Suburbia and its culturally draining impact

Sun, 22 May 2011 15:41:39 -0700

As I was standing in line at the grocery store, a friend I was with started wondering aloud why people would care so much about the endless celebrity drama portrayed on tabloid covers. The gossip industry is a highly competitive and profitable one. Publishers are often willing to pay a photographer tens or even hundreds of thousands to get that one most-desired shot. After giving this some thought, I believe the popularity of tabloids, among many other cultural phenomena, are indirectly connected to the influx of suburban sprawl the United States has seen in recent decades.

Effects of physical community arrangement

Before suburbs became popular with Americans, the three main components of society - residential, commercial, and industrial sectors (thanks for engraining those in my head, SimCity) - were very close together. Sometimes, one could find all three sectors in the same building. But, as societies continued to grow, the urban areas became overcrowded and busy, and as a result, people developed a desire for a blend between rural countryside lifestyles while still maintaining easy access to cities.

The predecessor to today’s suburbs were very much literal cabins in the woods, according to architecture author and novelist James Kunstler in his TED talk in 2004. Once these lone homes became popular in the 1950s, vast tracts of them were constructed and created the types of suburbs many of us live in today. While the original idea of a suburb was to live away from the city, while still close enough to it to commute, commercial and industrial sectors began to move into the suburbs to accommodate the rising number of suburban-dwellers. Demand for commercial and especially industrial sectors in urban environments fell dramatically once significant portions of a city’s population moved away from the city’s center, and the three main societal sectors became segregated.

Suburbs have now furthered the need to commute between locations. Before suburbs, people were naturally brought together in public spaces. When a city’s population is able to live, work and play in close quarters, the need to commute is reduced and can even be eliminated. Suburb-dwellers, though, must travel anywhere from ten to thirty minutes to go anywhere significant beside their homes. A tremendous issue of isolation exists for people living in suburbs.

Media on Kyle Anderson

Suburbia and its culturally draining impact

Effects of physical community arrangement