Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States

Rating:
Summary: Scholarly, Perhaps Too Much So
Review: Crabgrass Frontier is a thorough investigation of America's shift from industrial urban living to the semi-country suburban world sought as the American Dream by many modern Americans. Anyone how practices as a developer or builder should read this book. Unfortunately it would not change the thinking of most people deeply rooted in the current developer/builder practices, but it may sway some in the field and others, like myself, who are planning to enter the development world towards a more ethically responsible practice. In general, Crabgrass Frontier does a superb job identifying the factors, many of these immoral and illegal, that persuaded an entire country to strive for the Ozzie and Harriet lifestyle with the suburban cottage with white picket fence and a new Oldsmobile in the drive. There are many surprising facts related to the government's role in investing in the homogeneously white middle-class suburban developments that are now commonplace throughout our country. It is an excellent book that should be read and shared with others.

Rating:
Summary: Educational and thought-provoking
Review: 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:
Summary: Explanations before condemnations
Review: 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:
Summary: Scholarly, Perhaps Too Much So
Review: 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.