Readers familiar with Hayden's work will not be surprised that she emphasizes how women and men experienced different modes of suburban development. Early suburban planners made imaginative efforts to satisfy men's American dream of suburban home-ownership, but they failed to consider how women would react to their deep domestication, and too often the community life they promised failed to work. Hayden breaks with previous scholars in placing the struggle over women, families and the built environment at the heart of the suburban crisis, carefully showing how women's interests became engines of change in planning and design. She argues that "the single-family suburban house implies isolation, lacking physical and social context. For women, the dream is house plus neighborhood sociability."

Revisiting themes from Redesigning the American Dream, Hayden illustrates how different suburban forms--from Andrew Jackson Downing's landscaped estates (where men and their assistants were assigned the heavy gardening, women the ornamentation and weeding) to Catharine Beecher's working home for wives and contemporary fringe outposts removed from social environments--isolated and domesticated women, generating complaints about "lonelyville" in every generation. Beecher, a bestselling author and influential reformer in the early 1800s, "defined household work and nurturing as 'woman's true profession'" and "advised marrying early, giving up worldly activities, [and] having ten children." Yet she "never practiced the domestic feminism she preached," choosing instead a public and cosmopolitan life. Hayden credits Beecher with advancing domestic design by decades and making genuine improvements in women's work space. But like so many other architects and planners, Beecher "failed to understand the intense desire for community on the part of potential suburban residents."

Drawing heavily on primary sources, Hayden insists that suburban projects were more diverse and democratic than their critics have understood. By the 1850s communitarian movements began to influence landscapers, builders and designers, and an emerging class of reformers believed they could craft a transformative social architecture outside the city. New plans for picturesque enclaves, such as Alexander Jackson Davis's Llewellyn Park, New Jersey, and Frederick Law Olmsted's Riverside, Illinois, emphasized collective open space and encouraged shared public life. One communitarian settlement in Mount Vernon, New York, attracted 300 families by offering "protection against the unjust power and influence of capital"; others developed model towns to improve women's status through shared services and technological support. Building Suburbia's illustrations--including architectural plans, advertisements, photographs, maps and drawings--convey advocates' buoyant confidence that they were improving the infrastructure of everyday life.

Yet Hayden also documents how quickly utopian plans for suburbia went awry once the first generation of reformers disappeared and the speculators arrived. Picturesque enclaves, for example, became templates for two of the more odious suburban forms. First there was the exclusive, sometimes gated community, developed as an enclave for the affluent, often substituting a country club for the picturesque park. Tuxedo Park, New York, with gated estates inside a gated community, and Lake Forest, Illinois, with its spacious polo grounds and golf courses, feature prominently here. Second was the flat subdivision, with increased housing density, straightened roads, insufficient infrastructure and less public space--and usually the word "park" in its name, "whether it had a park or not." These would become suburbs for the masses, but only once they shed the landscaping, architectural charm and communitarian ethos that inspired reformist planners in the first place.

The two pressures that undermined the picturesque enclave--residents' drive for class segregation and developers' hunger for profit in the mass market--return in every stage of Hayden's account, devastating so many of the virtues embedded in each suburban form. Though she never names it, Building Suburbia reveals an underlying pattern in the history of US suburbanization: the tendency of privately organized and publicly supported growth machines to flatten, homogenize and reduce the most original and utopian suburban plans; and the consistent efforts of elite classes to separate themselves from the rest of the metropolis, even as they benefit disproportionately from mortgage subsidies and other social policies that purportedly promote housing for the middle class.

Building Suburbia vividly illustrates how housing policies directly altered the landscape in different periods of suburbanization. Much of Hayden's argument covers familiar territory, but her analysis of how federal legislation for accelerated depreciation facilitated the development of cheap commercial buildings, unsightly roadside strips and even unwanted sprawl is revelatory. In 1954 a Republican Congress intent on reversing a recession through speculative construction passed a tax-reform bill "enabling owners to depreciate or write off the value of a building in...a short time." According to Hayden, the bill "not only encouraged poor construction, it also discouraged adequate maintenance" by failing to provide any support for renovation of existing structures. Social policy made new construction a public good, and left existing buildings to deteriorate. "As the boom accelerated," Hayden argues, "the federal government encouraged suburban developers to cannibalize their own cities."

Builders rushed to put up shopping malls, motels and office complexes within open suburban areas. For the first time, they also began constructing complexes in the open fields beyond suburban borders, in the "growth nodes" and "tomorrowlands" that became today's sprawl. Hayden counts 22,000 suburban shopping centers built between the mid-1950s and late 1970s, 43,000 by the late 1990s. "By 2000," she writes, "Americans had built almost twice as much retail space per citizen as any other country in the world." Federal highway funds insured that there would be new roads to connect rural fringe areas to suburbs and cities. Yet the paucity of investment in public transportation meant that trains and buses were inadequate to serve the sprawling suburban nation.

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