Everyday Suburbanism
Everyday Suburbanism
Definition
Everyday suburbanism names the forms of quotidian suburban life that the dominant myth disempowers: "more progressive, collective consumption-oriented and social justice-seeking forms of everyday suburbanism and the politics that result from it" (Keil 2015, p. 579). The concept's burden is double-recovering: against the mythology of the self-interested, privatized, passive suburbanite — the 'suburbanites-are-passive' assumption — it asserts that "proper social movements exist in exurbia, but that they function in a hyper multiscalar fashion" (Schafran et al., quoted p. 590), and that the political potential of the periphery "begins to reveal a different set of political options from the one to which it has historically been tied" (p. 591).
The term's direct source in the article is Drummond and Labbé's "everyday suburbanism as a global way of life" (2013), invoked for 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" (p. 591). Its positive program is the disempowered inheritance the myth obscured: "more progressive, labour and collective consumption-oriented and social justice-seeking forms of everyday suburbanism and the politics that result from it" (p. 579). Its empirical face includes Fleischer's Beijing: "middle-class homeowners are increasingly aware of and willing to claim their growing power and agency in shaping the suburban space," with everyday life "a conduit and terrain of social differentiation" (quoted p. 591).
This page requires fuller treatment — created at the Keil ingest; the concept's kinship with everyday-life (Heller, Lefebvre, de Certeau) and with Røe's "mundane pragmatism" awaits fuller treatment.
Key Thinkers
- Roger Keil — the concept's advocate: the disempowered forms named, the politics their result claimed (2015)
- Drummond & Labbé (not yet paged — see log) — "We're a long way from Levittown, Dorothy: everyday suburbanism as a global way of life" (2013, in Keil ed., Suburban Constellations)
- Henri Lefebvre — the everyday-theory backdrop: the everyday's role as "conduit and terrain of social differentiation" (via Fleischer's Beijing) and the explosion of the historic city into peripheries
- Ananya Roy (not yet paged — see log) — "the politics of the suburban periphery is the politics of political society" (2015, quoted p. 590)
Related Concepts
- real-existing-suburbia — the operation the concept's forms belong to: the disempowered real over the mythical
- everyday-life — the parent philosophical concept; the suburban register of the quotidian
- suburbanism — the cluster the concept inhabits: suburbanism as way of life
- towers-in-the-park — the collective-consumption form the everyday politics surrounds
- suburban-governance — the governance modalities that "private authoritarian suburban ways of life" name against
- social-capital — the inhabitant-scale mechanism of suburban attachment (Røe's sibling register)
Source Support
Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:
- Towers in the Park, Bungalows in the Garden (Keil 2015) — the concept's founding source: the disempowered forms named (p. 579); Drummond & Labbé's "everyday suburbanism as a global way of life" (pp. 591–592); Fleischer's Beijing everyday-life differentiation and homeowner agency (p. 591); Roy's political society (p. 590)
Source Support linking rule: All entries in this section must be wikilinks to source note pages in wiki/source-notes/ using the source-notes/ path prefix. Never link to raw files — raw files are not wiki pages.
Open Questions
- The article names the disempowered forms ("labour and collective consumption-oriented and social justice-seeking") but gives no cases — what are the historical instances of progressive, collective-consumption suburbanism, and where would this wiki look for them?
- Keil's everyday suburbanism and Røe's mundane pragmatism are adjacent but distinct: the first a political potential to be recovered, the second a verdict on design ideology. Do they name the same inhabitant-scale reality or two different things (politics vs. pragmatism)?
- If the periphery "begins to reveal a different set of political options from the one to which it has historically been tied" (p. 591), what is the compositional role of the suburban interior (the extension, the garage, the commute) in that politics?
