Built in the 1930s on worn-out tobacco land between Baltimore and Washington, D.C., the planned community of Greenbelt, Maryland, was designed to provide homes for low-income families as well as jobs for its builders. In keeping with the spirit of the New Deal, the physical design of the town contributed to cooperation among its residents, and the government further encouraged cooperation by helping residents form business cooperatives and social organizations. In Greenbelt, Maryland, Cathy D. Knepper offers the first comprehensive look at this important social experiment. Knepper describes the origins of Greenbelt, the ideology of its founders, and their struggle to create a cooperative planned community in the capitalist United States. She tells how the town, saved at one point by the intervention of Eleanor Roosevelt, struggled through the McCarthy years, when it was branded "socialistic" and even "communistic." In conclusion, she provides a timely analysis of those qualities that not only helped the town survive but also served as the model for currents in urban development that have once again come into vogue in such movements as the new urbanism and traditional neighborhood development.

“A revelation . . . will open your eyes to the wide diversity and rich history of our ongoing suburban experiment.” —Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class America’s suburbs are not the homogenous places we sometimes take them for. Today’s suburbs are racially, ethnically, and economically diverse, with as many Democratic as Republican voters, a growing population of renters, and rising poverty. The cliche of white picket fences is well past its expiration date. The history of suburbia is equally surprising: American suburbs were once fertile ground for utopian planning, communal living, socially-conscious design, and integrated housing. We have forgotten that we built suburbs like these, such as the co-housing commune of Old Economy, Pennsylvania; a tiny-house anarchist community in Piscataway, New Jersey; a government-planned garden city in Greenbelt, Maryland; a racially integrated subdivision (before the Fair Housing Act) in Trevose, Pennsylvania; experimental Modernist enclaves in Lexington, Massachusetts; and the mixed-use, architecturally daring Reston, Virginia. Inside Radical Suburbs you will find blueprints for affordable, walkable, and integrated communities, filled with a range of environmentally sound residential options. Radical Suburbs is a history that will help us remake the future and rethink our assumptions of suburbia. “The communities Kolson Hurley chronicles are welcome reminders that any place, even a suburb, can be radical if you approach it the right way.” —NPR “Radical Suburbs overturns stereotypes about the suburbs to show that, from the beginning, those ‘little boxes’ harbored revolutionary ideas about racial and economic inclusion, communal space, and shared domestic labor. Amanda Kolson Hurley’s illuminating case studies show not just where we’ve been but where we need to go.” ―Alexandra Lange, author of The Design of Childhood

Photographs of three communities built during the Great Depression explore one of the most ambitious programs of Roosevelt's New Deal.