Green-Utopias of the New Deal: A Geo-Rhetorical Analysis of Historic Greendale, Wisconsin

Izzy Alexander, University of Tennessee Knoxville
Mia Nighgroh, University of Tennessee Knoxville

Greenbelt towns were championed during the Roosevelt administration as part of the New Deal’s efforts to create model suburban communities for low- and middle-income white families living in overcrowded urban centers. Posited as utopian planned communities, bordered by green spaces and intimately communal by design, the New Deal Resettlement Administration planned and built only three of these American “garden cities” before a lack of funding and community interest ended the federal project. We critically examine the second of these towns—Greendale, Wisconsin—through a geo-rhetorical lens. We frame the New Deal administration’s archival planning documents in conversation with the spatial rhetoric of the town itself, then apply a critical geographical lens through an examination of the lived experiences of individuals in the community. An analysis of the foundational planning rhetoric surrounding Greendale reveals how idyllic urban design principles, while beneficial for some, are rarely inclusive and further reproduce marginalized geographic boundaries and social discrimination. With the Greendale Historical Society archives and publicly accessible census data, newspapers, and federal New Deal Resettlement Administration records, we use historical narratives to address the personal and social impact of greenbelt cities. Combining planning documents and border maps of the constructed town with newspaper narratives of the resulting decade, we argue the Resettlement Administration reinforced systemic power imbalances through racialized suburbanization. We explore the relationship between suburbanization and modernity (Mignolo, 2007; Quijano, 2007). Combining concepts from rhetorical studies—border rhetorics (Anzaldúa, 1987; Lechuga & de la Garza, 2021), spatial rhetorics (Rohan, 2023), and archival method/ologies (Rice, 2020)—and a historical human-geographical examination of personal narratives, this interdisciplinary approach contributes a new perspective to sociological discourse about New Deal greenbelt towns (Gilbert & Howe, 1991). This work argues that the construction of Greendale—and other greenbelt towns—functioned as an exercise in modernity.

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 Presented in Session 182. Geographies of Racialized Dispossession