Also, people have been doing this for years. Versailles is where it is to escape the busy city. Union Square in Manhattan started as a residential area in the 1830s.

I think the thing that truly makes the modern suburbs suburban, is copy-pasting of common styles and uniform lots.

The author may be backprojecting salient features of the postwar bedroom suburb onto early waves of low-density urbanization as though his were _the_ salient features of the whole family tree. I think he admits as much by claiming that the essence of the Manchester pattern was the "complete break" between the urban core and desirable residential addresses. I don't find that he can establish his case that this is what this or all suburbanization essentially amounts to, so I disagree he shows that what happened here was what "the world copied." It does look like probably a lovely place to live.

The garden suburb "first emerged in England in the 1830s" per David Fishman [NB: not the same scholar as Robert Fishman] Bob Stern, and Michael Tilove's book "Paradise Planned," but garden suburbs are just one of the forms that subsequent waves of suburbanization have taken; earlier waves were also going on, and have continued to as well.

The Georgian (1710s-1820s) squares of many cities in England, for example, didn't have estate-style lawns nor walls around the neighborhoods, but they often had locked fences all around the garden. These private parks were known as squares, yes, but had little in common with cobblestoned market squares; the houses were sometimes even low-rise fashionable villas (among them Lloyd Square -- near the Angel of Islington -- a development which is still intact in Inner London). The fancy Clifton area of Bristol is at a higher elevation than the old port city but I disagree that separation from the core or social desirability are really what define a neighborhood as being suburban. Lloyd Square is a little unnervingly low; its buildings struggle to effectively amplify the space or create "positive space" because architecturally they can't anchor or confine it. So one perspective on suburban environments is this: they all exhibit urbanization processes where the spaces between buildings frequently do not even register primarily as "spaces between buildings" but as horizontal visual landscapes unfolding in various directions. I may have gotten this notion from the townscape studies movement.

Canal and waterfall mill workforce neighborhoods on both sides of the Atlantic significantly predate Fishman's and this author's wave of lower-density higher-skill suburban growth.

The arrival of more than ten thousand relatively skilled French Protestant families of mostly weavers to Spitalfields and Bethnal Green and the surrounding area east of the London wall between 1585 and 1587 caused rapid development of a pretty comparatively suburban character. For a more planned version, the architect Inigo Jones' Covent Garden specifically attracted wealthy homeowners in the 1630s and 1640s when future Soho Square was still undeveloped and the West End was not a business center. For a less planned and more-exurban growth pattern I think of Quakers moving between the City of London and the more bucolic area of Stoke Newington north of town.

What you may be missing is that in the US starting around 1950s, suburbanization inverted this millennia-old globally-generalized pattern. It was called "white flight" [1] at the time, because richer mostly white workers moved their tax revenues out of the city limits. Because so much infrastructure and social structure (like schools) was funded largely or even entirely from the local tax revenue, it hollowed out the "inner cities" and the feedback loops were devastating. That's why New York City became the murder capital of the world in the 1970s. Colloquially, in the US, "inner city" [2] came to mean a low-income and mostly minority neighborhood full of crime, not anything specific to its geographic location.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_city

The situation in the San Francisco Bay Area is similar. While there are still low-income communities in and near the urban centers (e.g., East Oakland, Richmond, Bay View/Hunter’s Point in San Francisco), there are many low-income and middle-class people who endure 4-6 hour round-trip commutes via car from places like Stockton, Modesto, Los Banos, and Salinas. I find my 45-minute commute from San Ramon to Fremont difficult (sadly I can’t afford to move to Fremont on my current salary without downgrading my apartment); I can’t imagine having to drive five days a week from Stockton to Fremont, but thousands of commuters do this.

There weren't housing shortages in most Northern cities in the 1980s. Significant deindustrialisation had hollowed them out and they were in economic decline. The population in Manchester dropped continuously from 766,311 in 1931 to 392,819 in 2001 before starting to recover[0].

This was also before the sell-off of council housing, so it was still possible for the authority to guarantee housing. So conservation of unloved but historically important buildings was probably a more pressing problem than finding some vacant land to build flats.

https://www.manchester.gov.uk/download/downloads/id/25393/a2...

They're not obliged to. Conservation is a good on its own terms. They also didn't address carbon burdens, asbestos or diversity.

Look I get it, there's a housing crisis. If you want to argue we should make suburban Seoul with towers for 10km can I remind you le Corbusiers ideas were implemented widely in Birmingham and Manchester and were a disaster.

Maybe, the answer is to raid the green belt? Oh look, another "special interest" bun fight. More Barrett homes now! More ticky tacky. More all the same.

No, well 1980s Manchester isn't modern day $prosperous city.

Further, I suspect a run down '10 servant' Victorian Villa could house more people in bedsits, than the replacement apartments, so in effect youre complaining that the have nots had housing at the expense of the better off, which probably isn't the complaint you were intending to make.

In China they went and built a ton of housing, but then people don't want to live in those cities and their population has peaked up. So forcing housing solutions doesn't necessarily end well either.