Constructing the Suburbs

Abstract

The suburban housing developments that have dominated the popular imagination in the years since their post–World War II heyday are a recent manifestation of a phenomenon that is neither particularly new nor uniquely American. As a number of historians have shown, most notably Lewis Mumford in his classic The City in History and Kenneth T. Jackson in his still-unsurpassed Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, suburbia is a social, physical, economic, ideological, and, as this book will argue, cultural formation with long and variegated roots. This chapter maps key moments and factors in the construction of what we know as the postwar American suburbs; it begins with a broad historical overview, and then proceeds chronologically through to the middle of the twentieth century. The focus is initially on material pressures and changes (for example on the effects of housing shortages and road building) and then on the causes and consequence of ideological change (in terms of gender roles and racial segregation). Throughout, my interest is in poetry’s role in constructing and disseminating an experience and understanding of suburbia. As I will argue, poetry has been implicit from the outset in contemporary suburban discourse.