The document discusses the rise of television and suburbs in postwar America from the 1940s-1960s. Television was seen as bringing the world into people's homes and allowing them to experience new places without leaving home. This helped fuel the spatial expansion of suburbs and car-dependent development. Television also played a key role in shaping and marketing suburban life while replacing true urban social experiences. New urbanist approaches later aimed to design walkable communities with mixed uses that fostered better quality of life compared to isolating post-war suburbs.
27. “ Numerous commentators claimed that television allowed people to travel from their homes while remaining untouched by the actual social contexts to which they imaginatively ventured.”
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30. “ In America it was the automobile – in synergistic combination with television – that induced a new type of urbanization: scientific in the extreme and with an unprecedented reliance on wartime engineering structures and practices. The American city began to explode spatially, but only as quilted interlock of increasingly confined and abstract synthetic environments” (Kwinter 509)
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33. “ Television of course provided only…a mastered environment oriented simultaneously to merchandising and to entertainment (to mitigate the tedium, monotony, and isolation of suburban life)” (Kwinter 511)
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37. “… neo-suburbanites…secured a position of meaning in the public sphere through their new-found social identities as private land owners” (Spigel 101)
38. “ Not that these happy families have made everyone else happy. If the vinyl-sided split-level and the wood-clad, rabbit-eared floor console were the twin pillars of American happiness in the boom years that followed two decades of depression and war, they also served as the durable scapegoats for America’s soullessness, conformity and anomie : vast wastelands, little boxes made of ticky-tacky, little boxes, all the same.” -- A.O. Scott, “The Medium Is the Mindset,” NYT, 4/9/00
41. “ The domestic architecture of the [post-War] period was itself a discourse on the complex relationship between public and private space” (Spigel 101)
