Radical Suburbs

Radical Suburbs is a revelation. Amanda's Hurley's detailed research and writerly style will open your eyes to the wide diversity and rich history of our ongoing suburban experiment. This book gives us all a new way to understand our many and varied suburbias and how to engage a serious conversation about making them for 21st century life. Essential reading for every urbanist. --Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class

Radical Suburbs is a revelation. Amanda Kolson Hurley will open your eyes to the wide diversity and rich history of our ongoing suburban experiment. This book gives us all a new way to understand our varied suburbias and how to engage a serious conversation about making them for twenty-first century life. Essential reading for every urbanist. --Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class

Radical Suburbs overturns stereotypes about the suburbs to show that, from the beginning, those 'little boxes' harbored revolutionary ideas about racial and economic inclusion, communal space, and shared domestic labor. Amanda Kolson Hurley's illuminating case studies show not just where we've been but where we need to go. --Alexandra Lange, author of The Design of Childhood

While contemporary issues of segregation, inequity, and climate change seem to call for a wholesale abandonment of suburban values, Radical Suburbs insists that history can provide surprising insight into these national issues. -- Tanner Howard, Metropolis

A kind of Invisible Cities of urban planning--a short, concise collection of American dreams about what leaving the city and building a new community could mean, and what changed those dreams over time. [ Radical Suburbs] is a glimpse into sometime even more exciting--a future that is, as yet, unwritten. --Heather Smith, Sierra

The overall history of housing in America isn't about the unfettered human spirit at its best; it's about greed and fear and short-sightedness . . . [but] that makes this little book all the more necessary. The communities Kolson Hurley chronicles are welcome reminders that any place, even a suburb, can be radical if you approach it the right way. --NPR

A hopeful chronicle of experiments that mostly went awry. Hurley, a child of suburban Maryland and an astute writer on urbanism at CityLab, reminds us that the ill-defined realm between downtown and countryside has long attracted idealists, do-gooders, preachers, and cranks. -- Justin Davidson, New York Magazine

In six well-researched and informative--yet fast-paced--chapters, Hurley introduces us to a tapestry of suburban social experimentation, from communal living in celibacy to a community of working couples inspired by the Bauhaus. It is a rich collection of projects, most of which have been overlooked by standard urban surveys. ... Much-needed fuel for the imagination. -- The Architect's Newspaper

In her slim, highly accessible volume, Hurley, who lives in a Maryland suburb outside of Washington, D.C., offers six intriguing case studies of Northeastern suburbs whose development was based on more than commercial real estate interests. --Carolina Miranda, Los Angeles Times

Radical Suburbs stresses the importance of envisioning new models and, crucially, developing policies and strategies to pull them out of Beta and into real use. It won't be easy--America is still 'an adventure in real estate, ' as James Baldwin noted, leaning heavily on the marketplace. What the market delivers is market-rate housing. Augmenting it so those now excluded are housed well in those communities, too, that adding density lifts all boats: this is the challenge to our imagination that Kolson Hurley sets.-- Arcade