I was going to post summaries and reviews of books I am reading for exams. Somehow that got lost in shuffle of a thesis, a commuter marriage, teaching, moving, etc. Well, let’s get this kick-started back up with a summary of Robert Fishman’s Bourgeois Utopias. I’m not going to review this one.

Fishman’s book, a chronological, cross-cultural study of suburbia, takes issue with Kenneth Jackson’s argument that suburbia was a uniquely American creation. In fact, Fishman argues, suburbia was a creation of London bourgeois evangelicals. In the mid 18th century, suburbia became an attractive alternative to urban life for the London bourgeoisie. The dirtiness and license of the city, as well as the cultural ideal of protection of the nuclear family, led Londoners to seek an alternate living arrangement, but one that “had come into existence without overall planning or formal conceptions.” (63)

Ch. 2 Clapham – The residents of Clapham created the first “true suburb” characterized by an “Evangelical domestic ideology” (51), connection to work in London for merchants, and a picturesque landscape. John Nash was the first architect to realize these principles and create a suburban development, per se, in Village Park at Regent’s Park, where the buildings “appear[ed] to be ‘humble places of voluntary retirement.’” (67)

Ch. 3 Manchester – The industrial city intensified the whirlpool effect of bringing people, businesses, etc., closer to the center, but making the center too expensive to live in. This change occurred in the 1830s, when one merchant (Samuel Brooks) converted his townhouse into a warehouse and developed land outside the city for himself and for other merchants. This process was also motivated by class fear, as in London, to a certain extent. Manchester’s twist on suburbanization was the plateau and decline of the textile industry. Rather than invest in mills and other cotton-related companies, merchants invested in suburban land. (91) “As Ruskin understood, the Evangelical virtues of bourgeois suburbia—a sanctified family life in union with nature—had in the context of the industrial city turned into an escape and an evasion. Because middle-class women and their families were safely placed behind the walls of Victoria Park, the rest of Manchester could indeed be turned into a ‘furnace ground.’” (102)

Ch. 4 Paris and the US – The bourgeoisie reclaimed the central city (despite conditions that would facilitate suburbanization) through the authoritarian rule of Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann. He plowed boulevards through Paris and lined them with bourgeois townhouses, providing capital so that developers could afford to do the developing. Suburbanization was not an inevitability. In the United States, there was an early preference for the urban townhouse, but “the loss of that self-confidence which had sustained residence in a disorderly, democratic city” “caused the suburban form to supplant the townhouse among the American bourgeoisie after the mid nineteenth century.” (118-9) The American style of suburbanization, because of Downing, Olmsted, and Vaux, owes its origins to England, featuring “Evangelical domestic ideology and the picturesque tradition of design.” (121) However, particularly with respect to Riverside, “the bourgeois utopia rested on a frighteningly unstable economic base. The bourgeois utopia depended for its survival on market forces that even the bourgeoisie could not control.” (133)

Ch. 5 Philadelphia – “Suburbanization in the railroad era thus strengthened the city, especially the downtown area. Every suburban house meant greater demand for office space, stores, and other facilities patronized by the middle class.” (137) The suburban landscape defined the classic suburb, a collective, “communal” achievement realized by patience on the part of the bourgeoisie. Architects responded to the landscape with a new suburban architecture – colonial revival. An open plan, a renewed mingling of the family, and association with the conquerors of the west characterized suburban architecture of the period. “The classic suburb has thus left a dual legacy. It is first a monument to bourgeois civilization at its most prosperous and self-confident; but it is also a testimony to bourgeois anxieties, to deeply buried fears that translate into a contempt or hatred for the “others” who inhabit the city. (154)

Ch. 6 Los Angeles – The automobile decoupled the suburban house from the central city, unleashing the demand for unlimited residential lots and houses. After building the world’s largest mass transit system, the growth of the region made suburban homes unaffordable to the middle class. Real estate developers and business leaders, as part of the Automobile Club of LA, decided to promote auto transportation instead, opening up all land to development, rather than that clustered along rail corridors. Architecture again followed to provide a small, comfortable suburban house for the middle and working class– the bungalow.

Ch. 7 Technoburb – the periphery has become urban, with housing, jobs, and civic institutions locating outside the city center.

Discuss. I’m interested to see how much Fishman’s book is still taught, as measured by undergraduates landing here by searching “Bourgeois Utopias summary.” William Cronon’s book seems to get a lot of play still, though it was published 15 years ago. Arnold Hirsch’s book gets a decent amount, but there have been so many urban history books that have followed his lead I think other books have replaced his on history syllabi.