In my Openness book I argue that, especially in America and Europe, life has generally gotten better in the last couple of hundred years.
Some critics argue, to the contrary, that modern suburban housing developments are boring, conformist locations lacking a sense of community and cultural vibrancy. They then use this argument to advocate that government urban planners adopt regulatory and subsidy policies to “infill the urban core,” i.e., force suburbanites to live downtown.
Herbert J. Gans, quoted below, refuted the critics.
(p. B11) Herbert J. Gans, an eminent sociologist who studied the communities and cultural bastions of America up close and shattered popular myths about urban and suburban life, poverty, ethnic groups and the news media, died on Monday [April 21, 2025] at his home in Manhattan. He was 97.
. . .
His findings were often surprising. For his first book, “The Urban Villagers: Groups and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans” (1962), he immersed himself in the life of Boston’s working-class West End. The area was later bulldozed for “slum clearance,” and he lamented the destruction of a vibrant community. A half-century later, the book still stood as a classic statement against indiscriminate urban renewal.
Similarly, Dr. Gans challenged conventional wisdom about postwar suburbia in “The Levittowners” (1967). For more than two years, he lived in Levittown, N.J., later renamed Willingboro, and concluded that the residents had strong social, economic and political commitments, and that notions of suburbanites as conformist, anxious, bored, cultureless, insecure social climbers were wrong.
For the full obituary, see:
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated April 23, 2025, and has the title “Herbert J. Gans, 97, Dies; Upended Myths of Urban and Suburban Life.”)
Gans’s books mentioned in the passages quoted above, are:
Gans, Herbert J. The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community. New York: Columbia University Press, 1967.
Gans, Herbert J. The Urban Villagers: Groups and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1962.
My book mentioned in my initial comments is:
Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.