Hipster Duck
Senior Member
CDL, if you haven't read it already, you'd be interested in Robert Fishman's Bourgeois Utopias. It's a fascinating book that chronicles the suburban movement, beginning with its earliest incarnation in the just pre-industrial London of the 1700s (Clapham common). It shows how the English tendency to physically segregate classes, coupled with a movement toward Evangelical Protestant values and a lack of state interference led to the suburban forms of England and America (and the rest of the Anglosphere, in turn). On the continent and, indeed, everywhere else in the world, segregation involved government interference to keep the middle and upper class in the inner city, dispersing the working poor to the periphery. Paris under Haussmann is the best example of this, and so too, I guess, is what's currently going on in China.
I suppose that Wren would have had to act fast, as evangelicalicism and the rise of materialism in England were beginning to bear fruit at his time. If he would've pulled through with his plan, I imagine that all of us in the English-speaking world would be living in very different cities today.
I suppose that Wren would have had to act fast, as evangelicalicism and the rise of materialism in England were beginning to bear fruit at his time. If he would've pulled through with his plan, I imagine that all of us in the English-speaking world would be living in very different cities today.
