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Title: Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States by Kenneth T. Jackson ISBN: 0-19-504983-7 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 April, 1987 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.4 (5 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Explanations before condemnations
Comment: This book is obviously a classic of urban-studies literature and a lot of people have said a lot of good things about it.
One thing to keep in mind when considering this book, however, is that (contrary to what others have said) it is *not* a history of suburbanization through the end of the 20th century. It is much more an explanation of the roots of 20th century suburbanization -- as they took form in the 19th century.
The author does an excellent job of explaning the cultural and technological conditions that existed in the 19th century which made the move the the perifery seem attractive and, above all, logical. Today, in the 21st century, we have a difficult time placing oursleves in the shoes of the aspiring 19th century home-owner. We get stuck on the question "How could they just leave their cities to rot?" This book takes us back to show us the ideals, hopes and dreams of the 19th cenury burghers -- which the author also expertly contrasts to 19th-century realities. In this way, Jackson shows us how the move to a tract-house on a winding lane named after a tree could only seem like the conquest of the new-world utopia to the train-hopping clerks who first embraced suburbia.
The brightest examples of these cultural trends are the author's description of the rising symbolic importance of the garden, as well as his emphasis on the media-images associated with the new "old" country gentry. Overall, he describes an America (ironically) in search of its "country" roots, while in the midst of the greatest urban/industrial boom the world has ever known. By placing the reader firmly in a world where the word "cab" connoted a horse and carriage and where "pollution" meant horse-dung, Jackson makes us aware that the suburbs arose out of a legitimate desire to improve living standards in a very real way.
In sharp contrast, to so many books on the same topic _The Crabgrass Frontier_ is not a vitrolic condemnation of selfishness or race-paranoia or consumer-madness. It is a cultural commentary on certain 19th mores which -- when taken to their logical extreme (as they were in the 20th century) -- have a profound effect on the geography of the modern American city.
Rating: 4
Summary: Educational and thought-provoking
Comment: Crabgrass Frontiers explores the development of American cities and suburbs in the late 19th up to the late 20th century. Jackson describes how innovations in transportation, including horse trolleys, steam-powered rail, and others including the private automobile, have helped shape the urban landscape. He also describes how as the cities expanded, minorities and the impoverished became "trapped" in the inner city, cut off by superhighways that speed suburbanites from bedroom communities in the suburbs to their offices in the central business district in the city core.
Rating: 4
Summary: Scholarly, Perhaps Too Much So
Comment: This is a remarkably well-researched book. However, Professor Jackson makes incredible statements downgrading the importance of race in the making of the American suburbs. While he is undeniably correct that the impetus in American urban policy has been to spread out as far as technology will allow, he does not address to motive behind the no-holds-barred rush for the exits that has typified urban life since WWII. Any observer who credits his senses and not what he reads in a dusty census form in an archive knows that race was the reason for the postwar suburban boom. Professor Jackson or someone should update this book in light of Prof. Sugrue's Origins of the Urban Crisis, which discredits Prof. Jackson's theories on race.
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Title: The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs ISBN: 067974195X Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 November, 1992 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia by Robert Fishman ISBN: 0465007473 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 01 February, 1989 List Price(USD): $19.50 |
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Title: Edge City: Life on the New Frontier by Joel Garreau ISBN: 0385424345 Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: 01 October, 1992 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened by Rosalyn Baxandall, Elizabeth Ewen ISBN: 0465070132 Publisher: HarperCollins Pub. Date: 19 June, 2001 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: The Origins of the Urban Crisis by Thomas J. Sugrue ISBN: 0691058881 Publisher: Princeton University Press Pub. Date: 13 April, 1998 List Price(USD): $20.95 |
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