Review Essay: Suburban Disciplines

Keating has written on the practice of local history. See Ann Durkin Keating, Invisible Networks: Exploring the History of Local Utilities and Public Works (Malabar, FL, 1994).

Pierce F. Lewis, "Axioms for Reading the Landscape," in The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays, ed. D. W. Meinig (New York, 1979), 14. On more recent approaches to landscape, see George L. Henderson, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Landscape: For a Return to the Social Imagination," in Everyday America: Cultural Landscape Studies after J. B. Jackson, ed. Chris Wilson and Paul Groth (Berkeley, 2003), 178-99.

See Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, 1980/1984); Henri Lefebvre, "The Everyday and Everydayness," trans. Christine Levich, Yale French Studies 73 (1972/1987): 7-11.

Ann Durkin Keating , Building Chicago: Suburban Developers and the Creation of a Divided Metropolis (Columbus, 1989).

See, e.g., Peter Bacon Hales, Silver Cities: The Photography of American Urbanization, 1839-1915, 2nd ed. (Albuquerque, 2005); Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Matthew Brady to Walker Evans (New York, 1989); Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. R. Howard (New York, 1981).

Various essays in Page and Mason’s anthology on preservation explore the partisan shaping of history. Max Page and Randall Mason, eds., Giving Preservation a History: Histories of Historic Preservation in the United States (New York, 2004).

An earlier version is Ann Forsyth , "Planning Lessons from Three U.S. New Towns of the 1960s and 1970s: Irvine, Columbia, and the Woodlands," Journal of the American Planning Association 68, no. 4 (Autumn 2002): 387-441.

Dolores Hayden , Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000 ( New York, 2003); Robert Bruegmann, Sprawl: A Compact History (Chicago, 2005).

Irving Lewis Allen , "New Towns and the Suburban Dream," in New Towns and the Suburban Dream, ed. Irving Lewis Allen (Port Washington, NY, 1977), 15.

Kevin Lynch, Image of the City (Cambridge, MA, 1960).

Nicholas Bloom offers a more critical treatment of Rouse. See Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Merchant of Illusion: James Rouse, American Salesman of the Businessman’s Utopia (Columbus, 2004). Also see Howard Gillette, Jr., "Assessing James Rouse’s Role in American City Planning," Journal of the American Planning Association 65 (Spring 1999): 150-67.

Ian McHarg, Design with Nature (New York, 1969). Some of McHarg’s writings have recently been collected; see Frederick R. Steiner, ed., The Essential Ian McHarg: Writings on Design and Nature (Washington, DC, 2006).

See Ann Forsyth , "Ian McHarg’s Woodlands: A Second Look," Planning 69 (August-September 2003): 10-13.

See "Reston, Virginia," Simon Enterprises, May 1962; Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Suburban Alchemy: 1960s New Towns and the Transformation of the American Dream (Columbus, 2001), 17-32.

Forsyth does not capitalize the N and U in New Urbanism, and one detects a bit of policing.

Robin Evans, "Figures, Doors, Passages," Architectural Design 4 (1978): 267-78, reprinted in Evans, Translations from Drawing to Building (Cambridge, MA, 1997).

Landscape renderings often used "before and after" views, with all signs of production elided. See, e.g., Humphrey Repton, "A Common Improved in Yorkshire," in Fragments on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1816), 76. See John Dixon Hunt, Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture (Cambridge, MA, 1992).

Archer has elsewhere shown how autonomy and separation drove British settlement ideas in a colonial context. Archer, "Colonial Suburbs in South Asia, 1700-1850, and the Spaces of Modernity," in Visions of Suburbia, ed. R. Silverstone (New York, 1997), 26-54. Also see Anthony D. King, Spaces of Global Cultures: Architecture Urbanism Identity (New York, 2004).

For portrayals of the suburban grounds and lawn as ideological instrument, see Georges Teyssot, ed., The American Lawn (New York, 1999).

"How to Achieve Privacy: The Greatest Privilege of Our Time," House Beautiful (January 1956), cover. The social role of spatial qualities has recently been explored by Sandy Isenstadt, The Modern American House: Spaciousness and Middle Class Identity (New York, 2006).

On women’s and men’s activities outside the home, see Mary Corbin Sies, "The Domestic Mission of the Privileged American Suburban Homemaker, 1877-1917: A Reassessment," in Making the American Home, ed. M. F. Motz and P. Browne (Bowling Green, 1988), 193-210; Margaret Marsh, Suburban Lives (New Brunswick, NJ, 1990); John Stilgoe, Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb, 1820-1939 (New Haven, CT, 1988).

The "intramural" or overly internal focus is borrowed from Paul Mattingly, "The Suburban Canon over Time," in Suburban Discipline, ed. Peter Lang (New York, 1997), 39-51. Also see Kevin Kruse and Thomas Sugrue , eds., The New Suburban History ( Chicago, 2006).

Themes of agency, appropriation, and knowing participation in broader regimes of consumption have also been charted in cultural theory. See, e.g., Jon Fiske, Reading the Popular (Boston, 1989); Daniel Miller, ed., Acknowledging Consumption (New York, 1995).

The transformability of suburban houses is central to Barbara Kelly’s unique study of Long Island’s Levittown; see her Expanding the American Dream: Building and Rebuilding Levittown (Albany, 1993). Andrew Wiese, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (Chicago, 2004).

For an underappreciated essay linking goods and ideas, see Igor Kopytoff, "The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process," in The Social Life of Things, ed. Arjun Appadurai (New York, 1986).