Suburban Manifesto

A spectre is haunting America—the spectre of suburban sprawl. All the powers of the Midwest have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: the mom and pop store, the town square, the local church, and the Chicago City Council.

Where is the chain superstore that has not been decried as suburban sprawl by local shops? Where is the strip mall that has not hurled back the branding reproach of suburban sprawl against the more successful malls, as well as against other new expansions?

Two things result from this fact:

I. Suburban sprawl is already acknowledged by all America to be itself a power.

II. It is high time that suburban sprawlers should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the spectre of suburban sprawl with a manifesto of the phenomenon itself.

The enemy is not urban sprawl. Cities are beautiful. Urban sprawl has architectural merit. Suburban sprawl has no aesthetic value. It’s big and ugly. The walls are corrugated aluminum. The façades are cinderblocks broken up with doors and small windows. The homes are identical—they are vinyl siding monstrosities. The churches connote storage units before they do Heaven.

I’m not in favor of keeping Wal-Mart out of small towns. Just the opposite. Wal-Mart is the world’s largest private employer. Towns of all sizes are indebted to Wal-Mart. I see a strong resemblance between Super Target and perfection. There is something great about a store that sells patio furniture, all six seasons of West Wing and 24-packs of diet coke. Don’t get me wrong.

But we’ve all read Fountainhead. We know that there can be beauty in utility. We know that the world is better for the extra effort. Is it suddenly too much to ask? We can have spacious, efficient interiors with elegant exteriors.

And since when did everything have to be so far apart? Why do I have to get on the highway to get from Target to Cracker Barrel? The buildings are so rectangular they’d form the pieces to the easiest game of Tetris ever. Let’s pack ‘em in like little sardines.

The beauty of suburbia is that you feel like you’re in a small town but you still have access to the excitement of a big city. The beauty of a small town is that everything’s close together.

The new suburbia is not associated with a great city. And it no longer feels like a small town. Vote accordingly with your dollars.