New Deal Utopias

The photographs of the built environments and landscapes of Greenbelt, Maryland; Greenhills, Ohio; and Greendale, Wisconsin, evoke utopia both as an idea and place in the American mind. The towns were designed to be model cities to address the social and economic discrepancies brought on and accentuated by the Depression. In the 1930s, the program was critiqued as socialistic and communistic by conservative members of Congress, industrial and corporate leaders, and newspapers hostile to New Deal policies, yet they still managed to make an indelible impression on urbanist ideas in America.