In addition to noting how suburbs began because of religious intentions to pull women out of dirty and immoral cities, this essay looks at how the suburbs were seen as a place for leisure, ultimately exacerbating the divide between work and leisure:
The idea of the bungalow and its compound, the suburb, caught like wildfire, largely because its hidden message was one of leisure, universal and perpetual. The bungalow exists in dozens of different cultures with almost as many definitions – from seaside shack (Britain) to hotel-side pavilion (Germany) to house fit for Europeans (Africa, Mexico and the Caribbean).
The common theme, apart from the sense of a stand-alone single-family dwelling, is the theme of manifest leisure, obvious waste or, in Thorstein Veblen’s term, conspicuous consumption. ”People will undergo a very considerable degree of privation in the comforts or the necessaries of life,” Veblen wrote in his 1899 Theory of the Leisure Class, ”in order to afford what is considered a decent amount of wasteful consumption”.
The idea that this waste-time, or leisure, might be available to everyone quickly made it despised by the upper classes but beloved by the rest. It was as if, in buying a bungalow, you were buying the promise, or at least the possibility, of perpetual vacation.
But there’s an irony here which, like so much of Western modernism, looks set to rebound on us. For excess leisure doesn’t make us healthy or happy. We’re just not that kind of primate.
I wonder how this has changed today for generations that were raised in the suburbs. The contrast between the life of leisure in the city versus the suburbs was probably quite clear for those who lived in the city, particularly industrializing cities in the 1800s and early 1900s, but for those that have only known the suburbs, do the suburbs still operate as a haven for leisure? Is the key to suburban leisure the actual relaxing nature of it or its contrast to alternatives that are perceived as being even worse?
This essay also hints at how the work-leisure divide can be bridged. One option presented is to construct more mixed-use developments where workers and residents could interact more. But another option would be to construct or rebuild “third places” where people could find a middle ground between home/family and work. Such institutions (commericial or not) could mediate these two realms. Third, I wonder if this problem might dissipate as younger adults may be more willing to mix these two categories as work becomes less of an income-earning activity and more of a passion, vocation, or calling.
Legally Sociable 