Slurbs (1962)

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Thu Apr 28 01:44:00 UTC 2005


_Urbs vs. Burbs_
Andrew Ferguson says sprawl and "slurbs" are the wave of the future
--New York Sun, 27 April 2005, pg. 9, cols. 2-5.
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It appears to be from California and not New York.
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(OED)
slurb
orig U.S.
[App. f. sl- (as in sloppy, sleazy, etc.: see quot. 1962) + URB(AN a., though later re-analysed as if from SL(UM n.1 + SUB)URB.]
    An area of unplanned suburban development.

  1962 WOOD & HELLER California going, Going.... 10 The character and quality of such urban sprawl is readily recognizable... These are the qualities of most of our new urban areasof our slurbsour sloppy, sleazy, slovenly, slipshod semi-cities. 1966 Guardian 22 Apr. 12/3 About 35 miles west of London there is a new town that no one knows about. It is in Berkshire, between Reading and Sandhurst, and it includes Wokingham and Crowthorne. It is what Californians, who have plenty of them, call a ‘slurb’an amorphous and intermittent spread of houses. 1967 Economist 8 July 120/2 The pattern which has turned Los Angeles into an ‘un-community’, into ‘twenty suburbs in search of a city’, into the archetypal ‘slurb’. 1979 B. WARD Progress for Small Planet xxi. 235 The basic concept of ‘urban villages’ (the Chelseas, the Trasteveres, the Greenwich villages)..often allow a vitality and an attractiveness which the world's concrete suburban deserts, slurbs, and sprawls so demonstrably lack.
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'Slurbs' (That Means Untidy Cities) Peril State's Future, Group Warns
JERRY GILLAM. Los Angeles Times (1886-Current File). Los Angeles, Calif.: Jan 10, 1962. p. 13 (1 page):
SACRAMENTO - A warning that lack of co-ordinated statewide planning is producing "slurbs" that threaten California's future was issued Tuesday by a private advisory group.

The group, known as California Tomorrow, a non-profit organization composed of 20 business, professional and civic leaders. defines "slurbs" as "our sloppy,  sleazy, slovenly, slipshod semi-cities."
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'SLURBS' ASSAILED BY CALIFORNIANS; State's Urban Growth Called 'Slovenly' and 'Slipshod'
Special to The New York Times.. New York Times (1857-Current file). New York, N.Y.: Jan 14, 1962. p. 44 (1 page) :
SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 13 - A call to arms has been sounded for Californians to resist conversion of the Golden State into "slurbs."

The term was coined by a new nonprofit organization as meaning chaotically devloping urban areas - "our sloppy, sleazy, slovenly, slipshod semi-cities."
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Pamphlet Attacks City Planners for Creation of Area 'Slurbs'; City Planners Hit for Creation of 'Slurbs'
BILL BURNS. Los Angeles Times (1886-Current File). Los Angeles, Calif.: Apr 22, 1962. p. CS1 (2 pages)
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Area Cities Answer to 'Slurbs' Accusation; Centinela-Bay Officials Say Criticism Is Pitch for Metropolitan Government CITIES ANSWER
BILL BURNS. Los Angeles Times (1886-Current File). Los Angeles, Calif.: Apr 29, 1962. p. CS1 (2 pages)
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Planner Says Many People Live in 'Slurbs'; URBAN PLANNING
Los Angeles Times (1886-Current File). Los Angeles, Calif.: Jan 6, 1963. p. SG1 (2 pages)
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' Clusters' Instead of 'Slurbs'; Along with 'New Towns,' they are an innovation in residential developments that may help to rescue the suburban dream from the nightmare of mass-produced housing. ' o!usteFs'. Instead of 'SluFbs'
By ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE. New York Times (1857-Current. Feb 9, 1964. p. SM36 (5 pages)
First page:
But somewhere along the way the suburban dream turned into the subdivision nightmare, the dreary look-alike developments, the slums of the future, the "slurbs."
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(FACTIVA)
Section
F Powledge article suggests methods cities could use to fight back against...

28 words
22 May 1971
New York Times Abstracts
Pg. 31, Col. 2
English
c. 1971 New York Times Company

F Powledge article suggests methods cities could use to fight back against suburbs, or 'slurbs'
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THIS WORLD
HAROLD GILLIAM
SQUEEZE PLAY: THE LEGACY OF PLANNING BY COMPUTER

Harold Gilliam
1,555 words
10 February 1985
The San Francisco Chronicle
SUNDAY
19
English
(Copyright 1985)

Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood.
- Daniel Burnham
This was a big plan for the Bay Area, and it stirred plenty of blood, but not in the way Burnham meant.
It was done a couple of decades back by a passel of federal agencies, coordinated by the Army Corps of Engineers; and it envisioned this region shortly after the turn of the coming century as a swarming conurbation of uninterrupted cities, suburbs and slurbs . You could drive from Gilroy in the south to Healdsburg in the north through an unbroken urban mass, without passing a single stretch of open space except
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REORDERING THE SUBURBS. (SHOPPING MALLS, OFFICE PARKS, TOWNS: A SURVEY OF ARCHITECTURE IN THE SUBURBS)

8,352 words
1 May 1989
Progressive Architecture
78
>From Critics to Apologists The very role architects could play in solving that problem may be tainted by a tendency to sneer at the suburbs and by the desire to impose solutions rather than draw them out of what is there. The case against the "slurbs," as critic Ada Louise Huxtable called it, has been carried by eloquent prosecutors from John Keats, who named the suburban antihero of his novel Crack in the Picture Window John Drone, to the inimitable Whyte, whose Organization Man condemned generations of white-collar suburbanites. The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit still dominates our perceptions--although the author of that novel, Sloan Wilson, has claimed that his book was misread and that his hero was in fact rebelling against the suburban conformity he has come to symbolize.



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