new visions of suburbia.pdf

Journal of Urban Design, Vol. 14. No. 4, 415–438, November 2009

New Visions for Suburbia: Reassessing Aesthetics

and Place-making in Modernism, Imageability

and New Urbanism

ANN FORSYTH * & KATHERINE CREWE **

* Department of City and Regional Planning, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA; ** Department

of Planning, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

A BSTRACT This paper explores three controversial and large-scale attempts by architects

to build more attractive suburban areas: Cumbernauld in Scotland (key designs

constructed in the 1950s and 1960s), Irvine in California (key designs from the 1960s and

1970s onward), and Poundbury in England (key designs created in the 1980s and built

from the 1990s on). They represent major approaches to the issue of aesthetics and place—

modernism, humanistic imageability and legibility, and new urbanism or the Urban

Villages Movement. The paper distinguishes between several terms relevant in assessing

visual character: objective aesthetics, style, place and satisfaction. It is argued that all

three developments conform to some principles of the visual and psychological aspects of

good design; but these principles differ, resulting in criticisms from those promoting

different styles.

The Visual Character of Suburbia

That suburbs are ugly has been taken for granted by many architects and

journalists. Yet for others—including many residents and some designers—

suburban areas mix convenience and quiet with spaciousness and a green

landscape that is highly attractive. In part this difference in perception is due to

the two groups focusing their attention on different parts of what is a huge

metropolitan landscape. There is a great deal of aesthetic diversity in suburbs.

However, in part these differing perspectives represent real disagreements

about the appearance of the suburban landscape and about how to judge that

appearance. One person’s green haven is another’s monotonous lawn. This paper

explores three controversial and large-scale attempts by architects to build more

attractive suburban areas: Cumbernauld in Scotland (key designs constructed in

the 1950s and 1960s), Irvine in California (key designs from the 1960s and 1970s

onward), and Poundbury in England (key designs created in the 1980s and built

from the 1990s on). The underlying philosophies of the three cases are different,

leading to different visual characters reﬂecting modernism, imageability and

New Urbanism or the Urban Villages Movement. The paper assesses the three

Correspondence Address : Ann Forsyth, Department of City and Regional Planning, Cornell

University, 106 West Sibley Hall (mailing), Ithaca, NY 14853, USA. Email: forsyth@

cornell.edu

1357-4809 Print/1469-9664 Online/09/040415-24 q 2009 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/13574800903265470

416 A. Forsyth & K. Crewe

places according to important sets of visual criteria from their periods. It ﬁnds

that all are well designed according to one or another prominent and widely

agreed upon set of design criteria, but that they represent different styles, some of

which are not to the taste of designers from a different period or school of

thought. Proponents of each type talk past each other due to these differing

stylistic preferences and this focus on style is muddying debates about visual

quality. 1 This distinction between aesthetic quality and style is an important one

and a lack of clarity on this issue has confused a number of discussions about

suburban design.

Differences in taste between members of the design ﬁelds are not the only

areas of disagreement. Many authors have also pointed out different styles also

have varying levels of expert, public and resident acceptance (Nasar & Kang,

1989; Nasar, 1998; Stamps, 1999; Gifford et al. , 2002). That is high visual quality

judged in expert terms and resident satisfaction or popularity are not the same, as

is also demonstrated in the cases in the paper. Cumbernauld, particularly its

brutalist town centre, has been most criticized by non-designers, while Irvine and

Poundbury have received heavy criticism from within the design ﬁelds for their

conservative styles.

The case studies draw on a number of sources, including site visits to the new

towns that were also photographed, published assessments, unpublished reports

and dissertations, archives, approximately 50 interviews with residents and

planners 2 and reviews of other data such as local media and websites. These

sources provide both core data and context for this more conceptual discussion of

visual character and quality.

The Problem: Suburban Ugliness and Placelessness

There are several ways in which people design new developments to be an

improvement over more typical suburbs. For example, suburban areas might be

designed to maximize the efﬁcient provision of public or social services or with

the hope of promoting social interaction or social equity. Alternatively, suburban

areas may be planned to support transit use, lighten an ecological footprint, or to

foster economic development. Developments created according to such

principles may be attractive and distinctive. However, the cases highlighted in

this paper have as their main focus the improvement of aesthetic dimensions of

physical form.

The period since World War II is the period in which suburban development

expanded around the globe, fed by population growth and diffusion of

motorized transportation. Such rapid urban expansion has been criticized for a

variety of social, ecological and ﬁnancial ills (Whyte, 1956; Gordon et al. , 1960;

Friedan, 1963; Real Estate Research Corporation, 1974). In addition, suburban

development has been attacked for its aesthetics—seen as monotonous, bland

and tasteless. Indeed, one book on suburbia written by an architect in the 1960s

was simply titled The Australian Ugliness (Boyd, 1960; Blake, 1964; Kunstler, 1994;

Duany et al. , 2000). Many of the most vocal critics have been elite architects and

other cultural commentators criticizing middle class and lower-middle class

taste; few have criticized elite suburbs for aesthetic reasons (Bruegemann, 2006).

However, debates did not stop at criticism of existing developments, and

instead a number of alternative planning and design approaches were proposed

New Visions for Suburbia 417

and even built. There have been several generations of these ideas including the

following styles or movements:

. Modernism : Taking advantage of the post World War II building boom in the 1940s

and 1950s, a number of modernist designers hoped to create a more

contemporary architecture in new towns and in suburbia. This tradition ranged

from grandiose designs such as Brasilia to the more human scale of Cumbernauld

in Scotland or Vallingby in Sweden (Sert, 1973; Holston, 1989). Some of the later

postwar modernism was inﬂuenced by such approaches as townscape that

emphasized the human experience of place, if from a visual perspective as

interpreted by highly trained architects (Cullen, 1961; Klemek, 2007).

. Imageability/Legibility within Humanism : By the 1960s and 1970s dissatisfaction

within Modernism and outside it led to more nuanced but also diverse

humanistic approaches, drawing on work such as that by Kevin Lynch and

Christopher Alexander (Lynch, 1960; Alexander et al. , 1977; Southworth, 2003).

While not actually called Humanism at the time, and sometimes seen as late

Modernism, this was part of a wave of work that looked at how cities actually

functioned, that examined how residents actually experienced the city, and that

included such inﬂuential analyses as that of Jane Jacobs (Jacobs, 1961). Many

developments built on this thinking—from 1960s Columbia, Maryland, to 1970s

Village Homes in Davis. The current paper examines Irvine, California, that

drew heavily on the early work of Kevin Lynch in Image of the City (Lynch, 1960;

Irvine Company, 1972a, 2002; Forsyth, 2005). That is it represents one subset of

this movement, focused on imageability rather than, say, diversity, human scale

or vitality (Lynch, 1981). There are of course many other designs that explicitly

draw on this tradition, although relatively few large-scale planned commu-

nities. An exception is False Creek, in central Vancouver that drew on the work

of Christopher Alexander (Vischer, 1985, 1986).

. New Urbanism/Urban Villages : By the 1980s suburbanization had been in full

force for decades and some parts of the postmodern design movement

proposed not just tinkering with Modernism but radically restructuring or even

rejecting it. Commencing in the 1980s, but coming to prominence in the 1990s,

the New Urbanist movement of North America and the urban village

movement in Europe tapped into these professional debates and also popular

dissatisfactions with conventional city layouts, proposing a return to the urban

designs of the early automobile, or even the pre-automobile, period (Kunstler,

1994; Duany et al. , 2000; Leccese & McCormick, 2000; Neal, 2003). This

movement attracted prominent architects and journalists, but unlike Modern-

ism or Humanism, architectural proponents of this approach are relatively

marginalized from the elites of their profession (Rowe, 1997). Instead,

architectural elites in this period became increasingly captivated by the design

possibilities of radically new materials and construction technologies while

New Urbanists and the urban village movement largely promoted a more

traditional urban structure and vernacular designs.

Design Criteria

Assessing whether these approaches or others provide an improvement in

suburban design is a complicated topic. Each of the three approaches above—

Modernism, imageability, and New Urbanism—uses different design approaches

418 A. Forsyth & K. Crewe

with different criteria for judging success. To judge a design from one approach

using assessment tools or criteria from another is revealing, but may not actually

measure the issue of quality as such.

In work evaluating responses to places, authors often distinguish between

objective and subjective aesthetics; and between formal and symbolic models of

aesthetic preference (Ataov, 1998, p. 241). Objective models focus on the

‘environment itself’. Ataov (1998) describes two types of models. The ﬁrst is a ﬁne

arts perspective, where formal artistic qualities (e.g. proportion, scale and

complexity) are judged by experts. A second set of models, less relevant to this

paper, relate to lay reactions to natural environments reﬂecting human evolution.

Subjective theories are more concerned with ‘meanings and feelings’ evoked by

physical features—some of these meanings are individual and some shared by

social groups (Ataov, 1998, p. 242; Moore, 1979; Lang, 1987; Nasar, 1994; Hubbard,

1996). These broad distinctions are dealt with in more detail by examining four

clusters of concepts that are ﬁrst outlined then described in more detail. 3 This

provides a language for examining how the three movements judge visual quality.

. Aesthetics is the study of taste and value (worth or importance). One type of

value is beauty or sensory pleasure. ‘Objective aesthetics’ involve expert

judgements of physical qualities (Ataov, 1998; Bullock & Trombley, 1999, p. 12).

(In contrast, much writing on aesthetics from the perspective of psychology

examines lay reactions to places.) The term ‘objective’ relates to the role of

experts, but experts can have different underlying theories of what are good

aesthetics, and the ﬁeld of philosophical aesthetics is notorious for its theoretical

diversity (Adorno, 1997; Isaacs, 2000). However, in urban design a set of core

principles such as complexity, scale and enclosure provide something of a

common expert language (Ewing & Handy, forthcoming).

. Style is a way of doing things that can be characteristic of a particular group or

period, a manner, such as a style of writing or a style of building; it can also

connote fashion. Styles conform to rules (Rapoport & Hawkes, 1970). Styles are

intimately related to the issue of ‘taste’—the capacity to appreciate, discern,

perceive and discriminate, as well as a preference or liking. A signiﬁcant

literature ties taste to social position (Gans, 1974; Bourdieu, 1984). Thus, one

expert may judge the physical qualities of a building according to the principles

of one style, and another expert may use the principles of a different style,

reﬂecting their different tastes.

. Place is a complicated term with many meanings, however, in dealing with the

sense of place it “connotes the myriad values, beliefs, feelings, hopes and fears

the human beings attach both individually and collectively to certain

settlements, regions, environments and landscapes” (Bullock & Trombley,

1999, p. 652). ‘Place’ denotes an emotional connection which is broad, but may

include sensory experiences.

. Satisfaction and popularity are typically related to positive lay (not professional)

perceptions. ‘Satisfaction’ relates to the ﬁt for human activity and the fulﬁllment

of needs, and is exempliﬁed by the ﬁeld of environmental psychology and the

practice of post-occupancy evaluation (Cooper Marcus & Sarkissian, 1986;

Cooper Marcus & Francis, 1998). While the psychological study of aesthetics

looks at many different responses, this paper focuses on positive ones—popular

characteristics, those that are admired, accepted, liked or sought after.

New Visions for Suburbia 419

These four clusters of concepts, are called, in order: ‘objective aesthetics’, ‘style’,

‘place’ and ‘satisfaction’.

The three design approaches all deal with these dimensions in some way,

although not all receive equal emphasis. In order to analyse these dimensions in

relation to suburban design, this paper selected three key documents from the

design movements outlining design criteria or principles reﬂecting visual issues.

The three sets of principles were either widely agreed upon or authored by

signiﬁcant ﬁgures or both. These are described below then related to the three cases.

Modernism: Athens Charter

The Athens Charter was based on discussions held in 1933 at a meeting of the

International Congresses for Modern Architecture (CIAM) held on a cruise

between Marseilles and Greece. However it was not published until 1943

(Sert, 1973, p. vii; Le Corbusier, 1973). The 1933 cruise was the fourth meeting

of the congress, dealing with the design of cities. In preparation members

developed case studies of 33 cities mostly from Europe (Sert, 1973, pp. vii – x).

While Modernism evolved over time and had diverse voices, the Athens

Charter provided a reference point for the movement and also dealt with the city

and not just the building. As Sert (1973) explained in his foreword to a 1973 edition

of the Athens Charter:

It is, in many ways, incomplete judged by today’s standards. It does not

deal deeply enough with economic, sociological, and ecological factors

and with legal implementations; it is very much a product of architectural

thinking, of a Congress composed mainly of architects. The principles

outlined in this charter have, nonetheless, had considerable inﬂuence

(good and bad) on much of the urban design work done since the last

world war by architects and city planners. (Sert, 1973, p. x)

The Charter itself is composed of 95 statements, each published with an additional

paragraph of explanation. Some statements are observations or ‘generalities’ and

others are requirements for new designs. It is a vision of top-down local and

regional planning that deals with the coordination of what it terms habitation,

leisure, work, and trafﬁc—the main uses of land in a city. It has a social conscience

based on individual biological/psychological needs balanced with collective

interests. The Charter advocates human proportions as a key base for design

(Art. 76) but is also enamoured with the potential of new technologies

(e.g. advocating separated roads with grade separated intersections) (Art. 61,

Art. 64). Physically it sees a city where dwellings have access to light and air,

proposing the concept of towers in the park, to help reduce or ameliorate the super

densities of some of the early 20th century cities that the CIAM members had

studied. The CIAM principles also propose separation of uses, maintaining

accessibility through new forms of trafﬁc rationalization and hierarchy. The Charter

sees distributed access to green views and athletic recreation as important.

Building would be in contemporary style: in one of the most ﬁrmly worded

propositions the Charter states:

The practice of using styles of the past on aesthetic pretexts for new

structures erected in historic areas has harmful consequences. Neither

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