Untitled - Centre for Comparative Literature - University of Toronto

community and the dilapidated, devastated wasteland. “Remember,” says the voice-over
narrator of a 1958 promotional fi lm for Denver, Colorado, suburb Broomfi eld Heights, Birth
of a City, “some of the slum areas of today were the suburban hopes of yesterday.” These
“hopes” frequently begin as idealized planned communities, with a place for everything
and everything in its place, and yet they frequently fail, within a short period of time,
often a matter of decades, to live up to their promised ideal. Many urbanists have posited
reasons for this, from contemporary critics of Howard’s and Le Corbusier’s, to Jacobs in
the 1960s. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she argues for the “ubiquitous
principle [which] is the need of cities for a most intricate and closely-grained diversity of
uses that give each other constant mutual support, both economically and socially” (14);
lack of diversity is problematic and eventually fatal for their development. But Jacobs
was far from the fi rst object; John Archer in his recent book, Architecture and Suburbia,
cites Christine Frederick, a consulting household editor for the Ladies’ Home Journal and
other magazines from 1912-1948, writing that “the suburban house [is] so pathetic in
its pretense of an individualism which doesn’t exist. The little gingerbread attempts to
achieve difference are so palpably hollow and unsuccessful” (qtd. in Archer 254). This
“gingerbread-ness” is symptomatic of the institutional collaboration that so offends Jacobs.
She writes:
Extraordinary governmental fi nancial incentives have been required to achieve
this degree of monotony, sterility, and vulgarity. Decades of preaching, writing
and exhorting by experts have gone into convincing us and our legislators that
mush like this must be good for us, as long as it comes bedded with grass.
(Death 7)
The monocultures created by planning committees, where all the houses are grouped
together in one section, all the commercial areas in another, and industry tucked well away
out of sight, have ended up creating an environment more forbidding and terrifying than
many a city street at night. The fragmentation of physical and social interactions, as well
as the growing popularity of suburban gated-communities, leads to a further emphasis on
separation, seclusion, and segregation based on a variety of factors (Archer 300).
Physical and psychological isolation and fragmentation is created by the artifi cial
design of the suburbs with its uniform zoning and social and economic monocultures, an
70 transverse