Building Privacy and Community

Abstract

An examination of a middle-class housing development built during the late 1940s and early 1950s—Crawford Heights in Madison, Wisconsin—suggests the critical role of domestic architecture and landscape design in everyday suburban life. Evidence in the built environment and statements of current and former homeowners show that the layout of Crawford Heights and the design of its dwellings increased opportunities for surveillance between residents, helping them balance desires for privacy and community. This essay builds on previous studies of postwar suburbia by revealing how occupants negotiated these competing desires through living in their houses and neighborhood in ways that countered prescriptive discourse. It also prompts consideration of contemporary planners’ renunciation of the postwar suburban landscape, potentially providing some ideas that might help them forge aspects of community even while nurturing privacy for residents.