Chronicling the birth of the Duckworths' neotraditional town in Chester County's rural Londonderry Township, Rybczynski experiences an epiphany: He realizes that his genteel Chestnut Hill neighborhood started out as a developer's rote subdivision. So did Forest Hill Gardens in New York, Palos Verdes Estates in Los Angeles, and many other desirable communities. Why, even Philadelphia's prettiest rowhouse blocks were thrown up by a developer on a tear. Today's profit-driven arrays of ticky-tacky boxes, Rybczynski concludes, may be tomorrow's cherished neighborhoods.
"For better or worse," he writes, "America has always approached community building as a business."
America, Rybczynski riffs, owes its existence to developers eager to make a buck. George Washington, before going off to become father of the nation, was a land surveyor, which was an early form of developer. And Thomas Jefferson? Didn't he lay out a college campus before building that fancy house on the hill? No wonder we declare the right to subdivide to be self-evident, and that all cornfields are endowed with certain inalienable property values.
Last Harvest (Scribners, $26) may be an unabashed paean to suburban developers and their developments, but Rybczynski has picked one of the Philadelphia region's best professionals. After a career devoted to cultivating housing monocultures, Joe Duckworth became an early convert to New Urbanism. The movement's followers, who are holding their annual convention in Philadelphia through this weekend, are more interested in creating textured, mixed-use places that mimic older towns like Wayne or Haddonfield than in simply throwing up more rows of single-family houses.
