The First Suburb
manchestermill.co.uk
manchestermill.co.uk
> [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.
I think the thing that truly makes the modern suburbs suburban, is copy-pasting of common styles and uniform lots.
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.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gerard
[2] https://archive.org/stream/murrayshandbookf00john/murrayshan...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb
* https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/8/27/in-praise-of-s...
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.
I used to take it going from Pleasanton to Santa Clara, and I remember there was lots of revelry on the way back home.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I note the author does not say what actions they took to ensure their decisions did not negatively affect the supply of housing.
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.
Malvina Reynolds - Little Boxes
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.
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...
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.
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