Individualism=Suburbanization

“Culturally, it is impossible not to see physical suburbanization  as one of the fruits of America’s historic inclination towards individualism.  This is not to suggest that our suburbs lack or must necessarily lack the communal associations regarded by Tocqueville as essential to virtue, civility, and just democratic politics. Nevertheless, compared to the traditional city, suburbia seems morally and culturally deficient in two noteworthy respects. The first is suburbia’s comparative class homogeneity, most starkly evident when one compares the uniformity of housing in virtually any suburban residential development with the variety of housing types that can be found on urban residential streets. The second is that the very nature of the postwar suburb requires a dissociation of daily communal life from physical place, a dissociation that not only fails to sustain both the social reality and the aesthetics of communal life but positively undermines them.” Philip Bess, Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architecture, Urbanism, and the Sacred (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2006), 22-23