Radical Suburbs: Experimental Living on the Fringes of the American City

by Amanda Kolson Hurley

America’s suburbs are not the homogenous places we sometimes take them for. Today’s suburbs are racially, ethnically, and economically diverse, with as many Democratic as Republican voters, a growing population of renters, and rising poverty. The cliche of white picket fences is well past its expiration date.

The history of suburbia is equally surprising: American suburbs were once fertile ground for utopian planning, communal living, socially-conscious design, and integrated housing. We have forgotten that we built suburbs like these, such as the co-housing commune of Old Economy, Pennsylvania; a tiny-house anarchist community in Piscataway, New Jersey; a government-planned garden city in Greenbelt, Maryland; a racially integrated subdivision (before the Fair Housing Act) in Trevose, Pennsylvania; experimental Modernist enclaves in Lexington, Massachusetts; and the mixed-use, architecturally daring Reston, Virginia.

Inside Radical Suburbs: Experimental Living on the Fringes of the American City you will find blueprints for affordable, walkable, and integrated communities, filled with a range of environmentally sound residential options. Radical Suburbs is a history that will help us remake the future and rethink our assumptions of suburbia.

Genres: Nonfiction, Urban Planning, Politics, History, Urbanism, Cities, Sociology

160 pages, Paperback

Published April 9, 2019

About the author

Amanda Kolson Hurley is a writer who specializes in architecture and urban planning and a senior editor at CityLab. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Architect magazine, The American Scholar, and many other publications. She lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Reviews

[Yenta Knows · Rating 3 out of 5]

I grew up in a typical suburb: Silver Spring, Maryland (ironically, the author’s residence as well).

My house was in a typical subdivision. It was a brick split level on a lot of about 6000 ft.², one of many identical houses in the subdivision that stretched for acre after mind-numbing acre. Everyone was white and middle class and the kids needed a parental taxi for most activities. This all seem typical. It was what it was.

This book shows that suburbs don’t have to be this way. What it does not explain in any detail is why most suburbs are what I experienced and very few are the radical variations that the author presents.

So it’s a pretty good first step, but only a first step.

I must also criticize the book for its graphical poverty. The author wrote six chapters, each focusing on a different radical suburb. For each suburb she includes two photographs: one shows a typical residence. The other shows some of the people involved in developing the suburb.

Why did the author limit herself to just two photos? Why aren’t there maps, subdivision plans, multiple photos of residences and public structures? Why didn’t she give us a better idea of the personality of each suburb?

And why didn’t she give us a better idea of what the suburbs are like to live in now? Reston, for example, was supposed to be, and might be, a place where one can live, shop, and work in the same town. Of all of the suburbs described, it might come closest to reaching that ideal. How well has it done? How many Restonians work in Reston? How many are able to walk or bicycle to their place of business? Why didn’t the author tell us?

[jay · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a short six chapters, each a vignette of a different community that highlights the surprising potential of suburbs: the architecture, the ideas, the diversity (or lack thereof). Being from Northern Virginia, I was especially enthralled by the chapters about the New Deal city of Greenbelt, MD, and the modernist planned city of Reston, VA. As a resentful suburbanite, I'm even intrigued by its arguments for suburbs as a solution to housing, equality, and even climate change. However, the reason I'm hesitant to give this a glowing review is because of its brevity. Though acknowledged in the introduction, the length of this book doesn't allow it the chance to go in depth on the ideas it presents. Plus, though it appeals to my bias as a DMV resident, it focuses maybe a bit too much on the metro DC area, in which the author also resides. Still, this book is clearly well researched and I would recommend it to urbanites, suburbanites, and anyone who thinks the history of the suburbs is solely defined by cars, isolation, and middle- to upper-class white families.

PS: I appreciated the NUMTOT shoutout in the introduction.

[Peter Tillman]

Here's an interesting excerpt:
https://www.citylab.com/design/2019/0...
"Back in the early 1960s, Malvina Reynolds wrote a song called “Little Boxes,” inspired by a drive past rows of lookalike pastel-hued houses in a new suburban housing tract in the Bay Area. (Her friend Pete Seeger had a hit with the song in 1963.) Reynolds saw the cookie-cutter houses as both symbols and shapers of the conformist mindset of the people who lived in them—doctors and lawyers who aspired to nothing more than playing golf and raising children who would one day inhabit “ticky-tacky” boxes of their own.

But Reynolds was wrong about who lived in this suburb, Daly City, just south of San Francisco. It was not originally home to the martini-chuffing doctors and lawyers she imagined, but to working-class and lower-middle-class (white) strivers who were the last group to get in on the postwar housing boom.

Then, only a few years after Reynolds wrote the song, Filipinos and other immigrants from Asia began arriving in Daly City. The “ticky-tacky” architecture that Reynolds scorned proved amenable to them remodeling and expanding homes for extended families, and Daly City became the “Pinoy capital” of the U.S., with the highest concentration of immigrants from the Philippines in America."

Looks worth trying.
Here's another of her suburb articles: Homewood, IL
https://www.citylab.com/life/2018/04/...

[aa · Rating 3 out of 5]

The idea of American suburbia suggests notions of monotony, isolation, conservatism, nuclear families, white people, and a culture obsessed with wealth, privacy, and status-seeking. Living there is typically a non-option for anarchists. Cities tend to have social struggles and radical milieus. Rural areas have been the site of communes. What historical precedents for meaningful life and action have the suburbs given us?

Suburbia’s public image, however, might be outdated. Gentrification has pushed minorities and other poor people out of urban areas, changing the ethnic and class makeup of the suburbs. In 2019, 35% of suburban inhabitants were people of racial minorities, which is close to their percentage in the general population. The number of poor people living in the suburbs surpassed those in cities during the Aughts and continues to rise. Immigrants are now bypassing the cities and moving straight to the suburbs, often living in extended rather than nuclear families.

In her book, planner and author Amanda Kolson Hurley challenges the idea that suburbia is incompatible with experimental life. She lists anecdotes like those above as well as six examples of experiments in the last 150 years where radicals, artists, architects, religious communalists, and others attempted to live their ideas in the American suburbs.

The first group she describes was a mystical sect of celibate, millenarian Lutherans who built some of the many religious-inspired communes in the 1800s. The Harmonists believed Jesus was simultaneously man and woman. They saw sex as a futile attempt to regain wholeness that could only be achieved through the Second Coming, supposedly just on the horizon. They planned to wait for the apocalypse in communal harmony like the original Christians in the Book of Acts. In doing so, they founded three towns in the United States. The final one in Ambridge, Pennsylvania was called Economy.

In Economy, all property was shared communally. Between six and eight Harmonists shared a house, sometimes through no blood relation. They kept factories away from their homes and held civic and market functions in their houses rather than public buildings. Economy flourished for decades, and the Harmonists had high standards of medicine and often lived to an unusually old age for the time. Women were taught to read and given voting rights. While not a proper suburb, its proximity to Pittsburg allowed the Harmonists to get their industrial machinery from and sell their wares to the city quickly using the Ohio River. While inspiring in many ways, the experiment was authoritarian with strict rules. Members were expected to obey the authoritarian leader unconditionally. After decades, the town died due to economic competition from factory production and their celibacy foreclosing the possibility of future generations.

Hurley’s second example is the anarchist Stelton Colony. Founded in 1915 a few miles from New Brunswick, New Jersey, this small village revolved around a newly built Modern School. The Modern School movement was an anarchist initiative to open schools focusing on self-directed education. They wanted to foster children’s creativity and initiative instead of subjecting them to authoritarianism typical in schools and other institutions. In Stelton, this went was far as the school’s first successful principals helping the kids publish their own newspaper, Voice of the Children.

Nearly half the colonists worked in New York City, so their suburban proximity to the city was important. The decision to originally move from NYC was contentious. Some viewed the move as a retreat from the movement and eventual entry point into conventional society. The decision was cemented after anarchists accidentally exploded a bomb they were constructing in a NYC tenement building, killing four. The atmosphere of danger, repression, and surveillance that followed validated the decision for the Modern School movement to relocate away from the city.

The colony was not a commune in the contemporary sense. The anarchist colonists had no intentions of living off the land. They did not hold property in common, which Hurley argues maintained the colony longer than other secular communes. Individuals owning property, she argues, brought a level of personal investment that kept residents there despite factionalism and conflicts. Attorney General Palmer also held this view after sending agents to spy on the colony during the First Red Scare, leading him to leave the colonists alone.

That said, there was no leadership, and collective matters were voted on. Even children had voting rights. In the 1950s, the colonists were happy to sell homes or rent to Black people, which was unusual for suburbia at the time. The FBI began regular visits again during the Second Red Scare, fearing the anarchists and Black residents were planning a revolt. The colony began to decline in the 1930s due to conflicts over the Spanish Civil War, assimilation of immigrants’ children, and anarchism’s fade from prominence. After 1970, the last holdouts were gone.

Hurley’s next example is Greenbelt, Maryland, a suburban enclave of public housing created by FDR’s leftist adviser Rexford Tugwell. Greenbelt was the New Deal’s experiment with administering public housing for the middle class. It consisted of single-family rent-controlled houses with income ceilings for tenants. Using European architecture, shared plazas existed rather than individual yards, and rowhouses instead of detached structures.

Despite its reputation at the time for being communistic, there were always reactionary elements. Black people were barred, and only nuclear families were given residency. Eventually, business coalitions against public housing pressured President Truman into restricting it to the very poor with his 1949 Housing Act, nixing any similar experiments in the future. Greenbelt eventually became a normal suburban subdivision.

Six Moon Hill and Five Fields were suburban developments designed and inhabited by The Architects Collaborative, a group consisting of the Bauhaus’s founder and his proteges. They believed design could be a tool for building a more egalitarian society. In the 1940s and 1950s, they formed a corporation, bought a parcel of land outside Lexington, Massachusetts, designed houses, and lived in them. To equalize decision-making, they reserved one share of the corporation to each adult resident.

Some of their architectural innovations included small bedrooms meant to nudge people into larger common areas, and kitchens with minimal walls, meant to connect women with what was happening in the rest of the house. There were no fences built between houses, which facilitated children playing together. With Six Moon Hill successful, TAC created a similar suburb called Five Fields, which attracted other intellectuals. Hurley tells an anecdote of a resident staging an annual Shakespeare performance behind her house starring neighborhood children.

Though both developments created pleasant living situations for the residents, they did not change the course of suburban development. Ultimately, the traditional Levittown model won out because the Federal Housing Authority opted to back mortgages for conventionally designed houses due to their higher resale value. Nowadays, the TAC houses sell for roughly $1 million.

Chapter 5 outlines the history of Checkerpoint Square, an intentionally integrated suburban neighborhood created in the 1950s. In order to secure loans for integration, taboo at the time, they had to use orthodox architecture and neighborhood planning.

The following chapter showcases the anti-suburb of Reston, Virginia. Reston was built by a real estate developer inspired to challenge conventional suburbs after motorcycling through Europe. Eschewing isolated yards, he built dwellings around a shared plaza, encouraging residents to mingle. The neighborhood consisted of multiple types of housing, including apartments, townhomes, and detached houses, which facilitated class intermingling. He was part of the “New Towns” movement, where architects and planners attempted in the early Seventies to transform sprawl into satellite cities. He also believed, as many did in the Sixties and early Seventies, that they were verging on a “leisure society” where automation would reduce the workweek to thirty hours or less. Reston was built to maximize the interactions and activities available in this hopeful scenario.

Of course, neither the New Town movement nor thirty-hour work week came to fruition. But the residents still liked the architecture and design. When the main investor, Gulf Oil, fired the founder to streamline conventional suburban development, residents formed a community association to counter their influence. While Gulf tried converting Reston to a traditional suburb, the community association fought back. Among their achievements include a reverse-NIMBY initiative where they successfully lobbied for a homeless shelter to be built in their suburb.

Reston, Six Moon Hills, and Greenbelt were all inspired by urban planner Ebenezer Howard. When the suburbs were just developing in the early 20th century, Howard and other intellectuals created the template for a “Garden City.” Combining what they saw as the best of city and country, this ideal habitat would bring people of all classes into walkable, relatively close living arrangements while also being near nature. Howard wanted to provide good living conditions for people of all classes and for the land of the garden city to be collectively owned. He was opposed to the stark inequalities of capitalism and saw the Garden City as a peaceful alternative to revolution.

Ignoring Howard’s acceptance of class society and property ownership, a hypothetical anarchist society could look something like a Garden City. While rural life can be isolating and cities require domination of surrounding land for food cultivation and extensive division of labor, Garden Cities of varying size could host space for people to feed themselves through permaculture while still facilitating social life. Mass society could be replaced by many overlapping smaller ones.

But Hurley doesn’t seem interested in utopian thinking. Her argument that suburbia can be a site for experimentation seems aimed at architects and planners who design space and change zoning ordinances, not scruffy anarchists. The two examples of people building their own habitats are the Harmonists and anarchists, both of whom begun a century ago or more in pre-suburban environments without strict zoning laws and regulations. The examples in suburbia proper are of middle-class people or richer people who contracted out the building process.

What interest do anarchists have in experimental living? Some of us practice prefiguration, embodying our ideas in order to build a new society in the shell of the old. Collective living and/or permaculture experiments mean to build and tweak workable practices in hope that they spread throughout society. Others simply want to drop out, which may mean living one’s ideas collectively or alone.

Whatever our orientation, experimental living for us in the suburbs would likely embody a DIY ethic excluding the direct involvement of architects and planners. Perhaps we could rent or buy a house and try living intentionally and communally, like many anarchists already do in cities. But if we want to have some say over the design of the space we live in; we need to own it. Unlike with rural land projects, this is usually expensive, especially since many suburban townships are currently competing for real estate’s massive liquid capital by urbanizing and gentrifying.

Building a single, large, multi-story structure that could safely house multiple people is probably outside of our DIY skillset. So, if we were to create our own housing and live collectively, we probably would want to buy a parcel of land and build multiple structures on it. But we are limited in suburbia by restrictions forbidding more than one house per lot and strict standards for homebuilding. Farm animals are often outlawed in suburbs, as are rain catchment systems and many permaculture practices. Neighbors, neighborhood groups, and zoning laws would probably frown upon or halt any efforts to tear up the grass and cultivate food forests. Anything that threatens nearby home values would be resisted by homeowners since their homes are often their primary asset.

Experimental suburban living for anarchists seems difficult unless we can find cheap suburbs with lax zoning laws, or neighbors who don’t care. Perhaps as the suburbs continue to impoverish, it will become easier.

[Shaine · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn’t like this book but found the comparison between Trevose and Levittown interesting

[Jen Bracken-Hull]

Eh. I appreciate the effort to calm down people’s judgement. Reading this right after Lola Milholland’s Group Living was an interesting insight into suburbs as potentially larger group living experiments. Emphasis on potentially.

Things I liked: racial and socio economic analysis (not quiiite class analysis), breaking down binaries (city/country vis a vis land/water) (a mix of both exist in many forms in nature, so if you’re gonna go with a nature metaphor good luck).

Anyway, still funny to me that Daybreak gets a mention. My sister lived there. No thanks.

[lorelei · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting would have been nice if there are more photos since there are already pictures,
I liked the parts about reston and learning something new, very short and sweet, could have been more in depth about the communities

[Erin B · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was definitely well-researched and well-written. The case studies were interesting and informative, although at times I found myself skimming ahead to get to the analysis after reading so many of the facts of the cases. I was under the impression that the book would delve into more contemporary examples of radical, experimental, or non-normative living in the suburbs, and with the exception of the lingering effects of the intended community in Reston, it didn't really do that. I would have loved to read more analysis on what these case studies mean for a way forward, and I feel like the conclusion acted as more of a summary than anything.

[Nathan Shuherk · Rating 5 out of 5]

I haven’t read much on city planning, but this was a great book for what it is. Introductory case studies. Perhaps this was insufficient for people more versed on the subject, but I think this was a great starting point for helping get into the broader spectrum of nonfiction books on housing and urbanization, both historical and modern. Hurley is a great writer and many of the criticisms of the books brevity are fair because I certainly want more - but there’s more out there; this book didn’t need to be a compendium.

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have never lived in a “ticky-tacky” style suburb because of the connotations they carry - but this book is a fascinating reminder that Not All Suburbs fit this dull, lifeless stereotype. The stories the author shares lend some much-needed nuance to the suburban mythos that temper the disdain and shame you might have felt when seeing such a place before.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that I personally will ever leave behind the convenience and excitement of the city. I will just respect some of those communities a bit more for their founding vision, and an even more select few for their continued dedication to building a better human habitat.

[Jared Stewart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hurley gives examples from American 20th century suburban developments that were unique, creative, and radical in their design. Hurley has an illustrative style of writing that really allows you to see the places she writes about and imagine an alternate future of suburbia. Fun and needed perspective!

[Matthew Hall · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fun, short book that details some radical approaches to living, city planning and home design. Some of these experiments have had long tails and unintended consequences, but others offer interesting visions for reforming the various contexts in which we live, work and play.

[Abby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting, intersectional viewpoint on American suburbia. I recommend this read for anyone interested in city planning, or anyone in the NUMTOT facebook group.

[JC · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an extremely fun read. I stumbled upon it at the perfect time, after doing an extensive investigation into my own neighbourhood’s town planner Macklin Hancock and the major influences that informed his work. There was quite a bit of overlap that I found in Hurley’s book including stuff on the garden city movement, the new town movement, Walter Gropius, and Clarence Stein.

There are six little sketches that Hurley composes for this short book, and the first two are sort of utopian socialist communes, something I’m tremendously fascinated by because the intersection of socialist politics and religion is what got me interested in lefty politics in the first place. She gets into the Shakers as well as the Harmonists, who patterned their living on the early church of Acts. What I found to be the most fascinating thing she mentioned was the comments Engels made in 1844 on the New Harmony commune. You can read his full comments here, including some stuff he wrote about Shakers and Unitarians, but I will leave some excerpts from the Engels essay here:

“When one talks to people about socialism or communism, one very frequently finds that they entirely agree with one regarding the substance of the matter and declare communism to be a very fine thing; “but”, they then say, “it is impossible ever to put such things into practice in real life”. One encounters this objection so frequently that it seems to the writer both useful and necessary to reply to it with a few facts which are still very little known in Germany and which completely and utterly dispose of this objection. For communism, social existence and activity based on community of goods, is not only possible but has actually already been realised in many communities in America and in one place in England, with the greatest success, as we shall see.

…Apart from the Shakers, however, there are other settlements in America based on community of goods. In particular the Rappites are to be mentioned here. Rapp is a minister from Württemberg who in about 1790 dissociated himself and his congregation from the Lutheran Church and, being persecuted by the government, went to America in 1802. His followers went after him in 1804, and thus he settled in Pennsylvania with about one hundred families. Their combined fortune amounted to about 25,000 dollars, and with this they bought land and tools.

…In 1815 for various reasons they sold up their whole colony and once more bought twenty thousand acres of virgin forest in the State of Indiana. Here they built the fine town of New Harmony after a few years and put most of the land under the plough, established vineyards and corn-fields, built a wool- and cotton-mill, and became richer with each passing day. In 1825 they sold up their whole colony to Mr. Robert Owen for twice one hundred thousand dollars and set off for the third time into the virgin forest. This time they settled by the great river Ohio and built the town of Economy, which is larger and more handsome than any in which they had previously lived.”

While looking up New Harmony, Indiana, I discovered Paul Tillich’s ashes are interred in a park there, which is named after him. Tillich was one of the more influential theologians for me, himself a socialist and involved with the Frankfurt School while in Germany. Very neat connection. I admittedly got into Tillich by way of Martin Luther King Jr who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Tillich.

Hurley’s second sketch focuses on the Fellowship Farm Cooperative Association in Piscataway, New Jersey, which was a community full of communists and anarchists, which had some really radical self-directed learning within their education system. The commune eventually mirrored some of the tensions between anarchists and communists that became very salient after the October Revolution of 1917. This commune was really fascinating because it was a logical transition from the more self-sufficient forms of utopian communism to a more modern iteration of the 'suburb' in direct antagonism to the metropolitan economic core. Many of the community’s residents had to commute into the city for work. They were a truly working class community, often struggling to survive, yet managed to accomplish some very impressive things. That dynamic of commuting is a truly suburban experience that my family experiences daily.

The first ‘modern’ suburb Hurley gets into is Greenbelt, Maryland, which was a New Deal development sponsored by the FDR administration. Clarence Stein was actually involved in this town plan, and a lot of its collectivist design ideas came directly from Stein’s Radburn development. Stein’s Radburn would also be extremely influential on Macklin Hancock’s Don Mills development in Toronto, and later his Meadowvale and Erin Mills plans in Mississauga. Like Don Mills, Bauhaus design principles also featured prominently throughout Greenbelt, Maryland. The main man behind Greenbelt, Maryland was Rexford Tugwell, who Hurley calls a ‘left-wing economist’. I suppose the political spectrum is all relative and that’s what passes for ‘left wing’ among Bloomberg journalists (jk), but Tugwell was a liberal democrat who was red-tagged by outlandish red scare campaigns. I’m amazed Tugwell has ended up garnering a reputation as a communist, when he never identified as such. He was involved in the Progressive Party, which certainly housed some communists, but mostly fellow travellers, democratic socialists and progressive liberals. Hurley goes into some of the anti-communist hysteria that ended up coming down on Tugwell, and the reputation of Greenbelt, Maryland as a communist neighbourhood, which I found tremendously interesting. There was even an interesting mention of Aaron Copland composing the music for one of the media campaigns promoting Greenbelt, Maryland.

Copland himself had openly supported communist candidates, and as I see it, was more radical than Tugwell. So there certainly was a milieu of radical politics in the midst of it all, which is pretty fascinating. Copland composed the music for the final section of the 1936 film “The City” (commissioned by Catherine Bauer) which featured Greenbelt, Maryland and Stein’s Radburn, New Jersey. While I don’t think anyone was really fomenting a revolutionary overthrow of the American government, there were some interesting radical currents throughout these early suburban planning circles.

The next sketch was on Morris Milgram’s Concord Park neighbourhood in Trevose, Pennsylvania. This was fascinating because I know even among left-leaning town planners, issues of racial segregation and red-lining were not only severely neglected, but sometimes actively embedded into their development plans. Milgram was a Jewish socialist, previously engaged in socialist organizing with the Workers Defense League and expelled from City College for protesting a reception given for Italian fascists. As a town planner, he put a tremendous amount of effort into trying to create a fully racially integrated neighbourhood. He’s a much more interesting figure than James Rouse in my view. In Milgram’s Concord Park, there was an interesting dynamic that emerged where the Black members of the neighbourhood were on average wealthier than the white members because they were refused from purchasing houses in other neighbourhoods on racial grounds, whereas wealthier white homebuyers, did not want to live in a racially integrated community and looked for homes elsewhere.

The fifth sketch was of the communities of Lexington, Massachusetts that Gropius was directly involved in along with other members of TAC (The Architects’ Collaborative). This is something I missed while doing research on Gropius. Macklin Hancock was a student of Gropius while at Harvard and Gropius had an enormous and direct influence on Hancock’s work at Don Mills and Meadowvale (where I live). The idea of architects living in the neighbourhoods they designed sounds like a very Bauhausian idea typical of Gropius, who himself was very influenced by Ebenezer Howard and William Morris. Hurley has a section on Howard in her book. The communities of Five Fields and Six Moon Hill are things I’d like to read more about and to see if Macklin Hancock drew any influence or worked with the TAC in any capacity. Norman Fletcher, a founder of TAC and Six Moon Hill, explicitly mentioned utopian socialism as being a central influence for many of the members of TAC.

Finally, the last neighbourhood discussed in Hurley’s book was the ‘new town’ of Reston, Virginia, deeply influenced by Howard’s garden city principles. James Rossant was the planner behind Reston, and was also a student of Gropius while at Harvard. Rossant had actually worked with Macklin Hancock on a plan for Dodoma, Tanzania. This was part of the post-colonial development in which Tanzania was transitioning into socialism, and Hancock had worked to incorporate some of Nyerere's Ujamaa principles into Dodoma's cluster of villages. Ayala Levin discusses this in her paper “The village within”, and the contributions made by Rossant and Hancock. As for Reston, Virginia, Hurley focuses on Robert Simon, the entrepreneur behind the Reston development, but still makes a lot of interesting comments on the very experimental nature of Reston and its avant-garde architecture which would eventually be abandoned under the constraints of capitalist logic.

I think one of the most important parts of this book is the introduction where Hurley explains that suburbs in a sense have existed for a long time, and have most often been where poorer working class people have lived, in contrast to the picture painted by the Malvina Reynolds song “Little Boxes” popularized by the communist folk singer Pete Seeger. There was a period in which the wealth moved into the suburbs, mostly at the behest of white supremacy and racial capitalism, but the tide is turning back to normal, and the suburbs have increasingly become the homes of predominantly racialized and working class communities once again. That is the experience I have had in the suburbs, particularly a ‘new town’ development in a region in which the South Asian community makes up about half of the population. There’s a lot in this book that I will be returning to because I know there are a lot of connections to be made between the material in this book and the little ‘new town’ of Meadowvale in which I live.

[lina hunt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’d give it a 3.5 tbh. It was really interesting to learn about “radical” suburban experiments, especially the ones close to where I grew up. I didn’t expect so much focus on the architects of the communities in the second half of the book, but it was cool to see how private enterprise tried to fill in the gaps left by bad housing policy.

[Carol · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned so much about suburban experiments and how they evolved and, in some cases, still exist. Hurley visits the places and talks to long-time residents and sometimes to experts or curators of the neighborhoods, and builds this book with layers of theory, research, and personal experience.

[Cailin Pitt · Rating 5 out of 5]

this was a really good read. i've always disliked suburbs, mostly because the vast majority of them feel too cookie cutter and boring. they also have served as a reminder of the places people who look like me weren't welcome in for such a long time. however, it was really cool to learn about the suburbs that were built to address issues like segregation in cities and unwalkable communities. i really enjoyed learning about the New York suburb built by communists and anarchists, as well as the DC suburb inspired by the dense, community oriented cities of Italy. the author's main point is that many people (like myself) turn our noses up at the idea of suburbs, but suburbia is really what we make of it. suburbs can be dense. they can be diverse. they can have thriving communities full of people who interact with each other and spend time outside.

[Rick B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very thought-provoking and well written. Only wish there could have been a comparative analysis of the other "greenbelt" towns of Greenhills, OH, and Greenfield, WI to the results in Greenbelt, MD; as well as a chapter on Columbia, Maryland.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enclavism—the desire to cluster with people who are similar to you—is a thread running through this book. It was a driving force in Economy, Stelton, and in Lexington, and to a lesser degree in Greenbelt, Concord Park, and Reston. It can't be social engineered away. And it does have real benefits: social cohesion (providing a network of support beyond the nuclear family), high levels of community engagement, and often, a more economical, efficient, and fair use of space and goods, through the trading of private space or privileges for a robust commons. The drawback is that insularity can harden into "not-in-my-backyard" exclusion, and that needs to be countered. Local governments, by amending their zoning laws to allow duplexes, triplexes, accessory dwelling units, in-home businesses and corner stores, and small apartment buildings, and by rescinding outdated parking requirements, could make a big dent in inequality.

Today, "suburb" is almost a shorthand for "orderly and conventional community." Maybe they're sort of boring, but lots of people want to find a place to make a sturdy and dependable home. Sounds great, right? Well, that is one reason why if today's American suburbs are radical, it is because they have become (both explicitly and implicitly) bastions of conservatism standing athwart history yelling stop.

Suburbs often work diligently to exclude outsiders from other income brackets through exclusionary zoning. There are many downsides to this strategy, of course. These policies drive up housing prices; they make it harder to get on the property ladder, which hinders income mobility; they stifle innovation and industry by limiting where either can happen; because schools are funded by property taxes, suburbs have become inequality engines; they sprawl horizontally rather than vertically; they require a lot of resources to build relative to row houses or apartment buildings; they reduce walkability and require more driving, sedentary lifestyles, and isolation. For all of these reasons, progressives would do well to think more about housing. And I don't think that many people really like mowing the lawn.

Amanda Kolson Hurley's core argument in Radical Suburbs is that it was not always this way. She offers a short history of six American suburbs that differed from the larger culture. Today, we might loosely code such communities as "communes," a word whose connotations suggest alternative culture communities founded by people who share a common economic, architectural, and urban planning vision. These were homes of avant guard architects and designers and in one case of anarchists.

Despite the sort of people who made up these bastions of alternative lifestyles, Radical Suburbs was never particularly interesting to read. Perhaps AKH is aiming for an audience a bit above my background level, but I couldn't escape the feeling that she's not great at framing the chapters in a way that guides a novice reader through them. These chapters feel more like university essays or position papers, and I kept imagining what this book would be like if it were written by Michael Lewis or Michael Pollan.

Readers who are just beginning to think about housing (readers like me) might prefer Montgomery's Happy City, which covers broadly similar content but in a much more engaging way.

[Brooklyn Attic Books]

A cute little book with a few examples from the early part of the last century of innovative neighborhood/community designs. The chapters don't go into greater detail than a few descriptions of the layout of the neighborhoods/house interiors, and some historical origin stories. The neighborhoods discussed in the book were alternative answers to the suburban sprawl that occurred after the Great Depression and then again continued at an accelerated rate post-WWII.

I can see where the modern day cults/weird religious communities got their start. The ones that are spread throughout the Midwest and Western states we keep seeing documentaries about. It was popular to go forth and make your own way. This is America, the land of the free, after all. You basically just had to get a group of like-minded individuals together and go claim land, or buy it dirt cheap. And setup your community. One community had strange enough customs that celibacy was a key factor in their community.

Unfortunately, the book only lightly touches upon the design and "radical" aspects. And I'm not sure what was so radical about any of these neighborhoods as they have all soared with current market rate prices and other than the fact that they allowed people of different ethnic groups to purchase homes prior to the 1968 Fair Housing Act.

This book was written/published in 2019, prior to the pandemic. As we all, property prices have skyrocketed not only in desirable "garden" city neighborhoods but also in the edges of every town across America. Real Estate has become even more cut-throat than the numbers back in the middle of the 20th century complained about. It seems that real estate prices (the cost of living) has and always will be too high for the general public, yet we keep on keeping on. Don't we?

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is great: Very readable, and yet packed full of fascinating information and insights. The six chapters take you through as many different suburbs, starting with Economy, PA, in 1824, described as a "proto-suburb" and a "stagecoach-suburb" of Pittsburgh. Next we learn about the Stelton Colony, founded in 1915 by Anarchists in New Jersey within commuting distance of New York City. After that, there's Greenbelt, Maryland, a New Deal project not far outside Washington, DC, a far more interesting story than I ever knew growing up in the next county over. Then it's up to the Boston area to learn about developments created by Bauhaus-influenced architects, Six Moon Hill and Five Fields. Chapter 5 is the story of building an integrated suburb outside of Philadelphia, called Concord Park. Chapter 6 is about Reston, Virginia, another place I was aware of without knowing the whole history and ongoing story I learned here. Each story is compelling in its own right, and I enjoyed reading them all together (with the author's intro and conclusion for context). Highly recommended!

[Shauna Sorensen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Suburbia is what we make it.

This is a short book that offers several case studies of experimental suburbs that don’t delve too deep, but still pose interesting questions and inspire optimism.

Without getting into the details of each, I found it interesting how varied groups went about creating their own suburban lives. Several lessons that I took away were that there is the necessity of a social glue, which, in the past might mean god, or currently could mean ecological stewardship or social justice. And while it is difficult, the goal is to balance this social cohesion with the insularity it may provoke, so you can avoid the NIMBY crowd.

This is obviously simplifying a lot of the questions and ideas raised. However, I found this book thought-provoking and especially important as we face current housing crises.

[Brad B · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a suburbanite by necessity rather than choice, I was looking forward to reading Radical Suburbs. Now that I’m finished, I confess, I’m not entirely sure of the book’s intent. It’s primarily about historic events, with very little text devoted to places in their current condition. But the histories are brief snapshots and not enough to give a real sense of the places or the people who influenced them. The book ends up feeling more like an expanded outline. There’s next to nothing in the way of an action plan for residents. By the author’s own acknowledgment, issues like transportation and business, crucial to any urban or suburban development, are largely omitted. And there’s no index! I’m giving Radical Suburbs three stars because what history it includes is interesting, but I would have preferred more depth and more coverage of current communities, along with concrete steps the rest of us can take to bring some radical life to our own suburbs.

[charlie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wish this had included more contemporary examples and that there was a deeper understanding and articulation of how both state and local/municipal legislation impacts development: the author does not have a planning or development background and it really shows. I agree with a lot of the overall points but the focus on historic circumstances that no longer are the case instead of their legacy + these super specific "radical" examples (that were exceptional more so than radical) sort of undermined some of the points in the introduction about suburb demographics! And the recommendations at the end were really facile. In some ways I think I wanted this to be a different book and in other ways I was just looking for a lot more depth than the author could offer. If you know nothing about planning or the history of development in the United States it is probably a more fun read.

[Lee Barry · Rating 3 out of 5]

I live in a radical Reston-like community in a first-ring suburb. Like Reston, it is no longer just a charming bedroom community and is now more of a city with 20+-story hi-rises. For all of the people that live in these types of communities around the country, it's good to know the history to ensure that the original visions and plans don't get lost for the sake of growth. It's not a problem in my community--yet. If one returned here after 20 years they would be shocked at the level of growth. Hi-rises seem out of scale but might make sense in hindsight.

It's interesting that the book does not cite James Howard Kunstler's Geography of Nowhere. The books are similar, although Kunstler's writing is much more acerbic. If you haven't read it, it is highly recommended.

[Andrew Westphal · Rating 4 out of 5]

True to her stated intention, the author showed how a few suburbs *initially* existed as radical spaces. These examples showed that the common perception of suburbs as boring enclaves for moneyed whites does not tell the whole story. In the end, however, several the author’s examples of fringe communities turned into the very thing she refuted: the domain of NIMBYs and (mostly) whites with $1M+ homesites. These cases prove that walkability and strong community dynamics are valuable factors for homebuyers, but it doesn’t exactly show that suburbs continue to be — or can return to being — radical spaces.

[Samuel Nelson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good set of case studies on planned suburban communities, their origins, missions, and outcomes.

Definitely has a somewhat narrow scope, but the author recognizes that. Over it six chapters, you’re introduced to six communities that each tell an interesting example of what a community can look like.

A real treat for anyone in the DMV (like me and the author) as the backend of the book has quite a number of examples from the area.

Would definitely recommend to anyone interested in broadening their idea of what housing can and should be, breaking down “stereotypes” about suburbs, and thinking about what really matter in urban development.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great chronological whistlestop tour of all the suburban typologies that break the nuclear family ticky-tacky mold. From religious communes to top-down planned brutalist developments, the "sub urb" is a diverse development type with a longer history than is often acknowledged.

In addition, special attention is paid to the proven ways some of these radical suburbs have dealt with socioeconomic problems that plague suburban communities today, including race and class based segregation, NIMBYism, culture, and civic services.

[Katya · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was very curious to find out how the suburbs can be something beyond the sprawl where I grew up. The author describes examples of interesting projects but most of them are not exactly scalable. These experiments are interesting but if you imagine a 500k+ population living this way, then the economic and ecological toll becomes obvious. The only scalable example was about the medium density planned development (its name escapes me) which is also how some "cool" suburbs now try to develop. I suppose it would have been more helpful to learn about transit-oriented development.

[DW Rowlands · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was quite an interesting history of six US suburbs (though I feel the first case was somewhat borderline) that were founded for non-capitalist reasons, varying from utopian religious settlements in the 19th Century to post-World War II attempts at racial integration and "New Towns." I mostly read it because it's the only source I know of on the history of Reston, VA, but a number of the other chapters were interesting, and I was surprised to learn of the anarchist "Stelton Colony" in early-20th Century New Jersey near New York City.