Tag Archives: suburbs

US mosques increased from 1,209 to 2,106 between 2000 and 2011

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A new study shows that the number of mosques in the United States increased 74% between 2000 and 2011:

Researchers conducting the national count found a total of 2,106 Islamic centers, compared to 1,209 in 2000 and 962 in 1994. About one-quarter of the centers were built between 2000-2011, as the community faced intense scrutiny by government officials and a suspicious public. In 2010, protest against an Islamic center near ground zero erupted into a national debate over Islam, extremism and religious freedom. Anti-mosque demonstrations spread to Tennessee, California and other states.

While some are pleased as this suggests Muslims feel comfortable enough in the United States to establish religious congregations, I think there are two other interesting things about these findings:

1. The methodology for counting mosques:

The report released Wednesday, “The American Mosque 2011,” is a tally based on mailing lists, websites and interviews with community leaders, and a survey and interviews with 524 mosque leaders. The research is of special interest given the limited scholarship so far on Muslim houses of worship, which include a wide range of religious traditions, nationalities and languages.

Researchers defined a mosque as a Muslim organization that holds Friday congregational prayers called jumah, conducts other Islamic activities and has operational control of its building. Buildings such as hospitals and schools that have space for Friday prayer were not included. Chapters of the Muslim Student Association at colleges and universities were included only if they had space off-campus or had oversight of the building where prayer was held…

The 2011 mosque study is part of the Faith Communities Today partnership, which researches the more than 300,000 houses of worship in the United States. Among the report’s sponsors are the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, the Islamic Society of North America and Islamic Circle of North America.

I wonder if other researchers might disagree with this methodology, particularly with how a mosque was defined. This is a reminder that it can be difficult to track or count religious groups because there are no master lists, not everyone is in the phone book, and not everyone has a web site. Additionally, religious congregations can quickly form and disband.

(I assume the researchers talk about this in their report but could the increase in mosques could be related to doing a more comprehensive search this time around?)

2. It is interesting to note where the mosques are located:

The overwhelming majority of mosques are in cities, but the number located in suburbs rose from 16 percent in 2000 to 28 percent in 2011. The Northeast once had the largest number of mosques, but Islamic centers are now concentrated in the South and West, the study found. New York still has the greatest number of Islamic centers — 257 — followed by 246 in California and 166 in Texas. Florida is fourth with 118. The shift follows the general pattern of population movement to the South and West.

I am most interested in the figures about the suburban growth as I have tracked several cases of proposals for mosques in the Chicago suburbs. This article doesn’t say but I wonder if the greater number of suburban mosques is because city mosques have moved from city to suburb (which would mirror the movement of Protestant churches out of the city in the post-World War II suburban boom) or because these are new suburban mosques built in response to a growing suburban Muslim population.

 

New MoMA exhibit “Foreclosed” reimagines suburban life

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Perhaps a side effect of the downturn in the housing market in recent years is a willingness to think boldly about a new future for American suburbs. “Foreclosed,” a new exhibit at MoMA, proposes several solutions:

Foreclosed had its origins in a research project initiated by Reinhold Martin in 2009. Martin, who directs the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University, wondered whether the foreclosure crisis could have a silver lining, by giving Americans reason to rethink one of the most impractical (and wasteful) aspects of the American dream. That, he argued, could lead to the proliferation of new housing types that blur lines between public and private spaces. With Anna Kenoff and Leah Meisterlin, he produced a book, the Buell Hypothesis, last year…

That proposal is by Amale Andraos and Dan Wood of WORKac, for a section of Keizer, Oregon that would be five times as dense as neighboring suburbs, but with three times as much open space. A gorgeous, dome-shaped structure contains a community composting plant. Around it are buildings that recall the best work of Steven Holl, Bjarke Ingels, and MVRDV. One imagines a developer seeing Andraos and Wood’s elaborate 1:250 model, depicting a gently futuristic suburb, and wanting to break ground tomorrow.

The other star of the exhibition is Jeanne Gang, the Chicago architect. She and her teammates tackled the problems of Cicero, an older Chicago suburb that is filled with rotting industrial facilities but not the kind of housing needed by its large immigrant population. They decided to play to Cicero’s strengths, as what Gang calls an “arrival city,” by creating modular housing that can go up or down in size as families evolve. They also reclaimed industrial facilities as gardens and, like most of the teams, came up with an unconventional financing scheme. Like the very different WORKac proposal, Gang’s Cicero proposal seems practically shovel-ready, even though, as she pointed out in a New York Times op-ed, it remains illegal under Chicago’s zoning code.

The most provocative idea in the show may belong to MOS—the firm headed by Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample—which focuses on East Orange, New Jersey. The plan acknowledges the lack of pedestrian life in today’s suburbs and reclaims the streets themselves as building sites. That allows increased density without the need to demolish existing housing. But if the idea is strong, details, of what the “ribbon” buildings” would look like and how they would function, are sparse…

Inner-ring suburbs are in need of some solutions as they often face big-city problems without the resources or attention they need to truly innovate.

Now the trick is to try to implement one of these options. (See some images here.) While it is interesting to consider what might be done, it would be useful to ask the architects about how they would go about putting these plans into action in particular suburbs. What would suburban governments and residents approve? Where would the funding come from? A prominent composting plant? Gang’s plan requires changing a lot of zoning laws? Looking at some of the comments to this story, there is some skepticism. If these designs are in a museum, is the exhibit intended to be more art or practical design?

Also, I always wonder about the assumption that better design will automatically lead to population, cultural, and economic revival. In other words, if you adopt these new methods, your suburb will improve. Alas, these things don’t come with money-back guarantees.

Why the Washington Metro doesn’t yet reach Tysons Corner

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As part of an argument that seems to really be about the difficulties of large-scale bureaucracies in responding to change, Michael Barone explore why the Washington Metro has had difficulty in reaching suburban destinations like Tysons Corner, the prototypical edge city.

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The negative attention that building a big home can draw

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While reading an article about some big homes that are still being built in the United States (are there enough wealthy people doing this to counteract data?), there is an interesting part about the negative attention these homes can draw.

One obvious drawback of building big: unwanted attention. Neighbors sometimes chafe at the idea of an edifice down the street the size of the White House. Reacting to McMansions that went up in the housing boom, some communities, like Chevy Chase, Md., passed rules that regulate more strictly how big houses can grow, says John McIlwain, a senior resident fellow specializing in housing issues at the Urban Land Institute.

Near where Mr. Pritzker’s home is under construction, neighbors are up in arms over another of Mr. McCoy’s projects, a roughly 70,000-square-foot compound (downsized from 85,000 square feet) awaiting permitting for Prince Abdulaziz ibn Abdullah ibn Abdulaziz Al Saud, son of the king of Saudi Arabia. The compound is on three lots and would include a main home of 42,000 square feet—part of it underground—a guest house, pool cabana, gate house and another residence of up to 20,000 square feet. The prince’s lawyer, Benjamin Reznik, notes other residences in the neighborhood are super-sized and says opposition has been “fomented” by neighbor Martha Karsh, the wife of Oaktree Capital Management founder Bruce Karsh. Ms. Karsh has hired publicists to attract attention to the project, he adds. “Newt Gingrich wishes he had that campaign going,” says Mr. Reznik.

George Mihlsten, a lawyer for a community coalition and Ms. Karsh, says the coalition hired his firm and that Mr. Reznik has hired outside help too, including a community-relations firm (Mr. Reznik says that was in response to Ms. Karsh’s campaign). “He likes to focus on Martha, but the truth is he and his client have created the controversy by proposing an outlandish plan and going behind the backs of the community to try to get it built,” Mr. Mihlsten says in an email, likening the scope of the project to a small community shopping center. More than 1,500 residents of Benedict Canyon signed a petition expressing their opposition to the project as it was originally proposed, according to a representative of the coalition.

The scope of these projects makes them extremely complex to construct. Finding or assembling the property can take several years, and the design and construction of a super-size project can take up to five years or more, builders say. (These days, lower labor costs in some areas can mean quicker turnaround times or better value.) Just finding parking for the 100 to 200 tradespeople that can be on-site for a big job, compared with the eight to 20 people typically working on a 4,000-square-foot home, can require planning; commandeering church parking lots is one standby.

If you have enough money, can’t you just budget some resources for dealing with the neighbors and/or going to court to make sure your home is built? But if your neighbors are also wealthy, perhaps you are in trouble…

The article hints at the regulations that many municipalities have put in place in order to limit these large homes. This leads me to several thoughts. First, are there communities that have intentionally left no or few regulations in place in order to make it easier for the construction of bigger homes? Another way to think about this would be to look at communities that have had public discussions about regulations for larger homes but then decided to do nothing. Are there communities that actually want these larger homes? Second, are these extra-large homes extremely concentrated in a few communities that have more relaxed regulations? Third, has someone ever looked into whether the level of opposition to a proposed big house is proportionally related to the size? For example, a house that is 500 square feet larger than the surrounding homes might receive one-quarter of the NIMBY attention of a proposed house 2000 square feet larger.

Editorial: group homes must maintain even higher appearance standards for suburban neighborhoods

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The Daily Herald has an editorial that argues suburban group homes have to keep up even higher appearance standards matching their surrounding suburban neighborhood. The particular case involves a group home in Des Plaines who wanted to expand their facility from five to eight residents but the city rejected their proposal.

He described a facility that was poorly maintained, often appears to exceed its limit of five clients and allows its back yard to become covered in weeds and vines.

Tom Kucharski, who lives near the home, admitted that it made corrections to its appearance but only after “they were forced to do it.”

With group homes under consideration or being developed throughout the suburbs, most notably recently affecting Palatine, Mount Prospect, Arlington Heights and Buffalo Grove, this is just the type of experience a town should not have to hear. It is hard enough to overcome the unfounded fears and prejudices of potential neighbors to a group home, without having to face the additional burden of a shabby experience somewhere else…

But it is a sad truth that existing facilities must go above and beyond expectations of high-quality maintenance and neighborliness if that idealistic vision is to become reality. And the day will never come if homes permit themselves to be perceived as a neighborhood nuisance or eyesore.

Here is what I think the argument is saying:

1. Suburbanites don’t generally like the idea of having a group home for the developmentally disabled in their residential neighborhood. The Daily Herald wishes this were not the case.

2. Yet, the newspaper understands why neighbors would be opposed to the expansion of this facility because they have not kept up their property. (I would be interested to know if the interior was kept up or whether it was just the outside that was disheveled.)

3. The editorial concludes that such group homes actually have to go above and beyond typical standards to convince people that they could and should be built in residential neighborhoods. The editorial laments this “sad-but-real duty.” But, the editorial comes off as then attacking this particular group home, with some justification, and then saying it and other group homes should do extra work to change the opinions of NIMBY-minded neighbors.

It seems like the editorial wants it both ways: suburbs should approve more of these homes but the homes have to be immaculate so that they all don’t get a bad reputation. Here are a few alternative ways this might be addressed:

1. Thinking through why suburbanites don’t want group homes in their neighborhood in the first place. Do the suburbanites “win” in this case because the group home “failed” its duty? Could there be some way of setting up a structure that helps the neighborhood take ownership for this facility or having broader community groups sponsor these homes in order to help maintain the facilities?

2. Could municipalities move more quickly in asking facilities to clean up or have stricter standards for these particular zoning uses? This way, the rules are very clear from the outset: you need to follow these guidelines or you will get major fines. With clearer and more quickly enforced guidelines, you don’t let it get to a point where the whole backyard is full of vines and weeds.

Perhaps we can think about it in another way – let’s put it in racial terms. Let’s say an immigrant family moves into a generally nice suburban neighborhood. Over a few years, this family lets their yard deteriorate. The neighbors start complaining. It takes a while for the city to act. Eventually, the neighborhood has a chillier reception for another immigrant family who wants to move in because they assume this new family will have the same traits. Would the Daily Herald say it is the responsibility of the immigrant families to be even cleaner and more middle-class than their neighbors to convince them? (I realize this isn’t a perfect analogy…)

I can’t help but feel that the Daily Herald is suggesting that middle-class suburban values should always win out.

Naperville downtown like “Rush street west”?

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In response to the stabbing death that happened in downtown Naperville this past weekend, one city councilman suggests the city needs to enforce liquor regulations more closely:

Councilman Doug Krause pointed out that the city has only shut down one bar for one day in the past five years due to a liquor license infraction, and that an ordinance passed last month will allow bars to stop serving food at 9 p.m.

“It’s becoming more of a Rush Street after 10 o’clock at night — it’s like Rush Street west,” Krause said Sunday night. “It’s been increasing over the last eight to 10 years. There are mobs out there.”…

“We had over 6,000 calls for police service in downtown Naperville last year. The problem is an enforcement problem,” Krause said referring to liquor law enforcement.

Councilman Grant Wehrli disagreed with Krause, calling his response a “knee jerk reaction to an event that is still under investigation.”

This sort of reaction is something I was expecting even though Naperville is a relatively safe place.

At the same time, this does lead to a larger issue that I hinted at on Sunday: how Naperville wants to balance being a cultural and entertainment center while also remaining family-friendly. On one side, having a lot of bars in a suburban downtown is not usually considered family-friendly. Particularly on warm summer nights, there are a lot of people who congregate in downtown Naperville late into the evening, including many teenagers and families, to partake of music, shopping, the Riverwalk, and family restaurants and eateries. This sort of violence is not clearly not helpful to maintaining this environment but even public drunkenness is not terribly conducive to this.

On the other hand, having a thriving restaurant and bar district can bring in a lot of tax revenue. Instead of residents going elsewhere (perhaps downtown Chicago even?), they spend their money out in downtown Naperville. Lots of suburban communities would love to have the problem that Naperville has had of not having enough parking spaces for all of the downtown visitors or having the kind of restaurants that exist in most suburbs only in shopping centers. The restaurants and bars help attract other businesses.

So how does a well-respected suburb balance these two interests? One of the worst things that could happen to the downtown is that it is branded “unsafe” and people turn away. At the same time, when there are plenty of people around and there is alcohol involved, it is really hard to stop everything bad from happening.

“Farewell to the suburban age”?

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One strategist argues that the “suburban age” is over in America:

Note how this process is self-reinforcing. As people moved out, municipal revenues stagnated in the old urban core. This meant that deteriorating urban services in downtown areas pushed out more people. Meanwhile, the expanding suburban population could use its growing political clout to demand more public spending on highways and other urban infrastructure for the suburbs. The expansion of urban infrastructure was fiscally very expensive, but America’s powerful mid-century economy could afford it. By the end of the 20th century, some suburbs had spread so far from any urban core that they were given a new name: “exurbs”.

Today, however, these very dynamics, both financial and sociological, have gone into reverse. Concerns about the state of US federal, state and municipal finances have grown sharply. In August 2011, ratings agency Standard & Poor’s downgraded the credit rating of 11,000 municipal issues following the downgrade of the federal government. In November 2011, Jefferson County, Alabama, filed for bankruptcy, the largest such filing in US history. At the very least, this means that the United States will not be able to afford further expansion of urban infrastructure for many years. Indeed, American city managers will be forced to recognise that urban services are much cheaper to supply in a concentrated urban form…

Meanwhile, the structure of American society is also changing rapidly. In 1950, households based on married couples accounted for 78 per cent of all households. Single-person households accounted for less than 10 per cent. Over the following 60 years, however, the institution of marriage went into steep decline in America. The latest census data shows that married couples accounted for only 48 per cent of households in 2010 and that their share is rapidly falling. In contrast, the single person household now accounts for 27 per cent of households.

The residential requirements of this new social structure are drastically different from those of the traditional family. The single individual, for instance, is likely to prefer an easily managed apartment and close proximity to bars, restaurants, hospitals, shops and friends. The implication of the above sociological and fiscal dynamics is that the future trajectory of American cities is towards increased density. Some old city-centres will revive even as new hubs will emerge.

There are two major arguments here against the suburbs:

1. They are too expensive to maintain in the long-run.

2. Family structures have changed and the new forms of social arrangement, such as living alone, would be best done in the city.

Both of these are problems though I’m not sure they necessarily mean that Americans will revert to city living and promoting urban policies over suburban policies. I wonder if the shift toward the densification of the suburbs, often built around New Urbanist developments or retrofitting, would adequately solve both of these issues.

The overall premise of this piece is echoed by others (see a similar argument from The Atlantic last year) and I wonder how much of this is simply the same suburban critique that we have heard now for decades: suburbs are unsustainable and their design does not cater to everyone (teenagers, singles, the elderly, etc.). Is this era of economic crisis going to be the period where these critiques actually move residents and policymakers toward other options?

There is another intriguing part about this analysis: how American policies about suburbs influence other country’s policies. This writer suggests that India is aspiring in some ways to follow the American model when the country would be better served to promote denser cities. If the American suburban model does decline (and we would have to think about how exactly you would measure this decline), would other countries abandon their smaller suburban plans?

In trying to preserve open space in New Jersey, the land falls into the hands of the wealthy

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Here is an interesting argument from a northern New Jersey columnist: the state’s effort to conserve open space by offering a tax break for farmland has left most of the open farmland in the hands of the wealthy.

It’s in the New Jersey Constitution, has been since 1963. Farmland is assessed for property taxes at its agricultural value, not its development value. To qualify, the property has to be at least five acres. Subsequent laws require that it generate at least $500 a year in agricultural revenue.

The goal was and is to preserve some of New Jersey’s diminishing stock of open land before it is all turned into condos and McMansions.

The program is working. But open land costs so much that the people who can afford to buy it tend to be well-to-do. This is unfair, critics say, because it enables rich people to surround themselves with open space and views while real, dirt-under-the-fingernails farmers are forced out of state…

Unsurprisingly, some owners of such New Jersey properties are megabucks celebrities. The rock star Jon Bon Jovi owns seven farm acres in historic Middletown, near the shore in Monmouth County, on which he paid $104 in taxes in 2010. Steve Forbes, magazine publisher, paid $2,005 in taxes in 2009 on 450 acres in Bedminster, in the Somerset Hills.

And here are former Gov. Christine Todd Whitman and her husband, John, who own 167 acres in Tewksbury, in Hunterdon County, on which they paid $1,521 in taxes in 2010, and 65 acres in Bedminster, on which they paid $173.

This sounds like a situation of unintended consequences: the law was intended to keep farmland open in the midst of suburban development but because of rising land prices plus tax breaks, the wealthy benefit.

Of course, there are other ways to conserve open space in the face of development. Contrast the approach in New Jersey versus the actions of the DuPage County Forest Preserve. After World War II, the Forest Preserve was very aggressive in grabbing open land, particularly land around waterways. If I am remembering correctly, by the late 1960s the Forest Preserve had over 15,000 acres in a rapidly expanding county that grew from almost 155,000 people in 1950 to nearly 492,000 in 1970 to over 904,000 in 2000. This didn’t come without a cost: the Forest Preserve had to find money to fund these purchases and there were complaints about rising local taxes plus the debt taken on in bonds. Additionally, the Forest Preserve ended up in several tussles over land with municipalities as both the County and suburbs wanted to control land before it disappeared. Today, there are still complaints about the Forest Preserve as the over 25,000 acres are maintained with taxpayer dollars. At the same time, there are a number of very nice sites and the land, unlike farmland, is open for everyone to use.

So if it came down to providing tax breaks  for the farms of wealthy landowners or having facilities that are taxpayer supported but also available to all, which would you choose? Presumably there are other options to choose from as well?

Country music highlights the ideals of the country in the midst of a suburban nation

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A music critic suggests makers of and listeners to country music are mostly in the suburbs, not the country:

Of course the actual lives lived in those small towns are somewhere within these songs, but many of the details are glossed over, romanticized, politicized or just plain ignored. There are megachurches in small towns now, not just cute little white chapels. There are Meth labs. There are business sections of town that don’t look too different from what you see in suburbs around big cities; e.g., not very pretty. There are factory farms, which bring some uglier realities than the idyllic farms of country songs (the stench of large-scale hog farms, for one). There are immigrants from other countries, possibly even (gasp!) illegal ones, often working the least appreciated of the farm and factory jobs. There are eccentricities and new developments that just don’t fit the portrait of rural America in country songs.

Plus, the country singers and songwriters aren’t all living in the country these days, but are just as likely to be found in your McMansions in the suburbs (look, for example, at the neighborhood Brad Paisley stands in, whether it’s actually his or not, in the music video for “Welcome to the Future”).

Country music fans live in such suburbs and cities, as well. Country today preserves the myths, half-truths and conjecture associated with the divide between small towns and cities, rarely acknowledging the gray areas in between. (Montgomery Gentry: “Don’t you dare go running down my little town where I grew up and I won’t cuss your city lights”). In country music today there is a constant sleight of hand going on with regards to “the country life”, shuffling up ingrained ideas of what it means with ones rooted in today or yesteryear.

Sometimes this might be political, a way to smuggle (or, more often, showcase outright) conservative ideas about the way America should and shouldn’t be. More often it’s probably of convenience or laziness, repeating past successes or playing into what artists imagine their audiences want to hear. But on another level this is about genre, about preserving a certain library of scenes and stories, to make the music recognizable as country and further the tradition. Then again, genres are shaped by the minds of the fans as much as the musicians, and by the times we live in.

In this argument about country music, the themes of country music highlight (a stereotype of?) the rural nature of America even as the producers and consumers are all part of a suburban or exurban existence. I tend to think of suburbs as an American adaptation to the issue of cities versus rural areas, a debate that began in the early days of the American project. The suburbs offer some of the city life, particularly the access to business and culture, with some of the country life with single-family homes and lots and a closer proximity to nature. In this case, the genre of music highlights a past era of American history as we are clearly a suburban nation today.

Are there country songs that celebrate the suburbs? I’m always on the lookout for cultural products that highlight the suburbs. Also, is it fair to single out a country music star for a McMansion – do other music stars also in suburban McMansions?

If there is a popular genre of music that holds out an ideal vision of the country life, is there a genre that does the opposite, hold out an ideal vision of city life?

The disappearing natural world in children’s books

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A new sociological study suggests the natural world is disappearing from award-winning children’s books:

A group of researchers led by University of Nebraska-Lincoln sociologist J. Allen Williams Jr. studied the winners of the American Library Association’s prestigious Caldecott Medal between 1938 (the year the prize was first awarded) through 2008. They looked at more than 8,000 images in the 296 volumes.

They noted whether each image depicted a natural environment (such as a forest), a built environment (such as a house), or a modified environment (such as a cornfield or manicured lawn). In addition, they observed whether the illustrations contained any animals, and if so, rated them as either domestic, wild or anthropomorphized (that is, taking on human qualities)…

Specifically, they find images of built and natural environments were “almost equally likely to be present” in books published from the late 1930s through the 1960s. But in the  mid-1970s, illustrations of the built environment started to increase in number, while there were fewer and fewer featuring the natural environment…

“These findings suggest that today’s generation of children are not being socialized, at least through this source, toward an understanding and appreciation of the natural world and the place of humans within it,” Williams and his colleagues conclude.

Here is the list of Caldecott winners. Here is what the award is about:

Each year the Newbery Medal is awarded by the American Library Association for the most distinguished American children’s books published the previous year. However, as many persons became concerned that the artists creating picture books for children were as deserving of honor and encouragement as were the authors of children’s books, Frederic G. Melcher suggested in 1937 the establishment of a second annual medal. This medal is to be given to the artist who had created the most distinguished picture book of the year and named in honor of the nineteenth-century English illustrator Randolph J. Caldecott. The idea for this medal was also accepted enthusiastically by the Section for Library Work with Children of ALA and was approved by the ALA Executive Board.

Do Newbery winners (chapter books) have more depictions of nature?

Perhaps this is simply the necessary consequence of suburbanized America. How many children actually have consistent opportunities to interact with nature or even to see it? The suburban world is a strange one in that while it has a lot of natural imagery (think of street names) and the first suburbs of the mid 1800s invoked pastoral themes, the natural world is very homogenized and sanitized.

Additionally, we live in a country that suggests technology can improve or solve most problems while nature might seem somewhat static (even though it is incredibly dynamic). Perhaps we are now a culture where only the built environment promises excitement while nature seems unpromising. Or perhaps pressing social concerns simply tend to outweigh natural concerns at every turn.

While this study can’t conclude whether these books are reflecting cultural concerns or forming cultural ideas, it does raise questions about what children’s books should be doing. Teaching valuable lessons? Passing along cultural values or cultural capital (a la Bourdieu)? Entertaining? Helping kids learn to read and learn about the world? Making money for the publishers? All of the above?

I wonder if any of the Caldecott Award committees thought about the role of nature in the books they selected.

(This study seems a bit similar in methodology to a study last year that looked at gender biases in children’s literature.)