Towers in the Park, Bungalows in the Garden: Peripheral Densities, Metropolitan Scales and the Political Cultures of Post-Suburbia

Author: Roger Keil Year: 2015 Source type: article (Built Environment Vol. 41, No. 4, Winter 2015, "Suburban Spaces, Suburban Cultures," Alexandrine Press, pp. 579–596 — the same special issue as Living on the Edge (pp. 567–578) and The Construction of a Suburb (pp. 538–549); pagination corroborated by the raw text's running heads and page numbers) Raw file: raw/articles/keil-2015-towers-in-the-park.md

Summary

Keil's paper — the third article in the Built Environment 41.4 special issue and a product of the SSHRC-funded Global Suburbanisms MCRI — sets out to "disentangle the real-existing suburbia from some of its enduring myths," doing so "mostly through a discussion of densities." Against the hegemonic image of the single-family home behind the picket fence, Keil argues that "densities in suburbs have always been mixed and diverse," that the emphasis on US-style individualized suburbanization has "disempowered other, more progressive, collective consumption-oriented and social justice-seeking forms of everyday suburbanism," and that this myopia has blocked the pathways through which "post-suburban metropolitanism" must find solutions to the region's most pressing social, economic and environmental problems. The paper proceeds through the suburban mythology (low density, privatism, automobility), a global survey of emerging post-suburbia, a set of "density enigmas" (both terms "chaotic"; the hyper-density proposition of Chakrabarti and Glaeser critiqued; the low-density libertarianism of Cox and Kotkin dismissed as having "little intellectual and no political merit or plausibility"), and a closing politics of density and scale — anchored in Toronto, where the "towers in the park" were "a spatial strategy of creating social equity across metropolitan space" while the bungalow suburbs scaled a private political project.

Key Claims

Suburbs "have traditionally come in all sizes and densities," but have been "mostly imagined as places of low density, privatism and automobility"; this "singularity of focus on a particular form of suburban life has been myopic and has limited the view towards suburbia as a global phenomenon" (p. 579).
The stereotypical suburban morphology-cum-community, idealized, "has contributed to hiding poverty, diversity and change, as it did in Watts before the 1965 uprising and Ferguson, Missouri before the tragic events of 2014"; France's banlieue is likewise depicted "in a one-dimensional environment while in fact it often contains a spectrum of morphologies and socioeconomic realities" (Touati-Morel) (p. 580).
Keil is "critical of the hyper-density proposition" (Chakrabarti 2013; Glaeser 2011) while refusing its "logical opposite," the low-density preference of American libertarianism (Cox 2012; Kotkin 2013), which "has little intellectual and no political merit or plausibility" (p. 580).
The low-density suburb was "more or less [a] historical accident" — not the only form suburban areas could have adopted (Ford 1994); the determining factor was infrastructure: radial rail first, then "expressway networks laid over the auto-accommodating grid, and later the cul-de-sac structure of suburbanizing cities" allowed development to fan out, supported by "big sewer pipes and electricity grids" (Filion, Fishman, Poitras) (p. 580).
The bungalow-mansion spectrum was woven into "a new national narrative" threaded by a "new symbolic economy that had a direct influence on the image and imagination of national territories" (Sevilla-Buitrago), with the single-family home "central" to the imaginary (pp. 580–581).
"'[T]he dominance of the freestanding single-family house in major urban settings is a relatively recent phenomenon'" and a product of "a great deal of experimentation" (Ford 1994); "to be an American was to live in a house" (p. 581).
The house became "the relay station of the Fordist-Keynesian regime of accumulation" (Knox's Metroburbia), and Easterling's multiplier logic made the suburb's design idea "more powerful when it is positioned as a multiplier that affects a population of houses" (p. 581).
Home ownership was a societal discipline: pitched "against 'the lodger evil' and the 'unstable tenant'"; "Privacy was seen as the glue of society and the protection of the family all at once"; its "disciplining effects… on workers and immigrants were especially emphasized" (p. 581). The automobile "symbolized freedom, perhaps even more than the title to the suburban home," and was "the important missing link between the suburban home and the productive and consumptive hubs of the emerging landscape of the Keynesian-Fordist economy" (pp. 581–582).
Richard Harris's "three suburban stereotypes about North American suburbs": "the ideal quest for privacy; conformity with the suburban ideal; and the common misgivings among researchers about suburbia" — the last feeding a critical "disdain" for suburbia that clouds researchers' view of its changing social and political reality (Keil 2016) (p. 582).
Post-suburbia is globally registered: the post-socialist peripheries' "multi-headed deity" landscape (Hirt and Kovachev); single-family construction exploding after 1990 in the former Soviet bloc (Stanilov); McGee's Global-South definition of suburbs as settlement types spanning "high-rise apartments, town houses, condominiums, family homes, and illegal settlements"; Wangjing, Beijing's "mature and diverse suburban landscape" congealed in 20 years (Fleischer); China's "constellations of urbanization and suburbanization" (Wu) (pp. 582–583).
Density and compactness have become "a rarely questioned normative objective" — "the mantra of central city-based urban environmental policies" — yet Tonkiss notes the debates are "not only sterile or semantic, but also increasingly irrelevant, for the majority urban experience" (p. 583).
Regeneration cannot be prescribed from above: "any attempt to reform or regenerate the suburbs must come from the suburban populations and their democratic institutions themselves and cannot be prescribed and implemented through centrally-led, top-down processes" (Keil and Hertel) (p. 583).
Sudjic's reversal: Jacobs's West Village "is closer to an English suburb than it is to the kind of metropolis she praises" — and Bourne's counter-observation that "the densities of new residential developments in Toronto's outer suburbs are, on average, the highest on the continent" (pp. 583–584).
Lower densities were made "socially sustainable and marketable by… the diseconomies of the automobile and the Keynesian-or Fordist mode of regulation"; the region trended so that "the areal extent of the built-up city has grown faster than population" (Bunting et al.) (p. 584).
In Canada, "wasted density" — "islands of high-density residential areas stranded in a sea of low-density single-family homes" — is the inevitable outcome of metropolitan spatial distribution (Filion et al.; Fiedler and Addie) (p. 584).
Both "suburbs" and "density" are 'chaotic' terms — "They defy clear definition, but everyone uses them with a certainty that often leads to heated debate and misunderstanding" (pp. 584–585).
The cultural prejudice against low and medium density "has a certain colonialist tinge": planners "firmly at home in gentrifying neighbourhoods of city cores… seem to know best what is good for the suburbs and the planet"; they cherry-pick "best practices" (the mediaeval compact city, Barcelona, Medellin) and overlook "south to south inter-referencing" (p. 585).
Lagos at 18,150 people/km² is "the fourth densest large city in the world by some measure, but hardly the built form and networked infrastructure to support the… urban life North Americans or Europeans would associate with Good Density"; in Maputo, "the discourse there is not density but poverty, not abundance but need" (p. 585).
Density is site-specific and meaningless without "the broader societal context and patterns of use": residence no longer follows a linear live-work relationship — "There is no productive centre where the husbands go by day, and bedroom suburb where the housewives and the station wagons stay behind"; children cross the region to school, and universities now sit in the peripheries (Addie et al.) (p. 585).
Cohen's carbon caveat: "When the people clustered are prosperous professionals, the carbon benefits of density can be cancelled out by the emissions their consumption causes. The smokestacks, of course, are elsewhere" — and "Density can be one of the best ways to concentrate wealth and power; and density can be one of the best ways to concentrate poverty and oppression" (p. 586).
The tower/bungalow double-bind of the poor: "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).
Toronto's compact inner city "has a low-density urban field to draw from when it comes to the delivery of its goods and services" (Keil and Young) — airports, warehouses, just-in-time trucking, intermodal rail yards — "A dialectics of density and sprawl is the reality of the regional city" (p. 586).
Chakrabarti's hyperdensification (30 units/acre; Hong Kong, New York, Europe as examples; "iceberg homes" in London) believes, with Glaeser, in "dense form not as a container of but a catalyst for smart economies and people"; Keil's critique: the double movement that condemns suburbia and proposes compact re-urbanization "leave[s] broader scales and topological relationships… unconsidered" — "The region and the world remain the blind spots of urban density" (pp. 587–588).
The three assumptions underlying the sprawl critique: the 'undercomplexity' assumption ("cookie-cutter" suburbs as "fairytale image… underplays the reality of structural and formal diversity"); the 'suburbs don't change' assumption; and the 'suburbanites-are-passive' assumption (pp. 587–588).
Charmes and Keil's three critiques of the density prerogative: the politics of densification ("Densification is not neutral but it is contested across various political camps"; smart growth and new urbanism have become de rigueur as developers "sell growth (and their ambitious plans) with a green strategy"); morphology matters ("density per se does not say much about urban form"); and existing suburban densification regimes "differ substantially from each other" — class and social status differences matter (p. 588).
Marcuse on density and justice: "The meaning and effect of density in the city are directly related to social differentiation within a city, in a complex fashion varying directly by class, race and gender"; "A dense city per se is neither good nor bad, desirable or undesirable. It depends on which city, and for whom"; "Planning for density without considering class, race and gender is likely to produce proposals biased in favor of business uses and upper-income classes against the poor and working classes" (pp. 588–589).
Density is "highly uneven and many suburbs are as diverse as many inner cities. The processes currently set up to increase density carry with them a high potential for reinforcing existing inequalities" (p. 589).
Peck's formula for the ideological settlement: "American suburbia has been relationally defined, in ideological terms, as the dispersed other of metropolitan Keynesianism, and in social terms as a haven from both big cities and 'big-city problems'" (p. 589).
Toronto's post-WWII "towers in the park" — the peripheralization of higher densities — "was explicitly seen as a spatial strategy of creating social equity across metropolitan space"; the islands of high density "have been forever written into a narrative of modernist and planning failure" (p. 589).
Metropolitan-scale politics bypasses "the dead-end road of density dichotomism": the ultra-rich's penthouses and "giga-mansions" matter not through "the density of their exclusivity" but through "the political power their inhabitants and their class exert over the entire region"; hyper-density in internationalizing cores "stands in opposition to the powerlessness and poverty in dense tower neighbourhoods at urban peripheries from Glasgow to Paris and Leipzig and Toronto"; "Density per se does not provide a sharp lens" (p. 590).
Once the Tieboutian scale has been jumped, "all manner of spatial reorientations in the region and beyond are possible" (Keil 2000); Schafran et al.'s "scalar promiscuity" — exurban social movements functioning "in a hyper multiscalar fashion," a strategy differing from Smith's "scale jumping" because it responds "to the always-already fragmented nature of politics, governance, and service provision embedded in exurban space" (p. 590).
Roy on the postcolonial suburb: "the politics of the suburban periphery is the politics of political society," renegotiating "emerging contradictions of centrality/peripherality, formality/informality, state/market" — contributing to "a general 'critique of stable categories of space, society, and state'" (p. 591).
Larco's finding: "The stereotypical suburban image of the single-family home and the nuclear family is no longer the exclusive reality of suburbia. Maintaining this image impedes our ability to create policies that engage the actual composition of suburbs"; almost 10 million suburban multi-family units in America come in three types — condominiums, elderly housing, and 'mixed-use lifestyle centres' — with a different demographic/family structure (pp. 591–592).
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.; Hamel and Keil) (p. 592).
Lefebvre's implosion-explosion dialectic names the half-century of urban spread: "The tremendous concentration… of urban reality and the immense explosion, the projection of numerous, disjunct fragments (peripheries, suburbs, vacation homes, satellite towns) into space"; the literature treats the fragments "as mere products (not producers), derivative (of central processes)" — "In reality, these fragments are linked (and governed) through the modalities of state action…, capital accumulation… and private authoritarian suburban ways of life" (p. 592).
The concluding sign-formula: "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).

Connections

Concepts: towers-in-the-park — the title concept, Toronto's peripheral high-density islands as public political project; real-existing-suburbia — the paper's master operation; post-suburban-densification — the density analytic and its politics; hyperdensity — the contested remedy (Chakrabarti, Glaeser) vs dismissed libertarianism (Cox, Kotkin); everyday-suburbanism — the disempowered progressive forms; suburban-governance — Ekers/Hamel/Keil modalities of state action, capital accumulation, private authoritarianism; scalar-promiscuity — Schafran et al.'s exurban movement strategy; implosion-explosion-dialectic — Lefebvre's dialectic framing the conclusion; suburbanism, post-suburbia, planetary-suburbanization, zwischenstadt, urban-sprawl, housing, welfare-state-housing, polycentrality, home-ownership-democracy, right-to-the-city, dromology, gentrification, sustainability, separate-spheres, neoliberal-metropolis

Authors: Roger Keil — the author; Principal Investigator of the Global Suburbanisms MCRI that funded the paper (acknowledged p. 596). Fellow MCRI researchers: Cochrane, Per Gunnar Røe. Cited figures (logged PAGE NEEDED, not paged): Richard Harris, Vishaan Chakrabarti, Edward Glaeser, Wendell Cox, Joel Kotkin, Amélie Touati-Morel, Pierre Filion, Robert Fishman, Carpio/Irazabal/Pulido, J-P Addie, Eric Charmes, David Olive.

Debates: power-and-space — Position Y (the politics of density): density as concentrator of power and oppression; Marcuse's class-race-gender planning lesson

Related source notes: Living on the Edge (Cochrane, Colenutt & Field 2015) — same special issue; the reversal thesis and the (sub)urban region. The Construction of a Suburb (Røe 2015) — the Nordic welfare-state counter-form, here echoed in Keil's "towers in the park" register of social-democratic suburban density. Politicizing the interior (Teston 2018) — the political interior's regional-scale counterpart.

Direct Quotes

"Suburbs have traditionally come in all sizes and densities. Nonetheless, they have been mostly imagined as places of low density, privatism and automobility." (p. 579)

"In this paper I will disentangle the real-existing suburbia from some of its enduring myths. I will do this mostly through a discussion of densities." (p. 579)

"the emphasis on a particular form of US-style individualized suburbanization has led to a focus on 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 and the politics that result from it." (p. 579)

"It has been Detroit's misfortune to have city limits that are far too big for its population." (David Olive epigraph, p. 579)

"the appearance of the stereotypical suburban morphology-cum-community as an ideal(ized) community has contributed to hiding poverty, diversity and change, as it did in Watts before the 1965 uprising and Ferguson, Missouri before the tragic events of 2014." (p. 580)

"Once in place, the newly suburban zone seems placid." (Richard Harris epigraph, p. 580)

"see the city block as a one-time urban fringe" (Richard Harris 2013, quoted p. 580)

"This preference, mostly identified with a certain strand of American libertarianism has little intellectual and no political merit or plausibility." (p. 580)

"while city dwellers elsewhere in the world were content to live in a wide variety of settings, to be an American was to live in a house" (Ford, quoted p. 581)

"a design idea for suburbia becomes more powerful when it is positioned as a multiplier that affects a population of houses" (Easterling, quoted p. 581)

"In Toronto and across the continent, just about everyone felt that home ownership was a good thing. They believed that it reinforced the independence of the family, encouraging thrift and reducing demands upon the public purse" (Harris, quoted p. 581)

"Privacy was seen as the glue of society and the protection of the family all at once." (p. 581)

"Postsuburbia, in other words, possessed a polychromic and polyphonic quality that is more reminiscent of the modern metropolis than of 1950s suburbia." (De Meyer et al., quoted p. 582)

"debates over density and sprawl become not only sterile or semantic, but also increasingly irrelevant, for the majority urban experience" (Tonkiss, quoted p. 583)

"any attempt to reform or regenerate the suburbs must come from the suburban populations and their democratic institutions themselves and cannot be prescribed and implemented through centrally-led, top-down processes." (p. 583)

"the densities of new residential developments in Toronto's outer suburbs are, on average, the highest on the continent" (Bourne, quoted p. 584)

"In many cases, the outskirts of metropolitan areas have adopted almost all the characteristics of the classic city and adapted them to a lower density" (De Meyer et al., quoted p. 584)

"wasted density (i.e. 'islands of high-density residential areas stranded in a sea of low-density single-family homes') is seen as an inevitable outcome of metropolitan spatial distribution" (p. 584)

"The cultural prejudice against low and medium density also has a certain colonialist tinge." (p. 585)

"The problem of density sits in an uncertain place in-between: the point at which density becomes overcrowding, especially in slum settings, is never quite clear" (Tonkiss, quoted p. 585)

"When the people clustered are prosperous professionals, the carbon benefits of density can be cancelled out by the emissions their consumption causes. The smokestacks, of course, are elsewhere" (Cohen, quoted p. 586)

"Density can be one of the best ways to concentrate wealth and power; and density can be one of the best ways to concentrate poverty and oppression." (p. 586)

"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)

"A dialectics of density and sprawl is the reality of the regional city while the discourse on density pits one against the other in a rather unproductive manner." (p. 586)

"The region and the world remain the blind spots of urban density." (p. 587)

"The politics of densification: Densification is not neutral but it is contested across various political camps." (p. 588)

"density per se does not say much about urban form. There is a wide variety of ways by which to achieve similar types of density." (p. 588)

"A dense city per se is neither good nor bad, desirable or undesirable. It depends on which city, and for whom." (Marcuse, quoted p. 588)

"Planning for density without considering class, race and gender is likely to produce proposals biased in favor of business uses and upper-income classes against the poor and working classes; in favor of white against African-Americans; and in favor of men against women… Early generalizations, such as those prompted by Jane Jacobs' work in the West Village, overlooked this lesson" (Marcuse, quoted p. 589)

"density as it exists is highly uneven and many suburbs are as diverse as many inner cities. The processes currently set up to increase density carry with them a high potential for reinforcing existing inequalities." (p. 589)

"American suburbia has been relationally defined, in ideological terms, as the dispersed other of metropolitan Keynesianism, and in social terms as a haven from both big cities and 'big-city problems'" (Peck, quoted p. 589)

"the peripheralization of higher densities (compared to the Victorian lower density core) was explicitly seen as a spatial strategy of creating social equity across metropolitan space." (p. 589)

"Those islands of high density in the periphery have been forever written into a narrative of modernist and planning failure." (p. 589)

"It is time to change our view of the suburbs without telling the suburbanites how to change." (p. 589)

"The density of their exclusivity and the location of their residences are utterly unimportant compared to the political power their inhabitants and their class exert over the entire region." (p. 590)

"The reality of hyper density that changes the reality of real estate markets and politics in large internationalizing cities stands in opposition to the powerlessness and poverty in dense tower neighbourhoods at urban peripheries from Glasgow to Paris and Leipzig and Toronto." (p. 590)

"Density per se does not provide a sharp lens to understand the urbanism that takes shape here and the politics that naturalize its polarities into winning and losing modes of urban life." (p. 590)

"Not only do proper social movements exist in exurbia, but that they function in a hyper multiscalar fashion, with key players engaging simultaneously at different scales in different partnerships and formations on often fairly disparate issues. We define this as 'scalar promiscuity', a geopolitical strategy which differs from the 'scale jumping' (Smith, 1995) often discussed in the literature, for this is less a response to a rescaling imposed from above… and rather a response to the always-already fragmented nature of politics, governance, and service provision embedded in exurban space." (Schafran et al., quoted p. 590)

"the politics of the suburban periphery is the politics of political society" (Roy, quoted p. 590)

"The stereotypical suburban image of the single-family home and the nuclear family is no longer the exclusive reality of suburbia. Maintaining this image impedes our ability to create policies that engage the actual composition of suburbs" (Larco, quoted p. 591)

"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" (Lefebvre, quoted p. 592)

"The tremendous concentration (of people, activities, wealth, goods, objects, instruments, means and thought) of urban reality and the immense explosion, the projection of numerous, disjunct fragments (peripheries, suburbs, vacation homes, satellite towns) into space" (Lefebvre, quoted p. 592)

"In reality, these fragments 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 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)

Open Questions

Keil's critique of the hyper-density proposition targets its "blind spots" (the region and the world), but the paper leaves the constructive alternative mostly at the level of democracy: densification "must be a democratic and differentiated affair" (p. 589). What would a democratic, differentiated densification actually look like as a design brief — and for whom, given the paper's own demonstration that "suburbanites-are-passive" is itself a caricature?
The paper's three assumptions (undercomplexity; suburbs don't change; suburbanites-are-passive) are offered as a caricature of the critics, with the "deconstruction of these assumptions open for discussion" (p. 588). What would a research program that takes all three critiques seriously test first?
Does the conclusion's "sign" reading — tower and bungalow as signs of scaled political projects — commit Keil to a semiotics of the periphery, and if so, how does it square with his critique of one-dimensional representation (the banlieue, Watts, Ferguson)?
The paper's Toronto evidence (Bourne's continent-highest outer-suburb densities; the 'wasted density' islands; the tower neighbourhoods' renewal politics) is cited but not analysed here — the article points to Poppe and Young (2015) for the politics of Toronto's tower neighbourhoods. What is gained and lost by Keil's decision not to look "specifically at suburban governance or regional governance"?
How does the "right to the suburb" (Carpio et al., p. 590) relate to Lefebvre's right to the city as this wiki holds it — extension, correction, or rival claim?
Keil dismisses Cox/Kotkin libertarianism as having "little intellectual and no political merit or plausibility" (p. 580) — yet those authors command a mass audience. What does the asymmetry between intellectual dismissal and political purchase tell us about the density debate's real terrain?