Technology · Form / mobility

The cul-de-sac / Radburn layout

1929 · Radburn, NJ

What it is

The Radburn layout, designed by Clarence Stein and Henry Wright for Radburn, New Jersey from 1929, organised housing around short dead-end streets (cul-de-sacs) that branched off feeder roads, with homes turned inward toward shared greens and a separate network of footpaths crossing roads by underpass. The aim was to fully separate the pedestrian from the motor car within a residential 'superblock'. The Depression halted the scheme before completion, but its diagram circulated widely.

Why it matters

It defined the template for postwar suburban subdivision, with its branching road hierarchy of cul-de-sac, collector and arterial. That hierarchy shaped decades of car-dependent suburban form and is now criticised for poor connectivity.

Plans it shaped

See it on the timeline →
hub.toekom.st — History of Urbanism · an interactive timeline of 850 planned cities across 6,000 years.