Suburban Dreams

Suburban Dreams
Author: Greg Dickinson
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2015-06-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0817318631

Explores how the suburban imaginary, composed of the built environment and imaginative texts, functions as a resource for living out the "good life"

Suburban Dreams

Suburban Dreams
Author: Beth Yarnelle Edwards
Publisher: Kehrer Verlag
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011
Genre: Documentary photography
ISBN: 9783868281842

Since 1997, photographer Beth Yarnelle Edwards has been documenting idyllic suburban middle-class settings in America and Europe. The series begins in California's Silicon Valley - the artist's home - before moving to Germany, France, Spain, Iceland and the Netherlands. Edwards approaches everyday scenes with a mixture of documentary interest and cinematographic staging. She combines real-life settings with philosophical truths, conveying images of loneliness, media exposure and escapism.

American Dreams, Suburban Nightmares: Suburbia as a Narrative Space between Utopia and Dystopia in Contemporary American Cinema

American Dreams, Suburban Nightmares: Suburbia as a Narrative Space between Utopia and Dystopia in Contemporary American Cinema
Author: Melanie Smicek
Publisher: Anchor Academic Publishing (aap_verlag)
Total Pages: 73
Release: 2014-10
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3954893215

The suburban landscape is inseparable from American culture. Suburbia does not only relate to the geographical concept, but also describes a cultural space incorporating people’s hopes for a safe and prosperous life. Suburbia marks a dynamic ideological space constantly influenced and recreated by both the events of everyday life and artistic discourse. Fictional texts do not merely represent suburbia, but also have a decisive role in the shaping of suburban spaces. The widely held idealized image of suburbia evolved in the 1950s. Today, reality deviates from the concept of suburbs projected back then, due to e.g. high divorce rates and an increase of crime. Nevertheless, the nostalgic view of the suburbs as the “Promised Land" has survived. Postwar critics object to this perception, considering the suburbs rather as depressing landscapes of mass-consumption, conformity and alienation. This book exemplifies the dualistic representation of suburbs in contemporary American cinema by analyzing Pleasantville, The Truman Show and American Beauty. It examines how utopian concepts of suburbia are created culturally and psychologically in the films, and how the underlying anxieties of the suburban experience, visualized by the dystopian narratives, challenge this ideal.

Suburban Nation

Suburban Nation
Author: Andres Duany
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2000
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780865476066

Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk are at the forefront of the New Urbanism movement, and in "Suburban Nation" they assess sprawl's costs to society, be they ecological, economic, aesthetic, or social. 115 illustrations.

The New Suburban History

The New Suburban History
Author: Kevin M. Kruse
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2006-07-15
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0226456633

Introduction: The new suburban history / Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue -- Marketing the free market : state intervention and the politics of prosperity in metropolitan America / David M.P. Freund -- Less than plessy : the inner city, suburbs, and state-sanctioned residential segregation in the age of Brown / Arnold R. Hirsch -- Uncovering the city in the suburb : Cold War politics, scientific elites, and high-tech spaces / Margaret Pugh O'Mara -- How hell moved from the city to the suburbs : urban scholars and changing perceptions of authentic community / Becky Nicolaides -- "The house I live in" : race, class, and African American suburban dreams in the postwar United States / Andrew Wiese -- "Socioeconomic integration" in the suburbs : from reactionary populism to class fairness in metropolitan Charlotte / Matthew D. Lassiter -- Prelude to the tax revolt : the politics of the "tax dollar" in postwar California / Robert O. Self -- Suburban growth and its discontents : the logic and limits of reform on the postwar Northeast corridor / Peter Siskind -- Reshaping the American dream : immigrants, ethnic minorities, and the politics of the new suburbs / Michael Jones-Correa -- The legal technology of exclusion in metropolitan America / Gerald Frug.

Suburban Modern

Suburban Modern
Author: Robert M. Stamp
Publisher: TouchWood Editions
Total Pages: 452
Release: 2004
Genre: Calgary Region (Alta.)
ISBN: 9781894898256

While avant-garde modernism disrupted the art salons, architecture schools, and design studios of the world's more sophisticated urban centres in the 20th century, Calgary slept through the cultural upheavals as a provincial backwater. Calgary's initiation to modernism might be dated to February 13, 1947, when Imperial Oil blew in its famous well at Leduc. Or the 1948 football season, when Tom Brooks and Les Lear wrapped the Calgary Stampeders football team around an innovative and modernist-looking T-formation backfield to win the Grey Cup. Calgarians embraced the modern age after the Second World War, taking modernism into the streets and into the suburbs. They went beyond art, architecture, and design, and redefined modernism to include homes, furniture, appliances, and cars. In the process, Calgarians democratized, feminized, and suburbanized modernism. Suburban Modern examines controversies over "coloured" margarine and "mixed" drinking in post-war Calgary. It shows how new petro office buildings transformed the downtown skyline during the 1950s and 1960s, and how new bus lines, roads, and bridges changed the city's transportation network. As the city sprawled horizontally to engulf its ever-expanding suburbs, shoppers deserted downtown for suburban malls. The book follows young couples into their post-war dream homes with modern furnishings and barbecue-appointed patios. Suburban Modern argues that the suburbs rather than the downtown defined Calgary's approach to modernism.

New Suburban Stories

New Suburban Stories
Author: Martin Dines
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2013-09-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1472510321

Exploring fiction, film and art from across the USA, South America, Asia, Europe and Australia, New Suburban Stories brings together new research from leading international scholars to examine cultural representations of the suburbs, home to a rapidly increasing proportion of the world's population. Focussing in particular on works that challenge conventional attitudes to suburbia, the book considers how suburban communities have taken control of their own representation to tell their own stories in contemporary novels, poetry, autobiography, cinema, social media and public art.

Suburban Remix

Suburban Remix
Author: Jason Beske
Publisher: Island Press
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2018-02
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1610918630

Investment has flooded back to cities because dense, walkable, mixed-use urban environments offer choices that support diverse dreams. Auto-oriented, single-use suburbs have a hard time competing. Suburban Remix brings together experts in planning, urban design, real estate development, and urban policy to demonstrate how suburbs can use growing demand for urban living to renew their appeal as places to live, work, play, and invest. The case studies and analysis show how compact new urban places are being created in suburbs to produce health, economic, and environmental benefits, and contribute to solving a growing equity crisis.

Pushing Cool

Pushing Cool
Author: Keith Wailoo
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 411
Release: 2021-11-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 022679427X

Spanning a century, Pushing Cool reveals how the twin deceptions of health and Black affinity for menthol were crafted—and how the industry’s disturbingly powerful narrative has endured to this day. Police put Eric Garner in a fatal chokehold for selling cigarettes on a New York City street corner. George Floyd was killed by police outside a store in Minneapolis known as “the best place to buy menthols.” Black smokers overwhelmingly prefer menthol brands such as Kool, Salem, and Newport. All of this is no coincidence. The disproportionate Black deaths and cries of “I can’t breathe” that ring out in our era—because of police violence, COVID-19, or menthol smoking—are intimately connected to a post-1960s history of race and exploitation. In Pushing Cool, Keith Wailoo tells the intricate and poignant story of menthol cigarettes for the first time. He pulls back the curtain to reveal the hidden persuaders who shaped menthol buying habits and racial markets across America: the world of tobacco marketers, consultants, psychologists, and social scientists, as well as Black lawmakers and civic groups including the NAACP. Today most Black smokers buy menthols, and calls to prohibit their circulation hinge on a history of the industry’s targeted racial marketing. In 2009, when Congress banned flavored cigarettes as criminal enticements to encourage youth smoking, menthol cigarettes were also slated to be banned. Through a detailed study of internal tobacco industry documents, Wailoo exposes why they weren’t and how they remain so popular with Black smokers.

Urban Forms, Suburban Dreams

Urban Forms, Suburban Dreams
Author: Malcolm Quantrill
Publisher:
Total Pages: 192
Release: 1993
Genre: Architecture
ISBN:

One of the primary tasks for architecture in today's world is to create a sense of place, for the contemporary community--meshing urban density with suburban growth and change--is "neither here nor there." Both urb (city) and suburb in our society challenge architects to conceive through social engineering and geometric design a sense of wonder in space. "Between urban forms and suburban dreams," the volume editors write, "lie many slippery paths, and we have trodden most of them in search of . . . lost utopias." Prominent scholars offer a variety of perspectives and insights that will be of value to architects, urban designers and planners, and others interested in the forms of life in our cities and suburbs. Peter Eisenman proposes that the media, tele-video especially, have dissolved all distinctions between the "here and there," one place and another. Colin Rowe, on the other hand, sees the city as a distinct "place," if different from the modernist formula vision; he believes it is a collage that can best be understood as a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. Kaisa Broner-Bauer's account of the modernist city as a lost utopia poignantly traces the modern movement's idealism to its nineteenth-century precursors and raises the question of what happened to the planners' brave new world. Diane Ghirardo looks at the architectural effects of the brave new world in fascist Italy. The case of entrepreneur-developer Gustave Ring, who designed space during the New Deal, is explored by Dennis Domer. Ring's Arlington Village, near Washington, D.C., offers a thoughtfully landscaped semirural space that remains popular today. A contrasting scale and purpose is addressed in Marco Frascari's study of Coral Gables, Florida. In his quest for wonder in architecture, he clarifies the deep spiritual responsibility of architecture, which cannot be fulfilled by mere technical dexterity or conjuring with words and geometric puzzles. These and related issues are further addressed by Drexel Turner and by Stephen Holl, both of whom focus on the special needs at the edge of the city; and by Bruce Webb and Martin Price, who examine the relationship between highway and place; by William H. Whyte, who turns to face the city's center; and by Malcolm Quantrill, who explores the "landscape between innocence and experience."