Rome introduction
mill towns vs. suburbs
- big push to industrialize the south starting
in the 1880s
- they built housing for their workers
- lots of identical cheap houses
- built mostly before 1920s, houses built to be
rented out
- post WWII suburbs were built mostly for
families whose husbands would commute to the city
- people bought their houses
- new technology to build identical cheap
houses
- two things made this possible: automobiles
and VA loans
more
aerial views of Lakewood Park
the building of large housing developments after WWII,
using assembly line techniques
quite quickly some people began to see these as bulldozed
landscapes
1959 video on 1950s suburban sprawl
notice that the critique of the environmental
impact started within 10 years
these are issues today but were also issues in the 1950s,
before the modern environmental movement got going
zoning for commercial and residential areas goes back to
the late 1920s
Is the environmental movement a reaction to increasing
damage to the environment
Or is it the result of people getting richer and seeing
themselves as consumers and complaining about quality of
life issues that previously hadn't concerned them
what problems did environmentalists emphasize (p. 6)?
- mid 1950s to early 1960s: outdoor
recreation, open space, wilderness preservation
- mid 1960s to early 1970s:
pollution
- mid 1970s on: energy
conservation, endangered species...
How this story is different:
- concerns about losing nature were not just about
wilderness and the rich but also about the places middle class
people lived (not just out there)
- ideas from the conservation movement of wise use
continued to be important
- the environmental movement was not just an extension of
the science of ecology
- different government agencies were on both sides
- property rights arguments were important in suburbs
- what is the relationship between consumerism and
environmentalism?
consumers cared about what affected them