Suburban Governance

Definition

Suburban governance names the modalities and mechanisms through which the suburb — and the urban region it now dominates — is governed: "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, quoted in Keil 2015, p. 592). The ingested article states the conclusion's version: the fragments of urban expansion 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" (p. 592). The concept's novelty is its tri-modal structure — governance not only by public authority but by capital and by the "private authoritarian" way of life itself — which makes suburban governance more than municipal government: the suburb is governed by policy, by accumulation, and by private rule at once.

The article's concrete apparatus: path-dependent institutional arrangements ("Much of the politics of the new periphery is shaped by path-dependent institutional arrangements and existing territorial governance processes," p. 590); the municipality as "decentralized conduit" — "'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" (p. 591); the comparative national variants (Canada's "far higher levels of municipal integration and developed regional government political infrastructures" than the US, Fiedler and Addie, quoted p. 592); and the postcolonial extension — Roy's "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" (quoted p. 590).

This page requires fuller treatment — created at the Keil ingest; the Ekers/Hamel/Keil modalities framework (Regional Studies 2012) and Hamel & Keil's Suburban Governance: A Global View (2015) await their own treatment (see log).

Key Thinkers

• Roger Keil — the concept's co-author (with Ekers and Hamel) and the ingested paper's holder: the three modalities, the path-dependence claim, the political-society formulation (2012, 2015)
• Michael Ekers & Pierre Hamel (not yet paged — see log) — co-authors of "Governing Suburbia: Modalities and Mechanisms of Suburban Governance" (Regional Studies 46.3, 2012)
• Jean-Paul Addie (not yet paged — see log) — "Real existing regionalism: The region between talk, territory and technology" (Addie & Keil 2015); municipalities as "the decentralized conduits of (bio)regional integration"
• Ananya Roy (not yet paged — see log) — the postcolonial suburb's governance: political society, formality/informality renegotiations (2015)

Related Concepts

• suburbanism — the parent cluster: governance as the periphery's central process
• real-existing-suburbia — the governance reality behind the myth
• neoliberal-metropolis — the political economy the modalities operate within
• governmentality — the Foucauldian ancestor of the modalities framing
• territory — the territorial-governance process the politics is shaped by
• user-participation — the Nordic governance apparatus's participatory generation (Røe's case)

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 three modalities (pp. 592); the Tieboutian-scale jump (p. 590); path-dependence and territorial governance (p. 590); the greenbelt/places-to-grow conduits (p. 591)
• Designing a Place Called Home (Wentling 2017) — the municipal and private instruments documented from the regulated side: the zoning game ("planning and zoning board members often give in to pressure from citizen groups… protecting their own property values"; controls "acknowledged to have driven up the cost of new homes by as much as 24%", p. 37); the police-power scope question ("it is questionable whether they represent reasonable uses of the municipalities' 'police power,'" p. 38); the developer-exactions regime (impact fees, inclusionary zoning's price inversion, pp. 38); and the private-government layer — homeowner associations owning and maintaining private streets and open space ("Private streets are owned and maintained by homeowner associations… the single-family buyer resistance to homeowner associations," p. 66; fence/accessory-structure control through HOAs and deed restrictions, pp. 114–117), with the commons counter-case — New England greens maintained "without homeowner associations or other legal entities" (p. 73). Where Keil names the tri-modalities and Cochrane et al. the planning regime, Wentling shows their everyday instruments at the lot line (see separation-of-uses, nimbyism, missing-middle-housing).

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

• What does "private authoritarian suburban ways of life" (p. 592) name precisely — HOA-style private government, the household's internal authority, or the homeowner's veto? The article uses it as a governance modality without defining its institutions.
• Keil deliberately does not "look specifically at suburban governance or regional governance… which I have recently done elsewhere" (Hamel and Keil 2015) — the article thus poses governance as background. What would the article's density-politics argument add to the governance framework if foregrounded?
• If "once the Tieboutian scale has been jumped all manner of spatial reorientations in the region and beyond are possible" (p. 590), what determines which reorientations actually occur — and what is the design-disciplinary equivalent of a jumped scale?