Towers in the Park, Bungalows in the Garden: Peripheral Densities, Metropolitan Scales and the Political Cultures of Post-Suburbia

ROGER KEIL

In this paper I will disentangle the real-existing suburbia from some of its enduring myths. I will do this mostly through a discussion of densities. Based on international experiences but also encouraged by recent developments in Canadian suburbs, I will argue that densities in suburbs have always been mixed and diverse. But the emphasis on a particular form of US-style individualized suburbanization has led to a focus on a cultural politics of social conservatism, property ownership and privilege which has obscured not just alternative social and built forms in suburbia, but has disempowered other, more progressive, labour and collective consumption-oriented and social justice-seeking forms of everyday suburbanism and the politics that result from it. It has also obscured some of the pathways through which post-suburban metropolitanism has to find solutions to some of the most pressing social, economic and environmental issues we confront in urban regions today.

It has been Detroit's misfortune to have city limits that are far too big for its population.

David Olive, 2015

Suburbs have traditionally come in all sizes and densities. Nonetheless, they have been mostly imagined as places of low density, privatism and automobility. The American suburb in particular – and to a similar degree those in other Anglo-Saxon countries such as Australia, Canada and the UK – has provided the hegemonic image of single-family homes behind picket fences and a driveway leading up to a garage. Such singularity of focus on a particular form of suburban life has been myopic and has limited the view towards suburbia as a global phenomenon.

In this paper I will disentangle the real-existing suburbia from some of its enduring myths. I will do this mostly through a discussion of densities. Based on international

experiences but also encouraged by recent developments in Canadian suburbs, predominantly based on the case of Toronto, I will argue that densities in suburbs have always been mixed and diverse. But the emphasis on a particular form of US-style individualized suburbanization has led to a focus on a cultural politics of social conservatism, property ownership and privilege which has obscured not just alternative social and built forms in suburbia, but has disempowered other, more progressive, collective consumption-oriented and social justice-seeking forms of everyday suburbanism and the politics that result from it. It has also obscured some of the pathways through which post-suburban metropolitanism has to find solutions to some of the most pressing social, economic and environmental issues we confront in urban regions today.

On the reverse side of these representa-

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tions, the appearance of the stereotypical suburban morphology-cum-community as an ideal(ized) community has contributed to hiding poverty, diversity and change, as it did in Watts before the 1965 uprising and Ferguson, Missouri before the tragic events of 2014. It also clouds the view of typical differentiations inside suburbs, as is the case in France whose banlieue is usually depicted in a one-dimensional environment while in fact it often contains a spectrum of morphologies and socioeconomic realities (Touati-Morel, 2015).

At the outset, and to avoid misunderstandings, I should mention that in discussing the one-dimensional low-density mythology of suburbia, I will also introduce the normative position taken by many planners and urbanists that see the – real and imagined – density of suburbia as a problem. In doing so, I am critical of the hyper-density proposition: recent pleas for models of urbanism that involve an even higher concentration of humanity in dense urban cores (Chakrabarti, 2013; Glaeser, 2011). In this context, I am not introducing or discussing the logical opposite of the hyper-density proposition, the normative preference for low-density settlements. This preference, mostly identified with a certain strand of American libertarianism has little intellectual and no political merit or plausibility (Cox, 2012; Kotkin, 2013).

Low Density, Privatism and Automobility: The Suburban Mythology

Once in place, the newly suburban zone seems placid.

Richard Harris, 2013, p. 35

Let's take a drive through the sprawl, through these towns they built to change.

Arcade Fire, Sprawl I (Flatland)$^{1}$

Richard Harris observes that 'the transitional aspect of suburban land is obvious' (2013, p. 33) and continues that this simple truth still is not easy to grasp. He invites us to 'see the

city block as a one-time urban fringe' (Ibid.). Yet, the reality of suburban change, and the existence of the land market that structures it is often hard to accept, especially for the suburbanites themselves. In the Anglo-Saxon, but specifically the North American case, the landscapes and morphologies which have served as the model for most writing on suburbia, this dialectic of constant change and the hesitation to admit it, is tied to the three connected aspects of low-density urban form, private home ownership and an automobile infrastructure. The first two were more or less historical accidents as the low-density development now typical of most cities in Australia, America and Canada was not the only form suburban areas could have adopted (Ford, 1994). The determining factor of infrastructure was important. While metropolitan expansion was originally driven by radial rail transit infrastructure (as, famously, in the case of Los Angeles), expressway networks laid over the auto-accommodating grid, and later the cul-de-sac structure of suburbanizing cities in particular, allowed development to fan out – also supported by extensive other networked infrastructures such as big sewer pipes and electricity grids – over extensive swaths of subdivided land (Filion, 2013; Fishman 1987; Poitras, 2011).

The late modern and imperial periods of extensive colonial urbanization around the globe had given the new suburban settlers a range of choices between the classic bungalow and the mansion. The bungalow represented the simplicity of private residential space that had been spread under British colonial rule from India to the UK, California, Canada and other parts of the world (King, 2004). The mansion was a product of the preferences of early modern English gentry who brought a romantic and sometimes lavish sense of luxurious style to the periurban zone from the city, often linked to tourism near and far. In this settlement of the English, Canadian, American and Australian (soon to be suburbanized) countryside, based on

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the principle of enclosure to a considerable extent, a new national narrative was woven with the threads of a 'new symbolic economy that had a direct influence on the image and imagination of national territories' (Sevilla-Buitrago, 2014, p. 251). To this imaginary, the single-family home was central. That it also fits well with the growing demands of a mass-produced form of housing and the desires of the development industry to maximize its profits on a grid of tract housing cemented the role of the bungalow-mansion spectrum of houses at the core of the suburban model in much of the English Commonwealth. The ubiquitous grid also allowed the car to move freely, without regard for the centre, through the various ecologies of the suburbanizing metropolis (Banham, 1971; Fishman, 1987).

Yet, it is necessary to remember that 'the dominance of the freestanding single-family house in major urban settings is a relatively recent phenomenon' and a product of 'a great deal of experimentation' (Ford, 1994, p. 127). Especially during the Victorian era, the drive for middle-class domesticity and distinctive national culture coalesced in such a way that 'while city dwellers elsewhere in the world were content to live in a wide variety of settings, to be an American was to live in a house' (Ibid., p. 134). This urban ideal ultimately also infused the massive suburbanization that characterized America in the twentieth century. And, as Keller Easterling has perceptively noted 'a design idea for suburbia becomes more powerful when it is positioned as a multiplier that affects a population of houses' (2014, p. 84). The house became the relay station of the Fordist-Keynesian regime of accumulation, a position that lingered into the current age of Metroburbia when consumption of space and gadgetry knows no bounds (Knox, 2008).

At the same time, the libertarian ideal of the individual house as the centre of societal life ran up against the strong urge by modernist planning and state bureaucratic institutions to order and regulate the urban experience:

While the literary and artistic avant-gardes were waxing lyrical over the metropolis as an exaltation of modernity, modernist urban planners turned their backs on the city. In their attempts at formulating solutions to the miserable conditions and suffocating atmosphere of the industrial metropolis inherited from the 19th century, the English 'garden city' model of Ebenezer Howard, the German Siedlungswesen, the designs of Soviet 'disurbanists' and Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City tried to circumvent the existing metropolis. (De Meyer et al., 1999, p. 17)

This tension is characteristic of the way in which we imagine the political metropolis today as a new neoliberal era of city-making has once again recalibrated the role of planning and markets and their relationships to each other (Fontenot, 2015; Magnusson, 2011; Peck, 2015).

The suburb of homes was also a suburb of homeowners. Alongside the form, there was the private title to the land and to the property that characterized this thrust of suburbanization in Anglo-America. Houses were owned, as was the land, whether those structures were built through a formal, regulated process of subdivision and mass production or a more informal ('unplanned') process of acquisition and sweat equity (Harris, 1996). Pitted against 'the lodger evil' and the 'unstable tenant', ownership of the single-family home was considered a societal goal with ancillary benefits of great value. Privacy was seen as the glue of society and the protection of the family all at once. Richard Harris notes: 'In Toronto and across the continent, just about everyone felt that home ownership was a good thing. They believed that it reinforced the independence of the family, encouraging thrift and reducing demands upon the public purse' (Ibid., p. 97). The disciplining effects of home ownership on workers and immigrants were especially emphasized.

While the home and its ownership were factors of social stability and the backbone of a conservative outlook on urbanism overall, the automobile became the connector that provided mobility when needed and always symbolized freedom, perhaps even more than

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the title to the suburban home. Although, as is well known, suburbanization in its common American form was often the immediate outcome of land speculation driven by rail-based infrastructure – with Los Angeles perhaps the classic case – leading among other things to ‘streetcar suburbs’ (Warner, 1978), the private motor car was ultimately the important missing link between the suburban home and the productive and consumptive hubs of the emerging landscape of the Keynesian-Fordist economy of the mid-twentieth century (Poitras, 2011).

Taken together, these developments resulted in what Richard Harris (2014) has called ‘three suburban stereotypes about North American suburbs’: the ideal quest for privacy; conformity with the suburban ideal; and the common misgivings among researchers about suburbia (see also Fiedler and Addie, 2008). As I have explored elsewhere, the latter has led to a veritable ‘disdain’ for suburbia that has clouded the view of many critical researchers in assessing their changing social and political reality today (Keil, 2016). But, of course, even the North American ideal case really had variegation and distinctive periods often neglected by apologists for, and critics of, suburbia alike (Lang et al., 2006).

Emerging Global Post-Suburbia

Among the new developments that are relevant in the context of this article are changing land use and morphological patterns in core suburban countries and beyond. De Meyer et al. (1999, p. 24) observed accordingly:

In the course of the 1980s, yet another stage in the process of dispersal was reached. After the rise of suburbia as a domestic-residential phenomenon, and after going on to assimilate commercial and industrial functions, suburbia now also assimilated the increasingly important service industries that are deemed so characteristic of postindustrial society.

This new suburban trend was even more encompassing than the previous ‘suburban solutions’ had been and marked a departure

from the ‘suburban ideal of the 18th century’ and ‘the embodiment of a new kind of city’ (Ibid., p. 27). The new dispersed, multi-focus, discontinuous, variably dense, and multi-centred city, not oriented towards the traditional core, has been called ‘post-suburban’ amongst other things (see most recently Phelps and Wu, 2011). While recognizing critical voices such as Marcuse (1995), De Meyer et al. (1999, p. 70) summarize the emerging view of changing suburbia at the turn of the millennium:

Postsuburbia, in other words, possessed a polychromic and polyphonic quality that is more reminiscent of the modern metropolis than of 1950s suburbia. Unsurprisingly, therefore, it has been presented sometimes as the decongested continuation of an essentially urban ideology, in which the emancipation and liberty of individuals take pride of place.

Postsuburban changes have now been registered across the globe, albeit in various forms and to varying degrees (Phelps and Wu, 2011; De Meyer et al., 1999, p. 32). In some regions of the world, like in the states of the former Soviet Union, once dense peripheries are now developing patterns more reminiscent of the West where, ‘after decades of limited residential choices, the desire to emulate the lifestyle enjoyed by residents of the West is … a powerful force contributing to suburbanization’ (Stanilov, 2007, p. 179). Accordingly, single-family home construction in the peripheries of the region exploded after 1990 and so has the presence of big box commercial developments typical of the in-between cities of the West (Ibid., pp. 184–186). This is resulting in a mixed landscape likened metaphorically by Hirt and Kovachev (2015, p. 193) to a ‘multi-headed deity’ in the tradition of Eastern European pagan religions ‘looking to past and to future, and to the four corners of the world’. In his work on the post-suburbanization of the Global South, Terry McGee has concluded:

that suburbs are best defined as a category of settlement that is one of the many types of the built environment of housing settlement types,

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commercial and industrial spaces, as well as infrastructures that include high-rise apartments, town houses, condominiums, family homes, and illegal settlements that are now part of the emerging fabric of an urbanized world. (McGee, 2013, p. 25)

Similar observations can be added from the experience in India (Gururani and Kose, 2015) and Africa (Bloch, 2015; Mabin, 2013). In China, a newly sub/urbanizing country, where Wu (2013, p. 194) sees a process of 'urbanization of suburbs' under way, 'suburban development is more about constellations of urbanization and suburbanization, and it is heterogeneous in terms of population composition'. In her case study of Wangjing in suburban Beijing, Fleischer (2010) has registered a hierarchy and typology of different morphologies that have rapidly congealed into a mature and diverse suburban landscape over the past 20 years.

Sub/Urbanization and Density: A Few Critical Notes

Fran Tonkiss (2013, p. 43) has noted that in a global perspective 'debates over density and sprawl become not only sterile or semantic, but also increasingly irrelevant, for the majority urban experience'. However, density, or more specifically higher rather than lower density, is a concept that enjoys much love in urbanist circles. It is often seen as a necessary precondition for sustainability and even resilience. It has become a rarely questioned normative objective. Densification and intensification – often paired with the notion of compactness – are desired processes of urban planning and development. They are the mantra of central city-based urban environmental policies ostensibly geared towards a twenty-first century urbanity tied to pedestrianization, cycling and transit as mobility options of choice. In the outer reaches of metropolitan areas, New Urbanism (NU) has carried the torch of densification (Tomalty and Haider, 2010). NU was, however, just the first gambit in the larger battle

for larger scale 'sprawl repair' and the urbanization of the suburbs, which has produced a cottage industry of travelling urbanists, pundits and planning consultants that range from the serious (Dunham-Jones and Williamson, 2011; Jessen and Roost, 2015) to the naïve (Gallagher, 2013).

The thrust of such enthusiasm for density and compactness is easy to understand if not somewhat contradictory as it often neglects the complex problems related to a single focus on an (abstract) concept of density at the expense of other considerations related to sustainability and resilience (Charmes and Keil, 2015). While problematic, my mentioning of it here is not meant to be critical of its potential consequences for climate change and other goals its proponents carry on their banners. As Keil and Hertel (2015) have argued, any attempt to reform or regenerate the suburbs must come from the suburban populations and their democratic institutions themselves and cannot be prescribed and implemented through centrally-led, top-down processes.

The preference for higher density and compactness, so strong today, clearly has not always been there. In fact, the modernist reaction to the 'kaleidoscopic' modern city was an intervention to disassemble the city and to reassemble it in new rational landscapes of metropolitanism that may have had density cores but were rather dispersed overall (De Meyer et al., 1999). The great planning debates of the twentieth century were often also less than clear about central issues of density and form and there was much confusion, a point made rather acerbically by Deyan Sudjic in his comment on Jane Jacobs:

Jacobs ridiculed suburbia in the conventional manner of the metropolitan intellectual of her day, and she scorned the attempts of the planners to reconstruct the city in its image. Curiously, much of the West Village around Hudson Street, with its small scale tree-lined streets, is closer to an English suburb than it is to the kind of metropolis she praises. (Sudjic, 1992, p. 23)

Jacobs's later home in Toronto was even

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more susceptible to this critique. Her house stood in the centre of the Annex neighbourhood, a posh early vilified (King, 2004) example of a city extension, not unlike today's (new) urbanist suburbs in the wealthier neighbourhoods of Toronto's periphery. For a European visitor, used to the fin de siècle architecture and perimeter development of that continent's cities, the pre-modernist tree lined streets of Victorian Toronto are hardly the standard of urbanity that they are often made out to be in the urbanist literature of that and other cities (Sewell, 1993). At the same time observers of Toronto's périphérie had already noted some time ago that 'the densities of new residential developments in Toronto's outer suburbs are, on average, the highest on the continent' (Bourne, 2001, p. 26).

As suburbanization proceeded through the twentieth century, lower densities were made socially sustainable and marketable by what we now know to be the diseconomies of the automobile and the Keynesian-or Fordist mode of regulation. They also allowed for entirely new patterns of suburbanization to take hold. The Los Angeles model of grid-based, decentralized, rather than corridor-hub driven suburbanization became more common (De Meyer et al., 1999, p. 21; Fishman 1987). Generally, the suburbanizing region put in motion a trend by which 'the areal extent of the built-up city has grown faster than population' (Bunting et al., 2002, p. 2534). In addition, suburban space became the domain not just of residential subdivision but also of the service, back office and manufacturing industries in search of cheap land and proximities to wealthy exurban neighbourhoods where management resided (De Meyer et al., 1999). The story is now familiar, at least since the 1990s, as the functions of urbanity and density have become disentangled: 'In many cases, the outskirts of metropolitan areas have adopted almost all the characteristics of the classic city and adapted them to a lower density' (ibid., p. 27). Mixing of functional elements and densities becomes the norm in the post-

suburban in-between city across an urban region punctured by edge cities and technoburbs (Sieverts, 2003; Garreau, 1991). In this process, in Canada, 'wasted density' (i.e. 'islands of high-density residential areas stranded in a sea of low-density single-family homes') is seen as an inevitable outcome of metropolitan spatial distribution (Filion et al., 2006; Fiedler and Addie, 2008). In another world region, Eastern Europe during post-socialist transformations, Stanilov (2007, p. 179) has observed:

The general trend towards spatial decentralization in the post-socialist years has resulted in a flattening of the residential density gradients in cities throughout central and Eastern Europe. The well-known 'camel back' shape of the line depicting the decrease of density in the socialist city with distance from the city center has begun [sic] to even out by the decline of population in the central zones and the increase of densities in the urban periphery.

As this new multi-density, multi-function urban region has emerged over the last generation, it has consistently defied systematic analytical, cartographic representation and planning intervention (De Meyer et al., 1999, p. 30-38). But it has bred a new politics, which we will examine below.

Density Enigmas

Density deserves another look in order to understand some of its inbuilt contradictions. We might ask questions such as: is there 'good density' or 'bad density'? Is the term as simplistically positive as is often suggested? Are processes of intensification value free apart from their positive effect on the environment? I offer a few observations below that may have to be taken into account when discussing the term in policy and planning debates. My main interest here lies in illuminating the notion of density in the conversation about urbanizing, i.e. densifying the suburbs.

If we talk about suburbs and density, we need first to recognize that both terms are 'chaotic'. They defy clear definition,

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but everyone uses them with a certainty that often leads to heated debate and misunderstanding. There are many versions of both suburbs and density. In the growing debate on what to do with suburbs and suburbanization, the normative preference of most self-declared urbanists is clear. Suburbs are deemed unsustainable, costly and unjust due to their sprawling use of land, their increased infrastructure cost and segregative socio-spatial structures. Let's leave aside for now that these normative preferences are cultivated with a set of very stereotypical images on suburbanization at their base – operating with idealized notions of single-family homes and individualized backyards, automobilized infrastructures and cul-de-sac streetscapes as discussed above.

The cultural prejudice against low and medium density also has a certain colonialist tinge. Planning professionals and urban visionaries, often themselves firmly at home in gentrifying neighbourhoods of city cores, seem to know best what is good for the suburbs and the planet. They also tend to disregard cultural preferences for less dense living in other contexts than North America or Europe. Their normative preferences take on an absolute tone that cherry-picks historical or geographical 'best practices' (be they the European mediaeval compact city or today's Barcelona or Medellin) out of a broad spectrum of past and extant urban realities. South to south inter-referencing in city building (both good and bad) is often overlooked in the process. African city builders are unlikely to follow the prescriptions for more compactness and density in urban form as it is recommended in the Global North. The density of African cities is problematic as where there is overcrowding and lack of urban services, there will be endogenous solutions born in both path-dependency (various African countries and cities continue to develop along various distinct trajectories) and innovation (geared towards the specificity of that situation rather than displaying generic traits) (Simone, 2004).

In fact, most North Americans and Europeans would abhor the already existing low-rise densities you find in African squatter settlements and slums. Lagos, Nigeria, for example, the fourth densest large city in the world by some measure, has a density of 18,150 people per square kilometre but hardly the built form and networked infrastructure to support the kind of urban life North Americans or Europeans would associate with Good Density (CityMayors Statistics, 2007). In Maputo, often touted as one of the success stories in African urbanization, still 80 per cent of the population live in slums (Campbell, 2005). The discourse there is not density but poverty, not abundance but need. Ton-kiss (2013, p. 38) admits accordingly: 'The problem of density sits in an uncertain place in-between: the point at which density becomes overcrowding, especially in slum settings, is never quite clear'.

Density as a site-specific quality is almost meaningless if one doesn't look at the broader societal context and patterns of use as well. A person can live in a compact, dense, walkable neighbourhood but work a long drive or transit ride away from it. In an age when families are not traditional (if they have ever been!), choice of residence is no longer a question of linear live-work relationships. There is no productive centre where the husbands go by day, and bedroom suburb where the housewives and the station wagons stay behind. If there are double income earners in one family, they likely work at different locations in the urban region. The location of their home will have to be a compromise. To assume everyone will be able to live and work in a particular, dense part of town is rather unrealistic in this situation. This is complicated by children going to school across the region to seek opportunity in education. Many educational institutions of higher learning are now in metropolitan peripheries (Addie et al., 2014).

Another context is wealth and class. Rich people often live in dense neighbourhoods with lots of cultural, culinary and commercial

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amenities. But those places may not be accessible to public use, they may be gated or concierged, protected from public access, or priced out of reach. They also may not be the most ecologically sustainable by themselves. As Daniel Aldana Cohen (2014, p. 151) reminds us: 'When the people clustered are prosperous professionals, the carbon benefits of density can be cancelled out by the emissions their consumption causes. The smokestacks, of course, are elsewhere'. Density can be one of the best ways to concentrate wealth and power; and density can be one of the best ways to concentrate poverty and oppression. Wealthier people may be living in dense quarters but they are also more likely to travel, to own a vacation home, to drive multiple and bigger cars and to travel far afield by air in their professional practice. In that case, residential density may be good for their home community but it makes no difference for the planet.

Poorer people may be forced to the periphery by gentrification; they may have multiple part-time jobs that force them to be mobile across a sprawling urban region. They also have less political clout and their influence on the overall urbanist choices in their city tend to be minimal by comparison with the often professionally trained, wealthier inhabitants of the dense, bourgeois neighbourhoods downtown. If they live in tower neighbourhoods, their home is vilified by a discourse that problematizes that particular form of living. If they live in the bungalow city, their sub/urbanist aspirations and automobilist lifestyles are considered part of the problem.

The current discourse on the dense city marginalizes both experiences and their inhabitants. Swiss researchers have also found that inner-city density is not always a panacea when it comes to energy savings. Referring to the 'barbecue effect', they have found that suburbanites, reviled for their use of automobiles to get around, may stay put in the evenings and weekends to enjoy their living environment while urban dwellers may drive to far places where they can seek

nature or open space for recreation (Munafo, 2014). This is at least an open empirical question that deserves further exploration.

At a regional scale, the compact density of the newly celebrated, high-rise condominium-filled, compact inner city of Toronto, for example, has a low-density urban field to draw from when it comes to the delivery of its goods and services (Keil and Young, 2008). The condominium towers along the waterfront benefit from the spatially expansive existence of the airport; the warehouses where commodities are stored before they get delivered downtown; the extensive road system where just-in-time truck delivery occurs around the clock to keep the coffee shops and boutiques of the dense downtown in business; the intermodal rail yards that span several city blocks. Many of these functions and land uses are conveniently overlooked when we speak about sprawling suburban space. A dialectics of density and sprawl is the reality of the regional city while the discourse on density pits one against the other in a rather unproductive manner.

Sixty-one percent of all Americans now live in single unit detached housing on about an acre of land as Chakrabarti (2013, p. 26) has shown. That is a real problem in so much as in North America, in particular, those living arrangements are supported by the most unsustainable economy in the world, in terms of energy consumption per capita, waste, and so forth. The same kind of densities may not be quite as disastrous in an economy that is set up in more modest terms or that have fully-fledged ecological modernization processes going on that affect energy use, mobility, etc. in other ways (i.e. many Swiss and South Africans live in single-family structures in low to medium density but in both – rather different – countries, much less energy use is needed to live in those structures and to move people around).

Chakrabarti, like others, also makes an implicit assumption that density is associated with compactness and centrality. Yet, the density–centrality equation abstracts from

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a lot of other factors in the urban region. As high-rises in centralized cities' cores are cited as factors in economic productivity, it is commonly being ignored that those who manage and profit from that core productivity often live in the least dense and most exclusive exurbs at the region's edge. The complex geographies of power and wealth have to be factored into the equation instead of focusing merely on one side of the problem: the sprawling suburbs.

An often-proposed antidote to the sprawling suburbanization of today is 'hyperdensification', that is living at a density of 30 units per acre (which still does not take into account who and how many people live at such density or how they are living there). Examples given are Hong Kong, New York, but also European cities. In fact, we are not talking here about just high-rise living. Recent developments in London's stressed housing market have led to the phenomenon of 'iceberg homes' with multiple below ground floors and amenities (Waldie, 2013). Towers are usually seen as the core component of hyperdensity and, as the argument goes, the more high-rise density, the more productivity can be expected. The tower strategy explicitly rejects other forms of density enhancing options: 'For decades, growing U.S. cities have gained density not through strengthened downtowns – through hyperdensity – but through sprawling borders and, consequently metropolitan regions have become less efficient and bigger consumers of our resources'. Where density has been achieved at the margins through intensification of commercial strips and new urbanist experiments, Chakrabarti (2013, p. 133) sees potential just cause for popular resistance: 'As a result, people often think "development" and rightfully believe it means congestion and traffic snarls. Indeed, if the word conjures images of a bucolic Main Street being transformed into a big-box commercial strip or an office park, they are justified in having that fear'. Like Edward Glaeser, author of the manifesto Triumph of the City (2011),

Chakrabarti believes in dense form not as a container of but a catalyst for smart economies and people: 'It is indisputable that technology – the elevator, structural steel, and the subway – ushered in a different and fundamentally better way of life for billions' (2013, p. 131).

Given such clear preference for a particular kind of density, a few critical observations are in order. Planners and urbanists coalesce in a double movement that (a) condemns existing and future suburbanization and (b) proposes more compact re-urbanization initiatives in return. In this double movement both steps are problematic. In the first instance, assumptions are made about the suburbs and suburbanization that may not hold up to full scrutiny. This was discussed above. The proposed remedy for the damages done by suburbanization contains an amalgam of mostly site specific and urban form oriented measures that leave much context unconsidered. They operate on the scale of the house, the street and perhaps the neighbourhood, and leave broader scales and topological relationships of those units unconsidered. The region and the world remain the blind spots of urban density. The normative debate on urban density is relatively uninformed of the complex 'urban political ecologies' specifically and the larger city/country-side dialectics generally that sustain it in a world of fully extended urbanization (Ajl, 2014; Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2014; Goonewardena, 2014).

Fed by normative positions on density like the ones just discussed, there are three assumptions that commonly underlie the critique of the sprawling suburbs:

1. The 'undercomplexity' assumption: much stated criticism of the suburbs unthinkingly or polemically paints a very uniform picture of what suburbanization consists of today. Especially in North America, the notion of 'cookie-cutter' suburbs of single-family homes carries the day when the debate on density is raised. The assumptions come in packages

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of individualized private housing on more or less small lots that are serviced by overpriced, often oversized infrastructures that are paid for dearly by taxpayers at large. This fairytale image of present suburbanization dynamics underplays the reality of structural and formal diversity and abstracts from the various political economies that build and support that diversity.

2. The 'suburbs don't change' assumption: While the inner cities, particularly in the Jane Jacobs tradition of Toronto, are depicted as lively laboratories of urban change and variable densities, the suburbs are caricaturized as unchanging and static. Urban street life in dense downtown spaces is idealized while few questions are asked about the privatized, 'gated' and enclosed spaces that come with the condofaction of the inner city (see for example Hume, 2014).

3. The 'suburbanites-are-passive' assumption: While the suburbs are depicted as unchangeable or even unsalvageable, their residents are often considered passive, self-interested, private and even worse: opposed to the density push that comes from the inner city. The passivity of the burbs and of their burghers is deemed a major factor in their unchangeable nature.

Now this may all be a caricature itself, and I will leave the deconstruction of these assumptions open for discussion. In the meantime, please consider a second set of observations that is derived from the introduction to a symposium of comparative papers on intensification in French and Canadian suburbs (Charmes and Keil, 2015; Filion, 2015; Poppe and Young, 2015; Rousseau, 2015; Touati-Morel, 2015). In their joint work Eric Charmes and Roger Keil have critiqued the density prerogative from three angles:

1. The politics of densification: Densification is not neutral but it is contested across various political camps. The environmental argu-

arguments in favour of densification are often plastic and dependent on the speaker's interest and subject position. The argument that denser cities are more sustainable than their lower density counterparts only holds if many higher scale issues of energy use etc. are ignored. Smart growth and new urbanism have now become de rigueur in development discourse as land developers, builders and local political elites sell growth (and their ambitious plans) with a green strategy.

2. Moreover, in the density debate morphology matters: density per se does not say much about urban form. There is a wide variety of ways by which to achieve similar types of density.

3. Existing suburban densification regimes are not all the same: They differ substantially from each other. Both physical landscape and socio-political governance present a wide spectrum. Class, and other social status differences are important in this context.

This last point is a segue to my final set of concerns that get us back to the notion of density itself. In a classical paper that examines planning in New York City over 100 years, Peter Marcuse (1993) critically illuminated density as a concept and intensification planning as a practice. Three important observations from that proposition are particularly relevant in the context of this paper:

1. 'The meaning and effect of density in the city are directly related to social differentiation within a city, in a complex fashion varying directly by class, race and gender and by the nature of the dominant economic activity in the city' (Marcuse 1993, p. 1).

2. 'A dense city per se is neither good nor bad, desirable or undesirable. It depends on which city, and for whom. A dense city is likely to be corporate and elite only if it reveals high concentration in the central business district and, as in New York, in the financial and midtown districts' (Marcuse 1993, p. 24)

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3. 'Planning for density without considering class, race and gender is likely to produce proposals biased in favor of business uses and upper-income classes against the poor and working classes; in favor of white against African-Americans; and in favor of men against women… Early generalizations, such as those prompted by Jane Jacobs' work in the West Village, overlooked this lesson' (Marcuse 1993, p. 25).

In conclusion, then, and before we turn to our last section on the use of density in sub/urban politics, we can maintain that density as it exists is highly uneven and many suburbs are as diverse as many inner cities. The processes currently set up to increase density carry with them a high potential for reinforcing existing inequalities. Stepping outside the dense/city-sprawling/suburb mode of thinking and filling the gaps between the high-rise condominiums and single-family homes remain imperatives as cities like Toronto enter the next wave of intensification. In a scenario where millions of newcomers are yet to arrive in an already densely populated urban region over the next generation, we cannot afford to look at either suburbs or density in the ways we have to date. It is time to change our view of the suburbs without telling the suburbanites how to change. And it is time that the suburbanization of the inner city in mono-cultural condominium boxes is revised. Both in substance and process, the densification of the larger metropolitan region must be a democratic and differentiated affair that defies the stereotypes used in much public debate and planning discourse. And this leads us, finally, to politics.

The Politics of Density and Scale

When discussing suburban politics in the context of this paper, I will not look specifically at suburban governance or regional governance which I have recently done elsewhere (Hamel and Keil, 2015). I will instead focus on suburban politics as it is influenced by

the density debate and as it influences this debate. The basis of my arguments below is my experience in North America, most notably Toronto. Suburban politics in the past has been most directly associated with the privatism of its households and communities. Perhaps the clearest expression of this relationship has been the liberal or neoliberal tradition of public choice as the regulating principle of politics in the fragmented peripheries of America's metropolitan outskirts. What was sold as a politics of individual rights and opportunity meant, in reality, 'privatizing with class' (Hoch, 1985), enclaving at best, and segregation at worst. As we re-evaluate the role of the suburban in these current times of neoliberalism, we can follow Jamie Peck's assessment that, indeed, 'American suburbia has been relationally defined, in ideological terms, as the dispersed other of metropolitan Keynesianism, and in social terms as a haven from both big cities and "big-city problems"' (2015, p. 130). In the US context, but also elsewhere, this 'dispersed' form has also often been associated with low-density morphologies as landscapes of freedom's desire. By contrast, the 'towers in the park' (or related mixed forms of suburban densities) were symbolic not only of the social democratic or socialist modernism prevalent in Eastern and Western Europe but also in Canada where American and European traditions of planning were mixed. In Toronto during the post-World War II years, when it was known as 'the city that works' due to its double-tier metropolitan governance, the peripheralization of higher densities (compared to the Victorian lower density core) was explicitly seen as a spatial strategy of creating social equity across metropolitan space. Those islands of high density in the periphery have been forever written into a narrative of modernist and planning failure. The dense/city versus dispersed/suburb trope has been an ideal carrier of more than practical urbanist differentiation of form and function: it became, to some degree, the ideal battle ground for ideas of human life that are

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entirely unrelated to how we are housed, sheltered and moved around.

The question of density in politics often sidesteps the real issues metropolitan regions must nowadays confront: how to create sustainable environments that are just in terms of social distribution and access to resources such as mobility, education, health care and jobs. It doesn't really matter, in this context, whether the ultra-rich, for example, live in penthouses around Central Park in New York, along the Thames in the heart of London or in a 'giga-mansion' on shaved hilltops in Los Angeles. The density of their exclusivity and the location of their residences are utterly unimportant compared to the political power their inhabitants and their class exert over the entire region. At the scale of the metropolitan region, then, politics is beginning to give rise to new discourses that bypass the dead-end road of density dichotomism (Haldeman, 2015; Story and Saul, 2015). The reality of hyper density that changes the reality of real estate markets and politics in large internationalizing cities stands in opposition to the powerlessness and poverty in dense tower neighbourhoods at urban peripheries from Glasgow to Paris and Leipzig and Toronto. The giga-suburbanization and vulgar, gated neoliberal mansions (Knox, 2008) that sprawl into the outskirts of many urban regions around the world, from Los Angeles to Shanghai, on their part stand in opposition to the equally sprawling bungalow suburbs that get built in their shadow as well. Density per se does not provide a sharp lens to understand the urbanism that takes shape here and the politics that naturalize its polarities into winning and losing modes of urban life.

Much of the politics of the new periphery is shaped by path-dependent institutional arrangements and existing territorial governance processes. In Eastern Europe, for example, Stanilov (2007, p. 187) has observed that '[m]any of the new suburban communities, popping up beyond the concrete walls of communist housing estates, still lie within the admini-

administration boundaries of the metropolitan jurisdiction'. Meanwhile, in France, Touati-Morel (2015) has noted 'hard' and 'soft' densification policies in the Paris city region that reflect the different socio-spatialities and variable densities of municipalities there. For their part, Poppe and Young (2015) explain how the jurisdictional proximity of inner-suburban low- and high-rise neighbourhoods lead to a particularly complex set of political imbrications in Toronto's efforts to accomplish 'renewal' of that city's tower neighbourhoods.

The Changing Social and Political Climate in the Suburbs: The Question of Scale

For the emerging politics of the post-suburban landscape, it is important to note that once the Tieboutian scale has been jumped all manner of spatial reorientations in the region and beyond are possible (Keil, 2000). De Meyer et al. (1999, p. 31) have noted 'The morphology of postsuburbia, which should be viewed at a wider regional scale, evinces more similarities with the concept of "megalopolis" as introduced by the French geographer Jean Gottmann'. In this changing geography, scale is an important marker of both state order and critical possibility. In building on the seminal work on 'the right to the suburb' by Carpio et al. (2011), Schafran et al. (2013, p. 2835) argue that:

Not only do proper social movements exist in exurbia, but that they function in a hyper multiscalar fashion, with key players engaging simultaneously at different scales in different partnerships and formations on often fairly disparate issues. We define this as 'scalar promiscuity', a geopolitical strategy which differs from the 'scale jumping' (Smith, 1995) often discussed in the literature, for this is less a response to a rescaling imposed from above – either by more powerful institutions or by changes in regional and global economies – and rather a response to the always-already fragmented nature of politics, governance, and service provision embedded in exurban space.

In the real existing regionalisms of today,

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the politics of scaling (jumping, promiscuity, etc.) is tightly connected to the territoriality of shifting discourses and technologies of mobility, for example, that allow various parts of the region differentiated access to the opportunities of the region and keep others from them. At the same time, 'as municipalities are becoming the decentralized conduits of (bio)regional integration' (Addie and Keil 2015, p. 415) through the regional logic of the Toronto region's greenbelt and places to grow policies, they contain difference in new ways.

The political landscape we now encounter in post-suburbia is linked to morphological change which, in turn, has its roots in larger scale changes to socio-economic and demographic restructuring in metro regions overall. Nico Larco (2010, p. 70) has found that '[t]he stereotypical suburban image of the single-family home and the nuclear family is no longer the exclusive reality of suburbia. Maintaining this image impedes our ability to create policies that engage the actual composition of suburbs'. The political consequences of this disjointed perception are now beginning to be felt in both apparent mismatches of policy to the actual terrain of post-suburbia and in the emerging political reactions as a new set of demands express the growing awareness of social difference and morphological variation in the metropolitan periphery. Multi-family housing, for example, appears to become more widespread in the periphery more generally. There are almost 10 million such units in American suburbs alone. They come in three types: condominiums, elderly housing, and 'mixed-use lifestyle centres' mostly in the elite income bracket. Suburban multi-unit housing is also characterized by a significantly different demographic/family structure as it is home to more singles than the classical subdivision (Larco, 2010, pp. 70–75). In areas where smart growth rules are in place as is the case in the province of Ontario, there seems to be reason to believe that despite only modest progress towards higher density development region-

wide (Allen and Campsie, 2013; Filion, 2007), the discourse and the technologies of regionalism have shifted towards a redefinition of the territory (Addie and Keil, 2015). New urbanist developments may also contribute to more variety in the suburbs although critics warn that 'the development [of new urbanist communities] may also increase sprawl by inducing households to leave their high-rise developments' (Skaburskis quoted in Fiedler and Addie, 2008, p. 15).

The discursive shift due to changing socio-spatialities, densities and morphologies can be observed in a variety of settings. Fleischer (2010), for example, has noted that ideological amalgams of modernity, environmentalism, middle classism and consumerism have now become effective in suburban conversations in Beijing and elsewhere in China. The traditional (Maoist) productivist orientation in ordering space was given up in favour of a consumerist orientation and a dominance of the middle class in sub/urban political and social spheres. Everyday life plays a huge role as a conduit and terrain of social differentiation (Fleischer, 2010, pp. 33–67). At the same time, 'middle-class homeowners are increasingly aware of and willing to claim their growing power and agency in shaping the suburban space' (Ibid., p. 149).

Drummond and Labbé (2013) have made us aware of very similar tendencies in the Global South where the suburban experience is increasingly characterized by multiple simultaneous transformations that will require a close look at actual social interactions in these changing morphological and social constellations. While the circumstances of the production (and consumption) of space in post-suburban China and the Global South are different from the classical case of North American suburbanization, the change in morphologies is related, as it is in the West, to a more general shift that Rohan Quinby (2011, p. 128) has described as 'the spatiotemporal ecology of the postmetropolis … displacing the logic of the traditional city within a suburban-like order of horizontality

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and dispersal'. This development echoes and simultaneously qualifies, the prescient observations by Henri Lefebvre on the transformations that characterized 'extended urbanization' more generally. Critiquing the ideal of 'Unitary Urbanism' that was identified in the 1960s with Situationist ideas on urban change, he dated the end of city-centred urbanism to 'the moment that the historic city exploded into peripheries, suburbs – like what happened in Paris, and in all sorts of places, Los Angeles, San Francisco, wild extensions of the city' (Lefebvre and Ross, 2015, p. 49).

Sub/urban density – its physical reality and its ideological significance – is a product of historically changing processes of governance through the state, capital accumulation and private authoritarianism (Ekers et al., 2012; Hamel and Keil, 2015). This has always been distinctive in various circumstances. For the Canadian case, for example, Fiedler and Addie (2008, pp. 8–9) have observed:

Whereas the American system is seen as an outgrowth of universalistic principles and competitive individualism, Canada represents the outgrowth of attempts to preserve linguistic and provincial cultures, rights and elitism, and as such, Canadian city-regions exhibit far higher levels of municipal integration and developed regional government political infrastructures than do cities in the United States.

What is new today, is that the old and assumed divisions into camps of political practice and ascriptions of values to places associated with certain location and densities are changing.

The culture of politics in post-suburbia is now very conscious of the notions that come with density in the metropolitan arena. The periphery begins to reveal a different set of political options from the one to which it has historically been tied. In her work on the governance of the postcolonial suburb, Ananya Roy (2015, p. 344) has pointed out that 'the politics of the suburban periphery is the politics of political society' through which emerging contradictions of centrality/

peripherality, formality/informality, state/market are renegotiated. In this sense, the discussion presented here aims to contribute to a general 'critique of stable categories of space, society, and state' (Ibid., p. 345).

Conclusion

For half a century now, urban society has been seen as having spread in an implosion-explosion dialectic (Lefebvre, 2003). Lefebvre defines this dialectic in these words: 'The tremendous concentration (of people, activities, wealth, goods, objects, instruments, means and thought) of urban reality and the immense explosion, the projection of numerous, disjunct fragments (peripheries, suburbs, vacation homes, satellite towns) into space' (Ibid., p. 14). In this paper, I have focused mostly on the density myths related to the 'numerous, disjunct fragments' of spatial expansion of urban society. In much of the literature on suburbia, these fragments have been treated as mere products (not producers), derivative (of central processes), and perhaps even disjointed from one another. In reality, these fragments are linked (and governed) through the modalities of state action (i.e. public policies), capital accumulation (through the production of space) and private authoritarian suburban ways of life (Ekers et al., 2012).

This had much to do with the caricature image of low-density subdivisions that is the basis of the depictions we have commonly used of them. Instead of accepting common myth and caricature, in this paper I began to turn my attention to the politics and governance of these multiplied, yet not necessarily fragmented, diverse, yet internally connected processes of urban society in the periphery. I pointed to the limits of a purely density-focused political discourse on and in suburbia. I presented, as an alternative, a more complex view of the kaleidoscopic fabric of today's suburbia. I cast my net globally but re-centred the narrative constantly with reference to Toronto, where dynamic post-sub-urbanization processes are under way and

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where new forms of political constellations are constantly being born. Much of the politics of post-suburbia continues to revolve around morphology and its associated perceptions of urban life. In this context, my proposed departure from a dichotomic view of urban density versus suburban sprawl reveals a much more intricate tapestry of morphology in the urban periphery. While the iconic images of peripherality, of the tower and the bungalow, remain central to this re-politicized margin of the urban region, they also are beginning to shift in both material reality and meaning. Ultimately, we can conclude that it is important to recognize that the towers in the park and the bungalows in the garden were in themselves signs of the scaling of very different political projects, one public, one private. Today both are placed next to each other at an even larger scale, the post-suburban landscape.

NOTE

1. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMMVnZWrdb0.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I want to thank Jenny Lugar for her research assistance for this article. Funding was provided through the Major Collaborative Research Initiative Global Suburbanisms: Governance, Land and Infrastructure in the 21st Century, sponsored by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

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