Bulldozer in the countryside
This California suburb, photographed by William Garnett, was one of the largest planned housing developments in the U.S.
What is Lakewood Park?
This innovative construction method, used in developments like Levittown and Lakewood Park, sped up the process of homebuilding.
What is assembly line construction?
This large piece of construction equipment became a symbol of both progress and environmental destruction in the suburban boom.
What is a bulldozer?
This type of construction spread rapidly after World War II and is blamed by Steinberg for damaging the natural environment.
What is suburban housing/development?
According to Steinberg, the rise of suburbs after World War II was influenced not just by lifestyle desires but also by this global tension between the United States and the Soviet Union.
What is the Cold War?
As suburban expansion spread, this method of waste disposal became common but led to issues such as groundwater contamination.
What are septic tanks?
This historian compared the environmental consequences of postwar suburban expansion to this infamous ecological disaster of the 1930s.
What is the Dust Bowl?
This state, in particular, saw the destruction of large amounts of prime farmland due to suburban growth, which caused concerns about agricultural loss.
What is California?
This common outdoor space in postwar suburban neighborhoods became a symbol of American pride and a major source of fertilizer and pesticide use.
What is a lawn?
For 25 years after World War II, the suburban house with its car, lawn, and energy-hungry appliances was powered by these nonrenewable energy sources.
What are fossil fuels?
The passage describes the shift in public perception of suburban development as this type of revolution.
What is "a quiet revolution"?
The destruction of this natural resource was common in the postwar period as farmland was replaced with suburban developments.
What are forests and farmlands?
This term describes the rapid spread of suburban development into previously undeveloped land, often associated with the loss of open space in the 1950s and 1960s.
What is urban sprawl?
Between what years did the number of miles driven in the United States drop from 334 billion to 213 billion?
What is 1941 to 1944?
This 1956 law provided $25 billion over 12 years to build thousands of miles of interstate highways, transforming America’s landscape and fueling suburban growth.
What is the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956?
In 1962, a seven-year-old boy from California wrote to this U.S. president, asking for the preservation of land for outdoor play after developers began building houses.
President John F. Kennedy
In his influential reports, William Whyte rejected this urban planning strategy, arguing that it was impractical and unfair to landowners.
What is zoning?
By the mid-1960s, growing concerns over suburban development led to this kind of grassroots activism.
What are anti-sprawl campaigns?
This paradox, first explained by a German mathematician in 1968, describes how adding new roads can sometimes make traffic worse instead of better.
What is the Braess Paradox?
These highly flammable evergreen shrubs, common in Southern California foothills, contributed to devastating suburban wildfires, including the infamous 1956 Malibu fire.
What is chaparral?
Between the 1950s and the 1970s, urban development destroyed nearly this many acres of wetlands in the U.S.
What is one million acres?
This President made a campaign for "natural beauty" a key part of the Great Society environmental agenda in the 1960s.
Who is Lyndon Johnson?
This federal act included a provision to aid city and county governments in acquiring open space, despite opposition from fiscal conservatives.
What is the Housing Act of 1961