The Suburbs The growth of suburbs was facilitated by the development of zoning laws, redlining and various innovations in transport. After World War II availability of FHA loans stimulated a housing boom in American suburbs. In the older cities of the northeast U.S., streetcar suburbs originally developed along train or trolley lines that could shuttle workers into and out of city centers where the jobs were located. This practice gave rise to the term bedroom community or dormitory, meaning that most daytime business activity took place in the city, with the working population leaving the city at night for the purpose of going home to sleep. *Note* General Motors bought all the street cars and scrapped them. Then the metro bus lines (With GM buses) took their place. See "Who Killed the Electric Car" The growth in the use of trains, and later automobiles and highways, increased the ease with which workers could have a job in the city while commuting in from the suburbs. In the United Kingdom, railways stimulated the first mass exodus to the suburbs. The Metropolitan Railway, for example, was active in building and promoting its own housing estates in the north-west of London, consisting mostly of detached houses on large plots, which it then marketed as "Metro-land". As car ownership rose and wider roads were built, the commuting trend accelerated as in North America. This trend towards living away from towns and cities has been termed the urban exodus. Waltopia Walt Disney developed a community stemmed from his Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT) concept. In the early 1990s, the Disney Development Company established the Celebration Company to spearhead its development within approximately 4,900 acres (20 km²) of land in the southern portion of the Reedy Creek Improvement District. Total investment for the project is estimated at US$2.5 billion. The master plan was developed by Cooper, Robertson & Partners and Robert A. M. Stern. Celebration utilizes new urbanism techniques as expounded in the EPCOT concept. Other facets shared by EPCOT and Celebration include plans for a community of 20,000 with state-of-the-art technologies. Unlike EPCOT, Celebration is planned in an early 20th century-architectural style and is not zoned for high-density residences.

The reference to "Arbeit macht frei", is not meant to offend victims of the Holocaust, but rather to remind us all of the darker side of social engineering. What may sound like a great idea at first, may actually lead us to our doom.

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Statue of Liberty (Pencil)