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This essay roughly explains main influential forces, partners and cultural context that lead to origin of new housing projects in majority of EU countries. It is also a separate chapter in the book "Between the Edges - Street-building Transition as Urbanity Interface" (THOTH, Bussum, 2004.) by the same author.

Mass-Culture Versus Cities

In contemporary city building, two main types of development projects occur: new suburban environments and urban renewal. These two environments, contrasting in structure and imagery, each follow their own particular myths that are opposed yet interrelated. What had been considered as a weakness of the traditional city, finds its alternative in the suburbs. Also, all problems that occur in suburban environments - especially social, cultural and ecological - are being considered in contrast to the nature of traditional cities. There are many, more or less well known, anti-suburban arguments that, although they seem logical and convincing, cannot interrupt the prevalent trend. For decades now, from Gans to Koolhaas, Davis and Sorkin, suburbia has been blamed for many alleged and real maladies, from the destruction of farmland and ecological systems to endangering the cultural base of society.

Amsterdam, streetscape from the new city extension Nieuw Sloten and street scene from the Amsterdam inner city.

Contemporary urban growth is mainly biased towards suburban developments accommodating the majority of middle class households. Basically, movement towards suburbia has a long history and has always occurred as a reaction to the many weaknesses of traditional cities. It seems that people accept the city as a necessity and attempt to flee into suburban environments, despite their limitations. Many other scholars consider it as a consequence of the incapability of urban planners and politics to solve the problems of overpopulated cities, lack of proper recreational facilities, traffic jams, high crime rate, social disorder and so on. In every particular urban context some new and specific problem can be found that seems to drive inhabitants toward suburbs.

Aggressive behaviour of drivers, crowded streets, traffic jams and lack of parking facilities are among people's prime objections regarding the daily challenges of city life. They complain that there are no safe routes for children on their way to school and that the high level of street noise damages both housing quality and their nerves.

In contrast to this, the suburb is considered as a Promised Land where children can safely cross the street where traffic flows smoothly and where parking is free and plentiful. However, behind suburban myth, on a local scale, things are not so perfect. There are often no necessary facilities as schools, hospitals or main stores within walking distance. Schools, shopping centres and public malls are organised separately, in a 'no-man's-land' between neighbourhoods or in adjacent towns where demographics better serve the retail conglomerates. Meanwhile, work places are concentrated in remote business-parks along the highway. All daily activities therefore have to be done by car. It turns out, to be a regional problem.

Due to increasing demand, regional motorways, as well as local road networks, have to be adapted to the new number of commuters who, by necessity, now make the daily drive between home and workplace. The suburban community's daily schedules are similar to the city routine but spread over the scale of the region. Because there is no compact city structure anymore, but rather a huge urbanised territory, the number of commuters on the road is increasing while the average speed of the motorway is going down. Traffic jams on the motorways are a common situation. There, the real consequence of the spread city can be seen in vivo. In a densely packed traffic jam, suburbia appears notCreated by Dubravka Ugresic just as a personal-time budget eater but also as a common waist of time and money. Not to forget, we all contribute to motorways and suburban infrastructure development and building by paying taxes, helping dwellers of suburbia to 'melt time into the air'. A motorway becomes the main representative of the public space where people can be seen in a glimpse of speed.

Besides being responsible for time squandered on the road, extensive suburban sprawl and its consequent dependence on automobiles has had a disastrous effect on the landscape and ecological system in general. Besides the unprecedented occupation of land, the most serious ecological offence caused by large-scale suburban development comes from the extensive road networks required to satisfy the need for mobility. For such low-density settlements, sufficient public transport systems cannot be made cost-effective due to low volume of usage. Inhabitants, therefore dependent on individual transport, hence require millions of square meters of asphalt to cover the landscape in order to satisfy their transportation needs. This blight on the landscape, together with suburbia's requisite addiction to frequent automobile usage can be considered as one of the most damaging assailants of the natural environment today.

Another problem of the city is the lack of proper parking facilities. The search for a safe place to leave one's car is a time consuming and frustrating exercise. In the new settlements, this problem does not exist. Parking rates are high and almost everybody can park his car on a nearby parking lot, one's driveway or in a private garage. To satisfy parking needs huge areas of useful land must be sacrificed for asphalt. According to Garreau, there has to be about one and a half times as much space to park the cars as there is to nurture their drivers. Still 75% of Americans consider themselves environmentalist, holding the belief that cities are anti-ecological.

This homocentric attitude which, considers the suburb as an ecological realm, is shared among most of the inhabitants of settlements on the outskirts of a city. Suburbs are, per definition, distant from the city's dynamic and nestled close to, or in the landscape. As being surrounded by agricultural land or landscape, people commonly experience them as a natural paradise. There is plenty of space for children to play, for family to take a walk on a Sunday morning in the woods, or to garden, their own piece of nature in the back yard. We plant our own roses, we are environmentalists. The dream had been fulfilled. But, here another controversy occurs. If the suburb occupies the territory of the landscape - there is no landscape any more. It had been destroyed in order to condition a new development. What's left are the stretched pieces of once continual and homogeneous structure of nature. In comparison to the traditional ideal, environmental structure had been certainly changed for the worse. Although R. Stern's concern for suburbia as a planning type rather than a condition of geography seems inadequate, his position relating traditional American suburbs as the country town in the city, 'rus in urbs', that has represented one of the best living environments in the past, can be granted. In contrast, in contemporary suburbs the sense of balance between the house and the landscape, between man and nature, as one of the fallacies of this tradition, had been discarded in favour of a stereotypical, alienate townscape. Who cares - the media are still advertising lonesome private gardens as a nature friendly, ideal world in itself.

As Richard Harvey stresses, the opposite concern seems reasonable as well. His concern is that only the urbanised living environments of high density and inspired forms of urban design are the paths to a more ecologically sensitive form of civilisation. In such environments, people can organise themselves and better learn how to deal with the new type of nature. Contemporary environments have a new structure that surfaced through the transformation of an idealised version of nature. High pollution rates, interrupted ecological networks and extensive waste of resources have been continuously changing that ideal.

But, in addition to physical and ecological aspects, critics from both sides have considered the cultural and social differences between cities and suburbs. Social problems such as drug use and high crime rates are the objections of city critics who perceive social problems as growing parallel to the rise in immigration, low-income groups and lack of social services. Altogether, crime, foreigners, and different social groups and cultures are considered as damaging to the living quality, social homogeneity and security in the city environment. Emerging from this critical, if not delusional perception, is the feeling that the city is both hostile and corrupting to traditional family values, while, suburban life on the contrary, is the logical setting for nurturing and preserving a superior and more wholesome existence.

Paradoxically, the phenomenon of suburbia represents a community of people who came there to be left alone. The spatial configuration of suburbia represents this controversy precisely. One of the main physical characteristics of the suburban environment is its low density, usually equalling about 30 houses per hectare. The housing typology, based on a single-family unit surrounded with its own garden, besides the extensive occupation of land, has the consequence of increased infrastructure and road surfaces. As a consequence of spatial dispersion, social contact is greatly diminished, at least contact of the kind that can lead to positive interaction. In the view of many sociologists (Davis, Soja, Guerrau, Sennett), this is among the causes of social disintegration in suburbia. It seems as a paradise that can easily turn into a prison. Segregation has an enormous impact on the community life, but above all, with its massive appearance, suburbia shapes the future of society in general: values, behavioural patterns and politics.

Fundamentally, suburbia is politically inferior. At least, people cannot experience what the media reports. On a local level, the picture is slightly different. If the city block is a fortress which accommodates a group of different families, protecting them from the public domain and guaranteeing limited privacy; the suburban neighbourhood is a middle-class community fortress. There, over time, inhabitants are organising themselves in order to protect their collective dream. They use all means to block the building of broader public interests, services and facilities in their surroundings and any other public works that may interrupt their way of living. In the same way, they are preventing social diversity within the community. Downs, for example, finds that the middle class wants its neighbourhood dominance to prevail in order to control their residential objectives that do not match with objectives of the low-income households. The dominant behavioural pattern is dependent on the prevailing social group and, therefore, there is a strong belief that limiting the percentage of the low-income group can prevent emergence of 'undesirable' behavioural patterns. Action groups take these tasks seriously, organising people, writing petitions and using all means available to realise their personal and group goals. Gans, although stressing that he is not looking for illusory harmony between the classes, believes that by knowing each other better the class conflict can be reduced more effectively. This really seems as a utopian belief. The division between classes and social groups presented through the division of the society on suburbanites and citizens seems as a marker on a road with no return.

Finally, the overpopulated city is a fact that has been often quoted by city critics from Howard, via Le Corbusier to the contemporary ones. There is a strong belief that high densities cause asocial behavioural patterns, crime, health problems, social delinquency and other urban illnesses. Le Corbusierps comparative analyses of different traditional grid-based cities as New York, Buenos Aires and Paris, with the proposition scheme of the Radiant City, are based exclusively upon these differences. This notion had been a reflection of urban conditions between the two World Wars. But modern critics of the city often forget that contemporary city development has also been marked by growth alongside transportation routes. For this reason, contemporary European and American cities offer huge differences in the living environments, from densely populated centres to the urban sprawls of low-density development. It seems that some other argument should be found to advocate the contemporary trend towards suburbia. Although a lot had been done in the field of city renewal, obvious problems are still present. Cities are dynamic structures and magnets for different social groups and classes, lower social groups in particular. There, they can still find jobs and secure lives for their families. In turn, cities offer a colourful mixture of cultures, differences and contrasts that together also generate urban problems, tensions and complex interrelations that can be criticised easily.

On the other hand, as Richard Sennett pointed out, urban problems are real life. By escaping them we cannot solve them. By living in suburbs people are preserving themselves in closed, parallel worlds. These worlds are codified by the 'new puritan ethic', while their residents follow a pattern of 'purified identity' that is a synonym for pathology where, by coding the desire for coherence in affluent communal life, men have found the means to impose a voluntary slavery upon themselves by avoiding reality. Basically, these people are unable to deal with dissimilarities. In fact, as Sennett warns, the massive, dense city is not directly opposed to suburbia, but to the mass-culture society. With individualism and minding one's own business as a prevailing cultural notion, standards of spatial segregation are used as a device for privacy and self-defence. In short, social life in the new settlements is falling apart proportionally to its spatial segregation and clarity of division.

However, the majority of city builders do not share this attitude. Partly because all building developments are interconnected through the housing market, and partly because dwelling culture follows contemporary trends, suburban settlements no longer characterise their location. Suburban developers are, however, eager to apply a successful planning model to the entire housing market regardless of location. Therefore, suburban types have even been built within the city itself. These living environment-types, as well as the planning and design doctrine, from which they develop, appear like boomerangs returning back to traditional cities. Different forms of housing estates, gated neighbourhoods controlled by security guards and surveillance cameras, in the core of the city are best sellers on the contemporary housing market. A mass-culture strikes back, changing the city's nature.

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