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.Depression era and postwar housing developments mixed the techniquesof traditional real estate development with vague planning notions and gar-bled persuasions about futuristic modernism thus the all new scientificallymodern Cape Cod house. The FHA published guidelines and issued approvalsfor mortgage insurance, so naturally developers conformed to those guide-lines and even began to streamline the process by submitting large tracts ofsimilar houses for approval.The FHA also preferred prebuilt subdivisions,ones that were built all at once before the owners arrived thus constrainingthose factors that typically differentiated the fabric.Borrowing militaryprocedures for prefabricating housing or turning the entire site into anassembly-line organization provided few means of differentiation and fewfunctions of growth other than accumulation.Traditional development pro-tocols were replaced by protocols for product distribution or financial struc-tures.They were often expressed not as functional relationships, developingover time, but rather as templates that formatted the entire organizationat once.The intent over the coming years was to establish the subdivisionas relatively inactive organization, one that achieved financial stability byestablishing a single static relationship among its parts and maintaining thatrelationship over the life of a mortgage.The subdivision was primarily for-matted to absorb products, and these products would be its chief source ofdifferentiation.Some residential formations in the episodes discussed here were explic-itly designed.Others were unplanned improvisational organizations that re-|Part 3 135sulted from a series of default relationships related to real estate protocols,housing aggregates, changes over time, or multiple designers.Some of thesubdivisions examined here were shaped by global maneuvers or batch sum-mations across many similar elements or fittings.Alternative subdivisions es-tablished some kind of intermediate organizer that behaved like a functionto group variables in space and time or use the changes in one variable totrigger or initiate change among another set of variables.For instance, somefunctions established encoded units of growth to direct an ongoing develop-ment process.Simple streets were used in this way to modulate growth, den-sity, calibration, or other relationships within the fabric.Some of the smarteststreet networks were either unplanned, developed in periods of both planningand neglect, or developed as a relaxed version of more controlled formula-tions.These unplanned arrangements often achieved the greatest complexity,either within an anarchical pattern of growth or after a few simple relation-ships established some means of cross-reference and integration among itsparts.Those arrangements controlled by planning and styling or those ruledentirely by property and finance usually resulted in the dumbest and mostneutralized street volumes and networks.Repetition and banality within un-predictable patterns of consumption, not aesthetic reform, have been thesubdivision s most powerful means of adjusting itself, and the fabric is usuallymost complex when the wild cards have outnumbered the rules.The following episodes sample planning publications and projects, gov-ernment documents, and commercial artifacts as a means of examining thevarious forms of subdivision engineering and their attendant promotionalcampaigns.The episodes begin by looking at early cooperative efforts be-tween planners and the federal government in organizing subdivisions.Notes1.Lewis Mumford, The Garden City and Modern Planning, introductory essay inGarden Cities of To-Morrow (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965), 29, 30.2.Sir Raymond Unwin, Nothing Gained by Overcrowding! How the Garden City Type ofDevelopment May Bene t Both Owner and Occupier (London: Garden Cities and TownPlanning Association, 1912).3.Documenting shifting ideologies in New Deal liberalism, Alan Brinkley, referencesRonald Rotunda, The Liberal Label: Roosevelt s Capture of a Symbol, Public Pol-icy 17 (1968): 377 408.Brinkley and Rotunda discuss the dual meanings of the termliberal during the early 1930s.4.Jordan A.Schwartz, The New Dealers: Power Politics in the Age of Roosevelt (New York:Vintage Books, 1994), xi.|Subdivision Products 3.1 FUNCTI ON AND TEMPLATE: WAR-TOWNSUBDI VI SI ON SCI ENCEEarly twentieth-century residential planners articulated a new responsibilityfor architects that involved not only the aesthetics of landscape and buildingdesign but also the logistics of larger building and landscape organizations.Though most of these planners advocated the design of separate communitiesafter the Garden City model, in the end, they almost always designed neigh-borhood subdivisions or satellite suburbs some of which only referenced theGarden City through radial street geometries or English-country styling
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