Suburban Infill - Post War

Suburban Infill - Post War Shopping Mall Development

Suburbanization was a population shift from central urban areas into suburbs, resulting in the formation of suburban sprawl. Suburbanization began to occur in large amounts after World War II, soldiers were returning to the States and suburban neighborhoods were places that homes and families could be created. During the mid-50’s into the 60’s, America has a prosperous postwar economy and families were looking for places to separate work life and home life.

Opportunity and mobility were driving factors for Post War Americans. Various acts that were implemented into the American culture helped urban sprawl. The FederalAid Highway Act of 1956, for the first time, authorized the construction of over 40,000 miles of interstate highways in the United

States and ultimately became known as the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System. 1 Tremendous increases in population, as well as the number of cars on the road, necessitated massive spending on road construction. Additionally, the tremendous growth of suburbs, like Levittown’s, drastically increased the number of commuters and clogged traditional highways. The increased consumerism of the 1950s meant that goods needed to be transported longer distances efficiently. “By 1950, the same assembly-line methods that had turned out an airplane every five minutes during World War II were being used to build almost four new houses per minute”. 2

Urban sprawl began to take over the American landscape, and people began to trickle further away from the cities. Residential neighborhoods were strongly regulated by strict zoning restrictions. Many of these restrictions kept density low which forced to horizontal spread of homes for hundreds of miles. The repetitive nature of this sprawl transformed the landscape into a homogeneous architectural expression with no uniqueness.

1 Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956: Creating The Interstate System. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/publicroads/ 96summer/p96su10.cfm 2 Peiser, Richard B., and David Hamilton. “Professional Real Estate Develop ment.” Real Estate Development. Urban Land Institute, 2013. Web. 19 April 2020. http://www.shmoop.com/postwarsuburbia/timeline.html