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Introduction
Methodology
A Brief History of Northfield
Discussion of Suburbia
* What is a Suburb
*Northfield as a Suburb
Neighborhood Structure
Northfield Sense of Community
Conclusions
Works Cited
Acknowledgements
House in one of
Northfield's early neighborhoods
The genesis of the suburbia that we find in many of our U.S. towns has its roots in England, beginning with a man by the name of Ebenezer Howard. Howard looked into the concept of garden cities as an alternative to the overcrowded metropolitan regions connected with England’s Industrial evolution. The conception of garden cities included the following planning principles: low-density, single-family homes on their own garden allotment, arranged into self contained communities; efficient transportation being essential to facilitate the diffusion of people. By the early 1900s the garden city spread throughout England and found its way to the U.S. (Ward 5).
The most recent developments in modern suburbs often induce images of homogeneity and often come attached with negatively charged words such as “sprawl” and “flight (Martinson xxii). The modern view of suburbia has its roots in the post World War II trend that occurred all over the U.S., as a response to the lack of housing construction during the depression and throughout the war. Housing subdivisions exploded in the late 1940s in response to the housing shortage, the increasing population, and the economically improved status of the average American family. These new subdivisions were often products of large-scale developers, who built in terms of volume in order to keep up with demand (Martinson i). Housing and building technology research had been conducted in order to further stimulate housing production resulting in the prefabricated home, creating a faster and more homogenous production of homes (Wright 244). This mass production became incredibly important as the population of the U.S. rose by an unprecedented twelve million people between 1945 and 1950, suburb development left the outskirts of cities and ventured into any available land, especially in the Midwest (Martinson xvi). Martinson, author of American Dreamscape, provides a very pro-suburbia argument to this often-criticized form of development. He argues that the “post-war suburbs are distinct and very American forms of settlement (Martinson xxiv).” Nevertheless, it appears that Martinson’s fight is against a rising attitude of disdain for suburbs as they fail to distinguish house from house, neighborhood from neighborhood and even city from city.
New development at
the
south end of Northfield
Suburbs also create a greater dependence on motor vehicle transportation and threaten the original economic core of the cities they encompass. The ideals of new urbanism include a focus on neighborhood, public space, pedestrians, and should contain diversity and hierarchy (Calthorpe xi). Perhaps Martinson’s greatest adversary is Robert Fishman, who argues that modern suburbs, which he calls “technoburbs,” are a waste of land with focus on single-family homes and they create an increase in energy use due to the necessity to commute from the residential suburb to a place of work, with the potential of destroying the commercial core to which it was attached (Fishman 190).