A spacious house surrounded by a lawn, a swimming pool in the garden, housewives in aprons waiting for the husband with a drink in hand, children playing hula hoop and several cars in the garage ready to jump onto the road. The happy postcard of the American suburbs of the fifties, which once represented the ideal of the American dream of the white middle class, a quiet way of life isolated from the dangers of the city, continues to cling to the collective imagination, despite that it has been at least three decades since the happy colors began to fade and the utopia of that blissful universe ran into new forms of racial segregation and a climate crisis that demands urban models that are more respectful of the environment and less dependent on private transportation (represents approximately a third of carbon dioxide emissions in the US, the second most polluting country after China).
“With all the differences, the North American dispersed city and its challenges resonate deeply on the European continent, where 73% of the population currently lives in urban areas. The diffuse city, as Francesco Indovina called it, is now also a European phenomenon. The North American suburb is a mirror that allows us to think critically about the city we have and the city we want,” says Judit Carrera, the director of the CCCB, in the presentation of Suburbia. The construction of the American dream, an exhibition that traces a journey through the American suburbs, from the 19th century to the present, to, in the end, focus on the Catalan Suburbia, between the “caseta i l’hortet” and the townhouse, an arcadia reborn after the pandemic where, as urban planner Francesc Muñoz recalls, for twenty years, between 1985 and 2005, the pace of construction of single-family homes in the 311 municipalities of the province of Barcelona reached the chilling figure of one house per hour.
The exhibition also explores how these residential neighborhoods have fascinated the creators, who have turned them into literary material or film sets, although as the writer Rodrigo Fresán points out in an interview in the middle of the exhibition, it was easy to detect the worm inside the Apple. Or a severed ear full of ants hidden in the grass, like in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. The journalist and film critic Philipp Engel, curator of Suburbia, begins the tour in the 19th century, when with the arrival of the railroad, American elites began to build family sanctuaries outside the city in the care of women, the guardians of the home, some of them in gated communities with guarded access. But the great white flight occurred after World War II, when veterans eager to start families of their own were encouraged by federally backed low-cost (whites-only) mortgages, and the highway network opened. hectares of land for housing.
The dream turned into a nightmare, with the arrival of minorities that represented a threat to their security and, above all, to the value of their properties. The bad dream of being expelled from paradise embodied by Burt Lancanster in the film The Swimmer, who moves around the complex swimming from pool to pool to discover that his is empty; in Gregory Crewdson’s photographs of the dark side of American home life, in Todd Hido’s night shots; in the Americans proudly surrounded by weapons or in the natural hecatombs faced by the residents of the quiet residential areas that Thomas Doyle imagines in small miniature sculptures.
Trump himself contributed in 2020 with a message on “.