John Field, FAIA Seaside Broadside, Architecture California, 14. no. 2, November 1992, p. 44, 45
[p. 44] "A generation ago, many Americans began to fear a grim future for the nations's cities, and in response, there was a massive movement to the suburbs during the post-World War II decades. No one fleeing could have foreseen the similar decline in the nation's suburbs in the 1980's.
"The degeneration of suburban life affects the traditional pre-World War II suburbs-those commuter towns outside Boston, New York, or Chicago that spread out from earlier villages with their prototypical main streets-as well as the sprawling newer suburbs, where housing tracts and freeways engulfed farmland and ranches yet never developed any community focal points other than their shopping centers. Typical of this pattern of growth are Houston, San Jose, and the San Fernando Valley adjacent to Los Angeles.
"Where we live has lost its identity and with that has gone the citizen's sense of social responsibility, yet the comforting feeling of belonging to a larger community beyond an immediate circle of friends is essential in a human environment. The fact is that all American cities and suburbs are spreading far more than the population is increasing. It seems obvious that the destruction of the environment is caused by the subdivision of the countryside rather than by the growth of the cities. We need a different kind of urban development in order to provide housing that departs from the subdivision forms of the last fifty years. We must be flexible enough to adapt to the inevitable economic, social, and technological changes that the future will bring, without abandoning what we have already built.
[p. 44] "City planning in the United States functions like it did in competing dukedoms in the Middle Ages, but now each socio-political faction demands its share. So politicized is the process that the only goal, finally, is to find consensus on larger issues. This leaves a staff occupied with an endless codifying of small decisions about the design of buildings rather than dealing with the urban experience. Implementing design controls is institutionalizing the whimsy of consensus.
" . . .
[p. 44] "Unfortunately, at present, the most popular idea for dealing with these issues [population increases, housing shortages] and for planning for the future is based on a Ralph Lauren-like notion of creating a past that almost no one ever had. The concept is "the traditional small town."
[p. 45] ". . .
[p. 45] "Better suburbs like Pullman outside Chicago, or Forest Hills Gardens in Queens, which evolved from the nineteenth-and early twentieth-century escape from the city, work as small experiments, but endlessly extending them horizontally has destroyed the essence of their merit. Instead of retreating into a fantasy past, Americans will have to create a new vision and new patterns of more dense development . . .