An impossible stroll through the American suburbia: The end of public space

Abstract

If it is accepted that the morphology of the English garden city from which the American single-family housing suburb derives is deeply linked to the action of walking considering that the role of the first Romantic walkers -their discovery of the landscape and their aversion to the industrial city- was so important in its materialization, this research aims to highlight the paradox of the rejection of walking -especially in the United States- to the point of turning it into something almost impossible -and practically criminal- in order to place public space at the exclusive service of the private automobile and alien to any socialization. Some authors (Jackson, 1985) point to air conditioning, the automobile and television as the three advances that definitively transformed the public, but, in reality, they only finished off a task whose nature is fundamentally morphological. Although its origins can be traced back to the flight of the bourgeois elites from the City of London in the 18th century, the milestone at which its historical journey crystallizes is to be found in the suburb of Levittown on the outskirts of New York.