Living on the Edge: Building a Sub/Urban Region

Author: Allan Cochrane, Bob Colenutt & Martin Field Year: 2015 Source type: article (journal) Raw file: raw/articles/cochrane-colenutt-field-2015-living-on-the-edge.md

Publication: Built Environment, Vol. 41, No. 4 (2015), pp. 567–578, special issue "Suburban Spaces, Suburban Cultures" (Alexandrine Press; ISSN 0263-7960). Allan Cochrane: The Open University; Bob Colenutt and Martin Field: the University of Northampton. Research drawn from ESRC project Tensions and future prospects for sustainable housing growth. A case study of Northamptonshire and Milton Keynes (ES/1038632/1).

Summary

The paper argues that the suburbs must be repositioned as central — not peripheral or secondary — to contemporary urbanism, and demonstrates the argument with evidence from research on the edge of the London city region (the Greater South East). Tracing the area's repositioning in policy as a source of economic dynamism and labour-force housing, the authors chart the "new suburbia's" uncertainties and ambiguities (regional identity rejected by residents; the new suburbs imagined through a rural lens; nimbyism as contested label), and the way these spaces have been incorporated into the politics of growth through the Sustainable Communities Plan, housing targets, and a post-crash shift from sustainability to viability. The conclusion demands recognition of "forms of suburban urbanism": the suburbs are "of fundamental importance to any understanding of the dynamics of the contemporary city."

Key Claims

The central reversal: the suburbs should no longer be interpreted "as a response to urbanization, but, rather, understood to be a defining aspect of urbanism" (pp. 567–568). The paper's project is to rethink the suburbs' urban significance, not to defend them as escape.
Two traditional definitions under challenge: suburbs as (a) the almost inevitable ring of development around a central city, and (b) the Anglo-American "way of life" defined by escape from urban pressures — both assumptions now under growing challenge as urban form becomes "more dispersed and pluralized" (p. 567).
The suburbs as "bland non-places" — "defined by what they are not as much as by what they are" — is the traditional caricature the paper works against (Gertrude Stein's Oakland, "there is no there there"; Jane Jacobs's critique of suburban blandness), while the Chicago School's concentric-ring imagery "has retained a remarkable (if often unacknowledged) intellectual dominance" (p. 568).
A counter-tradition existed all along: Edel et al. (1984) on the working class actively claiming Boston's suburban spaces; Gans (1967, 1968) — "counter to Wirth's (1964) identification of urbanism as a way of life, to argue that suburbanism, too, was an urban way of life"; Banham (1971) on Southern California; Webber (1964) on an automobile-based "non-place urban realm" that "directly challenged those for whom place… was a defining characteristic of the urban" (p. 568).
The dominant critique remained anti-suburban: the US New Urbanists blamed "the rise of what they called the 'suburban nation' for the 'decline of the American dream'" (Duany et al., 2000), while Hayden's "more sophisticated critique focused on the political economy of the suburbs and the role of the development industry," her Field Guide to Sprawl illustrating "clustered world," "privatopia," "boomburg" and "zoomburg" (p. 568).
Three contemporary challenges to the old frame: the Los Angeles school (Dear, 2000, 2002) — "it is now the supposed peripheries that drive urban change, rather than the older urban cores"; the global South (Simone, 2004) — new urban developments that "owe little to the older urban cores"; and Sieverts's Zwischenstadt — "those spaces of the city that cannot easily be characterized in the spatial language of concentric rings" (p. 569).
Planetary suburbanization: "Some have even begun to talk of a post-suburban moment (see, for example, Phelps and Wu, 2011), while others have suggested that 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" (p. 569).
Against romantic urbanism: these new approaches are "not merely theoretical constructs, but attempts to capture the urban experience as it is lived in practice, recognizing what is," against "romanticized and elegiac notions of the 'urban' as a place of community and easy diversity (in the hands of authors such as Young and Wilmott, 1957, as well as Jacobs, 1961)" (p. 569).
The Greater South East as polycentric mega-region: Hall and Pain (2006) characterize it as "a global 'polycentric metropolis' or 'polycentric mega-region'"; the greenbelt "is no longer as tight a constraint as it once was"; and "despite its vast geographical spread (incorporating around half of England), this is effectively a London City Region" (p. 570).
Regions as assemblages, not scalars: the smaller regions within the mega-region "are not 'sub-regions' because they cannot simply be positioned within some sort of pre-existing scalar hierarchy but are part of a more complex system of socio-spatial relations, in which regions are being made and unmade (assembled and disassembled) to reflect changing sets of social and economic relations" (Allen and Cochrane, 2007, 2010) (p. 570). The studied area is "a (sub)urban region within the geographically larger London City Region."
Residents reject the regional frame: in the project's final workshops, participants "forcibly reminded" the researchers that "their territorial identity was local and they tended to reject any wider framing, as well as any description of their areas as suburban" — "although in shopping, leisure and consumption practice, as well as in travel to work they were embedded in wider (regional) networks" (p. 571).
Not the suburbanites of caricature: Milton Keynes — identified by Barker (2009) as "a paradigm of contemporary British suburbia" — now has a black-African population share significantly above the English average and close to 30% minority-ethnic school pupils; as one policy actor put it, "everybody here came here, everyone who is here is a migrant" (p. 571).
The archipelago vision: the smaller towns (Kettering, Wellingborough, Rushden, Daventry) sustain separate identities through town-centre development and the "market town legacy" — "a vision of (sub)urban development as an archipelago of settlements rather than a continuous urban space, but in many respects it remains a distinctive urban vision" (p. 571).
The rural lens: "it is hard to avoid the extent to which the new suburban is imagined through a rural lens" (Murdoch and Marsden, 1994): residents defend places in the language of village life even as the development form "echoes the suburban model" (pp. 571–572).
Nimbyism as professional frame — and its reversal: planners name "nimbyism" as "the main stumbling block to housing growth," but community actors turn the accusation around: "It's my back yard. You can't be anything but a nimby. If it's not your back yard, it won't affect you" (p. 572). It is often "the new suburbanites who are most active in engaging with the development process — having bought into an area, they have a commitment to maintaining their own position although they may also recognize the contradiction."
Growth politics are place-specific: fierce resistance in prosperous quasi-rural South Northamptonshire (2005) versus growth ambitions in Daventry and Corby, whose marketing "explicitly identified the town and its new developments in suburban terms as 'North Londonshire', promising commuters a different lifestyle in a green and pleasant land on the edge of the region" (pp. 572–573).
The Sustainable Communities Plan as growth machine: Labour's targets and Growth Areas promised "sustainable communities… through a series of carefully targeted nudges to the housing market, working with developers and house-builders" — "in principle, at least, it was intended to undermine the arguments of the 'nimbies' at the same time as delivering significant amounts of new housing" (p. 573).
The market-driven utopia: "the new suburbs were re-imagined as providing the basis of a market-driven utopia, in which major house-builders would be freed up to deliver the necessary supply of housing" — "A neoliberal belief in the power of the market (and house-builders in particular) was combined with active State support through planning and infrastructural development… these suburbs and this suburban region were expected to become the drivers or at least the necessary underpinning of neoliberal urban growth. But this was a deeply flawed utopia" (pp. 573–574).
Housing-led, not infrastructure-led: the persistent complaint was that "growth was 'housing-led' not 'infrastructure-led'" — estates without schools, roads, community facilities or local employment; delivery ran through "sustainable urban extensions" that incrementally drew on existing infrastructure, building on suburban models rather than new towns or garden cities (p. 574).
Crisis and viability: the 2007/08 crash ("Housing was the first industry into the recession," as one developer put it) and the new National Planning Policy Framework (2012) shifted the emphasis "from notions of sustainability to those of viability" — "an even stronger market-led vision, in which what ultimately matters is the extent to which house-builders deem development to be viable for them" (p. 575). Developers' costs logic: "the only place they can be borne is from the value of the land. House builders do not make the market."
The new model ends as the old model: with targets unmet and infrastructure slow to arrive, "the expectation is that infrastructural provision will follow later as suburban communities settle… The new model has ended up looking a lot like the old model in which housing has been built on the edges of other settlements, waiting for other forms of infrastructure to arrive" (pp. 575–576).
The 2013 City Deal for the South East Midlands LEP (focused on Milton Keynes) was "driven by targets for new housing" — "it implicitly recognized the suburban status of the area – not an economic node in its own right, but having a catalytic role for the wider region"; the local decision not to proceed was taken because existing targets were already a challenge, not because the model was wrong (p. 574).
The conclusion — post-metropolitan region: the region's development "can only be understood on the basis of recognition of its position within the wider post-metropolitan region"; a new "suburban" region is being "made up not just through the everyday lives of those resident within it, but also through the practices of the (public and private sector) policy professionals in their plans, some of which have been realized in built form" (p. 576).
Suburban urbanism: "it is increasingly necessary to move beyond the notion of the urban having some sort of defined core… The experience… also emphasizes the need to think more actively and creatively about the nature and possibilities of forms of suburban urbanism. These spaces are not simply afterthoughts in a world of spectacular city centre and office development familiar from the skyline of global and wannabe global cities. They are of fundamental importance" (p. 576).

Connections

Concepts:

suburbanism — the paper's central concept: suburbanism as an urban way of life and the suburbs as defining urbanism (Gans via Cochrane et al.)
post-suburbia — the "post-suburban moment" (Phelps & Wu) the paper cites and its own "new suburbia" evidence
zwischenstadt — Sieverts's "in between city," one of the paper's three challenge-sources to the old frame
planetary-suburbanization — Keil's "generalized suburbanization"/"continuous suburbanization of our world"
nimbyism — the planning-professional frame and its reversal by community actors
home-ownership-democracy — the post-1945 settlement that ties suburb, security and property values to English political identity (Cameron 2015)
urbanism — the discipline the paper redefines: suburbs as defining aspect, "forms of suburban urbanism"
urban-sprawl — the "dominant critique" (New Urbanists, Hayden) the paper positions itself against
housing — the growth machine: targets, Sustainable Communities Plan, housing-led vs infrastructure-led, viability
polycentrality — the "polycentric mega-region" (Hall & Pain); polycentricity as overlapping regions rather than scalar sub-regions
neoliberal-metropolis — the market-driven utopia: neoliberal belief in house-builders plus active State support
non-places — the suburbs as "bland non-places" in the traditional caricature; Webber's "non-place urban realm" as the concept's pre-history
home — home ownership as the route to security ("bricks and mortar" invulnerability; Cameron's "keys in their hand")
sustainability — the paper's audit of "sustainable communities" discourse and its viability-era eclipse
gentrification — cited as the dominant inner-city research focus the suburbs were eclipsed by

Authors:

cochrane-allan, colenutt-bob, field-martin — the authors (ESRC growth-region research programme)
jacobs-jane — cited as the dominant critic of suburban blandness and the romantic community urbanism the paper works against
banham-reyner — cited (Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies) as a counter-tradition of low-density urbanism

Debates: none in the wiki yet touch the suburb/centre question directly — the new suburbanism cluster begins here.

Related source notes:

source-notes/luna-2018-metropolitan-hybrids — Luna's polycentrality/reconcentration: the design-disciplinary counterpart to the paper's polycentric mega-region
source-notes/wise-2006-home-territory-identity — Wise's home as territorialization beside the paper's political-economic home ownership
source-notes/madigan-munro-2006-house-beautiful — domestic consumption and the renegotiation of identity in the home
source-notes/wassmer-2002-big-box-retail-decentralization — the American sprawl-and-fiscal-structure counterpart

Direct Quotes

"Traditionally the suburbs have been viewed as secondary products of urbanization, as the necessary consequence of growth emanating from the centre, which has required housing on the outskirts and commuting back in for employment and high-end consumption. But it is increasingly necessary to rethink this approach and to consider the implications of positioning the suburbs themselves as more central to processes of urban development and to defining the lived urban experience." (p. 567, abstract)

"It concludes by emphasizing the need to acknowledge the importance of the suburbs as a central, rather than peripheral or secondary, aspect of contemporary urbanism." (p. 567)

"What happens 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)

"In this context, the suburbs have often been understood as bland non-places, defined by what they are not as much as by what they are, with the dynamism of urban life somehow bleached out of them as reflected, for example, in Gertrude Stein's famous, or notorious, evocation of Oakland, California – 'there is no there there'." (p. 568)

"For Gans (1968) the point was already, counter to Wirth's (1964) identification of urbanism as a way of life, to argue that suburbanism, too, was an urban way of life." (p. 568)

"…a third draws attention to the Zwischenstadt (or 'in between city'), those spaces of the city that cannot easily be characterized in the spatial language of concentric rings (Sieverts, 2003). Some have even begun to talk of a post-suburban moment (see, for example, Phelps and Wu, 2011), while others have suggested that 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." (p. 569)

"The emergence of what we have identified as a suburban (more than sub-) region on the edge of London and the South East which is itself a particular sort of mega (city) region." (p. 569)

"'The dream of a property owning democracy is alive and we will help you fulfil it' he said (Maclellan and Osborn, 2015). 'Part of having a good life,' he said, 'is having a home of your own, it's not about assets and appreciating values it is about someone standing here with the keys in their hand thinking this place is mine'." (p. 569, quoting David Cameron, 2015)

"Hall and his colleagues highlighted the ways in which the planning system and the greenbelt in particular were used to limit housing development outside areas identified as urban, thus protecting the property values, amenities and lifestyles of those who were already privileged." (p. 570)

"As Gordon et al. (2004, p. 30) argue, 'the effective London economy extends well beyond the borders of Greater London, encompassing most of South Eastern England and perhaps some areas beyond, in what is for many purposes a single labour market'." (p. 570)

"In other words, despite its vast geographical spread (incorporating around half of England), this is effectively a London City Region." (p. 570)

"…they cannot simply be positioned within some sort of pre-existing scalar hierarchy but are part of a more complex system of socio-spatial relations, in which regions are being made and unmade (assembled and disassembled) to reflect changing sets of social and economic relations." (p. 570)

"…we were forcibly reminded by participants from community-based organizations, professional practice and local government that their territorial identity was local and they tended to reject any wider framing, as well as any description of their areas as suburban: although in shopping, leisure and consumption practice, as well as in travel to work they were embedded in wider (regional) networks." (p. 571)

"'The distinctive quality of MK is growth – it is a growing town capable of attracting a wide range of services and wishing to adopt the latest things very rapidly'." (p. 571)

"'everybody here came here, everyone who is here is a migrant'." (p. 571)

"This is a vision of (sub)urban development as an archipelago of settlements rather than a continuous urban space, but in many respects it remains a distinctive urban vision." (p. 571)

"They highlight what they call 'nimbyism', that is an approach that resists any development with the slogan 'not in my backyard'." (p. 572)

"Until you incentivize the local residents, there'll always be … nimbies, it's [the] main stumbling block to housing growth, nimbyism, make no mistake about that… The first thing they see on paper is this developer coming in trying to impose his will on us, make money, this, that you know, 'there is more traffic on the road'." (p. 572, planning professional)

"There are local views and differences. But God forbid anyone who wants to build on a field near me, it might affect my view, or I may have to wait longer at a traffic light. That is the Nimby factor." (p. 572, housing development company employee)

"It's my back yard. You can't be anything but a nimby. If it's not your back yard, it won't affect you." (p. 572, community actor)

"'Is it fair that a quango should dump 2,000 houses and ruin a village environment? Everybody knows everybody in villages'." (p. 572, local councillor)

"…for a time, Corby's marketing campaigns explicitly identified the town and its new developments in suburban terms as 'North Londonshire', promising commuters a different lifestyle in a green and pleasant land on the edge of the region." (p. 573)

"The sustainable communities plan promised to deliver economic, social and environmental sustainability through a series of carefully targeted nudges to the housing market, working with developers and house-builders." (p. 573)

"In this vision, the new suburbs were re-imagined as providing the basis of a market-driven utopia, in which major house-builders would be freed up to deliver the necessary supply of housing…" (p. 573)

"A neoliberal belief in the power of the market (and house-builders in particular) was combined with active State support through planning and infrastructural development. Rather than being a consequence of growth elsewhere, these suburbs and this suburban region were expected to become the drivers or at least the necessary underpinning of neoliberal urban growth… But this was a deeply flawed utopia, whose inconsistencies are already becoming all too apparent as spatial and social inequality is reproduced, within and beyond the region." (p. 574)

"One of the main criticisms of the policy regime associated with the sustainable communities plan (emerging from communities and local authorities alike) was that growth was 'housing-led' not 'infrastructure-led'." (p. 574)

"'Housing was the first industry into the recession back of 2007, the market dropped off a cliff'." (p. 574, developer)

"…it implicitly recognized the suburban status of the area – not an economic node in its own right, but having a catalytic role for the wider region." (p. 574)

"Despite some allusion to wider notions of viability (social and community as well as financial), in practice this implies an even stronger market-led vision, in which what ultimately matters is the extent to which house-builders deem development to be viable for them." (p. 575)

"Value and viability drive everything but the planners don't look at this… It is not the role of the house building industry to undertake experiments but for statutory authorities. We build homes." (p. 575, house-builder)

"Anything like that is a cost on development and the only place they can be borne is from the value of the land. House builders do not make the market. If land values fall back, so that the land value does not add up to meet the costs required, development will not happen." (p. 575, house-builder)

"In practice, the expectation is that infrastructural provision will follow later as suburban communities settle… The new model has ended up looking a lot like the old model in which housing has been built on the edges of other settlements, waiting for other forms of infrastructure to arrive." (pp. 575–576)

"In other words, its development can only be understood on the basis of recognition of its position within the wider post-metropolitan region." (p. 576)

"But this also means that a new 'suburban' region is being identified – the Greater South East – and being made up not just through the everyday lives of those resident within it, but also through the practices of the (public and private sector) policy professionals in their plans, some of which have been realized in built form in housing developments and material infrastructure." (p. 576)

"These spaces are not simply afterthoughts in a world of spectacular city centre and office development familiar from the skyline of global and wannabe global cities. They are of fundamental importance to any understanding of the dynamics of the contemporary city and its development and to the ways in which people live in it." (p. 576)

Open Questions

The paper demands that we "think more actively and creatively about the nature and possibilities of forms of suburban urbanism" but does not specify what planning or design would follow once the suburbs are the starting point rather than the residual category. What would a design-disciplinary suburban urbanism — interior architecture, spatial design for the (sub)urban region — look like in this wiki's terms?
Is nimbyism a defence of privilege (the Hall et al. 1973 continuity — planning protecting "the property values, amenities and lifestyles of those who were already privileged") or a legitimate articulation of local knowledge ("It's my back yard")? The paper documents both readings and leaves the tension unresolved.
The Milton Keynes multiculture evidence ("everybody here came here") is drawn from a separate ESRC project (Living Multiculture, ES/J00676/1). How far does the "not the suburbanites of caricature" claim travel beyond MK and Northampton?
The regional-assemblage theory the paper leans on (Allen & Cochrane 2007, 2010 — regions "made and unmade (assembled and disassembled)") is sociological. What is its counterpart in design or representation: how would one draw, plan, or design for a region that is assembled and disassembled?
The paper stops in 2015: it precedes the 2015 Housing and Planning Act, the 2016 Brexit vote, and the post-2020 suburbanization debates. How does its account of the growth politics of the edge read after both — and after Keil's later planetary-suburbanization work?
The abstract's "lived urban experience" is documented largely through professionals' and activists' talk, not through residents' everyday practice at the scale of house, street, and interior. Does the paper's central claim need the finer grain the design disciplines could supply?
Corby's "North Londonshire" marketing and the City Deal's "catalytic role" framing raise a question the paper leaves open: is the new suburbia a region in its own right (polycentric self-determination) or still London's housing annex — and can the two readings be held together?