Upstream - [TEASER] Suburban Hell and Ugly Cities

Episode Date: June 11, 2024

You can listen to the full episode "Suburban Hell and Ugly Cities" by subscribing to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/upstreampodcast As a Patreon subscriber, not only will you get access to at least one bonus episode a month, usually two or three, as well as early access to certain episodes and other benefits like stickers and bumper stickers, depending on which tier you subscribe to, but you’ll also be helping to keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project going. Find out more at Patreon.com/upstreampodcast or at upstreampodcast.org/support. Thank you. Why is even just driving through suburbia soul crushing? Why are so many cities and towns in the United States so…ugly? All of us here would probably agree that car-centric city planning and corporate development are huge factors to consider when asking these questions. But what exactly about this type of planning and development is it that feels so oppressive? What exactly is it about that strip mall that makes your heart sink? What exactly is it about that suburban lawn that makes you feel so uncannily uncomfortable? These are some of the questions that we explore in this Patreon episode. In this episode Robert reads and comments on two separate but related pieces: Why even driving through suburbia is soul crushing, by Alex Balashov and Compromise, Hell! by Wendell Berry. These pieces explore the anti-social, barren, and soul-crushing aspects of how we, under late-stage capitalism here in the United States, design the spaces we travel through and live in. From freeway interchanges that jut out like decaying exo-skeletons, to the barren eight-late expressways that cut neighborhoods in half, to the giant lawns, fake porches, and kitschy columns that ornament many suburban homes—this reading not only calls out these monstrosities but explains what they do to us on a psychological, nervous system, and social level. Further resources: Why Even Driving Through Suburbia is Soul Crushing, by Alex Balashov Compromise, Hell! by Wendell Berry 27:10: Images 1 & 2 McMansion Hell Related episodes: Upstream: Everyday Utopia and Radical Imagination with Kristen Ghodsee Upstream: Capitalist Realism with Carlee Gomes Upstream: Dialectical Materialism w/ Josh Sykes Grassroots Urban Placemaking with Mark Lakeman Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at  upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Alright, hey everybody, welcome back to another Patreon episode of Upstream. As you might have guessed, since we're jumping right in with no intro music or anything, this is going to be another reading and I actually think I might try to squeeze in two different pieces in this episode that are somewhat related. But really, there's not going to be much continuity between the last readings, which were more along the themes of imperialism and Palestine. I'm actually going to be reading a couple of pieces spaces that we live in and what that means for us sort of psychologically and socially and I guess sort of maybe the political aspects of urban design and architecture. I haven't read either of these pieces in at least a few years though,

so I'm kind of revisiting them and I'm really excited to read them from a hopefully somewhat more matured and developed perspective, you know, now that I've really taken a deep dive into Marxism in the last few years It's hard not to analyze everything through that lens. And so some of that may come up You know, I may even have some disagreements or criticisms. I know both of the authors are not Marxists. So yeah, I'm really not sure, but I'm very excited to find out, and I hope that you guys find it interesting as well. Just a quick note before we get started, I've really been loving the community that we've built on Patreon. And honestly, I've actually stopped responding to comments and messages as much on Instagram because I

just can't really keep up with it and it actually feels like really good to interact and engage with you guys on patreon and You know I try as hard as I can to respond to like every comment and as many of the DMS as I can get to so Yeah, I just wanted to to mention that and I also want to acknowledge that I know a lot of you were frustrated at the one-sided approach to the MMT episode with Doug Hanwood that we released as our first Patreon release. And I'm pretty sure that Della is working on interviewing someone who has an alternative perspective. I don't have any details like at all on that or a timeline but I just wanted to let you guys know that we have heard you and we are working on

another episode. Okay so the first article that I'm gonna read is by someone named Alex Balashav. Honestly I have no idea who he really, but this piece was just so eye-opening to me. I don't even remember how I first came across it, but it's called Why Even Driving Through Suburbia Is Soulcrushing. And it was published in Quartz in 2016. And as someone who partially grew up from about eighth grade through high school, deep in the suburbs, I felt this piece deep in my soul. It was really able to like really situate and articulate an otherwise like completely ineffable feeling that, you know, I'm still extremely intimate with. Suburbia really is soul-crushing to me, and there are so many factors that go into that. I think that culturally, in terms of the class of people who tend to move to the suburbs, at least where I grew up, it always felt super alienating. That's not the aspect of the suburbs that this piece is about.

This piece is about the design aspect of it, but being able to put sort of a materialist thumb so to speak onto some of the alienation that I felt growing up, it just felt like really enlightening and liberating even. I found it so interesting. And it was sort of like uncovering some past childhood trauma almost, like recognizing it is the first step. And I truly believe that growing up in neighborhoods designed for cars and not humans is traumatizing. And I know that word is overused and I'm definitely guilty of doing it a lot.

But I really don't think there's a more apt way to describe it, you know, to describe what it does to you. Like, not only does it alienate you from others in profound ways, but like on a nervous system and on a psychological and physiological level, the way that these neighborhoods are designed is just, it feels deeply, deeply anti-human to me. Yeah, so I'm really excited to revisit this piece. That's sort of my preamble. Let's get into it. As usual, I'm going to chime in a bit here and there and give some of my personal perspective and thoughts and analysis. I'll put the link in the show notes as well for the piece in case you want to read it or follow along.

Okay, yeah, let's dive in. I've written some in the past about how the predominant suburban design in the US is among the worst features of life here, viewed from the perspective of a European immigrant like me at any rate. Far from posing a mere logistical or aesthetic problem, it shapes, or perhaps more accurately, it circumscribes our experience of life and our social relationships in insidious ways. The destruction of the pedestrian public realm is not merely an economic or ecological absurdity. It has deleterious effects.

For just one small example of many, life in a subdivision called a sack keeps children from exploring and becoming conversant with the wider world around them because it tethers their social lives and activities to their busy parents' willingness to drive them somewhere. Okay, as an aside, like that immediately is just so, so resonant for me. Yeah, my schedule as a, you know, middle school, high schooler, until I got my own license was just completely dictated by my parents' availability. Okay, back to the text.

The spontaneity of childhood in the courtyard, on the street, or in the square gives way to the managed, curated, pre-arranged playdate. Small wonder that kids retreat within the four walls of their house and lead increasingly electronic lives. The virtues of a private backyard are easily exaggerated. It's vacuous and isolated, and kids quickly outgrow it. Growing up, we had a tiny backyard, so it wouldn't have really sufficed anyways. Okay, back to the text. However, it's been difficult to elucidate in specific physical terms what it is about suburbia that makes it so hostile to humanity.

To someone with no training in architecture, it's often experienced as a great, non-articulated existential malaise, like depression. You know it sucks, but it's hard to say exactly why. The same holds true in reverse. North Americans who have not traveled abroad extensively and don't have a clear basis for comparison can be tongue-tied when asked to explain what exactly makes a non-sparl city street

quote charming or quote cozy. It's telling that we have no widespread cultural vernacular for why classical urban settlements, which draw on millennia of intellectual background and corpuses of architectural knowledge, are pleasant. It's because Americans took that inheritance and unceremoniously discarded it, consonantly with the rise of the mass-produced automobile. It irks me that many of us know, on some level level that we live in a dystopian nightmare,

but we can't say what makes it a dystopian nightmare. And aside from the text, it reminds me of a quote, the dystopian nightmares that we're living in were the utopian fantasies of our forebears and like the dreams of the men of industry and the capitalists and the entrepreneurs of the 18th and 19th century, like we're living in their fucking hell worlds right now. Okay back to the text. That's how I came to spend a fair amount of time recently, thinking about and researching what exactly makes suburbia, suburbia.

I don't mean the abstract lessons why it sucks I've pontificated on that plenty I mean the physicality for example I live in Atlanta a suburban mega agglomeration that sucks in the same general way as cities like Los Angeles Dallas Fort Worth Houston and Phoenix sorry no offense to anybody who lives there and loves it. We're talking about specific aspects and specific parts of these cities. Okay, back to the text. When someone asks me where I'm from and I roll my eyes and diffidently groan Atlanta,

why? It's worth asking what specifically makes Atlanta, quote, groan g-r-o-a-n by the way and I relate to that so much when I tell people in the Bay Area what part of the Bay Area I'm from I always feel a little embarrassed and it's kind of dumb because I had no choice to you know grow up in that part of the Bay Area but still it's just you know there still, there's a lot that's just sort of wrapped up in certain neighborhoods. And there's certain cultures.

There's certain politics. And there's just certain feelings that we carry with us, having grown up in certain places. I recall interviewing Malcolm Harris on his book, Palo Alto. And he grew up in Palo Alto, I think at least partially, and I could so relate to him talking about, both in the book and I think in the interview as well, Palo Alto is fucking haunted.

And many of the people that live there, or even all of them, whether consciously or not, whether it's their fault or not, they're haunted. They are possessed in a way by the city, right? Like the crucible that they exist, it alters their brain chemistry in profound ways. And it has a lot to do with a lot of different things. But the design and the suburban physicality of certain suburban cities is definitely a significant part of that. Okay, back to the text. Patreon subscriber you will get access to at least one bonus episode a month, usually two or three, our entire back catalogue of Patreon episodes, early access to certain

episodes and other benefits like stickers and bumper stickers depending on which tier you subscribe to. You'll also be helping to keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project going. Find out more at patreon.com forward slash upstream podcast or at upstreampodcast.org forward slash support. Thank you.