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About the Author

Amanda Kolson Hurley is assistant book editor of The Washington Times.

Obras por Amanda Kolson Hurley

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Membros

Críticas

The idea of American suburbia suggests notions of monotony, isolation, conservatism, nuclear families, white people, and a culture obsessed with wealth, privacy, and status-seeking. Living there is typically a non-option for anarchists. Cities tend to have social struggles and radical milieus. Rural areas have been the site of communes. What historical precedents for meaningful life and action have the suburbs given us?

Suburbia’s public image, however, might be outdated. Gentrification has pushed minorities and other poor people out of urban areas, changing the ethnic and class makeup of the suburbs. In 2019, 35% of suburban inhabitants were people of racial minorities, which is close to their percentage in the general population. The number of poor people living in the suburbs surpassed those in cities during the Aughts and continues to rise. Immigrants are now bypassing the cities and moving straight to the suburbs, often living in extended rather than nuclear families.

In her book, planner and author Amanda Kolson Hurley challenges the idea that suburbia is incompatible with experimental life. She lists anecdotes like those above as well as six examples of experiments in the last 150 years where radicals, artists, architects, religious communalists, and others attempted to live their ideas in the American suburbs.

The first group she describes was a mystical sect of celibate, millenarian Lutherans who built some of the many religious-inspired communes in the 1800s. The Harmonists believed Jesus was simultaneously man and woman. They saw sex as a futile attempt to regain wholeness that could only be achieved through the Second Coming, supposedly just on the horizon. They planned to wait for the apocalypse in communal harmony like the original Christians in the Book of Acts. In doing so, they founded three towns in the United States. The final one in Ambridge, Pennsylvania was called Economy.

In Economy, all property was shared communally. Between six and eight Harmonists shared a house, sometimes through no blood relation. They kept factories away from their homes and held civic and market functions in their houses rather than public buildings. Economy flourished for decades, and the Harmonists had high standards of medicine and often lived to an unusually old age for the time. Women were taught to read and given voting rights. While not a proper suburb, its proximity to Pittsburg allowed the Harmonists to get their industrial machinery from and sell their wares to the city quickly using the Ohio River. While inspiring in many ways, the experiment was authoritarian with strict rules. Members were expected to obey the authoritarian leader unconditionally. After decades, the town died due to economic competition from factory production and their celibacy foreclosing the possibility of future generations.

Hurley’s second example is the anarchist Stelton Colony. Founded in 1915 a few miles from New Brunswick, New Jersey, this small village revolved around a newly built Modern School. The Modern School movement was an anarchist initiative to open schools focusing on self-directed education. They wanted to foster children’s creativity and initiative instead of subjecting them to authoritarianism typical in schools and other institutions. In Stelton, this went was far as the school’s first successful principals helping the kids publish their own newspaper, Voice of the Children.

Nearly half the colonists worked in New York City, so their suburban proximity to the city was important. The decision to originally move from NYC was contentious. Some viewed the move as a retreat from the movement and eventual entry point into conventional society. The decision was cemented after anarchists accidentally exploded a bomb they were constructing in a NYC tenement building, killing four. The atmosphere of danger, repression, and surveillance that followed validated the decision for the Modern School movement to relocate away from the city.

The colony was not a commune in the contemporary sense. The anarchist colonists had no intentions of living off the land. They did not hold property in common, which Hurley argues maintained the colony longer than other secular communes. Individuals owning property, she argues, brought a level of personal investment that kept residents there despite factionalism and conflicts. Attorney General Palmer also held this view after sending agents to spy on the colony during the First Red Scare, leading him to leave the colonists alone.

That said, there was no leadership, and collective matters were voted on. Even children had voting rights. In the 1950s, the colonists were happy to sell homes or rent to Black people, which was unusual for suburbia at the time. The FBI began regular visits again during the Second Red Scare, fearing the anarchists and Black residents were planning a revolt. The colony began to decline in the 1930s due to conflicts over the Spanish Civil War, assimilation of immigrants’ children, and anarchism’s fade from prominence. After 1970, the last holdouts were gone.

Hurley’s next example is Greenbelt, Maryland, a suburban enclave of public housing created by FDR’s leftist adviser Rexford Tugwell. Greenbelt was the New Deal’s experiment with administering public housing for the middle class. It consisted of single-family rent-controlled houses with income ceilings for tenants. Using European architecture, shared plazas existed rather than individual yards, and rowhouses instead of detached structures.

Despite its reputation at the time for being communistic, there were always reactionary elements. Black people were barred, and only nuclear families were given residency. Eventually, business coalitions against public housing pressured President Truman into restricting it to the very poor with his 1949 Housing Act, nixing any similar experiments in the future. Greenbelt eventually became a normal suburban subdivision.

Six Moon Hill and Five Fields were suburban developments designed and inhabited by The Architects Collaborative, a group consisting of the Bauhaus’s founder and his proteges. They believed design could be a tool for building a more egalitarian society. In the 1940s and 1950s, they formed a corporation, bought a parcel of land outside Lexington, Massachusetts, designed houses, and lived in them. To equalize decision-making, they reserved one share of the corporation to each adult resident.

Some of their architectural innovations included small bedrooms meant to nudge people into larger common areas, and kitchens with minimal walls, meant to connect women with what was happening in the rest of the house. There were no fences built between houses, which facilitated children playing together. With Six Moon Hill successful, TAC created a similar suburb called Five Fields, which attracted other intellectuals. Hurley tells an anecdote of a resident staging an annual Shakespeare performance behind her house starring neighborhood children.

Though both developments created pleasant living situations for the residents, they did not change the course of suburban development. Ultimately, the traditional Levittown model won out because the Federal Housing Authority opted to back mortgages for conventionally designed houses due to their higher resale value. Nowadays, the TAC houses sell for roughly $1 million.

Chapter 5 outlines the history of Checkerpoint Square, an intentionally integrated suburban neighborhood created in the 1950s. In order to secure loans for integration, taboo at the time, they had to use orthodox architecture and neighborhood planning.

The following chapter showcases the anti-suburb of Reston, Virginia. Reston was built by a real estate developer inspired to challenge conventional suburbs after motorcycling through Europe. Eschewing isolated yards, he built dwellings around a shared plaza, encouraging residents to mingle. The neighborhood consisted of multiple types of housing, including apartments, townhomes, and detached houses, which facilitated class intermingling. He was part of the “New Towns” movement, where architects and planners attempted in the early Seventies to transform sprawl into satellite cities. He also believed, as many did in the Sixties and early Seventies, that they were verging on a “leisure society” where automation would reduce the workweek to thirty hours or less. Reston was built to maximize the interactions and activities available in this hopeful scenario.

Of course, neither the New Town movement nor thirty-hour work week came to fruition. But the residents still liked the architecture and design. When the main investor, Gulf Oil, fired the founder to streamline conventional suburban development, residents formed a community association to counter their influence. While Gulf tried converting Reston to a traditional suburb, the community association fought back. Among their achievements include a reverse-NIMBY initiative where they successfully lobbied for a homeless shelter to be built in their suburb.

Reston, Six Moon Hills, and Greenbelt were all inspired by urban planner Ebenezer Howard. When the suburbs were just developing in the early 20th century, Howard and other intellectuals created the template for a “Garden City.” Combining what they saw as the best of city and country, this ideal habitat would bring people of all classes into walkable, relatively close living arrangements while also being near nature. Howard wanted to provide good living conditions for people of all classes and for the land of the garden city to be collectively owned. He was opposed to the stark inequalities of capitalism and saw the Garden City as a peaceful alternative to revolution.

Ignoring Howard’s acceptance of class society and property ownership, a hypothetical anarchist society could look something like a Garden City. While rural life can be isolating and cities require domination of surrounding land for food cultivation and extensive division of labor, Garden Cities of varying size could host space for people to feed themselves through permaculture while still facilitating social life. Mass society could be replaced by many overlapping smaller ones.

But Hurley doesn’t seem interested in utopian thinking. Her argument that suburbia can be a site for experimentation seems aimed at architects and planners who design space and change zoning ordinances, not scruffy anarchists. The two examples of people building their own habitats are the Harmonists and anarchists, both of whom begun a century ago or more in pre-suburban environments without strict zoning laws and regulations. The examples in suburbia proper are of middle-class people or richer people who contracted out the building process.

What interest do anarchists have in experimental living? Some of us practice prefiguration, embodying our ideas in order to build a new society in the shell of the old. Collective living and/or permaculture experiments mean to build and tweak workable practices in hope that they spread throughout society. Others simply want to drop out, which may mean living one’s ideas collectively or alone.

Whatever our orientation, experimental living for us in the suburbs would likely embody a DIY ethic excluding the direct involvement of architects and planners. Perhaps we could rent or buy a house and try living intentionally and communally, like many anarchists already do in cities. But if we want to have some say over the design of the space we live in; we need to own it. Unlike with rural land projects, this is usually expensive, especially since many suburban townships are currently competing for real estate’s massive liquid capital by urbanizing and gentrifying.

Building a single, large, multi-story structure that could safely house multiple people is probably outside of our DIY skillset. So, if we were to create our own housing and live collectively, we probably would want to buy a parcel of land and build multiple structures on it. But we are limited in suburbia by restrictions forbidding more than one house per lot and strict standards for homebuilding. Farm animals are often outlawed in suburbs, as are rain catchment systems and many permaculture practices. Neighbors, neighborhood groups, and zoning laws would probably frown upon or halt any efforts to tear up the grass and cultivate food forests. Anything that threatens nearby home values would be resisted by homeowners since their homes are often their primary asset.

Experimental suburban living for anarchists seems difficult unless we can find cheap suburbs with lax zoning laws, or neighbors who don’t care. Perhaps as the suburbs continue to impoverish, it will become easier.
… (mais)
 
Assinalado
100sheets | 2 outras críticas | Jun 7, 2021 |
I grew up with stereotypes of the suburbs as bastions of conformity. This book opened my eyes to a rich history of suburban social experimentation. Fascinating, well researched and deftly written.
 
Assinalado
jenhoward | 2 outras críticas | Dec 6, 2019 |

Estatísticas

Obras
2
Membros
67
Avaliação
4.1
Críticas
3
ISBN
8

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