Diagnosing Suburban Ruin

Abstract

In his critical writings on suburban development in the years after World War II, Lewis Mumford routinely denigrates brand-new built environments as a species of “ruins.” The present article traces the evolution of this trope through a series of Mumford’s encounters with inchoate suburban fringes on either American coast—first with New Jersey and the outer boroughs of New York City, then across an extended relationship with Northern California—to make concrete and reperiodize what has seemed to many historians a detached, offhand, and uniquely postwar polemic. It also reconsiders the philosophical genesis of Mumford’s critique, situating his anxieties about the putative “formlessness” of most suburban environments within an eclectic vitalist tradition that coexists uneasily with the orderly organicism to which he is usually assigned. Through the case of Mumford’s ruins, we can reexamine the contours, and then some of the afterlives, of the wider declensionist “suburban myth.”