The Decline of the American Dream - Book Report/Review Example

SUBURBAN NATION: THE RISE OF SPRAWL AND THE DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN DREAM” 17th April, 2007 “Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream” composed by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck, three well-known architect-planners, is one of the best-selling books which centers itself on the thoughts, ideas and philosophy of livable communities. This book points out two modes of urban growth such as the traditional neighborhood and suburban sprawl, pragmatically polar differences in functionality, appearance, and characterization, influencing the manhood in distinctive fashions. The authors outline the history of suburbia and how it has become converted into a problematic issue, eventually exploring ways to enhance neighborhoods by means of step-by-step strategy. The book, to its credit, is not a mere anti-sprawl denunciation, the genre it describes an ardent litany of information, diagrams and esoteric history, accordingly receiving readers’ attention. The book focuses on the malfunction of planners and architects to sustain the association between policy, design as well as aesthetics, which essentially triggers conventional neighborhood and towns such as Georgetown, Coral Gables, and Beacon Hills. The traditional neighborhood encompasses the basic structure of European colony on this continent during World War II, from St. Augustine to Seattle. It maintains as a significant part throughout the history of manhood to be the central prototype of tenancy in the remote areas of United States. The traditional neighborhood as structured with varied population consisting of mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly communities, may form the shape of village or may be grouped together to form towns or cities, leading to a continued form of development. This eventually permits into settlement of the continent without ruining the country or bankrupting the countryside throughout the procedure. Suburban sprawl, in practice representing the standard North American prototype of development, avoids historical standard of understanding and experience. It is a discovery, envisaged by planners, architects and engineers and endorsed by its producers in the huge “sweeping aside of the old” happening after the World War II. Contrast to the model of traditional neighborhood developed purely as a result of human needs; suburban sprawl actually acts as an artificial system to be put on a pedestal. The essential ingredient of the focus of the preponderance of “Suburban Nation’s” consideration is aesthetics, inclusive of rationality, consistent and comprehensive form of development. The authors primarily focus on the theme of the “American Dream” representing the quality of life as pleasurable, pleasant and suitable, the model of suburban sprawl actually failed to persuade that particular objective due to the separation among the land using within the framework of modern suburbia. Individuals within the community are spending an immoderate amount of time with their materialistic objects, especially cars in the context of transportation, whereas the young and the aged find themselves not being empowered and dependent on their parents and children for transport. The habitants of inner city find themselves separated from the modern trend of culture, management, administration and societal framework as number of jobs and services are left behind from their acquirement. The authors primarily argue that the objective to attain the idealized framework within a suburbanite can only be achieved if the public administration can be organized in such a manner so that most of the daily needs can be acquired through walking distance. Throughout the book, the authors explain the conflict of our development of suburban sprawl primarily centered for cars and not for the individuals, whereas, they declare that the plan comprising the pedestrians and inhabitants into consideration to make the byproduct more livable. However, the book is also focused on a positive perspective by ascertaining that the suburban sprawl being a North American phenomenon is actually a dynamic form of development which will be changed in the course of time as the authors put the references on America’s reinvention in every fifty or sixty years. The center of attention of the book is summarized with the problems of suburbia and to find out the solution of this problem. The authors essentially coin two sets of problems. Firstly, the description of the factors that contribute to the problem of suburbia and secondly, the patterns through which the suburbs are planned. The aim of the book is thus to highlight the interrelation between these two sets of problems and the undeviating inference in order to address the problem in concern by using appropriate urban design. As mentioned in the book, the suburbs are not actually the known prosaic axioms of fiction and journalism, transforming the inhabitants into disastrous, unhealthy and hazardous castaways. The authors stress on the difficulties associated with the modernism of suburbs primarily altering the American dream through isolation, segregation, wastage of resources and disruption in our esthetics primarily by extrication of land using and pandering to abundance of cars. The authors evidently accuse the planners for being responsible for the problem. The bureaucratic planners, architects and engineers allocated zoning and roadway homogeneity to facilitate ordering urban pattern rather than the other way around, promoting misguidance on federal policies sponsored lands as well as auto-consumption, and the space-devouring automobile as unjustly classified over other modes of transportation. The authors essentially put the focus on the distortion of ideal American dream into American suburbs characterized as the nonsensical, inhumane disaster is not organically formed rather the planners made it to happen. The authors portray the solution by paying their attention on the neighborhood design strategies. Their proposals primarily support the theme of residential areas with the fit and finish of the small New England or southern towns, inclusive of commercial zones within walking distance resembling more like a main street rather than office park or development of narrower plane. The crucial explanation is to imitate the “traditional, organic” structure of pre-zoning America. To support their own ideologies, the authors mentioned few specific-built structural form of Alexandria, VA, Charleston, NC along with examples from their own projects which, according to them, look and feel much better. The authors hence, prefer to define the best possible implementation as the wholesale rejection or replacement of traditional zoning codes by means of put a master plan into practice which is inclusive of architectural restrictions, indicating the corporeal visualization of the city. As relevantly in the support of authors’ arguments, the statistics mentioned in the book specifically illustrate that the majority of the Americans are unwilling about sprawl rather their preference is inclined with old neighborhoods over new subdivisions, they are more enthusiastic about getting more public transit in preference to more lanes of highway, they are more focused about pining for the “good old days” fabricated with tree-lined streets and corner shops. While answering to the eventual development of sprawl, the authors keep their focus on the modernist aesthetics that represent the style of post war architectural design and planning, the phenomenon known as neotraditionalism, as the authors called it. The initial reason behind the supporting developmental phenomenon incorporating the sprawl’s seductive minimalism, consisting of minimal quantity of homogeneous components arranged in any order. As per the authentication of review of these components is concerned, these can be analyzed individually, considering their independent occurrence whatsoever. The predominant feature of sprawl includes the exclusive segregation of each component; however, they are adjacent to each other. The urban planners, mostly influenced by sophisticated statistical and modeling technologies primarily built up during the war, in association with architects, mostly focused on the bookish technical knowledge and rarely focused on inherent human nature and necessities, developed the whole city by taking few key words like “drive hours” and “turn radii” into consideration, eventually gave birth to a pseudo structure not actually synchronized with human’s basic needs. Quite evidently, according to the authors, the inhabitants actually got stuck into the world of sprawl where the continual increase in the rate of sprawl actually threatens our being, our environment, our health as well as our general sense of community as a whole. In essence, the authors consider the last fifty years of urban planning as a deviation in the development of the urbanized cities of America. In contrast to this of incidence, the turn-of-the-century planning movements inclusive of City Beautiful movement as well as the Progress Era movement have produced the adorable and architecturally advanced urbanized landscaping as implicated in post-war planning along with its articulation on coherent, statistics-driven design, lacking the perspective of both the humanistic as well as aesthetic perceptions central to its forerunner. Public Administration and Enhancement of Public Value into Practice According to the literary meaning, public administration can be defined as the science of implementing policy. In the perspective of moral task, public administration can be described as an association of practicing the public welfare by means of creating civilized society and social justice. From the viewpoint of federal administration in the USA, public administration can represent the same weight as bureaucracy. In the book, the authors explain how gradual and subtle changes in city planning as well as zoning regulations followed by World War II influencing our living atmosphere eventually affects our social as well as cultural being including an individual’s state of mind, physical state, quality of life, outlook, societal interaction, educational success, crime rates, property evaluation, pollution, transportation planning in essence of putting a special emphasize on urban design. This book critically examines the interrelation among our physical environment and social processes and finally depicts as interlaced with each other that we take the relationship for granted. In that aspect, this book is truly an intelligent reflection which prompts its reader to review the concept of “community” in the mirror of considering the insensible approach of America, as illustrated by the authors, encapsulating the theme of engagement in mindless, self-devastating ‘sprawl culture’ by virtue of implementing nonexistent planning as well as social engineering to a significant extended period of time. The book can essentially be considered as a milestone in evaluating moral sense and public value while the authors of the book argue on the topic that suburbs have problems, and bringing forth some noteworthy information in regards to traffic accidents and road design. Essentially for quantitative analysis, the adolescents and children die each year as a result of road accidents is quite a prevalent phenomenon of suburbanization instead of practically acquiring healthy, beautiful, livable communities as such in ideal framework. Apart from that, the obvious cause of increasing rate of committing suicide or suicidal attempts primarily stemmed as a filtration of estrangement, isolation, autonomous, monotonous homogeneity within communal setup, unaffectionate subdivisions ignoring the significance of organic human attachment. As described by the authors, the suburbanization is clearly introducing a boring and dependent existence in essence of centralization of civic culture residing at the shopping mall as well as on the wheels becoming the key component of citizenship, integrating the Minivans symbolization of the downright dependency of children on their parental figures almost in every aspect of mobilization and activity. Without the transit, the children become chiefly dependent on television, leading to a squalid buffet of putrefying the cultural norms including the development of a pseudo-culture essentially governed by the lack of autonomy, critical public life, threatened over self-esteem and an understanding of real culture lead the adolescents to develop anti-social behaviour, suicidal tendency and ego-centric attitude towards to the outside world. The authors also put a clear quantitative framework about the amount of money spent on road network in practice compared to other modes of transit. The book is progressed with the theme of pre-war scenario which with entirely stipulated with the combination of a typical traditional neighborhood setting inclusive of farms, cities and small towns, which predominantly represented mixed-use and mixed-income economical structure, leading to a mutual interaction with diversified group of individuals on daily basis. In the post-war phase, the scenario gradually changing with an inclusion of the homogenized suburbs essentially a representation of orderly, friendly, clean as well as less crowded atmosphere. This idealization eventually raises the enactment of new zoning regulation with an elimination of mixed-use and mixed-income neighborhoods along with placing a greater dependence on private automobiles in spite of mass transit which in practice leads to a dedication towards lots of parking zone and roads. As a result, millions of Americans moved into the suburbs over the subsequent decades, consequently producing a negative impact on the society as a whole. The authors criticizes with plenty of examples by mentioning the objective of utility to its practical use such as residential and commercial buildings rarely used throughout the day, an exploitation of increased consumption of energy in these under-utilized buildings, wealth as a separator of American societal framework, physical health problems as individuals spend lots of time driving rather than walking, reduced rate of civility as individuals spend more time transiting alone through car rather playing their role as a pedestrian, increased rate of divorce as a result of spatial as well as temporal differences among spouses. This book is an excellent reflection of the influence of sprawl in association with suburbanization actually declines the required time for civic participation and family, mutual attachment among family members and re-evaluated with property or materialistic prices, which vastly regulates the business policies, tax, as well as location of the academic sectors, eventually leading it tougher for each successive generation to afford a home altogether. The book clearly synthesizes the role of public administration as one of the significant fields of social science in order to create a quantitative, factual pragmatic examination of the wrongs in America and its corresponding solution. Clearly and evidently the book is a genuine manuscript which explains the interconnection between the potential hazards associated with the progressive development of suburbs in America and the bureaucratic administration in the perspective of societal value and public welfare. The essential theme of the book is to make the reader aware of the public value not only in terms of the requirement of appropriate treatment of suburb sprawl in general, but also to think and re-think on the development of the surrounding environment by putting a keen eye on the differences among the patterns of development to encourage and the patterns to oppose. However, the external outline of this informative book is primarily based on architectural framework, but the intrinsic sense of development of the book deciphers the idea of modernistic societal network in terms of public value and public administration by virtue of spreading the message that the inherent search of human is for a belongingness within a community, not within a mere collection of houses located as cul de sacs. Their belief essentially extends considering the supremacy of authentic design and pertinent planning to the right to entire social malfunctioning as the grain of salt; certainly the opposites can result in catastrophic effect. The authors essentially put emphasis on the cascading layer of well-intended and disjoined regulations that is implicated the condition of an individual is practically within, extensively illustrates the circumstance incorporating that the government regulation and lack of community involvement at the macro level are in practice responsible for causing the problem, leading to an immense conflict to delineate the solution as a repurpose of participation of government regulation as a mode opposed to a successive expansion. Hence, this book is not a mere manifestation about the extension of sprawl rather it is an illustration of the consequential decline in community in terms of public participation, which consequently formulize the solution as the strategic development of traditional neighborhood. The practical involvement in terms of practicing public administration are sensibly elucidated in the book with the essence of certain practical key components for purposive development in true sense, which, according to the authors, includes – Restrain from cul de sacs as well as from winding streets and wide streets turning filtration, that are particularly attribute to the road accidents by enhancing speeding up of automobiles. Make available the parking lots primarily to the rear of the buildings along with pedestrian-friendly parking-to-shopping passageways as seen in the shop windows. Develop mixed-income residential area representing diversified community. Make an evenhanded homogeneous combination of businesses, shopping malls, recreation as well as public services so that those can be accessed within walking distance, leading the olds and children not being scrupulously dependent on others for transit. Encourage construction of multi-point street connection in association with neighboring developments in order to minimize the reliance on feeder roads. Construct narrow joint streets along with parallel parking space in order to regulate traffic as well as make the pedestrians satisfied while moving from one place to another. Encourage construction of diversified patterns of houses in close proximity incorporating apartments above commercial area along with subsidized housing prototype which is hypothetically stylistic as to the rest. However, the some of the excellence of ideas somehow is not viable in terms of considering it as illegal in current context of sprawl-induced planning and zoning ordinances as well as there is a noticeable resistance to the authority incorporated into regional planning essential for encouraging these genre of standardization. The fascinating part of the book is of course its ideology to provide an apparent solution to the proposed problem as the introduction of the old model of the traditional neighborhood integrating the layout not built as a “collector road” but as interlocked with street networks facilitating walking distance rather than driving in order to access daily necessities. An evident circumstantial reference essentially being compared with the beneficial aspect of neighborhood’s interconnecting streets over the “collector roads” includes the less traffic congestion as well as more pedestrian-friendliness. Moreover, the neighborhoods helps in diffusing social demerits that are essentially brought on by the suburbanized culture fundamentally incorporating mixed housing usages at a particular area which are not at all homogeneously restraining as found in subdivisions of suburbs. Sensibly, the traditional neighborhood model is centralized around a structural civic life focusing on commerce, culture as well as bureaucratic administration in the presence of governmental involvement which allows for better quality of life in particular as the community setup is continually evolving with the presence of more people being involved into the framework. Reference Duany A, Plater-Zyberk E and Speck J. (2001) Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream. North Point Press. ISBN-10: 0865476063. ISBN-13: 978-0865476066. Read More