Flutterby™! : Garden City Design

Yale Livable City Lab: Drawn Apart:

This paper disentangles the two by examining the role of garden city design (GCD), the dominant suburban planning paradigm for US suburbs in the twentieth century, characterized by winding streets, cul-de-sacs and hierarchical road networks. I construct a composite measure of GCD from street layouts and block configurations for over 60,000 neighbourhoods. I then estimate its effects on greenhouse gas emissions, social isolation and sedentary behaviour using ordinary least squares, propensity score matching and an instrumental-variable strategy that exploits historical waves in GCD adoption. GCD substantially worsens all three outcomes.