In Becky Nicolaides’ chapter titled, “How Hell Moved from the City to the Suburbs”, she gently and respectively rejects the perception of suburbia that most of American’s hold in their minds today. Inside this book, “The New Suburban History”, Nicolaides explains why the great urban scholars and writers of the 1950’s and 1960’s painted the wrong picture of the “hell” suburbia was and is seen today.
Her opinion may be difficult to undercover in the beginning of her piece due to her mostly positive regard to Louis Wirth, Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs and William White. She sums up the views of these four by stating, “They felt that if the ‘right’ physical environment could be created, a healthy community might come of it-- So when place-based community was not present, they perceived it as a social failure rather than a sign that community might be manifesting in other, nonlocal ways” (Nicolaides, 81). After explaining all of these writers’ work and studies in great detail, Nicolaides begins her argument against all of this “physical fallacy”(Nicolaides, 95). She believes this obsession over …show more content…
The post war atmosphere clouded the writers judgements to be impartial at the time. She writes, “In the 1950’s and early 1960’s, an age of anti-communist anxiety, intellectuals were more prone to critique mass culture, conformity and consumerism, rather than the basic structural flaws in the American liberal state” (Nicolaides, 96). Nicolaides describes how this perspective was applied to more things in the United States than just this negative analysis of suburbs. After this era and into the present day the new perspective is critically looking through a political economy lens. This is the reason Nicolaides believes there should be more investigation and study of the postwar suburbs. There is a “gaping void in our understanding” (Nicolaides,
Her opinion may be difficult to undercover in the beginning of her piece due to her mostly positive regard to Louis Wirth, Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs and William White. She sums up the views of these four by stating, “They felt that if the ‘right’ physical environment could be created, a healthy community might come of it-- So when place-based community was not present, they perceived it as a social failure rather than a sign that community might be manifesting in other, nonlocal ways” (Nicolaides, 81). After explaining all of these writers’ work and studies in great detail, Nicolaides begins her argument against all of this “physical fallacy”(Nicolaides, 95). She believes this obsession over …show more content…
The post war atmosphere clouded the writers judgements to be impartial at the time. She writes, “In the 1950’s and early 1960’s, an age of anti-communist anxiety, intellectuals were more prone to critique mass culture, conformity and consumerism, rather than the basic structural flaws in the American liberal state” (Nicolaides, 96). Nicolaides describes how this perspective was applied to more things in the United States than just this negative analysis of suburbs. After this era and into the present day the new perspective is critically looking through a political economy lens. This is the reason Nicolaides believes there should be more investigation and study of the postwar suburbs. There is a “gaping void in our understanding” (Nicolaides,