Summer
Books Book
tells tale of 60s reform in suburbia
SUBURBAN ALCHEMY:
1960s NEW TOWNS AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE AMERICAN DREAM By Nicholas
Dagen Bloom Ohio State University Press, 352 pages,
$27.95 |
REVIEWED By ANTHONY B.
SMITH
Reformers are not people usually associated with the suburbs. The
perception is that the burbs are for those who want to isolate themselves
from social problems, settle down, take care of families and enjoy the wonders
of American consumerism.
Yet as Nicholas Dagen Bloom argues in his Suburban Alchemy:
1960s New Towns and the Transformation of the American Dream, not all
suburbs are identical. His study of the new towns of Reston, Va., Columbia,
Md., and Irvine, Calif., reveals a reform movement during the 1960s that
modeled a suburbia beyond the endless ranch homes of conventional suburbs.
Under the leadership of enlightened developers such as Robert
Simon in Reston and James Rouse in Columbia, these towns pursued ambitious
social visions through conscious planning. They organized homes in clusters and
provided village centers intended to foster community and personal interaction.
Further, the towns, particularly Reston and Columbia, made special efforts to
offer mixed and affordable housing, to promote racial integration, to create
new opportunities for women and support the arts.
While the concept and planning of these suburbs came from
progressive developers, Bloom shows how the work of sustaining the reform
ideals of these towns lay with the residents themselves. In myriad ways the
residents of the new towns created vibrant, diverse communities. In Columbia,
they founded a community newspaper. In Irvine they created such civic rituals
as an annual community festival. In all three towns the residents demanded a
greater role in the governance of the communities, insisted on preserving the
original goals of mixed housing, all the while developing cultural institutions
such as galleries and performing arts centers.
Bloom admits that the towns have not solved all the problems of
suburbia -- such as their dependence on the automobile -- but he convincingly
shows how these towns creatively responded to the limitations of much of
suburban life. His study therefore helps complicate an understanding of
suburban America.
Homogenous communities, racial segregation and cultural emptiness
do not represent the only story of suburbia. The historical forces and people
associated with what gets called suburbia are too complex to be
reduced to simple interpretations. Suburban Alchemy reveals one
dimension of the vast reality of suburbia by exploring efforts to address the
suburban dilemma from within suburbia.
Indeed, so preoccupied is Bloom with portraying these suburbanites
as reformers that he leaves out other important aspects of the lives of the
residents in the new towns. For instance, religion is largely marginalized in
his story. This is unfortunate because, at least in terms of Catholics in
Columbia, Md., Blooms theme of the new towns as centers of reform could
have been extended. For, though Bloom doesnt refer to it, the interfaith
worship center that Rouse created for the religious communities in Columbia
gained praise in both America and Commonweal as an experiment in
ecumenism.
It would therefore have been interesting to know to what extent
these Catholics understood their suburbs through the lens of the second Vatican
Councils spirit of reform. Perhaps the reform ethos wasnt
completely generated from within the towns themselves but was fed by larger
realities such as the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) as well as by the
Protestant churches involvement in the civil rights movement.
Another dimension to the reform suburbs that Bloom doesnt
pursue is their place in the transformation of middle-class culture from the
plastic world of Tupperware associated with the older suburbs of the 1950s to
the authenticity and diversity so valued by the educated middle class of the
1990s.
The new towns that Bloom describes may have been one of the early
incubators in recreating middle-class identity around what David Brooks has
called the Bobo-- the person who combines bourgeois commitment to
success with bohemian values of self-expressiveness, creativity and
individuality.
For, as Bloom notes, the new towns of the 1960s and 1970s caught
the attention of liberal, middle-class professionals yearning for alternatives
to the alienating suburbs of postwar America.
But, as Bloom realizes, these new towns, by the 1990s, had also
become communities of the highly educated and affluent. Culturally exciting and
textured these new towns may have become, but one wonders how deeply the basic
struggles for family and home that many Americans continue to face resonate in
such well-intentioned and well-appointed communities.
Finally, as the latest census reveals, many suburbs in large
metropolitan areas are becoming more racially and ethnically diversified.
Diversity is thus now reshaping the suburbs even without the conscious efforts
of enlightened businessmen and residents. It may be that such places where
Hispanics, Asians, African-Americans and their children attempt to claim a
piece of the American dream are the new towns of social change.
Anthony Smith is an assistant professor in the department of
religious studies at the University of Dayton.
National Catholic Reporter, May 17,
2002
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