GEORGE A. GONZALEZ - fieldi

58THE POLITICS OF AIR POLLUTIONinnovations that facilitated this revolution (also see Curcio 2000 and Farber2002). Political factors, however, were just as important in the establishment ofthe automobile as the factors treated by Flink. We saw in the preceding sectionhow the politics surrounding the U.S. trolley helped create a market for theautomobile. Just as importantly, it was a political movement that prompted thedevelopment of the roads and urban planning that made the automobile a practicalreality for urban dwellers. Members of local growth coalitions politicallyinitiated and sponsored the physical and legal changes to the urban milieu thatallowed the automobile to operate effectively in this setting.LAND MANAGEMENT AND SUBURBAN DEVELOPMENTMarc Weiss (1987), in his instructive work on modern urban planning techniques,explains that such techniques were developed by large land developersin order to protect and enhance their large scale housing developments.Weiss points out that “subdividers who engaged in full-scale communitydevelopment ... performed the function of being private planners for Americancities and towns.” He goes on to write thatworking together with professional engineers, landscape architects, buildingarchitects, and other urban designers, residential real estate developersworked out “on the ground” many of the concepts and forms that came tobe accepted as good planning. The classification and design of major andminor streets, the superblock and cul-de-sac, planting strips and rollingtopography, arrangement of the house on the lot, lot size and shape, set-backlines and lot coverage restrictions, planned separation and relation of multipleuses, design and placement of parks and recreational amenities, ornamentation,easements, underground utilities, and numerous other physicalfeatures were first introduced by private developers and later adopted asrules and principles by public planning agencies. (3)Many of the largest and most innovative land developers “did more thanjust serve as innovators for the land planning ideas that were spawned in theearly 1900s, and spread rapidly during the succeeding four decades.” Instead,“many of the large subdivision developers played a direct role in actively supportingand shaping the emerging system of public land planning and landuseregulation” (4). They did so in conjunction with policy-planning groups.Leading examples of such groups include the Home Builders and SubdividersDivision and City Planning Committee of the National Association of RealEstate Boards (NAREB). As Weiss explains, most of those large developers,who he refers to as “community builders,” involved in shaping governmentregulations on land use during the early twentieth century “developed stylishand expensive residential subdivisions and were leaders” of this division andcommittee within NAREB. Significantly,