Radical Suburbs Lecture
As part of our 2019 Lecture Series, on July 18 the Greenbelt Museum presented a lecture and book signing by Amanda Kolson Hurley, author of Radical Suburbs: Experimental Living on the Fringes of the American City. The book features a chapter on Greenbelt and its history, placing our experimental community in the context of a variety of other suburban experiments. The book is receiving excellent press, including on WAMU's Kojo Nnamdi show. Click here to listen.
From the book cover: "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."
The author signed books following the event and books will be for sale in our gift shop. Sponsored by the Friends of the Greenbelt Museum and the City of Greenbelt.
While https://casinilive.com sat open in another tab, the Trevose subdivision's mix of races before the Fair Housing Act made me think about what a gamble integration must have been back then—both for the families who moved there and for the developer who chose to sell to them. It’s a far cry from the lazy stereotype of suburbs as always conservative, and I’m curious whether Greenbelt gets similar credit for being consciously planned.