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DESIGN FIRST: DESIGN-BASED PLANNING FOR COMMUNITIES

Figure 2.2 Coolidge Corner, Boston, Massachusetts. Figure 2.3 Riverside, Chicago, Frederick Law This mature suburban centre in Boston thrives around Olmsted, 1869. A curving street sweeps alongside a stop on the city’s elderly Green Line light rail a park towards the local ‘town center’ designed system. (Photo by Adrian Walters) around the commuter railroad station with service to central Chicago.

layout that incorporated detached villas in a the ‘pull factor’ of the countryside and the ‘push picturesque landscaped setting after the English factor’ of the overcrowded industrial cities. The raw fashion (Archer: p. 150). Three years later, in 1850, energy of the Industrial Revolution generated large the American architect A. J. Downing described in population increases in the major industrial cities in his influential essay ‘Country Villages,’ a design for Britain and America, but the concentration of an ideal suburb with a central landscaped park and commercial operations within the urban cores made wide, curving, tree-lined streets. Downing’s concepts, the land values too high and the environment gleaned from travels to many English examples, pre- too polluted for superior residential development. figure several important American suburbs during The poorer classes, with no resources to relocate or to the next 20 years, including most notably Llewellyn pay for suburban transportation, were trapped in an Park, New Jersey (developed from 1853 onwards by inner ring of unsanitary and overcrowded slums within Llewellyn Haskell, a New businessman, and walking distance of the mills and factories at the urban designers Alexander Jackson Davis and Howard core. By contrast, the more affluent bourgeoisie moved Daniels); and Riverside, just south of Chicago (1869) as far from the center as their means and transporta- by Frederick Law Olmsted (see Figure 2.3). tion options would allow, settling in new suburban By the time Olmsted was commissioned to design communities. Here they could enjoy countryside Riverside, the blending of picturesque aesthetics with amenities yet still travel to work in the city with rela- the new conceptual synthesis of city and countryside tive ease. One of the very first American examples of was firmly established as a key planning principle for this new commuter suburb was New Brighton, laid suburban residential development on both sides of out on Staten Island in New York Harbor in 1836, the Atlantic. Riverside, designed with direct rail and bearing a marked resemblance to the resort sub- access to Chicago, promised to provide a better life urb of the same name near Liverpool, , built than the middle class found in the city, with homes four years earlier in 1832 (Archer: p. 153). set amidst attractive landscape. This proved a win- While due attention is paid to the importance of ning combination, and Olmsted’s creation became a English origins and prototypes for the garden suburb, model development and a precedent for innumerable it is important not to underestimate the indigenous subsequent suburbs, influencing design not only in American influences of the New England villages, the USA but also exporting this influence back to and the Jeffersonian ideals of the individual gentle- Britain, the original source of many of its attributes. man farmer and democratic land development. The This suburban impetus throughout the nineteenth American president’s distaste for the city as the prime century can thus be thought of as a combination of venue for American society was well documented, as

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CHAPTER TWO ● CITIES, SUBURBS AND SPRAWL

was his deep philosophical preference for the virtues of country living. Thus the garden suburb, with its rural aesthetic and low density, seemed to embody key attributes of American life. The city could be kept at a distance, and the suburb embodied sound real estate principles – making money by converting cheap agricultural land to desirable residences. For millions of Americans in search of the good life it was, until recently, a near-perfect solution. This evolution of the garden suburb had one other important attribute: it presaged the creation of the Garden City ideal at the end of the nineteenth century that in turn catalyzed much urban and suburban design theory and practice throughout the twentieth century. However, as we have outlined, the romantic suburb was Figure 2.4 , near Liverpool, UK, begun a middle-class phenomenon, and there was another 1888. Soap magnate William Lever employed over important component of the nineteenth-century vision thirty architects in the design of this industrial model village. It is characterized by picturesque groupings of a Garden City arcadia: the development of model of traditional buildings in counterpoint to the long, industrial villages for the working classes. neo-classical that forms the axis of the plan leading Early industrial villages such as New Lanark, to the Lady Lever Art Gallery,completed in 1922. Scotland (1793) Lowell, Massachusetts (1822), and Saltaire in England (1851), illustrated a strain of phil- anthropic concern by industrialists and their archi- tects, and a growing sense of the need for socially responsible planning and urban reform. Other indus- trial villages such as Pullman (1880) outside Chicago, and the English examples of Port Sunlight (1888), (1895) and New Earswick, (1903) all con- tributed to this ideology. The social ideals of nineteenth-century reformers John Ruskin and William Morris were influential in this regard. Enlightened British industrialists Sir Titus Salt, W.H. Lever, and the chocolate magnates – Rowntrees and Cadburys – adopted these ideals in their attempts to improve the desperate conditions of industrial workers. These philanthropists constructed Figure 2.5 New Earswick, near York, UK, Parker and company towns in the clean air and natural beauty of Unwin, 1903. The housing in this model village was the English countryside beyond the ‘corruption’ of commissioned by Joseph Rowntree, a York industrialist famous for his chocolate products, to the city. Salt built Saltaire outside Bradford; Lever provide affordable housing for low-income constructed Port Sunlight outside Liverpool. George workers. Residency was open to all applicants in Cadbury developed Bournville southwest of need, and was not limited to employees of Birmingham; and perhaps most importantly, the Rowntree’s nearby chocolate factory.The housing Rowntrees created New Earswick north of York using layout illustrates the early development of Parker and Unwin’s picturesque composition and spatial designs by Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin (see arrangement. Figures 2.4 and 2.5). The planned communities of Port Sunlight and New Earswick in particular demonstrate a picturesque archi- tectural character in their buildings and an artful layout sharing many of the philanthropic intentions, or at of streets and public spaces. These features, together least, the enlightened self-interest of their British coun- with the reliance upon nearby cities, confirmed their terparts, were composed of well planned but rather places in the lineage of romantic suburban settlements. severe urban dwellings, owing nothing to the growing American examples like Lowell or Pullman, while popular taste for romantic imagery. It wasn’t until

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