could be knocked down without our permission.
"""
I note the author does not say what actions they took to ensure their decisions did not negatively affect the supply of housing.
There weren't housing shortages in most Northern cities in the 1980s. Significant deindustrialisation had hollowed them out and they were in economic decline. The population in Manchester dropped continuously from 766,311 in 1931 to 392,819 in 2001 before starting to recover[0].
This was also before the sell-off of council housing, so it was still possible for the authority to guarantee housing. So conservation of unloved but historically important buildings was probably a more pressing problem than finding some vacant land to build flats.
They're not obliged to. Conservation is a good on its own terms. They also didn't address carbon burdens, asbestos or diversity.
Look I get it, there's a housing crisis. If you want to argue we should make suburban Seoul with towers for 10km can I remind you le Corbusiers ideas were implemented widely in Birmingham and Manchester and were a disaster.
Maybe, the answer is to raid the green belt? Oh look, another "special interest" bun fight. More Barrett homes now! More ticky tacky. More all the same.
My experience owning a protected structure soon taught me that heritage officers have zero interest in practicality and would rather see structures fall in to the ground as their owners nearly bankrupt themselves instead of actually allowing the building to be a useful structure in the modern world.
That’s only because they weren’t well connected (by design?) to the community vs how say the Soviets implemented theirs (one of the things they actually got right, despite the brutal aesthetics). Similar story for the US “projects” - completely isolated from ADLs (activities of daily living).
From all the places I’ve visited, I think the Dutch and Danish have figured out a nice middle ground for building mixed use human scale places.
Which part was a disaster? High rise towers in Seoul and elsewhere seem to work after all, so if you're rejecting high rise towers on the basis that high rise towers didn't work in those situations, I'm not sure I follow your logic.
In China they went and built a ton of housing, but then people don't want to live in those cities and their population has peaked up. So forcing housing solutions doesn't necessarily end well either.
Suburbs are most of the time a forced housing solution. Allow people more freedom how to use the land they own. Have simple and sensible regulations on nuisance levels and light coverage. Japan is a good example where it works.
No, well 1980s Manchester isn't modern day $prosperous city.
Further, I suspect a run down '10 servant' Victorian Villa could house more people in bedsits, than the replacement apartments, so in effect youre complaining that the have nots had housing at the expense of the better off, which probably isn't the complaint you were intending to make.
I'm going to call bullshit on his definition of this as being the first ever suburb. He defines it just such so that it fits his narrative but if we define a suburb as a mostly "outlying district of a city, especially a residential one". Then suburbs are just about as old as large cities.
Take ancient Rome for example. The formal city of the Republic was built inside the Servian wall, but what were essentially suburbs formed rapidly outside this boundary and spread widely, with residential and commercial districts. The later Aurelian wall covered these too, but again, further suburbs spread beyond that as well.
The article loosely argues that suburbs are defined as being planned outlying communities with middle class populations, but for one thing, this isn't a hard definition of them and secondly, such things also were the case as far back as antiquity.
Going back to the Rome example, many reasonably well-off people moved outside the city walls precisely to escape the dirty clog of the core, and even planned suburban industrial/business zones were created there. An example of these: the immense (even by modern standards) state/business-controlled Horrea Galbae warehouses for imported goods, well outside the older Servian walls of the city.
There's just no way I can think of defining such urban spread as anything but suburban growth, far, far before the 19th century.
edit: Just for a visual idea of what this Roman suburban district and those giant warehouses looked like, this image is a decent example. They were well outside the main urban area and truly were enormous, with well over 200,000 square feet of floor space, all inside a single massive building. http://www.galba.net/horrea_galbae.html
I feel like “gated community” is closer in meaning than “suburb”, in the contemporary U.S. at least.
> [Samuel Brooks] bought 60 acres of land[,] surrounding it with a high wall (parts of which can still be seen on Upper Chorlton Road). To keep the city at bay he employed his own private police force and set up toll gates, which is where we get the name Brooks Bar.
Also, people have been doing this for years. Versailles is where it is to escape the busy city. Union Square in Manhattan started as a residential area in the 1830s.
I think the thing that truly makes the modern suburbs suburban, is copy-pasting of common styles and uniform lots.
The author may be backprojecting salient features of the postwar bedroom suburb onto early waves of low-density urbanization as though his were _the_ salient features of the whole family tree. I think he admits as much by claiming that the essence of the Manchester pattern was the "complete break" between the urban core and desirable residential addresses. I don't find that he can establish his case that this is what this or all suburbanization essentially amounts to, so I disagree he shows that what happened here was what "the world copied." It does look like probably a lovely place to live.
The garden suburb "first emerged in England in the 1830s" per David Fishman [NB: not the same scholar as Robert Fishman] Bob Stern, and Michael Tilove's book "Paradise Planned," but garden suburbs are just one of the forms that subsequent waves of suburbanization have taken; earlier waves were also going on, and have continued to as well.
The Georgian (1710s-1820s) squares of many cities in England, for example, didn't have estate-style lawns nor walls around the neighborhoods, but they often had locked fences all around the garden. These private parks were known as squares, yes, but had little in common with cobblestoned market squares; the houses were sometimes even low-rise fashionable villas (among them Lloyd Square -- near the Angel of Islington -- a development which is still intact in Inner London). The fancy Clifton area of Bristol is at a higher elevation than the old port city but I disagree that separation from the core or social desirability are really what define a neighborhood as being suburban. Lloyd Square is a little unnervingly low; its buildings struggle to effectively amplify the space or create "positive space" because architecturally they can't anchor or confine it. So one perspective on suburban environments is this: they all exhibit urbanization processes where the spaces between buildings frequently do not even register primarily as "spaces between buildings" but as horizontal visual landscapes unfolding in various directions. I may have gotten this notion from the townscape studies movement.
Canal and waterfall mill workforce neighborhoods on both sides of the Atlantic significantly predate Fishman's and this author's wave of lower-density higher-skill suburban growth.
The arrival of more than ten thousand relatively skilled French Protestant families of mostly weavers to Spitalfields and Bethnal Green and the surrounding area east of the London wall between 1585 and 1587 caused rapid development of a pretty comparatively suburban character. For a more planned version, the architect Inigo Jones' Covent Garden specifically attracted wealthy homeowners in the 1630s and 1640s when future Soho Square was still undeveloped and the West End was not a business center. For a less planned and more-exurban growth pattern I think of Quakers moving between the City of London and the more bucolic area of Stoke Newington north of town.
> This was simply how cities worked: the elite in the centre, the poor on the outskirts.
That checks out today as well - at least in Europe. Difference being that we have mass transit now, so everything close to stops is also more expensive.
What you may be missing is that in the US starting around 1950s, suburbanization inverted this millennia-old globally-generalized pattern. It was called "white flight" [1] at the time, because richer mostly white workers moved their tax revenues out of the city limits. Because so much infrastructure and social structure (like schools) was funded largely or even entirely from the local tax revenue, it hollowed out the "inner cities" and the feedback loops were devastating. That's why New York City became the murder capital of the world in the 1970s. Colloquially, in the US, "inner city" [2] came to mean a low-income and mostly minority neighborhood full of crime, not anything specific to its geographic location.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_city
Definitely (I’m an African American who grew up in “inner-city” Sacramento). There’s been a reversal of this trend during the 2010s, where the inner city has seen an influx of higher-income residents seeking lower home prices and shorter commutes. Places in San Francisco like the Mission District and Hunter’s Point have undergone significant gentrification. However, low-income renters in the inner city have been unable to keep up with rent increases, which has resulted in an exodus to exurbia or to entirely different metro. I have relatives who moved from Sacramento to Bakersfield for a lower cost of living. There has been a “reverse Great Migration” of African Americans from the inner cities of the North and California to large Southern metro areas such as Atlanta. Some of my relatives have “returned” to the South after three generations in California, albeit not to the same Southern communities or states their grandparents lived.
it's also worth noting that one big contributor to white flight was the desegregation of schools.
Big city school systems would now have to integrate people of color with white children. There were plenty of people who did not want this, and unscrupulous realtors would use blockbusting to generate huge profits, where they basically scared white people into fire selling by telling them minorities would come into their neighborhoods and integrate their neighborhoods, and then turning around and selling to minorities at inflated prices. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting
Suburbs were effectively havens for white people since most minorities could not afford to move into suburbs, and their separate school systems became effectively all-white as a result.
The situation in the San Francisco Bay Area is similar. While there are still low-income communities in and near the urban centers (e.g., East Oakland, Richmond, Bay View/Hunter’s Point in San Francisco), there are many low-income and middle-class people who endure 4-6 hour round-trip commutes via car from places like Stockton, Modesto, Los Banos, and Salinas. I find my 45-minute commute from San Ramon to Fremont difficult (sadly I can’t afford to move to Fremont on my current salary without downgrading my apartment); I can’t imagine having to drive five days a week from Stockton to Fremont, but thousands of commuters do this.
Hello! Stocktonian here! I currently commute from Stockton on the ACE train instead of driving. Many students, tech workers, and other kinds of workers also commute on it.
I would definitely find my commute unbearable if I had to drive every day instead.
While there are lots of commuters from Stockton to the Bay, I think it's better attributed to Tracy and Mountain House and Lathrop+Manteca a bit less, since those are more like bedroom communities.
There is a rail line that goes from Sacramento into the South Bay (ACE Rail) which is what you'd probably try to use if you could. Still takes 2.5hr one-way (which doesn't include last-mile parts), but at least you don't drive.
I used to take it going from Pleasanton to Santa Clara, and I remember there was lots of revelry on the way back home.
I haven’t ridden the ACE train before, but this can be a major benefit for those commuting from the Outer East Bay and San Joaquin County. Plus, I heard the seats are like Caltrain’s, which means it’s possible for commuters to get work done on the train.
There’s also the Amtrak Capitol Corridor for those living annd working along the 880 and 80 corridors. I’ve taken this a few times before during my college years, and it’s a nice, comfortable ride.
ACE hasn't been extended to Sacramento yet but there is the Capitol Corridor right now from Sacramento to the Bay.
Out of curiosity I checked some of those locations and it turns out I used to have a commute of roughly the same length as you have now. Bearable, but on the very edge of tolerance.
Meanwhile travelling on a daily basis from places like Stockton or Modesto is, to me, just extreme. I knew a doctor who travelled this far three times a week and he was already perpetually exhausted.
Sometimes I can't help but think that all those RTO policies were enacted only so that we would keep renting all those overpriced, cramped apartments.
The first suburbs were not car-centric and sprawling:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb
* https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/8/27/in-praise-of-s...
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0
""" developers were coming in with proposals to demolish the Victorian villas in the area so that they could build apartments. We decided to designate it as a conservation area so that nothing could be knocked down without our permission. """
I note the author does not say what actions they took to ensure their decisions did not negatively affect the supply of housing.
There weren't housing shortages in most Northern cities in the 1980s. Significant deindustrialisation had hollowed them out and they were in economic decline. The population in Manchester dropped continuously from 766,311 in 1931 to 392,819 in 2001 before starting to recover[0].
This was also before the sell-off of council housing, so it was still possible for the authority to guarantee housing. So conservation of unloved but historically important buildings was probably a more pressing problem than finding some vacant land to build flats.
https://www.manchester.gov.uk/download/downloads/id/25393/a2...
They're not obliged to. Conservation is a good on its own terms. They also didn't address carbon burdens, asbestos or diversity.
Look I get it, there's a housing crisis. If you want to argue we should make suburban Seoul with towers for 10km can I remind you le Corbusiers ideas were implemented widely in Birmingham and Manchester and were a disaster.
Maybe, the answer is to raid the green belt? Oh look, another "special interest" bun fight. More Barrett homes now! More ticky tacky. More all the same.
My experience owning a protected structure soon taught me that heritage officers have zero interest in practicality and would rather see structures fall in to the ground as their owners nearly bankrupt themselves instead of actually allowing the building to be a useful structure in the modern world.
That’s only because they weren’t well connected (by design?) to the community vs how say the Soviets implemented theirs (one of the things they actually got right, despite the brutal aesthetics). Similar story for the US “projects” - completely isolated from ADLs (activities of daily living).
From all the places I’ve visited, I think the Dutch and Danish have figured out a nice middle ground for building mixed use human scale places.
Most people aren't calling for towers all around, but mixed development instead of single family housing.
I believe you had this song in mind when you wrote your comment, didn't you ? : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_2lGkEU4Xs
The video is unavailable, but it's the intro song for the tv show Weeds, isn't it?
Which part was a disaster? High rise towers in Seoul and elsewhere seem to work after all, so if you're rejecting high rise towers on the basis that high rise towers didn't work in those situations, I'm not sure I follow your logic.
In China they went and built a ton of housing, but then people don't want to live in those cities and their population has peaked up. So forcing housing solutions doesn't necessarily end well either.
Suburbs are most of the time a forced housing solution. Allow people more freedom how to use the land they own. Have simple and sensible regulations on nuisance levels and light coverage. Japan is a good example where it works.
What’s the down side for them? People are paying less than $500 a month in rent for a 2 bedroom. Gives their whole economy a competitive edge.
No, well 1980s Manchester isn't modern day $prosperous city.
Further, I suspect a run down '10 servant' Victorian Villa could house more people in bedsits, than the replacement apartments, so in effect youre complaining that the have nots had housing at the expense of the better off, which probably isn't the complaint you were intending to make.
I'm going to call bullshit on his definition of this as being the first ever suburb. He defines it just such so that it fits his narrative but if we define a suburb as a mostly "outlying district of a city, especially a residential one". Then suburbs are just about as old as large cities.
Take ancient Rome for example. The formal city of the Republic was built inside the Servian wall, but what were essentially suburbs formed rapidly outside this boundary and spread widely, with residential and commercial districts. The later Aurelian wall covered these too, but again, further suburbs spread beyond that as well.
The article loosely argues that suburbs are defined as being planned outlying communities with middle class populations, but for one thing, this isn't a hard definition of them and secondly, such things also were the case as far back as antiquity.
Going back to the Rome example, many reasonably well-off people moved outside the city walls precisely to escape the dirty clog of the core, and even planned suburban industrial/business zones were created there. An example of these: the immense (even by modern standards) state/business-controlled Horrea Galbae warehouses for imported goods, well outside the older Servian walls of the city.
There's just no way I can think of defining such urban spread as anything but suburban growth, far, far before the 19th century.
edit: Just for a visual idea of what this Roman suburban district and those giant warehouses looked like, this image is a decent example. They were well outside the main urban area and truly were enormous, with well over 200,000 square feet of floor space, all inside a single massive building. http://www.galba.net/horrea_galbae.html