AMERICAN DREAMSCAPE: The Pursuit of Happiness in Postwar America

Another book about suburbia? They’ve been pouring off the presses lately, in a torrent of vituperation about the evils of sprawl, the depravity of automobile culture, and the sterility of suburban life. But this book is different. Martinson, a city-planning consultant and longtime suburbanite, has the novel idea that the 140 million Americans who live in the nation’s suburbs are not all fools.

All good planners are first of all good social observers, and Martinson offers the rare planner’s portrait in which suburbanites will recognize themselves. He points out that most of the vituperation comes from drive-by critics who glimpse suburbia only fleetingly and through an urbanist windshield. Accustomed to the more formal, structured form and life of the city, they see a wasteland of "visual chaos" and social isolation in the hinterlands, while overlooking the diversity of suburban experience and the social and community life that suburbanites weave by picking from geographically far-flung choices. At bottom, Martinson believes, the sprawl critics’ critique represents one more battle in the venerable war between cosmopolitan "gentry" and the workaday yeoman class.

He mainly has in mind the New Urbanists, the suburbia critics whose photogenic new communities (such as Seaside and Celebration in Florida) and canny arguments for an updated form of 19th-century town planning have made them darlings of the national media. (See "The Second Coming of the American Small Town," by Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, WQ, Winter ’92.) The New Urbanists rightly note the absurdity of zoning laws that make it virtually impossible to build anything like an old-fashioned town. But they have not been content to offer their ideas as just another choice for how to live; they insist that only a New Urban America will do.

The critics’ various plans for remaking suburbia can be summed up in one word: centralization. This means denser, more urbanized communities, more mass transit, and no new roads. Martinson thinks the critics are blind to the powerful momentum favoring decentralization and to the preferences of suburbanites themselves. The suburban backlash against sprawl is a response, not to decentralization, but to "the congestion and disorder that seem to accompany rapid growth," he writes. "Becoming more like a dense big city— which is many suburbanites’ very definition of congestion and disorder—is the last thing" they want.

What they do want is a more natural environment, which to Martinson suggests paying more attention to the larger landscape of suburbia, not just by preserving open space but by working to create a distinctive sense of place in each community. The germ of such an approach lies in the work of the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed some of the nation’s early suburbs. But Martinson notes that, with only a few exceptions such as Ian McHarg, most designers disdainfully turned away from suburbia after World War II. What will entice profit-conscious developers to seek out people like McHarg? Won’t regional planning schemes be needed to shape the larger landscape? Martinson doesn’t say enough about these and other questions. But he has seen into the heart of his subject and pointed the debate over sprawl in the right direction.

—Steven Lagerfeld