Oxford University Press Victorian Visions of Suburban Utopia: Abandoning Babylon

The rise of suburbs and disinvestment from cities have been defining features of life in many countries over the course of the twentieth century. In Victorian Visions of Suburban Utopia, Nathaniel Walker asks: why did we abandon our dense, complex urban places and seek to find "the best of the city and the country" in the flowery suburbs? While looking back at the architecture and urban design of the 1800s offers some answers, Walker argues that a great missing piece of the story can be found in Victorian utopian literature. The replacement of cities with high-tech suburbs was repeatedly imagined and breathlessly described in the socialist dreams and science-fiction fantasies of dozens of British and American authors. Some of these visionaries ― such as Robert Owen, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Edward Bellamy, William Morris, Ebenezer Howard, and H. G. Wells ― are enduringly famous, while others were street vendors or amateur chemists who have been all but forgotten. Together, they fashioned strange and beautiful imaginary worlds built of synthetic gemstones, lacy metal colonnades, and unbreakable glass, staffed by robotic servants and teeming with flying carriages. As varied as their futuristic visions could be, Walker reveals how most of them were unified by a single, desperate plea: for humanity to have a future worth living, we must abandon our smoky, poor, chaotic Babylonian cities for a life in shimmering gardens. Review In this prodigious book, architectural historians and urbanists alike will find a familiar cast of characters such as Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Jacob Riis. Yet Walker's contribution lies in his efforts to recontextualize these figures alongside utopian science fiction of that period... Walker situates these writings and their authors within cities themselves, locating a suburban yearning within the dense squalor of places such as London, Manchester, and New York. Victorian Visions operates at the intersection of Victorian literary history and architectural history. Walker treats his evidence, which ranges from romance novels to political essays, as a form of architectural documentation, deploying the spatial and material tools of built environment scholars to understand the physical implications of science-fiction texts. ― Willa Granger, Harvard University, Arris, vol. 32, 2021Walker's mastery of these essential writings is impressive, replete with thorough analysis ... this well-written, authoritative study will appeal to social and urban historians. ― W. S. Rodner, CHOICEAn astoundingly thorough excavation of the 'prehistory of the modern suburb' in nineteenth century, Anglo-American utopian literature...In addition to a cultural history, Victorian Visions is an architectural history...The contribution of Victorian Visions is its exploration of a century of 'visioning,' prior to the twentieth century homeownership, renewal, redlining, racial zoning, land use zoning, and transportation policies that realized the pastoral vision....In exploring the realm of fantasy fiction, it effectively recaptures, in a way few other texts can, the horror and urgency with which Victorian, middle-class Anglo-Saxon Britons and Americans viewed their cities. In so doing, it helps to explain why the 20th century descendants of these fantasy fiction readers and authors so enthusiastically pursued destructive policies of renewal, selective disinvestment, slum clearance, apartheid, and highway building. ― Andrew Whittemore, Journal of Planning HistoryIn this prodigious study of architecture, literature and dreams, Nathaniel Walker takes his readers on a marvel-filled tour of Victorian Visions of Suburban Utopia and shows that the line dividing "real" architecture and fantasy is thin indeed. Walker reviews a plethora of strange, wonderful, and terrifying texts, images, and buildings that represent the dreams of utopian visionaries. It is in this discourse of dreams that he finds the D