Post-Suburbia

Definition

Post-suburbia names the claim that a "post-suburban moment" has arrived: contemporary urban development no longer fits the classical suburb — the dormitory ring around a dominant core, a "way of life" defined by escape — and must be described in new terms. Cochrane, Colenutt & Field (2015) cite the formulation's source: "Some have even begun to talk of a post-suburban moment (see, for example, Phelps and Wu, 2011)" (p. 569), and their own evidence is post-suburban in substance: the outer suburbs of the South East "are increasingly being reinterpreted in public policy and political discourse as sources of economic dynamism, capable of generating economic growth, and as places whose purpose is to provide the housing for the labour force required to feed the insatiable demands of the wider economy of the London city region" (p. 568) — suburbs as growth drivers rather than growth consequences. The classical suburb's defining negatives fall away: the post-suburb is not a ring (the greenbelt "is no longer as tight a constraint as it once was"), not a dormitory (commuting is largely internal to the region; back office, logistics and retail locate in its centres), and not a haven of settled natives ("everybody here came here, everyone who is here is a migrant").

The concept's theoretical predecessors in the article's account are the Los Angeles school — Dear (2000, 2002): "it is now the supposed peripheries that drive urban change, rather than the older urban cores" — and Anderson's post-suburban Sydney. Cochrane's own chapter, "Post-suburbia in the context of urban containment: the case of the South East of England" (in Phelps & Wu 2011), is the English case within that literature: post-suburbia produced under containment rather than against it.

The Keil register (2015). The cluster's third source supplies the concept's definitional quotation and its global registration. De Meyer et al. (1999, p. 70), quoted by Keil: "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" (p. 582). The new dispersed city is "multi-focus, discontinuous, variably dense, and multi-centred… not oriented towards the traditional core" (p. 582), assimilating postindustrial service industries in the 1980s (De Meyer, quoted p. 582). The changes "have now been registered across the globe, albeit in various forms and to varying degrees": post-socialist peripheries growing "patterns more reminiscent of the West" (Stanilov), a "multi-headed deity" landscape (Hirt and Kovachev), McGee's Global-South settlement typology, Wangjing's "mature and diverse suburban landscape" (Fleischer), and China's "constellations of urbanization and suburbanization… heterogeneous in terms of population composition" (Wu) (pp. 582–583). Keil's own terminus is the article's conclusion: the post-suburban landscape is the scale at which "both are placed next to each other" — tower and bungalow, the public and private projects' signs (p. 593) — and "post-suburban metropolitanism" is the pathway through which the region must "find solutions to some of the most pressing social, economic and environmental issues we confront in urban regions today" (p. 579).

The Soja register (2000). The concept's Los Angeles-school ancestor now sits in the wiki directly. Soja's Exopolis chapter consolidates the "Outer City" literature — Peter Muller's The Outer City (1976) first demonstrated "that something very un-suburban was happening to American suburbia": "No longer just a commuting zone for the urban agglomeration, suburbanism had become its own way of life with its own spatial specificities" (p. 238). Postsuburbia emerges as "one of the catchall terms, with Orange County, the heartless center of postsuburban California (Kling et al., 1991), as its most representative case," alongside "the metropolis inverted," "the city turned inside-out," and "peripheral urbanization" (p. 238). What all these descriptions share "is the notion that the era of the modern metropolis has ended" — not that the metropolis has disappeared but that "its social, cultural, political, and economic dominance as a distinctive organizational form of human habitat is no longer what it once was" (pp. 238–239). Soja's own date for the Metropolis Era is 1920s–1970s: the Fordist dualized configuration of a monocentric core plus a sprawling suburban periphery. His historical correction (via Hise) reads the transition as dispersed nucleation from the start — "it is not housing and residential choice that drives this process so much as the decentralization of industrial production and employment" (quoted p. 241) — and his terminus is the role reversal: "the regional balance of industrialization… was reversed, with the majority of production and jobs located in the outer rings rather than in the inner cities" (p. 242), turning "mass regional suburbanization… into mass regional urbanization." See exopolis, edge-city.

This page requires fuller treatment — created at the first ingest of the suburbanism batch; deepened at the Keil and Soja ingests.

Key Thinkers

• cochrane-allan — the English post-suburbia case: post-suburbia under urban containment (2011); the (sub)urban region as the 2015 article's term for it
• colenutt-bob, field-martin — co-authors of the growth-region evidence for the post-suburban condition
• Roger Keil — the global registration and the metropolitan terminus: the De Meyer "polychromic and polyphonic" definition, the global post-suburban changes, post-suburban metropolitanism as problem-solving pathway, and the conclusion's adjacency formula (2015)
• Edward W. Soja — the Los Angeles-school consolidation: the Outer City literature, the Metropolis Era's end-thesis, the mass-regional-urbanization formulation, and the Hise historical correction (2000)
• Nicholas Phelps & Fulong Wu (not yet paged — see log) — International Perspectives on Suburbanization: A Post Suburban World? (2011), the source of the "post-suburban moment" phrase
• Michael Dear (not yet paged — see log) — the Los Angeles school: peripheries as drivers of urban change
• Katharine Anderson (not yet paged — see log) — post-suburban Sydney (After Sprawl, 2006)

Related Concepts

• suburbanism — the parent claim: suburbs as defining urbanism
• zwischenstadt — the German sibling concept: the "in between city" beyond concentric-ring description
• planetary-suburbanization — the process-scale version: generalized suburbanization of the world
• polycentrality — the form of the post-suburban region: overlapping centres, not a ring
• urban-sprawl — the moralizing term post-suburbia refuses ("the dominant critique remained the same")
• urbanism — the discipline post-suburbia forces to rethink its object

Source Support

• Becoming Places (Dovey 2010) — the estate-scale register: the covenant-governed estate as post-suburbia's building block — Common Interest Developments where "residents become members of a club rather than citizens of a society" (Webster quoted, p. 77), "the paradox of a market-led antidote to free-market economics," and the state's "Faustian bargain" of privatized infrastructure at the price of paralyzed change (p. 77); the peak-oil/climate question ("To what degree is the state obliged to maintain unsustainable urban areas under conditions of peak oil and climate change?", p. 78); and the inner-city variant — Beacon Cove as the post-suburban form inside the metropolis, "inward-looking, backward-looking and semi-privatized" (p. 58). See neighbourhood-character, suburbanism, place-identity.

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Living on the Edge: Building a Sub/Urban Region (Cochrane, Colenutt & Field 2015) — the "post-suburban moment" citation (p. 569); the new suburbia as source of economic dynamism and labour-force housing; the sustainable urban extensions; the "North Londonshire" marketing; the post-metropolitan region conclusion
• Towers in the Park, Bungalows in the Garden (Keil 2015) — the global register: the De Meyer polychromic/polyphonic definition (p. 582); the post-socialist, Global-South and Chinese registrations (pp. 582–583); post-suburban metropolitanism (p. 579); the conclusion's post-suburban landscape (p. 593)
• Designing a Place Called Home (Wentling 2017) — the practitioner's pre-figuration of the post-suburban blur: the convergence thesis — "some redeveloped areas of cities are becoming less dense, while many new suburban communities are becoming more dense… What is interesting is how similar housing in cities and suburbs is becoming" (p. 251); the market researchers' coinage Wentling reports — "'new urban-lite,' which attempts to provide some of the diversity and vitality found in urban areas while retaining some of the privacy and open space that suburban communities typically offer" (p. 251); "there seems to be a universal interest in moderate density living" (p. 251); and the ontological coda — "By definition, a suburb cannot exist without a city that it grew from" (p. 253). Where Keil's post-suburbia is the landscape where public and private projects scale up together, Wentling supplies the housing-market version: the same walk-up townhouse fabric in Philadelphia's remnant parcels and Hampton VA's suburbs (p. 250). See post-suburban-densification, missing-middle-housing, suburbanism.
• Postmetropolis (Soja 2000) — the founding Los Angeles register: Muller's Outer City and the "postsuburbia" catchall (pp. 238–239); the end of the Metropolis Era thesis (pp. 238–242); Hise's dispersed-nucleation correction (p. 241); "mass regional urbanization" and the ubiquity claim — "In the Era of the Postmetropolis, it becomes increasingly difficult to 'escape from the city,' for the urban condition and urbanism as a way of life are becoming virtually ubiquitous" (p. 242); the Orange County "postsuburban" cityscape (p. 141) and its scamscape crisis (pp. 343–345).

Open Questions

• Is post-suburbia a period (a moment after the suburban), a type (a distinct form of settlement), or a myth (the same suburb with new marketing — "North Londonshire")? The 2015 paper wavers between description and critique.
• How does post-suburbia relate to containment? Cochrane's own case is post-suburbia produced by the greenbelt (growth pushed beyond it) — does containment create the post-suburban condition rather than preventing it?
• The 2015 paper's post-suburbia is a policy-made region ("made up… through the practices of the (public and private sector) policy professionals in their plans," p. 576). Is the post-suburban moment therefore also a governing moment — and what would it mean to design for it?