As part of our 2019 Lecture Series, on July 18 the Greenbelt Museum presented a lecture and book signing by Amanda Kolson Hurley, author of Radical Suburbs: Experimental Living on the Fringes of the American City. The book features a chapter on Greenbelt and its history, placing our experimental community in the context of a variety of other suburban experiments. The book is receiving excellent press, including on WAMU's Kojo Nnamdi show. Click here to listen. 

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A short review:  "Radical Suburbs is a revelation. Amanda Kolson Hurley will open your eyes to the wide diversity and rich history of our ongoing suburban experiment. This book gives us all a new way to understand our varied suburbias and how to engage a serious conversation about making them for twenty-first century life. Essential reading for every urbanist." 

              —Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class.

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From the book cover: "American suburbs were once fertile ground for utopian planning, communal living, socially-conscious design, and integrated housing. We have forgotten that we built suburbs like these, such as the co-housing commune of Old Economy, Pennsylvania; a tiny-house anarchist community in Piscataway, New Jersey; a government-planned garden city in Greenbelt, Maryland; a racially integrated subdivision (before the Fair Housing Act) in Trevose, Pennsylvania; experimental Modernist enclaves in Lexington, Massachusetts; and the mixed-use, architecturally daring Reston, Virginia."

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The author signed books following the event. Sponsored by the Friends of the Greenbelt Museum and the City of Greenbelt.