Aesthetic criticisms of sprawl demanded open space to restore community definition and orientation

Evidence

The aesthetic argument was potent from the start. To many people, the tracts simply were ugly. They were places with no character. The 1950s saw a fierce intellectual attack on “mass culture,” and the aesthetic critique of tract-house development was partly a highbrow response to a new form of mass production. In the view of some critics, indeed, the postwar suburbs did not deserve the name, since they so manifestly lacked the parklike spaciousness of the suburbs built earlier for the wealthy. But the advocates of open space were proposing a solution to a specific problem, not simply deriding a general cultural phenomenon. To give life to new subdivisions, the critics argued, there had to be some open space. Open space provided much-needed contrast – “visual relief,” as one advocate put it, from the monotony of sprawl. Open space also helped to define communities, to mark one place off from another, and so gave residents a sense of belonging, a vital rootedness. — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 511

Categorization

• XREF: Open space as visual relief and boundary-marker connects to Lofland’s ordering/belonging themes and to the course’s land/place thread on how spatial layout shapes identity. — connects to: Open-space activism fused three distinct arguments with separate constituencies — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 508; Suburban open-space campaigns shaped environmentalist rhetoric and organizing — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 541; Aerial photographs of bulldozed subdivisions became a core visual argument for open-space activists — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 572 (+1 more)