The question might seem daft, given how gravely privacy is endangered in our digital age. Spies in government and the private sector routinely devour data for insights into our behavior, insights that may be used to manipulate our behavior. And privacy’s advocates contend that freedom and democracy are unthinkable without it. As philosopher Michael Lynch puts it, privacy affords us control over our thoughts and feelings, which is a “necessary condition for being in a position to make autonomous decisions, for our ability to determine who and what we are as persons.”

This idea—that privacy is an enduring, universal, even sacred virtue—is seductive. But it is wrong, and in a few ways: Privacy is a relatively recent institution, and less than essential to democracy. What’s more, privacy has never been secure; vulnerability is its native state.

Americans may be forgiven for assuming that privacy is a foundational institution in our democracy. You might have read that the nation was spawned, in part, by privacy concerns: colonists rebelled against British troops occupying their homes and invading their warehouses and workplaces. Privacy may not have been quite so central to our founders’ concerns, however. The term is not mentioned in the US Constitution—a right to privacy is never spelled out. In American constitutional law, this right wasn’t articulated until a century after the Revolutionary War, by future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis and his law partner Samuel Warren in an 1890 Harvard Law Review article. And privacy only earned a robust legal defense in the 1960s, when the Supreme Court under Earl Warren held that a right to privacy is presumed by the Bill of Rights.

It actually makes sense that privacy was a late arrival to democracy. It seems privacy was more revered, at least early on, as a spatial virtue, rather than a moral one. Historians indicate privacy was conceived as a bourgeois value in the 18th and 19th centuries, born of relative wealth. Premodern homes had few rooms, and certainly few that were designated for single—private—use, like a bathroom or bedroom. People all over the world generally lived in common spaces, which were also quite narrow.

This changed toward the end of the 19th century when a growing middle class demanded homes with multiple rooms into which residents could retreat. As industrialized societies became wealthier, the working class looked to enjoy the same benefits as the wealthy—including privacy. The English ultimately considered it a basic human right for laborers to have homes with private gardens in front and back.

The development and expansion of suburban architecture, especially in America, reflects the gains privacy made in the 20th century. You might say privacy is the central organizing principle of suburbia: houses are removed from the street; sidewalks are a rarity in many suburban neighborhoods, thus limiting intrusion by strangers; socializing happens in fenced-in backyards and spacious basements. Since, the 1970s, the average suburban home has grown by a third, even while the number of its inhabitants has fallen, meaning that suburbanites are practically swimming in private space, which seems to be a basic need.

It is easy to forget how new such standards of privacy are. In 1972, the British government formed a committee to report on the state of privacy. The committee found that “the modern middle-class family … relatively sound-proofed in their semi-detached house, relatively unseen behind their privet hedge … insulated in the family car … are probably more private in the sense of being unnoticed in all their everyday doings than any sizeable section of the population in any other time or place.”

But even as the “Younger Report” (so named because it was chaired by Sir Kenneth Younger, an experienced politician who led several commissions reporting on the state of British society) was claiming that privacy had been achieved in the 20th century as never before, democratic governments were finding new ways to infiltrate their citizens’ lives. In the U.S., historian Sarah Igo explains, that included surveillance of home populations during World War I, public health initiatives that invaded and exposed the homes and lives of the poor, and a growing bureaucracy that aimed to address a host of social ills, from retirement to unemployment to homeownership.

Said bureaucracy ballooned mid-century when the Social Security program was enacted, and assigned identifying numbers to all citizens, rendering them transparent to the government in the process. Many critics and commentators issued dire warnings that echo current concerns for privacy.

“[Our] wage-earning citizens … may well resent a system of surveillance in which every individual among them is kept under the eye of the Federal Government,” one of Social Security’s detractors claimed. “Our people have been accustomed to privacy and freedom of movement.” Likewise, a newspaper column warned readers that “your personal life would be laid bare,” “your life will be an open book,” and “you are to be regimented—catalogued—put on file.”

Such concerns soon evaporated, however. The dangers of lost privacy were unclear, uncertain, unproven; the tradeoff for being documented—namely, you gained a secure retirement—was evident.

In the digital age, these tradeoffs—often made with the active participation of the public—have so thoroughly routed privacy that people now have little expectation of it. Digital spies do not have to work hard to monitor us; this is a new era of sharing. Over the last two decades, consumers have become accustomed to divulging their data in exchange for the conveniences offered by technology. Many people expose intimate and once embarrassing details on social media, as a matter of course. Digital citizens increasingly live their lives in public, for all to see.

This may not be the tragedy that privacy advocates suggest.

I don’t mean to minimize violations of privacy, or to say that it’s not important or cherished—because surveillance does open the door to being taken advantage of, manipulated, or coerced. But I wish to offer this caution from history: privacy has never been essential to human liberty and flourishing; and it has always been threatened, and exceedingly hard to achieve or secure.

By understanding the history of privacy, we can better look to its future, and better evaluate proposals about data control. We should be skeptical, for example, about any law’s ability to protect our privacy—and about our own individual commitments to protecting it. We also should be careful not to oversell privacy as eternal and universal and vital.

If anything, privacy might prove to be a dangerous distraction from more important values. In this digital age, privacy itself can be dangerous when, isolated behind our computer screens, we are swayed by, and moved to magnify, all manner of conspiracies and untruths that undermine democracy. It is not surprising that autocratic regimes have thrived on digital communications, and the division, confusion, and alienation they produce.

The health, welfare, and vibrancy of democracy rely more on the public than the private realm—this has always been the case. How citizens organize in public, how they demonstrate, how they muster the tenacity, courage, and creativity to capture the attention of the populace, and sow the seeds of moral persuasion, this is the basis of our common liberty. We would be wise to relearn and apply this lesson.

The post Why Privacy Might Not Be Worth Protecting appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This almost-mythical family you are visualizing is drawn directly from a generation of magazine ads, commonplace during the mid-20th century, that portrayed so-called “indoor-outdoor living,” where the refinements of domesticity were combined with the restorative powers of nature. The indoor-outdoor look didn’t just sell things that suburban houses required or were improved by—like cars, construction materials, or domestic appliances. It also sold an illusion: Americans might imagine themselves living partly outdoors, but the ads ultimately promoted a life that took place inside all of the glass, metal, and wood that was being advertised.

As these idealized images of suburban life—indoor-outdoor living among them—took hold, Americans responded to the “allurement of open space,” as one film by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce called it. They moved away from cities, took out their wallets, and forged a consumer culture that largely depended on the ever-increasing material needs deriving from suburbanization. In doing so, millions of Americans bought the idea—as housewares manufacturer Revere Copper and Brass put it in a 1942 ad—that a home was “no mere space bounded by walls and divided into rooms,” but “a way of life to keep pace with your needs, to change with your tastes, to grow with your means.” In other words: a way of life that would keep you buying stuff.

After the end of World War II, real estate developers began planning and promoting open and spacious suburbs on a mass scale as an alternative to the unsanitary and overcrowded industrial city. This became possible for a number of reasons: first, farmland was relatively inexpensive, and often no longer needed for agriculture. Second, the war effort had led to the rise of new construction methods, based on standardization and prefabrication that considerably cut down building costs. Finally, the poor state of the existing housing stock and the growing population led the federal government to invest in new developments, especially by subsidizing mortgages for veterans and young couples, which underwrote “white flight,” as increasing numbers of white families moved from cities to suburbs.

To encourage this trend, advertisers decided to spotlight the suburbs’ desirability by capitalizing on their non-urban qualities, with a twist: they presented suburbia as a place where the comforts of civilization (that is, urban living) merged with the soothing embrace of the natural world. The suburban house was no homestead in the Great Plains; it was an outpost of modernity and convenience built on the frontier between the city and the wild. Advertisers dreamed up a seamless interpenetration of indoors and outdoors, homey interiors and sunlit exteriors, living room and back yard—visual evidence that it was possible to have the best of both worlds. They directed those images into millions of American homes through the pages of LIFE magazine, whose circulation peaked at more than eight million in the late 1960s.

These indoor-outdoor viewscapes were in fact a downscaled rendition of the modernism of Frank Lloyd Wright’s organic designs, or the glass houses by Mies van der Rohe, Philip Johnson, and Richard Neutra, all of which revolutionized high-end domestic architecture in the U.S. In the eyes of architectural critic Sigfried Giedion, these modern American houses marked a new chapter in the history of world architecture. In his posthumous work Architecture and the Phenomena of Transition, Giedion wrote of an era in which the boundaries between inside and outside were no longer clearly defined because peace, wealth, and technology had enabled humans to stop seeking shelter from the outer world. This was an age in which “interior and exterior space continually interpenetrated one another, establishing new interrelationships.” It was a new form of architecture defined by “a simultaneous striving both for freedom and for order.”

Although most Americans were ready to join in Giedion’s appreciation of this new architectural style, they could not afford these homes with their walls of endless and prohibitively expensive glass plates. But popular ads presented the new middle-class suburban home as a standardized and mass-produced version of the same type, a domestic dream within anyone’s reach. Ads and magazines called it “indoor-outdoor architecture.”

The marketing surged. In some instances, companies exploited these visions of suburban heaven to sell commodities that were linked with outdoor living. Aluminum, for instance, had become the metal of choice to manufacture everything from lawn mowers, awnings, fences, and outdoor furniture to aluminum foil and kitchenware. It was just as useful inside the home as outside it, but not as easily marketable—so showcasing it as the perfect material for outdoor living, as the sector’s leading company, Reynolds, did, made it more appealing to shoppers seeking all kinds of products.

Windows were another case in point. They were an essential fixture to protect interiors from weather and unwanted intrusions—but in mid-century ads, they became a way to frame the outer world and transport it inside, as a beautiful picture. By installing extensive sheets of glass like the popular Andersen Windowalls, for instance, one could “furnish the outdoor fun.” If the outdoors was the perfect setting for leisure activity—barbecues, picnics, and parties—window frames and glass plates let these visions (and through them, leisure as a way of life) penetrate the domestic environment. Glass made a house almost immaterial, giving residents the impression of living on their lawn instead of under a roof—or so these ads seemed to suggest.

The charms of the outdoor world could enhance not only where people lived, but also where they worked and went to school. Companies relocating to suburban office parks could enfold employees in the peaceful arms of nature, making the dull monotony of work all the more bearable. Suburban schools could be a place where “young minds find more room to grow,” according to ad copy from Libbey-Owens-Ford, a major glass-plate provider.

Most industries banked on the suburban ideal because that was where most consumers lived. Indoor-outdoor architecture became a visual cliché for postwar advertising of all sorts of goods. Some indoor-outdoor images encouraged activities quite alien to what most think of as the purportedly outdoorsy suburban life—for example, watching TV. And yet, between 1962 and 1963 Motorola ran a series of ads in LIFE magazine that depicted this most domestic, indoor-oriented of all hobbies in suburban fantasy homes, each harmoniously integrated into the landscape. The implied message was that TV and radio could illusorily take viewers and listeners outside the limits of their domestic world, thus counteracting the potentially claustrophobic properties of these technologies. These fictional modern architectures were born out of the imaginative mind of illustrator Charles Schridde, and some were clearly reminiscent of actual examples, such as Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House or Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West.

Driving was another essentially interior activity promoted with indoor-outdoor imagery. It was advertised as an outdoor activity in itself, because car owners had a world of unlimited adventures at their feet, or rather, wheels. And yet, drivers would mostly contemplate the beauty of the outdoors from a hermetically sealed capsule, and as suburbs sprawled further and further out, the hours spent behind the wheel grew exponentially. One could roll down the windows—but why, when the automobile interior was conveniently air-conditioned?

A suburban home, too, could be a controlled climate, but it took a dose of the indoor-outdoor mystique to win people over to the idea. Many postwar consumers resisted air conditioning because it required closing windows tight to function properly, and seemed to force people into a self-imposed domestic captivity. So creative directors on Madison Avenue hoping to push air conditioners had to suggest quite the opposite idea: that living in an air-conditioned house was like living outdoors all year round. Fresh air came to seem almost unnecessary, since one could artificially reach climatic nirvana inside one’s home.

Once again, the suburban house metaphorically dematerialized: it became “the great indoors,” as a Lennox air conditioning ad put it. In contrast to the images of advertising, ordinary life—the time people spent doing housework, playing, watching TV, driving a car to go to work or run one’s errands—took place indoors. The outdoors was transformed from a place to enjoy to an abstract concept. Postwar suburbanization ultimately put Americans into comfortable, all-encompassing interiors, allowing them to go from the living room to the garage to the car to the mall without ever coming into contact with fresh air.

The post When Americans Bought the Illusion of ‘Indoor-Outdoor Living’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The first image seen is a sign welcoming audiences: “YOU ARE NOW IN BEDFORD FALLS.” Even if initial audiences don’t know anything about this specific town, they “know” the community they about to enter: the American small town.

While we think of the small town as a place, it is also very much a journey to a former time. And by 1946, the year of It’s a Wonderful Life’s release, the small town had become associated with a fading past more than the urbanizing present. To enter the small town was to enter through the gates of nostalgia.

A quarter of a century earlier, the 1920 Census Bureau had declared the ostensible death of the small town. For the first time in U.S. history, more people lived in urban than in rural spaces. In The Urban Nation: 1920-1960 (1968), historian George E. Mowry declared that the small town in 1920 was analogous to the U.S. frontier in 1890. One era had ended and a new era had begun: a small-town nation gave way to an “urban nation.”

But this transition came with a paradox. Although a growing majority of Americans were leaving historical small towns for urban areas, the small town was never really left behind. In 1923, a mere three years after the Census Bureau revealed the precipitous decline of material small towns, sociologist Thorstein Veblen—today famous for his critique of the leisure class and for coining the term “conspicuous consumption”—recognized the small town as one of the United States’ most important “institutions” in “shaping public sentiment” and in defining the nation’s “character.”

In the early twentieth century, the small town ceased to be primarily a geographic form, and instead, became more of an ideological form. More specifically, the small became a trope—as the nation’s sacred home, a trope exemplified by It’s a Wonderful Life.

After an extended close-up of the Bedford Falls’ welcome sign, “You Are Now In Bedford Falls,” the camera enters the small town at night as snow descends. Although the town’s public spaces are empty, we hear various small-town subjects in voiceover praying for the well-being of the movie’s protagonist, George Bailey (James Stewart). Even though the public square is closed for the night, the small town’s communal identity of care and goodwill never sleeps.

In the next scene, we learn that the small town’s prayers ascend to heaven, reinforcing the ideology that Bedford Falls—and the small town more generally—is a sacred community. In heaven, two angels fret over George Bailey’s growing despair. Rather than a space forgotten by modernity, the small town proves a space directly connected to heaven and a space for which heaven cares. The angels decide to send the wingless angel Clarence to Bedford Falls to assist the movie’s protagonist. After the angels tell Clarence of his mission, one angel asks what book Clarence is reading, to the which the latter responds, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

Through such textual references, the movie suggests that Bedford Falls is analogous to Tom Sawyer’s small town of St. Petersburg (modeled on Hannibal, Missouri), despite the 70 years (1876 to 1946) separating the two texts. This epitomizes how, in the 20th century, myriad, diverse, material small towns gave way to “the small town.”

It was possible to see the ideological power of the small town in the 1920 presidential campaign. Republican Warren Harding ran his campaign exclusively from his hometown of Marion, Ohio, which was staged and advertised as a “small town.” In the wake of World War I, the small-town setting was central to Harding’s message of the United States becoming an isolated and independent nation-state, delinked from international affairs. Harding’s small-town vision explicitly contrasted with the internationalism of Woodrow Wilson, who sought a “League of Nations,” an international community that would work collaboratively to prevent another world war. Although the small town may have been materially declining, the small town proved its political mettle. Harding won in a landslide.

It’s a Wonderful Life, in many ways, repeats Harding’s aesthetic, but 26 years later. Just as the candidate used a small-town setting to establish a more isolated, autonomous United States in the wake of a world war, so too did Frank Capra. The film’s director enlisted in World War II to make propaganda movies designed to win the hearts and minds of the American public; It’s a Wonderful Life was Capra’s first film after the war.

The invitation to enter Bedford Falls may seem like an invitation to leave the horrors of the present; to enter a space outside of modernity, like an American version of Brigadoon, the mysterious Scottish village of the famous 1947 Broadway musical. However, this small town is not a nostalgic place outside of time. Instead, it is a stage on which an alternative and accessible modernity unfolds, what can be called a “main-street modernity.” In this sense, the small town anchors a powerful form of U.S. exceptionalism.

The small town thus becomes a stage for an “authentic” America, a place where “authentic” Americans are at home, “authentic” American narratives unfold, and “authentic” American values are practiced. The small town can be used for multiple political purposes–to portray the United States as an isolated and autonomous nation-state, or to represent the nation as a space of whiteness and patriarchy—which happens in It’s a Wonderful Life.

Consider the nightmare sequence in which Bedford Falls loses its identity and becomes a city. The transformation of Bedford Falls into Pottersville is not just because of a growing population. Rather this geographic transformation is shown as a fall from grace. In Pottersville, the camera pans over signs in a hurried, frantic pace, representing the tempo of urban life: “Blue Moon,” a bowling alley that features “fights,” a hotel, a “Midnight Club Dancing,” “Bamboo Room Cocktails,” a pawn shop, a sign advertising “20 Gorgeous Girls,” “The Indian Club,” “Dime a Dance,” and more. Just as the sign “You Are Now In Bedford Falls” evokes community and togetherness, these urban signs show a fallen community, saturated in sin.

This is evident by the strip clubs that have proliferated and, moreover, by signs indicating that Bedford Falls is now home to African Americans. Many of these signs are racially coded, advertising a culture of fighting, late-night dancing, and invitations to “jitterbug,” activities that were then racially coded as black. In 1944, the federal government imposed a 30 percent tax against “dancing” night clubs (cabarets) and soon, “No Dancing Allowed” signs emerged throughout the nation. This was a sin tax that targeted what was perceived to be African American culture. High taxation on dance halls was an indirect way to keep spaces white and to prevent different races from mixing.

Bedford Falls becomes Pottersville, in large part, because it ceases to be a predominately white space. It also ceases to be a space where women are largely confined to the domestic sphere. Everywhere in Pottersville, urbanization means that housewives are becoming sex workers. Violet (Gloria Grahame)—who in Bedford Falls was innocent, boy-hungry, and owner of a respectable business—becomes, in Pottersville, a prostitute. In the film’s logic, urbanization means that women become wage workers. Mary Hatch (Donna Reid)—who in Bedford Falls became the homemaker Mrs. George Bailey—becomes, in Pottersville, a spinster who works as a librarian.

As the film suggests, geography is destiny—even if that geography is a U.S. fantasy. If Bedford Falls remained a small town, women such as Mary would be “safe” in marriages. However, the small town becoming a city results in the collapse of all traditional institutions and the unleashing of racial diversity and gender freedom, themes troped as threatening by the film.

The world of “Bedford Falls,” with its whiteness and its home-bound women, was very much a fantasy at the time the movie was made. It’s a Wonderful Life presents Bedford Falls as an island outside the dominant modernity of the country. Specifically, it ignores the Great Migration of six million African Americans from south to north—the largest internal migration in U.S. history. And it ignores the feminist revolution that had begun to unfold during World War II, when more than 350,000 women served in the U.S. Armed Forces and nearly one in four women worked outside the home. Yet It’s a Wonderful Life presents Bedford Falls as a place that erases all this history, and all its contemporary turmoil. The film’s female characters, for the most part, all work in the home, and the only African American in the movie is a housekeeper (Lillian Randolph).

Here it’s worth considering the real town upon which Bedford Falls is ostensibly based: Seneca Falls. That town was home to what is largely recognized as the first U.S. Women’s Rights Convention in 1848. During the convention, 100 of the roughly 300 participants signed The Declaration of Sentiments (including the only African American present, Frederick Douglass), which Elizabeth Cady Stanton modeled after the Declaration of Independence.

Today, if you visit Seneca Falls, you can visit the Women’s Rights National Historical Park and learn the history of the Women’s Rights Convention and how, according to the official website, the “story of struggles for civil rights, human rights, and equality, global struggles … continue today.”

Yet down the street is a different museum that stages a much different history: the Seneca Falls It’s a Wonderful Life Museum, opened in 2010.

It’s a Wonderful Life was filmed at the RKO Ranch in Encino, in Southern California’s San Fernando Valley. But today, Seneca Falls markets itself as “The Real Bedford Falls.” Visitors are encouraged to take an extensive walking tour of the “real” Bedford Falls (a two-page map is available for download); there’s an annual It’s a Wonderful Life Festival during the first week of every December; and in 2009, The Hotel Clarence opened, named after George Bailey’s guardian angel.

Seneca Falls has chosen to portray itself as Bedford Falls—a small town outside of the dominant modernity—in large part, because like many small towns across the United States, it’s in economic decline. Today, Seneca Falls’ population is a mere 6,340 people and the poverty rate is 15.4 percent, higher than the national average of 14 percent. Seneca Falls was once an industrial town in the nineteenth and into the twentieth century with multiple mills. Today, tourism drives the town’s economy.

To survive in global capitalism, real small towns must trope themselves as the small town. It is one final perverse triumph of It’s a Wonderful Life: A cultural fiction has become a geographic reality.

The post How <I>It’s a Wonderful Life</I> Seized on an Urbanizing America’s Nostalgia for the Small Town appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

A half-century later, this Gallic version of the traffic roundabout has come to represent a grayer and grimmer France. Instead of lending carnival-like éclat to Tati’s circling vehicles, the rond-point now symbolizes the slow spiral of diminishing means and decaying hopes for Mr. Hulot’s everyman descendants. Since early November, many of these middle-class men and women, hailing mostly from the provinces, have formed a massive protest movement known as the gilets jaunes, or yellow vests, in reaction to President Emmanuel Macron’s economic policies, including increased taxes on gasoline and diesel. Wearing the bright yellow safety vests that French drivers must don when they are outside their cars on a public thoroughfare, these citizens of modest means have taken to the streets and boulevards—and particularly, the ronds-points—to protest their increasingly desperate social and economic conditions.

In fact, the rond-point has taken on both a symbolic and strategic role in these protests—one that Tati would have appreciated. Were he alive today, Tati’s Mr. Hulot might well be wearing a yellow vest, protesting the plight of the everyman amidst the circling cars of modern France.

To understand the sudden appearance of the gilets jaunes, it helps to consider the history of the rond-point itself. A familiar feature of France’s cityscapes, the rond-point has long been a source of awe and anguish to foreign visitors, particularly when, behind the wheel of a rental car, they must face the raging rapids that roar around the Place de l’Étoile and its monumental Arc de Triomphe. In fact, this particular rond-point, the brainchild of the unjustly forgotten urban planner Eugène Hénard, was the very first to be built in France. When he unveiled it in 1906, Hénard expected it would reduce the number of car and pedestrian accidents that occurred at the intersections for the dozen boulevards leading to the arch.

Hénard was proved right: ronds-points are, on average, twice as safe for pedestrians and drivers than traditional intersections. What Hénard perhaps did not anticipate was how popular his invention would prove. There are now more ronds-points than different kinds of cheese in France; for that matter, there are more ronds-points in France than in any other country. More than 30,000 pockmark the French landscape, with 500 more added every year.

But traffic safety alone does not explain the recent rash of ronds-points. City councils and mayors frequently spend significant sums of money—between 200,000 and 1 million euros—to transform the space within a traffic circle into publicity for their towns. Like three-dimensional billboards, the erection of statues or landscapes highlights local traits or wares. For example, the rond-point outside Bondy showcases a statue of black, brown, and white children, thus celebrating the Paris suburb’s ethnic diversity, while at the town of Tinchebray, the rond-point serves as pedestal for an immense rake and pail—not coincidentally, the products of the town’s single factory.

But paradoxically, the blossoming of ronds-points also measures the blight of the French middle-class dream. Since the 1960s, the rise of ronds-points has accompanied the multiplication of housing developments located outside the country’s cities. Between 1968 and 2011, the exurban population in France has grown from 9.4 million to 15.3 million, with the vast majority settling in single residence homes. This demographic bulge represents the so-called rêvepavillon, or suburban dream. Like the dream itself, the pavillon is modest: a small dwelling that is indistinguishable from hundreds of neighboring houses, built on land that once was pasture or farmland.

It is in the spaces between these exurban ronds-points where the dream has become an ordeal. As housing tracts have stretched ever further away from the cities, they have made residents increasingly reliant on their cars. The national rail company, the SNCF, has reinforced this trend by suppressing local rail lines in favor of high-speed lines between major cities. As a result, the government’s plan to increase taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel strikes a nerve already made raw by the declining purchasing power of, and rising tax burden on, what one government minister dismissively referred to as “those French who puff on cigarettes and drive on diesel.”

These are the very same French now wearing the gilets jaunes. The massive protest movement—an estimated 75,000 people blocked 580 roadways over one recent weekend—represents a dramatic shifting of the fault line between what the French sociologist Christophe Guilluy calls the métropole and périphérie. While the former is home to a highly trained and educated elite allergic to smoke and diesel, the latter is home to a struggling middle class alienated from these urban centers. This peripheral France—a socioeconomic as well as a geographic state—is, in effect, la France des ronds-points. In fact, the rond-point has now become a rampart for the yellow vests, who are underscoring that France remains a société bloquée—one dominated by the state, even as they challenge that power. By occupying hundreds of these traffic circles, they have turned them into impasses not just for cars, but also for the government as it seeks an exit from a deepening crisis.

Inevitably, the recent scenes of pitched battles between black-helmeted vandals and shield-wielding police along the Champs Élysées, amidst flaming tires and thudding tear gas canisters, claimed the world’s attention. By the early morning of December 1, the historic boulevard, covered in a wintry mist, had again become the stage for social and political upheaval. For some commentators, it is yet another reminder that the French are better at making revolutions than reforms.

But such claims simplify, if not falsify, a more complex reality. A closer look reveals that the vast majority of French have carried on the protests peacefully, at times joyously, at countless ronds-points across the country. They see them less as places of confrontation than reconciliation between those who use diesel and those who tax it. At a critical rond-point outside Gustave Flaubert’s native city of Rouen, the gilets jaunes, whose ranks are weighted towards women, have transformed the space into a camp site. Singing and chatting around a fire, the protestors are given food and support by the very commuters they are blocking.

To the north, in the Flemish town of Hazebrouck, a few dozen gilets jaunes transformed their rond-point into an open grill. Protestors chipped in to buy an entire pig, which they roasted over a fire and invited everyone, including car drivers, to share.

The post How Traffic Circles Became Ground Zero for the French Middle Class appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

New speculative builders, or “merchant builders” (as they called themselves), responded to answer this desire. In the first two decades after the end of the war, tens of thousands of such builders erected more than 13 million new single-family houses in new suburban subdivisions. These dwellings looked radically different from most buildings of the past: They were low-rise ranch or split-level houses, rather than the two- or two-and-a-half-story blocky-looking structures that had previously dominated suburban landscapes (houses with formal plans, sited on relatively narrow lots).

Old-style suburban house from Authentic Small Houses of the Twenties (1929)

 
Until recently historians have not known much about these builders. The Levitts, who created three very large developments in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, are well-known—but they weren’t typical. The Levitts built new communities with thousands of dwellings at top speed. The average merchant builder worked more slowly, in much smaller subdivisions, and in varied locations. Merchant builders often shared the backgrounds and attitudes of their buyers.

The Campanelli Brothers in 1948

 
The Campanelli Brothers of Braintree, Massachusetts, were one of these typical merchant builders. When Michael, Joseph, Nicholas, and Alfred Campanelli created a construction company in the late 1940s, they were young and inexperienced. Their parents, Francesco Campanelli and Lisa Marie Colondono Campanelli, arrived in the U.S. in 1915 from a tiny and ancient mountain village in the Italian Apennines; they settled in an immigrant neighborhood in the small city of Brockton. The boys were used to hard work, quitting school after their father died to help support the family by working at the Quincy shipyards near Weymouth. Joseph also worked on some house construction sites before World War II. The three younger brothers served short stints in the Navy during the war.

After they came home, the brothers used an army surplus truck to move gravel to big construction sites, including Logan Airport. Soon they began pouring concrete footings for new buildings. As their assets increased, they built two new houses in Brockton, one for their mother and one for their sister Ann, whose husband, Salvatore De Marco, now joined the brothers’ team. They branched out to small developments near Braintree, Massachusetts, and Warwick, Rhode Island. Success there led them to develop more ambitious subdivisions in Natick, Framingham, Peabody, and other areas near Boston. In the process, they assembled a sizable group of foremen and loyal subcontractors, many drawn from their old neighborhood and earlier shipbuilding work. Their firm rapidly grew into the leading home building enterprise in the Boston area, and later built extensively in Florida and Illinois as well.

The typical Campanelli house was attractive because, as one buyer explained it, it was “a new kind of house” for “a new time.” It discarded the old-fashioned, larger, more monumental look. It had a low-pitched roof, like contemporary ranch houses in California, but still kept shutters or an occasional bow window for a faintly “colonial” flavor. Campanelli houses usually had two or three bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen large enough to eat in, and a garage. The three-bedroom version was about 1,000 square feet of living space. In the mid-’50s, the firm extended the kitchens to form a “living kitchen” or a kind of a “family room.”

Plan for a typical Campanelli Brothers house

 
These plans were compact and “open,” with far less division between rooms than had usually been the case in American houses for all classes before World War II. The focus was on informal family activities—reading, watching TV, eating—and on an easy connection between indoors and out. In the rear stood a patio with the family barbecue and a large open yard, inviting for children’s play.

Ad for a Campanelli Brothers house, 1956

 
In the front, a large “picture window” offered passersby and visitors a preview of the interior. The fenceless and hedge-less front yard ensured visual continuity with neighbors’ houses and the street. Wide roads, with sidewalks, were laid out in curvilinear patterns by the firm’s engineer. The houses were equipped with sophisticated appliances—like the GE wall-mounted refrigerator that the Campanellis often used. Each house had a fireplace.

Ad for a wall-mounted refrigerator, 1956

 
How did builders arrive at these designs? The Campanellis always insisted that the designs were theirs. Yet they often said, in conversation and newspaper ads, that “the best architects a builder has are today’s home buyers and prospective buyers.” The Campanellis watched sales closely: The firm would begin a subdivision with a few model houses in various styles, and then continue building the model that sold best. What sold, and sold “like hotcakes,” were the new ranch houses.

The typical buyer was in a hurry: Near Boston and in most other American metropolitan areas, new homebuilding had stalled as the country struggled with the Depression and World War II. This meant an acute housing shortage. The typical buyer was eager to get started on a new life with the new family, new job, and access to a Federal Housing Administration—or Veterans Administration—financed mortgage. He and his wife wanted a house that broadcast the idea of “modernity.” They saw the Campanelli ranches as embodying the new lifestyle that they sought.

This ranch house was the type that was shipped to Moscow in 1959 to demonstrate what was available to the “average American.” (It was in the kitchen of a model ranch house that Vice President Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had their famous “kitchen debate” over the relative merits of Soviet communism and American capitalism.) Houses like this embodied the postwar aspiration of home ownership by the nuclear family, access to new places via the automobile, and a new, freer and more informal lifestyle.

In the first 15 to 20 years after the war, the buyers of new houses often came from white working-class backgrounds of varying ethnicities. Because of discriminatory FHA restrictions on mortgages, people of color initially had little access to the new suburbs. After the Civil Rights Act of 1964, however, African-Americans, Asian- Americans and Hispanic-Americans began to transform the population of the early suburbs. Meanwhile, however, rising land prices and rising interest rates began to close the frontiers of new suburbs to working-class populations. New kinds of builders, often large-scale corporations, built on the interstices between the postwar subdivisions—larger and larger houses, with more rooms for more specific purposes, aimed at ever-more-affluent buyers. The family home came to be seen as an investment that would be “traded up.” The postwar suburbs have merged into overall sprawl.

One result of these changes has been the widely disliked, oversized “McMansions” of today; another is the growing tendency of young couples to seek alternative housing: either in smaller and more mobile dwellings within “the tiny house movement” or in non-traditional center-city spaces such as lofts. The McMansions usually imitate monumental house styles of the 19th century, though they retain two features of the houses of the postwar era: the multifunctional living room (now called “the great room”) and the large “living kitchen” invented by the Campanellis and other merchant builders. And they are uncomfortably crowded onto small lots that are descended from the postwar era.

The long-term picture of American suburban housing since 1945 is one of sprawl, stylistic disunity, and diverging social composition. But for a while, merchant builders and postwar buyers created a new and attractive kind of American modernism for American domestic architecture.

The post The Surprisingly Modest Start to McMansion Sprawl appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In mountainous and rural areas, your county may be too small to do the big things you need; 24 of the 58 California counties have populations under 140,000, the number of people who live in my hometown of Pasadena. Yet in inland exurbs, your county is so sprawling that it can take more than three hours to get to the county seat; San Bernardino County is twice as big as the state of Massachusetts.

And in the big metropolitan regions where most of us live, counties—¬¬which are supposed to be the state’s form of regional government—divide up our communities, instead of uniting us. The Bay Area is sliced up between nine counties, from Santa Clara to Sonoma. The capital region around Sacramento includes six different counties. Greater Los Angeles is a mash-up of five counties, with no clear geographic divides between them. I dare you to drive through four neighboring cities in four different counties—Yorba Linda in Orange, Chino in San Bernardino, Corona in Riverside, and Diamond Bar in Los Angeles—and tell me when you cross from one county to another.

Even beyond the biggest cities, counties divide California: The growing agriculture-infused Fresno region has four different counties, and the Central Coast spans six. As a result, Californians routinely live in one county, work in another, and play in a third.

It has become commonplace in California to complain that our state is simply too big to work effectively as one entity, and to suggest, via ballot initiative (as in venture capitalist Tim Draper’s “Six Californias” scheme) or petition to the legislature (as the North State counties are doing) that we be split up into a number of different states. And some of these splitters’ complaints have merit. But creating new states would require Congress to go along, making these ideas non-starters.

Instead, we could redesign our counties all by ourselves, without Washington’s help. And, as the former Ventura mayor and San Diego planning director Bill Fulton has pointed out, counties are easier to reform because they are essentially administrative regions that are imposed on us—and thus don’t stir emotions like cities, which we choose to form.

The heart of the problem is that California’s antiquated design, with its 58 haphazardly drawn counties, doesn’t make sense today, if it ever did. The legislature created 27 counties back in 1850, and we kept adding counties until 1910, when California effectively froze county creation, locking in a map that has been unchanged by a century’s worth of growth. Indeed, the way that our counties divide us up is part of a larger fragmentation in California, where the problem is not big government but so many small and stupid governments—more than 6,000 in total, with 480 cities and thousands of special districts that few Californians know anything about.

This fragmentation of regions is not merely a problem of having untidy maps that make little sense to the people who live on them. Research shows that regions that are split up among many governments—as California’s are—have less affordable housing and more sprawl, congestion, racial and economic segregation, and disparities in local services than those with more consolidated regional governance.

“The harms of political fragmentation are many and tightly interrelated,” wrote the University of Minnesota’s Myron Orfield and Baris Dawes in a paper delivered last month at Chapman University in Orange. “The excessive competition triggered by political fragmentation encourages local jurisdictions to pursue socially and economically undesirable policies. Cities steal malls and office parks from each other, fight tax incentive wars for auto malls, and zone out the poor for fiscal advantage in a process rife with haphazard planning and NIMBY biases. … With jobs scattered like buckshot, transit, a cleaner environment, and basic opportunity for lower-income Americans becomes harder, not easier, to accomplish.”

The good news is that, in recent years, there has been more thinking in California about how to remake local government, including the size, boundaries, and powers of counties. Some of the best of this thinking can be found in retired Silicon Valley executive Thom Bryant’s short book, California 2.0.

California 2.0 shows that our lives, and many of our biggest problems, are regional: environmental systems, infrastructure, economic development, transit, and housing. And the book points out that the state already divides us into regions for certain ways of collecting data or governing; California has 10 biodiversity regions, nine water regions, 15 air basins. But our counties don’t match up with these regions.

So California 2.0 argues for dividing up the state into counties that each represent one region. There would be 19 in the author’s ideal structure, though California 2.0 suggests that even the old Spanish military’s 10 territorial districts would fit California better than today’s 58 counties.

If California were to embrace regionally consolidated government, it would be following a trend. France has been consolidating and empowering regions. The Twin Cities region in Minnesota and greater Portland in Oregon have strong regional structures, and some metropolitan regions, notably Toronto, have consolidated local governments.

Such regional counties would need more power to devise regional solutions to the state’s most pressing problems: schools, traffic, and housing. And, as California 2.0 argues, they’d need expanded boards of supervisors (California counties today typically have only five supervisors) and elected county executives to improve democratic accountability.

And if California politicians want to make real progress in their one-state war on climate change, they’ll need to embrace truly regional counties. Today’s state regulations on climate are unlikely to show much in results, in part because they require coordination between our fragmented local governments. But if we had counties that actually fit our regions, California might have a fighting chance of saving the world.

The post How California Got Broken to Pieces appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I relate to the concept because I, too, grew up on the edge. I used to say that I’m “from L.A.,” even though I’m not really from L.A. I’m from Temple City, a suburb 12 miles east of downtown L.A. I thought I was alone in claiming the middle from the edges until I met my husband, who says that he’s “from São Paulo,” even though he’s from Hortolândia, about 75 miles outside of São Paulo.

Over the course of our courtship and holidays, events and happenings, I’ve come to appreciate the similarities between the edgy outskirts of the two mega-cities, Los Angeles and São Paulo. These flat, temperate, nearly endless expanses of homes are new, are growing, and are housing the future.

Globally, city outskirts are considered dangerous places and here in the U.S., with the luxury condos being built in American inner cities, poverty is increasingly appearing on the fringes. As a double citizen of these suburbs—by childhood in Temple City and by marriage in Hortolândia—I have a more sweeping and more positive view. For me, the fact that these places are vira-latas, places that flip realities, is a sign of their strength.

Most of what we call the new urban culture, from the U.S. to Brazil, is really suburban culture. The trendy food eaten in downtown L.A. or downtown São Paulo is the food developed on the outskirts: ramen burritos, fried eggs in soup, arroz e feijao, spam tacos, yucca fries. In sprawling megalopolises like Paris and our hometowns, suburbs are often where you can find the most interesting graffiti and music. Suburbs are—away from the gentrified core of these cities—where many young people and ethnic minorities are. In the suburbs, the rent isn’t too high, but the possibilities can seem endless.

The author’s sister-in-law and brother-in-law at the top of their block in Hortolândia.

 
When my husband and I were growing up in Temple City and Hortolândia in the ’90s, both of our towns were lower-middle-class havens of young families and small public schools that had been built on agricultural land (Temple City on citrus orchards, Hortolândia on sugar cane fields). The São Paulo cities of Sumaré, Paulínia, and Jundiaí are comparable to SoCal’s Diamond Bar, Fontana, and Pomona: freeway off-ramp slates that grew to become hot real estate. Incorporated in 1960 and 1991, Temple City and Hortolândia saw whole neighborhoods pop up in uniform adobe. And then they appreciated in value. The Temple City house bought by an Okie 60 years ago for $50,000 will sell today—in cash—for $900,000. In Hortolândia, what sold for 30,000 Brazilian reais 15 years ago sells for 190,000 reais now.

Like many suburban families, both of our families are mixed race. My husband’s father was white Brazilian and his mother is black Brazilian. My father is Irish-American and my mother is Nicaraguan-American. It’s funny—in our wedding picture there is no way to truly tell who is an Oliveira and who is a Goulding. Or who is an Angeleno and who is a Paulistano.

For many in our edge cities, making it is to moving to the next big suburb over. Hortolândia is to Campinas what Temple City is to Pasadena. You go there to go out. You go there to work. Many people in Hortolândia work as domestic support staff in neighboring, more affluent suburbs. With the gridlock of the Sao Paulo region—which makes L.A.’s freeways at rush hour look like a carousel ride—a simple 10-mile ride takes an hour and a half, each way.

Growing up, my husband and I had little concept of places that weren’t as liquid as our cities of origin. We didn’t know those stable places where people weren’t from somewhere else. During my husband’s MBA program, we lived in Charlottesville, Virginia, in rural Albemarle County. That is, the middle of nowhere. After a couple months of barbeque and baked beans, we were going a little nutty. There is a comfort in the buzz of people you find on the edge.

And so we return to Hortolândia or Temple City as often as we can. There, people know about our lives. They know all about our baby boy, Caetano; they know his name, and his age. They pass him down the block like a football, and proclaim, “Que fofo!” How sweet! People even come and visit in the living room—in an era of Facebook and Twitter, that’s refreshing.

In Brazil, “suburban” is a derogatory term. Suburban skinny jeans have high, elastic waists to make room for bigger booties. Suburban shoes have glitter rhinestones, and sparkle. Suburban salons have deep conditioners for curlier, coarser hair. What suburban really means is favelado—from favelas, the slums on the urban outskirts of major cities. When they were first founded, favelas and their better-dressed cousins—small new satellite cities with paved roads and mayors—advertised their new cities with “Tem água. Tem luz.” There is water here. There is light.

People debate the future of the suburbs. Some still consider them the bright corners of the American and the Brazilian experiment. Others think that they’re boxy, and wasteful. That can be true. But with 53 percent of the world’s population already living in cities, and with the cost of living in urban centers rising, what happens as more people move out to the edges of the cities, to places like Temple City and Hortolândia, by de facto? The debate shouldn’t be whether or not people live on the urban edges, but how they live there.

Two years ago, my sister-in-law opened a corner shoe store in Hortolândia. Business has been slow. But there is hope that, as more and more urban dwellers move out, it will someday be busy. And that’s what makes the time pass. She sells shoes to her neighbors, and they all know her by name. This July, when our visit came to an end, a neighbor saw us leaving her store and yelled, “Deus te abençoe!”

God bless you!

The author’s sister-in-law with her son, Matheus.

 
What is a richer gift on these prodigal journeys? What else can we give to our son, besides that wild sense that he can be what he wants to be? That he can play under big, shady trees? That he can be happy, on his own terms? That he can come, and go, and be, and remain?

A hundred years ago, Brooklyn and Silver Lake were the suburbs of New York and Los Angeles. Who knows what will become of these new suburbs of suburbs. Now, as back then, they remain places for breathing deep, and dreaming big. In the suburbs, você pode virar a lata—you can turn the can over, and make a whole new life.

The post You Can Thank the Suburbs for the Trendy Ramen Burritos Downtown appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“I can honestly say this is the first time I’ve ever seen anyone high-five over New Jersey,” the activity leader says. The group chuckles. I shrug. She just doesn’t get it.

To be fair, most people don’t. They think of New Jersey as “the armpit of America” or some sort of Jersey Shore/Sopranos hybrid, where in between getting drunk and getting tan it’s perfectly normal to firm up your illegal deals in the back room of a strip club. As someone who grew up in the Garden State (like Buzz Aldrin, Queen Latifah, Dennis Rodman, and many, many others—after all, N.J. is the 11th most populated state in the country), I can tell you that it’s far more mundane than the television shows would suggest. Many were the Saturday nights in high school when my friends and I lamented that there was nothing to do in town.

I think my experience in Livingston was typical of American suburbia. I was happy to live close enough to Manhattan that a trip into “The City” was easy and quick, but I liked spending time in my hometown, too. I loved the neighborhood haunts where you could get a meal named after the high school mascot and the small shops that, while not brand names, carried high-quality, fashionable goods.

When it was time to think about college, I wanted to get out of the state not because I felt I needed to escape something, but simply because I wanted to see more of the country. In doing so, I found out that when you leave Jersey’s borders—even if it’s just, as in my case, to venture as far away as Boston—outsiders with a ton of assumptions and associations await.

Some samples:

“I was on the turnpike once. Is the whole state like that?” (No. There are lawns and trees and businesses other than strip malls and rest stops.)

“I’ve heard it smells bad.” (The Meadowlands are, literally, a swamp, surrounded by factories, so yes, that particular area, which you pass through when you head east from Manhattan, does have an acrid smell. But the solution is simple: get off the turnpike.)

“There sure are a lot of diners.” (Yes, and thank god for them.)

What surprised me most was how much other people’s opinions about my home state bugged me. I never had felt any particular pride about where I was from while I was growing up. It was just a fact, like my eye color or my age. I didn’t think it meant anything. But once I left the state, it became part of my identity. How else to explain my unbridled excitement the one and only time I ever worked a gas pump myself, my understanding of jug-handle turns, or why I feel no shame when belting out any Bruce Springsteen or Bon Jovi song, regardless of who is around?

I admit that I may have gone a little overboard at first. By the time my first semester at college was over, for every negative comment someone made about “the dirty Jerz,” I would be ready to counter with interesting facts (New Jersey is the only state where every town is a suburb of either New York or Philadelphia), celebrity natives (Jason Alexander and Chelsea Handler went to my high school), or just straight-up pride (New Jersey is awesome, and you have no idea what you’re talking about).

In the spirit of full disclosure, I’ll admit that I understand the easy appeal of generalizations. I’ve made a few pithy comments about other locations myself. When my AmeriCorps team was assigned to work in Oklahoma, I wondered aloud how a group of cows and horses had filled out the application to receive help from the program. Of course, after spending time there, I realized how badly I’d misjudged the place. I only wish others would afford the Garden State some open-mindedness as well.

It’s not that New Jersey is better than other states. The George Washington Bridge scandal was embarrassing, as is the fact that The Real Housewives of New Jersey is filmed there. And I admit that you can’t call either the Turnpike or the Parkway “scenic.” But for all of its flaws, real or perceived, New Jersey is still the place where I feel comfortable. I like that its greatness is understated, as opposed to Manhattan’s glamour or California’s cool. It’s not going out of its way to try to impress you. It is what it is, and you either get it or not.

Travel is said to broaden horizons and gain understanding. However, it also brings an awareness to what you have left behind, to what is home.

The post I Heart N.J. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Again, the streets empty this early hour,
Sunday evening, except those two
Walking their pugs before the work week starts,
There in the middle of the widened streets
As the occasional car passes by.
With the girl next door called for dinner and homework,
The lone dribbling has ceased. My summer break,
This visit home, the internship, my room …
And dusk turns on the porch lights; yards make sure
That facing windows here are far apart.
While I’m de-veining snow peas (with enough
To save for lunch tomorrow) and boiling water,
I wait for deer to gather on the lawns
And driveways as they nightly do. And soon
Parents will close their windows just as Mom,
Between work and dinner and her lonesome bed,
Did for the room which Matt and I bunked in.
With tongue clicks, we, as kids, would beckon the deer
Set in our driveway, anxious, seeking to be
Looked at with another kind of sight.

The post Suburban Eclogue appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“I never tire of his images,” said Rebecca Morse, who curated Sultan’s first retrospective, now on display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “Some details are of the world as it stands and some are purposeful and adjusted by him. The combination of those two things creates an interesting tension. You’re rewarded by additional viewings.”

For instance, there’s “My Mother Posing for Me,” from a series published in 1984. The main focus of the photograph is nominally the woman standing stiffly in a lavender satin blouse and white polyester pants. But Sultan didn’t just frame his mother in the shot—his father is sitting in the room, too, just to the left. His father, however, is ignoring the photo shoot and doing his own thing—watching the Dodgers on TV.

There’s an element of voyeurism in Sultan’s photographs—they give you the feeling of gaining access to sights you’re not usually allowed to observe. His “Swimmers” series (taken in San Francisco) invites you to stare at people’s bodies under the pool’s surface as they learn how to swim. “The Valley” series takes you on the sets of pornographic movies, where Sultan snapped shots of an empty, dirty-looking mattress or a high-heeled woman in a cover-up, smoothing her hair between shots.

Sultan often achieved the intimacy of his work by spending a lot of time with his subjects, Morse said. The pictures he liked best of his parents, for instance, typically came at the end of a weekend spent hanging out with them. Sultan seemed to want to get his subjects to the point of practically forgetting that he was there.

The level of comfort between Sultan and his subjects is evident in Morse’s favorite photograph, “Reading in Bed.” Sultan’s mother isn’t looking at the camera here, and has her nose buried in a magazine. His dad has strewn papers haphazardly on the bed and floor. They’ve kicked the comforter down to a twisted heap at the foot of the bed. You get the sense that you’re not disturbing the two of them as you check out the trinkets on their side tables, the rococo sconces, and that fabulous paisley wallpaper.

“Larry Sultan: Here and Home” is on view through March 22, 2015 at LACMA.

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