The Horizontal City and Suburbanisation: Fishman and Hall on Sprawl

The horizontal city is the one that grows outward instead of upward: low-density subdivisions, single-family houses, shopping centres with car parks and highways connecting pieces separated by kilometres of consumed land. It has been the dominant form of urban growth in the United States since 1945 and has spread to Europe, Latin America and Asia under the name of sprawl. Two historians of the city explain its origins and consequences: Robert Fishman, who reconstructed the cultural genealogy of the suburb in Bourgeois Utopias (1987), and Peter Hall, who placed the city on the highway among the great planning ideas of the twentieth century in Cities of Tomorrow (1988).

Robert Fishman and the bourgeois utopia of the suburb

Fishman shows that the suburb was born not with the car but with the English bourgeoisie of the late eighteenth century. London's evangelical merchants, who wanted to separate the family from trade and from the corrupt city, settled in villas with gardens in Clapham, and that bourgeois utopia of domestic life surrounded by nature travelled to Manchester, Philadelphia and the railway suburbs of Chicago. Each new transport technology, the tram, the commuter train and finally the automobile, widened the radius and lowered the cost, until suburban life stopped being the privilege of a few and became the destiny of the middle classes.

From suburb to technoburb: the city without a centre

The decisive turn, according to Fishman, comes after the Second World War, when the suburb stops depending on the centre. Federally guaranteed mortgages, the interstate highways of 1956 and the relocation of factories, offices and shops to the peripheries created what he calls the technoburb: a decentralised region where people live, work and shop without setting foot in the traditional city. Los Angeles, Houston or the Virginia counties next to Washington are cities without a centre where the single-family house and the car are the basic unit of life. Fishman reads this as the end of the classic suburb and the birth of a new urban form.

Peter Hall and the city on the highway

Hall supplies the context of ideas. In Cities of Tomorrow he devotes the chapter on the city on the highway to Frank Lloyd Wright and his Broadacre City of 1935, which proposed an acre per family and the automobile as liberator, and to Robert Moses, who built in New York the highways and bridges that made dispersion possible. Hall stresses that the horizontal city was also a political project: exclusionary zoning that banned apartment buildings in the suburbs, mortgage redlining that denied credit to Black neighbourhoods and massive public subsidies to the car that made what was extremely expensive look cheap.

Consequences of and alternatives to the horizontal city

The consequences both authors describe are well known. Consumption of farmland and natural land, car dependence with its emissions and road deaths, the high cost of infrastructure stretched over few people, segregation by income and race, and a daily life organised around commuting. Hall adds that sprawl hollowed out the centres of American cities and produced the urban crisis of the 1960s and 1970s, and Fishman warns that the technoburb lacks the public spaces in which civic life is built.

Alternatives have multiplied since the 1990s: the New Urbanism of Andrés Duany and Peter Calthorpe, which restores the street, mixed uses and medium density in the peripheries; Portland's urban growth boundary; transit-oriented development; and the regeneration of dead malls as complete neighbourhoods. Fishman has acknowledged in later work a partial return to city centres. But the horizontal city keeps growing in the Global South, where the model of gated development and the car is reproduced, and the historical lesson of both authors remains the same: dispersion was not a natural preference but the result of public decisions that can be taken differently.