Harry Moroz
Researching the Suburbs
Alan Scher Zagier of the AP wrote earlier this week about the creation of a National Museum of Suburban History:
Suburban America has been the butt of jokes and stereotypes for decades. The portrayal persists in Hollywood, which continues to zing the 'burbs with over-the-top tales of conniving, desperate housewives and wayward soccer moms in bed with Mexican drug lords. Enough, say the Johnson County civic leaders planning a National Museum of Suburban History. Their contention: With more than 50 percent of the country living in places like Shawnee, it's past time to take the suburbs seriously.
The journal Cities explored a similar theme in April (subs. req.), using that month’s issue to explore “the suburban question” and propose possible directions for research about the suburbs. Pushing back on the caricature that suburbs have become and referring approvingly to suburbs-booster Joel Kotkin, the journal’s editorial argues that “the backhanded treatment” suburbs have received “for more than a half century” must be redressed.
[T]he collapse of Wall Street in 2008-2009 shows that cheap money and a crass consumerism is the problem, not the built form. The built form can neither cause nor mediate social issues. On the contrary, these are the results of and/or responses to socio-political and economic processes.
Such a perspective tries to disassociate the design aspects of suburban life (particularly those deserving of criticism) from the disparagement typically heaped upon suburbs for their (perceived) racial, environmental, political, and social deficiencies. The motivation is that, if suburbs are here to stay (as the journal’s editors believe), this disassociation is perhaps the only way that suburban design and planning can be improved. In the issues concluding article, the editors themselves observe the challenge with such a strategy:
[W]e have lost track of criticism of the suburbs qua suburbs–that is, as manifestations of design principles–as something different from places that have coincidentally demonstrated particular social relations. These are somewhat different matters, and have been explored in some depth by Peter Saunders while distinguishing the problems of cities and the problems in cities. Indeed, this is a tension that has hamstrung academic debate since Marx, conflating as it does processes that can be thought to be linked to urbanization per se…with phenomena that are merely on display there, such as elevated crime rates. Nonetheless, these skeins of criticism tended to knot tighter and tighter over time, regardless of their original precision.
Whatever the merits of this approach, it at the very least risks overlooking the significance of cities as places of socio-political success and progress. As we wrote in The San Francisco Chronicle:
We have forgotten that the story of our cities is actually a great story of American progress: new kinds of housing, new social services, new forms of mass transit, new regulations of employment conditions and many other innovations that boosted living standards for the vast majority of Americans over the past century or so all began as urban experiments. Cities are laboratories of progressive change where government plays an outsized role in improving our daily lives.Such successes were a result of challenges unique to cities (no matter if they were “of” them or “in” them) that, simultaneously, cities were uniquely capable of addressing, whether it was because they had more developed and active political and social institutions, because they had the resources in population and tax base, or because not addressing such challenges would put the vibrancy of the city – its very raison d’être – at risk.
Considering suburbs as constellations of design principles alone might have some merit, but would at a minimum push consideration of the socio-political importance of cities to the background.
Harry Moroz: Author Bio | Other Posts
Posted at 11:50 AM, Jul 07, 2010 in
Permalink | Email to Friend
