Planetary Suburbanization

Definition

Planetary suburbanization names Keil's claim that suburbanization is no longer a phase or edge-condition of urbanization but its general form: "we are seeing 'generalized suburbanization', that is the 'continuous suburbanization of our world' in the context of planetary urbanisation (Keil, 2013, p. 9). Following Keil, it almost appears that the suburban way of life has come to define the urbanism of the twenty-first century" (Cochrane, Colenutt & Field 2015, p. 569). The concept inverts the classical model twice over: not only has the periphery stopped being secondary (it "drive[s] urban change"), but the "urban" and the "suburban" can no longer be scaled against each other at all — the suburbanization of the planet means there is no outside from which the suburb could be measured. Its corollary in the 2015 article is regional: the mega-city region incorporating "around half of England" is "effectively a London City Region" whose (sub)urban region is being "made and unmade (assembled and disassembled)" by economic and political practice rather than by any pre-existing scalar hierarchy (p. 570).

The concept pairs with the wiki's urban-sprawl as its descriptive counterpart: sprawl is the normative-architectural name (against the New Urbanists' "decline of the American dream"); planetary suburbanization is the process-theoretical name (Keil's suburban revolution). Both describe the same dispersal; only the former judges it.

The Keil register (2015). The concept's originator's own article now supplies the process's Lefebvrian ground and its global evidence. The process-formula is Lefebvre's: "For half a century now, urban society has been seen as having spread in an implosion-explosion dialectic" — "the tremendous concentration… of urban reality and the immense explosion, the projection of numerous, disjunct fragments (peripheries, suburbs, vacation homes, satellite towns) into space" (p. 592; see implosion-explosion-dialectic). Lefebvre 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" (quoted p. 592), and Quinby's "spatiotemporal ecology of the postmetropolis… displacing the logic of the traditional city within a suburban-like order of horizontality and dispersal" echoes it (pp. 591–592). The concept's evidentiary base is now global in the wiki's holdings: post-socialist density-gradient flattening and "multi-headed deity" landscapes (Stanilov; Hirt and Kovachev), McGee's Global-South typology ("high-rise apartments, town houses, condominiums, family homes, and illegal settlements… now part of the emerging fabric of an urbanized world," quoted pp. 582–583), India (Gururani and Kose), Africa (Bloch, Mabin), and China's "constellations of urbanization and suburbanization" (Wu) — "post-suburban changes have now been registered across the globe, albeit in various forms and to varying degrees" (p. 582). The concept's settlement typology widens accordingly — McGee: "suburbs are best defined as a category of settlement that is one of the many types of the built environment of housing settlement types, 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" (pp. 582–583).

This page requires fuller treatment — created at the first ingest of the suburbanism batch; deepened at the Keil ingest, whose article is the concept's originator's own text in the wiki's holdings.

Key Thinkers

• Roger Keil — the concept's originator: "Welcome to the suburban revolution," in Suburban Constellations (2013), pp. 8–16; his Towers in the Park article (2015) now supplies the process's Lefebvrian ground and global evidence in the wiki
• cochrane-allan, colenutt-bob, field-martin — the concept's English evidence: the Greater South East as a (sub)urban region of planetary suburbanization
• Henri Lefebvre — the dialectic's author: the implosion-explosion formula and the explosion of the historic city into peripheries (via Keil 2015)

Related Concepts

• suburbanism — the lived way of life that, on Keil's claim, has come to define 21st-century urbanism
• post-suburbia — the moment-claim (Phelps & Wu) beside the process-claim (Keil)
• urbanism — the planetary condition whose definition suburbanization now carries
• urban-sprawl — the normative-architectural name for the same process
• neoliberal-metropolis — the political economy of the process: suburbs as "the drivers or at least the necessary underpinning of neoliberal urban growth"
• space-of-flows — the network form across which generalized suburbanization operates

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Living on the Edge: Building a Sub/Urban Region (Cochrane, Colenutt & Field 2015) — the concept introduced via Keil 2013 (p. 9): "generalized suburbanization… the 'continuous suburbanization of our world' in the context of planetary urbanisation"; "Following Keil, it almost appears that the suburban way of life has come to define the urbanism of the twenty-first century" (p. 569)
• Towers in the Park, Bungalows in the Garden (Keil 2015) — the originator's own register: the Lefebvrian implosion-explosion ground (p. 592); the end of city-centred urbanism (p. 592); the global registrations — post-socialist, Global South, India, Africa, China (pp. 582–583); McGee's settlement typology (pp. 582–583)
• Postmetropolis (Soja 2000) — the concept's deep ancestor: the Mumford/Jacobs epigraph thesis that the book "closes with a world that has become… very much like a city, where urban ways of life extend to every corner of the globe" (p. 3); the planetary urbanization claim — "the entire world is rapidly becoming urbanized, from Antarctica to the Amazon, as the spatial reach of city-based cultures, societies, and economies expands into every region on the planet" (p. 152); "By the time this book is published, the majority of the world's population, for the first time in history, will be living in cities" (n. 2, p. 3); and the geohistorical root — Jacobs's national economy defined as "the sum of a nation's city economies and the past and current secondary effects of city economies upon the economies of towns, villages, countrysides and wildernesses" (quoted p. 14).
• source-notes/roe-2015-construction-of-a-suburb

Open Questions

• Keil's "suburban revolution" phrase and the 2015 article's "suburban way of life… define[s] the urbanism of the twenty-first century" — is planetary suburbanization a description, a prophecy, or a programme? What would it mean for design disciplines to treat it as the condition of all future practice?
• If suburbanization is planetary, is there still an urban for urbanism to be the theory of — or does the discipline's object dissolve into the between-city (zwischenstadt)?
• The 2015 article's planetary references are global-South (Simone) and LA-school (Dear) as well as Keil — but its evidence is English. What would a planetary suburbanization of the interior look like: are the mega-region's kitchens, commutes and extensions part of the same world-process?