by Hsuan Luo Mom smiles brightly while baking a cake for her children on their way home from school. Dad is on his way home too for a perfect meal, with a ribbon tied around a teddy bear for his lovely kids. Women exchange recipes all the time, and kids gather to play soccer with their dads as coaches. The whole neighborhood is friendly. This happiness that everyone aspires to enjoy is often set in a suburb, full of spacious houses with big yards. This is where nearly every middle class family wants to live. However, suburban life is also a fantasy that was invented by Hollywood films and the uniform world of advertising. Suburbs have evolved with a certain lifestyle that people appreciate, and they have become possible because of advances in technology, the dominant factor that affects how we envision our future. After World War II, while the economy of the U.S. was getting better, the automobile industry also flourished. The automobile became seen as a necessity and a thing of beauty, the sign of a new era. Hence residential designs made an effort to bring in this new practice of driving cars.
Look at suburbs today and you will see how they are designed to conform to the middle class values. The roads, which form neat squares, are always straight and broad. Each block has only a few families living independently, forming their own little universe. Hundreds and even thousands of houses sprawl many miles into the distance. From a bird’s eye view, this well-ordered world is the perfect expression of modernity. Moreover, there is a clear border between residential and commercial life, as residential suburbs contain very few shops, since they are located in another well defined district explicitly devoted to that purpose. And yet, people can only get there by driving, in a complex system of highways and subordinate roads. This forces people to drive, even if they are only acquiring daily necessities or doing daily activities. People are more dependent than ever on their cars. The automobile industry, as the apex of modernity, continually reinforced the necessity of cars through frequent advertising. However, we should be careful to consider the whole concept of the suburb in the first place. Where does it come from? Why is it considered an ideal lifestyle? In the 1960s, when the U.S. government dispatched military forces to support the remote war in Vietnam, people in the U.S. became even more dependent on suburban life. People could easily see images of the terrible war and this gave them the idea that life in the U.S. and in Vietnam were like opposite poles. People in the U.S. still lived happily without any worries about life and death, and they clung even more strongly to the comfort of their present life. Suburban life was seen even more as the model of a perfect existence. Nevertheless, as people nowadays are confronted with the rising price of oil, they are also experiencing the inconvenience of living for so long in the suburbs. Some people have tried hard to relocate themselves back to cities, and urban designs have become a new target for developers. But no matter what the new designs may be, we have to remember what lies behind any particular lifestyle. Just as suburban life went hand in hand with the automobile industry and the Vietnam War, living in a city is also not determined simply according to one’s wishes and desires. No matter how sentimental we may be toward any one lifestyle, all of them are created things, and thus they all contain certain kinds of hidden information. a
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Authors
The Taida Student Journal has been active since 1995 with an ever-changing roster of student journalists at NTU. Click the above link to read about the authors Archives
May 2024
|