Cul-de-Sac

Roman Mars:
This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars.

Roman Mars:
When people critique cul-de-sacs, a lot of the time, they’re actually critiquing the suburbs more generally. The cul-de-sac has become sort of like the mascot of the suburbs. Like if suburbia had a flag, it would have a picture of a cul-de-sac on it.

Katie Mingle:
I can still remember how strange that word sounded to me when my mom told me we were moving from the city of Atlanta to the suburbs of Denver. And that we’d be living on one of these… things.

Roman Mars:
Hey, that’s producer Katie Mingle doing my work this week.

Katie Mingle:
Hi, Roman!

Roman Mars:
The cul-de-sac is a French term, literally meaning “the bottom of the bag.” Or the ass of a bag.

Katie Mingle:
So it’s no wonder the French themselves prefer to use the word “impasse.”

Roman Mars:
Another fun fact: the plural of cul-de-sac is actually culs-de-sac. But Katie and I have agreed that it is impossible to refer to them this way without sounding like a couple of ass bags.

Katie Mingle:
I’ve always felt a little embarrassed by my suburban roots. By the cul-de-sac especially, which, with its uterine shape and having the word “sac” in it, gave me the feeling that I spent my early years coddled and sheltered in an asphalt womb.

Matt Lassiter:
Living on a cul-de-sac has come to symbolize everything that young hipsters or just people who don’t see suburbia as the American dream have come to despise. And it’s taken on this symbolic role.

Roman Mars:
That’s Matt Lassiter. And I think he just called you a hipster.

Katie Mingle:
Yep, I think he did.

Matt Lassiter:
It’s come to epitomize suburbia, both in the myth of the kind of “happy nuclear family American dream” and in the way that critics condemn it as a facade.

Roman Mars:
Matt teaches a “History of the Suburbs” course at the University of Michigan.

Matt Lassiter:
And the great age of the cul-de-sac is the 1950s and 1960s.

Katie Mingle:
Matt says that by the 70s and 80s, our faith in the nuclear family and in the suburban American dream was starting to break down. And it’s evident all over pop culture. Like in the 1980s classic “E.T.”

Matt Lassiter:
At the beginning of the film, we learn that Elliot’s parents are divorced and his father is down in Mexico with his girlfriend. And his mom’s there alone and the family’s sitting around the table and they’re very sad.

[It’s nothing like that, penis breath!
Elliot! Sit down.
Dad would believe me.
Maybe you ought to call your father and tell him about it.
I can’t. He’s in Mexico with Sally.]

Matt Lassiter:
And then E.T. comes from outer space, you know, almost like a savior figure, to bring happiness back to this sad, broken suburban family. And I think it’s really striking in the film, the way that Elliot can find freedom and excitement in the suburbs by riding his bicycle to the end of the cul-de-sac and then beyond, into the woods; and the kind of magical fringe, where the subdivision stops and the wilderness begins.

Roman Mars:
“E.T.” is devastating to me. And I get Lassiter’s point, about E.T. providing the escape hatch to the horrible, oppressive cul-de-sac, but I also think you can’t deny the fact that the kids in E.T. ruled the neighborhood. I mean the boys out-maneuvered the feds on their dirtbikes!

Matt Lassiter:
It’s a great place to be if you’re seven years old and you want to ride your big wheel out in the street. But it’s not a great place to live, I would argue if you’re fourteen years old and want to get out of the neighborhood and you don’t have a car. Then you start feeling trapped.

Katie Mingle:
Cul-de-sacs do tend to be isolating. They aren’t connected to other streets and they’re far away from town centers. But even though cul-de-sacs are experiencing a backlash right now, they were themselves part of a design backlash against urban living and the traditional grid-patterned streets that make up most cities.

Matt Lassiter:
We think about the cul-de-sac-based subdivision and its opposite, which is the urban grid pattern. But if you go back before World War II, there was a third alternative, which was the early garden suburbs that had curvilinear streets, but they were designed to fit in with the landscape, to create buffers between the houses, to integrate people into parks and lakes and other natural features. And so it was the opposite of the grid pattern, but it wasn’t the cul-de-sac-based into the road, sort of dead-end pattern. The streets almost always came back around to other streets.

Roman Mars:
It was when the suburbs became mass-produced after World War II, that the worst aspects of suburban design began to dominate.

[Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same]

Roman Mars:
Whether or not you buy the idea that cul-de-sacs are psychologically oppressive or stifling to the freedom of those that live there, they have some real quantifiable design flaws.

Katie Mingle:
Right, like imagine being a garbage collector or a street cleaner, and instead of driving down one long street and collecting all the garbage from that street and then taking a right onto the next street and so on, you have to turn around in all of these cul-de-sacs, over and over again. It takes more time, you use more gas. They’re expensive to maintain. And now some governments, like the one in the state of Virginia, are starting to ban them in all new developments.

News Reporter:
“For many homeowners, when it comes to moving into a new subdivision, they try to find a cul-de-sac because they say it is the best spot to be in. But now, leaders in the commonwealth are telling developers if they build a subdivision, they can leave these cul-de-sacs out. Kim Nelson and her 2 kids moved into this new subdivision eight months ago. She specifically picked this street because it was a cul-de-sac.”

Kim Nelson:
“We like living in a cul-de-sac area because it gives us an opportunity for our children to play in a very safe environment.

News Reporter:
“Like many other owners, Nelson says they don’t have to worry about speeding cars or streets with a lot of traffic.”

(Dial tone)

Roman Mars:
Wait, who are we calling?

Katie Mingle:
“My mom.”

Katie Mingle:
“Hey, mom.”

Mom:
“Hey, honey.”

Katie Mingle:
“I’ve been doing all this research about cul-de-sacs and I guess I’m wondering how you could move our family to such a depraved place?”

Mom:
(laughs)
“You loved the cul-de-sac! Because it was a place where you were allowed to go out there at all hours of the day and night and play and be pretty much unsupervised.”

Roman Mars:
Oh, she sounds nice.

Katie Mingle:
She’s the nicest. And it’s true, I did love the cul-de-sac. I didn’t like school and I didn’t fit in there, but none of that seemed to matter on the cul-de-sac. On the cul-de-sac, it was all about the ghost in the graveyard and finding the guts to launch off the skateboard ramp. And that was a world I shined in. My parents though, they always seemed like they lived there just for me. And after I moved away, eventually they did too. Now my mom and dad live in a new development that urban planners would refer to as “mixed-use.” That’s shops and houses and restaurants all mixed in together. They love it! They live right above “The Gap,” there’s a library within walking distance, my dad helps lead a lecture series in their condo, and I like that as they get older, they won’t need to be dependent on a car to get what they need. It’s perfect for them. But for a kid…

Katie Mingle:
“Where do the kids play?”

Mom:
“Where do they play?”

Katie Mingle:
“Yeah.”

Mom:
(laughs)
“The one family that I’m thinking of who live up on the 5th floor, their children are pretty young and they have talked about… they go to different parks around the area. Quite often.”

Roman Mars:
Going to parks with mom and dad doesn’t sound nearly as cool as taking over an entire street every night.

Matt Lassiter:
It’s really a type of suburban development that’s organized around the needs of 5-year-olds, or 8-year-olds, or 10-year-olds.

Roman Mars:
Professor Lassiter argues that we shouldn’t be designing our neighborhoods exclusively around the needs of 5-year-olds.

Katie Mingle:
And new studies are showing that as gas prices rise and people become more ecologically conscious, we’re already seeing a reverse flight back out of the suburbs and into cities. There are even fears that suburbs will turn into ghost town slums and ghettos of the future.

Roman Mars:
That would really give “Ghosts in the Graveyard” a whole new edge.

Katie Mingle:
Indeed.

Roman Mars:
99% Invisible was produced this week by Katie Mingle, from the great Third Coast International Audio Festival. Go look it up. And me, Roman Mars, with support from Lunar, making a difference with creativity. It’s a project of KALW 91.7, local public radio in San Francisco, the Center for Architecture and Design, and the American Institute of Architects, San Francisco. To find out more, go to 99percentinvisible.org.

  1. Tim

    Hey Scott,

    Haha that video is based on the town I live in. The map they show is an exact mirror image of Stevenage! An innovation at the time but, to be frank, it’s a run down dump now!

  2. Jalise

    I live on a very urban cul de sac, in Richmond, CA. I love how great it is for the kids in the neighborhood, and for impromptu conversations in the middle of the street. We all haul our trash cans out to the cross street at the entrance of the cul de sac,so that the trucks don’t have to come in (more gas, more hassle for the drivers, and for our little street, more wear and tear). The trucks don’t enter for street cleaning either – we sweep once in a while.

    I think what makes it nice though is a combination of the shape of the street and the design of the housing association here – we are a cooperative where all the houses are owner-occupied, mostly low-income, very diverse.

    The tree at the end of the cul de sac becomes the gathering place for picnics and birthdays – which makes it feel like some rural village plopped down in the city.

  3. What I love about this episode is the, almost back-to-the-future, time-travelling depiction on something that hasn’t happened yet. But is slowly happening. I live in Durban, South Africa and suburban sprawl is still a fairly new problem we are facing. Because, like the US, land is plentiful which is great but also not so much. The sprawl has led to decay in all our cities, which then leads to further disinterest in the centres, which leads to further sprawl. The problem now, which is where we can relate to your broadcast is that the suburbs, residentially (if that’s a word), hold all the wealth, which attracts crime and leaves the centres and CBDs pretty quiet and alot safer, regardless of what the majority of the country thinks.

    Which is interesting. The suburbs were the safe, paradise away from the hustle of the hub. And now have become super dangerous to live in. Which then leads to increased security and more ridiculous, separated gated communities, too removed from real society.

    The wave of decay and rejuvenation is happening and slowly but surely, we can see interest coming back into the city centres around the country. Durban is a little slower than the rest, but has the biggest potential.

    Thanks again for the cool episode, stream, download, thing, be it 3 years late. The cul-de-sac curve of modernism and sprawl is the most fascinating thing. Especially in 3rd world cities.

    Peace

  4. Ito Aghayere

    I was introduced to this podcast on Tuesday (via the Wild Ones episode, and have basically binged-listened to over 25 of these non-stop over this last week. Love this one. What is the song that is played at the very beginning?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

All Categories

Minimize Maximize

Playlist