A few years ago I began researching the evolution of the physical design and planning of the three greenbelt towns that were initiated in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Administration. While I was quite familiar with the context and social milieu of one of those towns because it was close to my home, I had never before visited Greenbelt. On my first trip there, I arranged to meet a University of Maryland professor at a local café. Since she and her students had been conducting material culture studies of Greenbelt, I thought meeting her first would be a good way to introduce me to the town. While we talked over dinner, I learned she was also a Greenbelt resident. After dinner, she told me she was on a Greenbelt committee that was making a presentation to the City Council that evening, and she had arranged for the committee to join us in the café so they could plan their presentation. Shortly, three people arrived and joined us at the table, brainstorming ideas for the upcoming council presentation. After being in town less than two hours, I was in a Greenbelt committee meeting.

As I was to learn later, it was a most fitting introduction to this particular city. The pioneer Greenbelters who moved into their community in 1937 felt most strongly about aspects of the physical design that affected their social relations with each other. But the Greenbelt idea, a steadfast belief in a planned cooperative community, is embedded not simply in its physical design (although that certainly plays a role) but in its most basic democratic organizational form, the committee, as documented in Cathy Knepper's book, Greenbelt, Maryland: A Living Legacy of the New Deal.

Knepper exposes us to the life history of Greenbelt, from the 1930s to today. When visiting Greenbelt, one wonders how this community has retained its strong cooperative ideology over the years. By continually posing and focusing on this question throughout the book, Knepper gives us an in-depth, insightful examination of the changing nature of social and economic cooperation in this very unique but still very American small city: how it has evolved and transformed, how it has been challenged, and what forces and conditions foster its sustainability. Three C words—cooperation, community, collective—are intertwined in Greenbelt's identity and nature, but not that of consensus. As Knepper (xiv) duly notes, Greenbelters view cooperation as “a way to achieve the long-term continuation of their communal goals. They did not see it as meaning everyone had to agree with everyone else at all times . . . . Ultimately, to Greenbelters cooperation meant a devotion to organizing and running their own town.”

Given the larger political and regional growth context in which the city is embedded, this has never been an easy path. Indeed, the chapter titles of her book often epitomize the continuing confrontation that the community has faced over the years: “The Government versus Greenbelt,” “Developers versus Greenbelt,” “Overcoming Difficulties in Cooperation.” To understand the continuous struggles to maintain and redefine the cooperative ideology of Greenbelt, one must look outside the city as well. Knepper describes how policies and agendas of state, county, and metropolitan political bodies, land developers and development growth patterns of the greater Washington D.C. region and, to a certain extent, the demographic and economic patterns of Prince George County have challenged the social and economic cooperative tenets of Greenbelt, and how the community has faced them.

Planners and architects have read about the origins of the greenbelt towns in textbooks, but often do not realize that they continue to be viable, self-sustaining cities and villages today: Greenhills, outside Cincinnati; Greendale, outside Milwaukee; and Greenbelt, outside Washington, D.C. While many of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal programs promoted housing development for the poor in rural areas and government sponsored urban housing, unique among these housing related programs was the greenbelt towns of the Resettlement Administration. It differed from other public housing in that they were outside cities; involved extensive acreage; and were complete community developments, with schools, parks, libraries, shops, recreational facilities, and the like. At Greenbelt, curvilinear streets formed superblocks of fourteen to eighteen acres in size, which were the fundamental unit for the residential neighborhoods. Homes, mostly row houses and apartments, face the center of the block which encompasses a large green space called a court. Pedestrian walkways surrounded these courts, as well as connected the different superblocks to each other and also to the town center. Pedestrian underpasses were incorporated where walkways cross major traffic streets. All of this was surrounded by a half mile wide greenbelt.

The greenbelt town program was the brainchild of Rexford Tugwell, a former Columbia University professor, who believed that an outdated individualism had to be replaced by a cooperative mentality and a collectivist economic policy. He persuaded FDR in the spring of 1935 to create the Resettlement Administration under Executive Order, using money set aside for unemployment.

The towns were originally intended to be exclusively for low-income residents, but because of mounting costs only modest- and moderate-income families moved in. One of the most crucial aspects of the planning of the towns was the selection of the residents. Families were favored for positive attitudes towards community life and participation. While religious diversity was fostered somewhat, racial discrimination was strictly practiced in all three towns, during the original tenant selection and for many subsequent years.

While the program did not allow for home ownership, it tried various means to foster a sense of town ownership, an important key in understanding the heritage of Greenbelt. The towns were unique for their cooperative institutions. All commercial ventures (e.g., food store, gas station, drug store) were established as cooperatives. Also, each town was a self-governing entity through the charters of incorporation in each of their respective states. The newness and experimental nature of the towns sparked the formation of self-help organizations and committees that operated vis-à-vis the government landlord. During the first year at Greenbelt, for example, approximately thirty-five organizations and ad-hoc committees were operating.

The pioneer residents of the towns may have felt a somewhat split identity. On the one hand, they had to go through a rigorous selection process to be able to live in a relatively high-quality environment, so they may have come to see themselves as quite special. On the other hand, they were often stigmatized, or at the least constantly scrutinized, by outsiders. The Washington press was particularly ruthless in depicting Greenbelt and its residents in its first few years. But their small size and pioneer spirit, coupled with a common vulnerability, may have further strengthened Greenbelters' feelings of community identity and cohesion.

The changing nature of Greenbelt, in terms of physical development, demographics, and particularly its social and economic cooperative ideals, are well documented by Knepper in several chapters. Her accessible narrative style is grounded in extensive historical and ethnographic research. Knepper covers major events in the town's history, such as the federal divestment of the town; construction of the Capital Beltway, the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, and abutting commercial and residential development that essentially cut the city in thirds; the efforts of developer Charles Bresler to intimidate and force the town to bend to his development proposals, resulting in the small community newspaper facing down this Goliath in the U.S. Supreme Court; and the red-baiting Chasanow case of the 1950s. But besides these significant events, there also remains the incremental, everyday conditions of life of this community. Knepper does address these latter conditions, yet not to the extent of some of the news-making events. Given its discriminatory history, for example, one wants to know more about its changing racial context over time. Greenbelt today is more diverse than its two sister greenbelt towns, but this racial diversity varies across Greenbelt. My own calculations of the 2000 Census show that sixty-three percent of residents of the west side of the city are African American; about twenty-five percent of residents in the original settlement and surrounding 1950s postwar residential area are African American; and forty-nine percent of Greenbelt East residents are African American, which is the highest income area of the city. This is a most intriguing pattern, and one which demands its own story—not simply of demographic counts over time, but the context in which such demographic and racial/ethnic change has happened in this city, and how such demographic and social trends have affected its cooperative identity and ideology across and within certain sections of Greenbelt. Knepper does touch upon this (e.g. she discusses how Greenbelters responded to fair housing initiatives), but not to the extent to which the topic deserves, given its prominence and potential lessons. Granted, one can not address everything in a single volume; this could be a topic for a separate book itself.

Unique to its sister towns, Greenbelt maintains many of its original co-ops, such as the grocery store, as well as new ones. Greenbelt Homes, Inc. (GHI), which purchased nearly all 1600+ homes at the time of divestment, still thrives and is one of the largest housing cooperatives in the US today. Also characteristic of Greenbelt, as mentioned previously, is the large number of committee-induced initiatives.

The question looms of how Greenbelt has managed to maintain its cooperatives and its intense civic/community engagement over the years. Knepper suggests that city traditions are one factor that holds Greenbelters together. However, the most convincing argument she constructs is that Greenbelt community and civic engagement is also sustained through authentic, community-generated material artifacts as well, particularly the Greenbelt News Review. Since 1937, it has been written and operated by volunteers, delivered free to every household, every week. It is filled with community news, reported and researched by Greenbelt residents. As she (201–202) claims, “. . . the importance of the community newspaper in the maintenance of Greenbelt's original goals and ideology can hardly be overstated. The paper reminded readers of town history and traditions and provided both communication among the increasingly far-flung residents and information on significant current events.” I personally have gone through hundreds of back issues of the paper and have been a subscriber for the last two years. In this day in which community papers are generally driven by corporate advertisers, high school sporting events, and the twisting tentacles of major newspaper holdings, there are few such surviving examples of trenchant, high caliber reporting and analysis of local events and conditions as framed, witnessed, and reported by local citizens.

Still, I was left wondering if it was simply city traditions and the tenacious local newspaper that continues to rekindle the cooperative spirit of many sections of this town. Other internal factors also need exploration and teasing out. It is a strongly Democratic community: the most recent voter registration figures show a five to one Democratic lead over Republicans. It also has more renters than homeowners, unlike national or state-wide patterns. But I think we also have to look at the greater context in which Greenbelt resides, its unique situation in its county and metropolitan region. As Knepper duly describes, there has been a continuing onslaught of outside interests that have stigmatized and at times tried to overwhelm this rather modest community, with its heritage of New Deal Democrats. Unlike the other two greenbelt towns, Greenbelters has never had control over their own land use and zoning matters which is controlled by the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission. Because Greenbelters see themselves as unique, they resent those who control their town's planning not recognizing their uniqueness in tangible form. Greenbelt residents have fought two major court cases that were eventually decided by the US Supreme Court, and in so doing, many residents have learned a lot about due process, large-scale civic collaboration and community cohesion. This dynamic perhaps has fostered a generational passing-along of community resistance and internal cohesion.

A number of architects, planners and policy makers today—particularly those associated with the Congress of New Urbanism—are striving to emulate design principles and social goals reflected in the origins of the greenbelt towns. But they often overlook the lessons emanating from the interwoven physical and social evolution of the distinct places themselves. Knepper's book is a gem, one that continuously reminds us of how our desire for community is not found simply in a city's plans and buildings, but in those social structures that support continual personal and social struggle to maintain an ideal.