Suburbanism

Definition

Suburbanism names the claim — made against the entire tradition that treats the suburb as secondary — that the suburb is not a consequence of urbanization but a defining aspect of urbanism, and that "suburbanism, too, was an urban way of life" (Gans 1968, counter to Wirth's "urbanism as a way of life"). Cochrane, Colenutt & Field (2015) state the reversal precisely: the suburbs have traditionally been viewed "as secondary products of urbanization, as the necessary consequence of growth emanating from the centre" — but it is "increasingly necessary" to position "the suburbs themselves as more central to processes of urban development and to defining the lived urban experience." What happens, they ask, "when the role of the suburbs shifts, so that they are no longer interpreted as a response to urbanization, but, rather, understood to be a defining aspect of urbanism?" (pp. 567–568). Following Keil, "it almost appears that the suburban way of life has come to define the urbanism of the twenty-first century" (p. 569). The concept has a dual shape: a theory of urban form (dispersed, pluralized, polycentric — no longer the ring around a core) and a theory of lived experience (suburban life "rather more complex" than the escape-from-the-city caricature: in Milton Keynes, "everybody here came here, everyone who is here is a migrant" — "not the suburbanites of caricature").

The wiki's term of art is the article's own hyphenated coinage "sub/urban": the (sub)urban region on the edge of the London city region, whose forms the authors name "forms of suburban urbanism" — "not simply afterthoughts in a world of spectacular city centre and office development… of fundamental importance to any understanding of the dynamics of the contemporary city" (p. 576).

The Nordic welfare-state register (Røe 2015). The cluster's second source supplies suburbanism's publicly planned form and its inhabitant-scale interior. Røe's Skjettenbyen — "a small satellite town" of 1,650 cooperative dwellings built 1969–1973 under the Oslo 1950 master plan's satellite-town programme — is the counter-case to the private-agent American suburb: the Nordic suburbs were made by public authorities, as "a stage for the expression of planning ideology, master planning and experimentation with housing types and suburban forms" (Hall 2002, quoted p. 539). The register's lived finding is suburbanism's strongest interior evidence: the planned ideology (the tæt-lav discourse, user participation, "great expectations") was 'hidden' from most inhabitants, whose attachment is a mundane pragmatism — "the kind that develops over time when people build social capital" in micro-places — yet "the planning layout, architectural form and practice-structure relations" of the plan "may still frame people's practices and place specific suburban culture in ways that make it different from suburbia elsewhere" (pp. 538, 547). Suburbanism here is place-specific without being ideology-obedient — the answer to the question of what the suburb is when the plan's culture-project fails but its layout persists.

The density-myth register (Keil 2015). The cluster's third source gives suburbanism its anti-mythological program and its central interpretive formula. Keil's program: "I will disentangle the real-existing suburbia from some of its enduring myths. I will do this mostly through a discussion of densities" — for "densities in suburbs have always been mixed and diverse" (p. 579). The myth's cost is political: emphasis on "US-style individualized suburbanization" produced "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" (p. 579; see real-existing-suburbia, everyday-suburbanism). The interpretive formula is the cluster's central sign-reading: "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" (p. 593; see towers-in-the-park, home-ownership-democracy). And the theory's process-ground: the explosion's fragments "are linked (and governed) through the modalities of state action…, capital accumulation… and private authoritarian suburban ways of life" (p. 592; see suburban-governance, implosion-explosion-dialectic).

The character/covenant register (Dovey 2010). The cluster's fourth source gives suburbanism its manufactured-identity pole: the new-urbanist and fringe estates of Melbourne (Beacon Cove, Caroline Springs) as "market-led development incorporating a self-conscious creation of place identity" — a "global mix of Garden City, New Urbanist and gated-community models" producing "instant place identity" (Dovey 2010, p. 67). The register's findings: new suburbs are "more socially open than they appear" — the market "turned out to be more diverse than the anticipated uniformity" (p. 71); the covenant is the estate's constitution ("private planning and design rules… not negotiable or subject to democratic processes," p. 77) and its closure — "Covenants are designed to produce an instant – but also final – place identity; in doing so they close down processes of becoming" (p. 78); and the character law — "built-form controls can easily become social controls" (p. 78). Where Cochrane et al. relocate the suburb to the centre of urbanism and Røe documents the welfare-state plan, Dovey documents the private-agent estate as the suburb's second engine — and its caricature-form: "The character of place… cannot be reduced to its characteristics without producing caricature" (p. 78). See neighbourhood-character, post-suburbia, place-identity.

The design-practice register (Wentling 2017). The cluster's fifth and final source adds the production side of the concept: the suburb as a designable object whose failures are traceable to instruments rather than to the form. Wentling's audit of "the 'plain vanilla'" (4–8 units/acre production housing) confirms the cluster's diagnoses from inside the industry: separation of uses "carried to absurd conclusions" (the 15-minute loaf of bread, p. 59), houses "sold from the inside" once the standardized exterior offers no identity (p. 40), and the garage saga — rear→side→front — as "a prime reason for why our streetscapes look so bad!" (p. 89). But the register also supplies the reordering programme: prewar settlement patterns as the template ("not a trend, but a return to acknowledged community planning goals that have been practiced for centuries, and as recently as the 1950s," p. 58), with the six principles (mixed-use, mixed-density, pedestrian-oriented, transit-linked, quality open space, environmental responsibility) restated as a practitioner's instruments rather than a trend. The register's theoretical payload is the convergence thesis: "some redeveloped areas of cities are becoming less dense, while many new suburban communities are becoming more dense" — "'new urban-lite'" — "there seems to be a universal interest in moderate density living" (p. 251), completed by the ontological coda "By definition, a suburb cannot exist without a city that it grew from" (p. 253). Where Cochrane et al. relocate the suburb conceptually and Keil politically, Wentling makes the reversal actionable — the missing middle, the porch, the alley, the product line as the instruments of a suburb redefined as moderate density. See missing-middle-housing, new-urbanism, separation-of-uses, home-ownership-democracy, social-capital.

This page requires fuller treatment — created at the first ingest of the suburbanism batch; with the batch's five sources now ingested, the fuller treatment is consolidated in the synthesis suburbanism-and-the-center-periphery-reversal.

Key Thinkers

• cochrane-allan, colenutt-bob, field-martin — the wiki's founding suburbanism source: the central/peripheral reversal, the (sub)urban region, the politics of growth, the lived ambiguities of the new suburbia
• Per Gunnar Røe — the Nordic welfare-state register and the inhabitant-scale evidence: the tæt-lav planned suburb, mundane pragmatism against the architects' progressive counter-culture, micro-place social capital, interior design and car parking as practice-structure relations (2015)
• Kim Dovey — the character/covenant register: the new-urbanist estate as manufactured place identity, the covenant as the market's antidote to itself, and "the only real characters are slippery characters" (2010; with Ian Woodcock & Stephen Wood)
• Roger Keil — the cluster's anchor theorist: the density-myth disentangling, the tower/bungalow sign-formula, the density enigmas, the disempowered everyday suburbanisms, and the Global Suburbanisms MCRI he led (2015)
• James Wentling — the design-practice register: the practitioner's audit of production suburban housing and its reordering programme — democratic housing stock, the garage saga, product lines, the porch, and the "new urban-lite" convergence (2017; first ed. 1994)
• Herbert Gans (not yet paged — see log) — the concept's precursor: suburbanism as an urban way of life (1968), against Wirth's urbanism
• jacobs-jane — the dominant critic of suburban blandness whose "romanticized and elegiac" community urbanism the reversal is made against — and whose West Village home Sudjic reads as "closer to an English suburb than… the kind of metropolis she praises" (quoted p. 583)

Related Concepts

• post-suburbia — the "post-suburban moment": suburbia that no longer fits the classical model
• zwischenstadt — Sieverts's "in between city": spaces that cannot be characterized in the spatial language of concentric rings
• planetary-suburbanization — Keil's "generalized suburbanization": the continuous suburbanization of the world
• taet-lav — the Nordic dense-low design discourse: the planned suburb's architectural ideology
• satellite-town — the drabantby: the master-planned unit of Nordic public suburbanization
• welfare-state-housing — the political economy of the publicly made suburb
• elective-belonging — the taste-split inside the suburb: architect-residents' cultural identification vs the majority's accumulated belonging
• micro-places — the scale at which suburban attachment actually forms
• urbanism — the discipline suburbanism redefines from the edge inward
• urban-sprawl — the anti-suburban critique tradition (New Urbanists, Hayden) that suburbanism answers
• nimbyism — suburban growth politics' contested central term
• home-ownership-democracy — the political settlement that made the English suburb a security project
• polycentrality — the mega-region form of the (sub)urban region
• towers-in-the-park — the public project's density sign in Keil's paired formula
• real-existing-suburbia — the anti-mythological operation the cluster's third source names
• everyday-suburbanism — the disempowered progressive suburbanisms the myth concealed
• suburban-governance — the tri-modal governance the fragments are linked through
• implosion-explosion-dialectic — the Lefebvrian process-theory of the spread

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Living on the Edge: Building a Sub/Urban Region (Cochrane, Colenutt & Field 2015) — the founding source: the reversal thesis (pp. 567–568), the counter-tradition (Edel, Gans, Banham, Webber), the three challenge-sources (Dear's LA school, Simone's global South, Sieverts's Zwischenstadt), Keil's generalized suburbanization, the Greater South East evidence, and the conclusion's "forms of suburban urbanism"
• The Construction of a Suburb (Røe 2015) — the Nordic welfare-state register and the inhabitant-scale interior: the tæt-lav ideology and its regime-for-culture, the mundane-pragmatism finding, place-based social capital in micro-places, the practice-structure framing thesis (interior design and car parking), and the "ideologically saturated place" formulation (pp. 538–549)
• Becoming Places (Dovey 2010) — the character/covenant register: the four-suburb study (Camberwell, Fitzroy, Beacon Cove, Caroline Springs), the manufactured-diversity findings, the covenant/CID analysis (p. 77), the "closure of debate" as the new suburb's distinguishing feature (p. 78)
• Towers in the Park, Bungalows in the Garden (Keil 2015) — the density-myth register: the disentangling program (p. 579), the tower/bungalow sign-formula (pp. 579, 593), the density enigmas and their politics (pp. 584–590), the disempowered everyday suburbanisms (p. 579), and the fragments-governed-not-disjointed conclusion (p. 592)
• Designing a Place Called Home (Wentling 2017) — the design-practice register: the audit of "plain vanilla" production housing at 4–8 units/acre (pp. 5–7); the democratic-housing thesis and the detached-dwelling universality claim (p. 18); the postwar cost machinery (square-footage appraisal, zoning +24%, land flow-through, pp. 36–38); the six return-principles "not… a trend, but… a return to acknowledged community planning goals" (p. 58); the garage saga as streetscape diagnosis (pp. 88–89); sense of place as operational goal (pp. 77–78); and the convergence thesis ("new urban-lite," p. 251; "By definition, a suburb cannot exist without a city," p. 253)
• Dark Age Ahead (Jacobs 2004) — the concept's temporal extension and its terminal forecast: the suburb's community deficit as a visible diagnostic ("One can drive today for miles through American suburbs and never glimpse a human being on foot in a public space, a human being outside a car or truck… This is a visible sign that much of North America has become bereft of communities," p. 36); the densification thesis — sprawl as "an interim stage" whose intensification is made necessary by the retirement bulge and the bursting housing bubble (pp. 147–148; see densification); the owner-driven conversion programme with the Mortensen Vancouver evidence (duplex conversions, coach houses, densities "twice or more of those in postwar suburbs," pp. 216–217); the NIMBY fairness concession ("They have a point worth heeding: things can be made worse," p. 152); and the museum-piece forecast — "Holdouts will be suburbs frozen in time, to be regarded in future as interesting twentieth-century museum pieces, much as frozen Victorian small towns are interesting nineteenth-century museum pieces. After Victorian architecture fell out of fashion, it was popularly scorned as hideous… before its appeal was rediscovered. We may expect that frozen suburban sprawls will endure a similar fashion cycle" (p. 152). See densification, missing-middle-housing, performance-codes.
• Why Architecture Matters (Goldberger 2009) — the suburban value-system (private space, racial and economic segregation) generalised to city and suburb; Goldberger's Nutley and Passaic memories as evidence of place and its erosion (pp. 110–14); and suburbia's role in the diagnosing of the 'new urban paradigm' (pp. 169–71).
• source-notes/glendinning-muthesius-1994-tower-block

Open Questions

• Is suburbanism a kind of urbanism (a species of the urban), its condition of possibility (the way of life that has come to define 21st-century urbanism), or its other (the thing urbanism has always defined itself against)? The 2015 paper argues the first two but keeps quoting the third.
• What is the interior of suburbanism? The wiki's clusters are interior-centric; the 2015 source works at region, town and housing-market scale. Partially answered by Røe (2015): interior design and car parking are named as the practice-structure relations that frame suburban practices — the suburb's interior as the plan's leftover instrument (the handbook's refurnishing rules, the parking at the edges). Further answered by Keil (2015): the suburban interior's double bind — "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" (p. 586) — the suburban interior as vilified from both sides of the density debate. A full account of the suburban interior (the kitchen, the extension, the commute) still awaits the batch's remaining sources.
• Is the concept Anglo-American-centred? The paper's challenge-sources (Dear's LA, Simone's African cities, Sieverts's Germany) suggest suburbanism is planetary (planetary-suburbanization) — but its "home-owning democracy" engine (home-ownership-democracy) is distinctly English. Røe's Norwegian case partially answers: the cooperative welfare-state suburb is a third engine — neither home-owning democracy nor the global South's informal periphery. Keil's survey extends the answer: post-socialist "multi-headed deity" peripheries (Stanilov), China's "constellations of urbanization and suburbanization" (Wu), McGee's Global-South settlement typology, and Roy's postcolonial political society.
• Røe's mundane-pragmatism finding poses the cluster's sharpest open question: if planned ideology stays "hidden" while layout "frames," is the design-relevant variable the discourse (which fails) or the configuration (which persists)? What, then, should suburban design actually claim to do? Keil (2015) sharpens it procedurally: "It is time to change our view of the suburbs without telling the suburbanites how to change" (p. 589).