ABSTRACT
By tradition, the suburb has enjoyed a poor reputation among urban commentators and practitioners in Great Britain and North America; indeed, the examples of derogatory quotes that can be assembled is literally endless. We can read of the spread of suburbia being likened to the spread of the ‘brown rat, ravaging everything before it’.1 The semi-detached British suburban house has been described as ‘perhaps the least satisfactory building unit in the world’,2 with its design being castigated as the ‘neo-Nothing’,3 bought for the ‘social cachet that…[it is] presumed to bring’4 and its ‘repetition’ being held to produce an ‘inescapable monotony of mass’.5 The epiphet ‘mass’ is particularly popular in writings about suburbia, for example, with Robert Sinclair6 arguing that associated with ‘the mass-produced home is the mass-produced man’. Suburban estates, then, are argued to be a failure ‘from a sociological as well as from an aesthetic point of view’.7 They are held to be ‘lifeless, culturally barren’,8 ‘little textbooks of social sterility’.9 ‘Suburbia’, wrote Lewis Mumford, ‘offers poor facilities for meeting, conversation, collective debate, and common action-it favours silent conformity’.10 More worrying still, perhaps, we can read of the dangers of the future city as becoming a glorified suburbia occupied by ‘robot-like human beings, differentiated only by their identification numbers, who live in Levittowns where homes are differentiated only by their street numbers’.11
