ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on three sites in the Seattle region containing large clusters of multi-family housing that contradict conventional notions of suburbs as disorganized and dominated single-family subdivisions. An integral part of postwar development, suburban apartment sites reflect prewar lot patterns, early planning models such as the neighborhood unit, and developer interests. They illustrate how intertwined methods of measurement and cultural frames render invisible their development logics. Using standard geographic units of analysis adopted for analysis and decision-making, for example, apartment clusters disappear from maps. Likewise, they are peripheral to early planning visions of neighborhood and domestic life and were conceived as independent sites with minimal connections to their surroundings. Yet, they link spatially and functionally to retail areas and subdivisions, creating potential neighborhoods, albeit ones with skeletal public infrastructure, and impoverished public spaces and pedestrian environments. Still, they are significant places because of the substantial numbers of people living in them and for what they say about our images of suburbia. All these places could be improved as neighborhoods and communities, but first we need to refine our images of suburban landscapes and the variety of sites within them.