48(12) 2591–2610, September 2011
The New Post-suburban Politics?
Nicholas A. Phelps and Andrew M. Wood
[Paper first received, February 2010; in final form, June 2010]
Abstract
Settlements variously termed ‘ex-urbs’, ‘edge cities’, ‘technoburbs’ are taken to signal
something different from suburbia and as a consequence might be considered postsuburban. Existing literature has focused on defining post-suburbia as a new era and
as a new form of settlement space. Whether post-suburbia can also be delimited in
terms of its distinctive politics is the open question explored here. The paper begins
by considering the need to make urban political theory more tailored to the different
settlements that populate the heavily urbanised regions of nations. The paper stresses
the structural properties of capitalism that generate differences within the unity of
the urbanisation process. It then discusses what is new about a class of postsuburban settlements, concentrating on what the increasing economic gravity of
post-suburbia, the difficulty of bounding post-suburban communities and the continuing role of the state imply for understanding urban politics and the reformulation of urban political theory.
Introduction
Settlements that variously have been termed
‘ex-urbs’ (Soja, 2000), ‘edge cities’ (Garreau,
1991), ‘technoburbs’ (Fishman, 1987) and
‘edgeless cities’ (Lang, 2003) are taken to
signal the rise of something different from
the traditional suburb. Consequently, they
are sometimes grouped together under the
umbrella term post-suburbia. Yet defining
post-suburbia has proved to be a difficult
exercise (Phelps et al., 2010). Academic
definitions have tended to focus on postsuburbia as a new era (Essex and Brown,
1997; Lucy and Philips, 1997) and as a new
form of settlement space (Kling et al., 1995).
However, both sets of definitions are
brought into question by the dynamics of
the urbanisation process which not only
reveals important antecedents to postsuburban forms (Hayden, 2003; Hise,
1997), but also works to dissolve the
Nicholas A. Phelps (corresponding author) is in The Bartlett School of Planning, University College
London, Wates House, 22 Gordon Street, London WC1H OQB, UK. E-mail: [email protected].
Andrew M. Wood is in the Department of Geography, University of Kentucky, 1457 Patterson
Office Tower, Lexington, Kentucky, KY 40506-0027, USA. E-mail: [email protected].
0042-0980 Print/1360-063X Online
Ó 2011 Urban Studies Journal Limited
DOI: 10.1177/0042098011411944
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NICHOLAS A. PHELPS AND ANDREW M. WOOD
divisions between city, suburbs and outer
suburbs (Walker and Lewis, 2001) and their
demographic and economic character.
Whether post-suburbia can be delimited
in terms of the actors involved in the urbanisation process is a question that has
received only limited attention in the existing literature. Comparison with the coalitions of interests that underpin traditional
growth machine (Molotch, 1976; Molotch
and Logan, 1984) and urban regime (Stone,
1989) models of the politics of urban development would seem particularly germane.
The composition of interests in postsuburbia is hinted at in a range of sources:
from Massotti’s (1973) early suggestion of
the urbanisation of the suburbs (and what
this implies about the growing range of
economic interests at play in rapidly changing suburban jurisdictions); to Gottdiener’s
(1977) noting of the integration of suburbs
into national administrative and business
hierarchies; to Teaford’s (1997) suggestion
of the meeting of suburban ideology with
new economic realities; to Kling et al.’s
(1995) arguments about the increasingly
cosmopolitan nature of suburbia.
Notwithstanding the difficulties of adequately defining and distinguishing postsuburbia, in this paper we argue that giving
thought to a category of post-suburban
settlements begs important questions of
established theories of urban politics. We
see value in entertaining the possibility of
some sort of break in the processes of urbanisation as implied in the post-modern
urbanism agenda even if we do not subscribe to this particular perspective on contemporary urbanisation. Rather, we want to
stress some of the important continuities
that exist between the suburbs of modernity
and the post-suburban politics of what
Beck (1992) terms a second modernity. In
doing so we open up several lines of inquiry
for possible future work in urban political
theory.
The paper starts out by considering the
need to make urban political theory more
attuned to the different settlements that
populate the heavily urbanised regions that
now characterise advanced capitalist economies as a result of patterns of increasing
functional specialisation and interaction.
We should point out that, in being
prompted in this inquiry by a desire to
explore the implications of the likes of edge
cities, edgeless cities, technoburbs and
ex-urbs and in reworking existing theories
of urban politics, this paper speaks primarily to the United States (US) case, although
we attempt also to extend its range where
appropriate. We go on to stress the structural properties of capitalism that generate
a differentiated politics across urbanised
regions and how they continue to present
differences within the unity of the capitalist
urbanisation process. We then discuss what
if anything may be new about a class of
post-suburban settlements. Our comments
are provisional but chime with Lang and
Knox’s claim that
The challenge is to identify new analytical
categories that help in understanding and
theorizing the spatial outcomes of this second
modernity (Lang and Knox, 2009, p. 799).
Here, we suggest that some of the distinctiveness of the new post-suburban politics
reflects its emergence as one arena in which
some of the facets of a transition in the logic
of the state from late modernity (Habermas,
1988; Offe, 1975, 1985) to a second modernity (Beck, 1992) unfold.
City, Suburb and Post-suburb:
Urban Politics and Settlement
Evolution
Theories of urban politics cannot be
expected to hold for all times and places
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THE NEW POST-SUBURBAN POLITICS?
(Swanstrom, 1993). Yet existing theories
tend to be limited to addressing a single settlement type—usually the city ‘proper’ or the
‘urban’ as an undifferentiated and unchanging unit of analysis. Notwithstanding some
of the difficulties of adequately defining
cities, suburbs and post-suburbs, not least
because of the unity of the capitalist urbanisation process (Harvey, 1985; Walker, 1981;
Walker and Lewis, 2001), we see considerable
analytical value in linking the analysis of
urban politics to a consideration of the different types of urban settlement and/or the
evolution of individual settlements over
time. In order to do so, we need to consider
how structural changes in capitalism become
apparent in different settlement types over
time.
The Evolution of Settlements within
Urbanised Regions
For some time now, the urbanisation process in the US has produced systems of settlements and associated interaction between
them that exceed the monocentric cityregions or metropolitan areas of modernity
to cover much larger, frequently polycentric,
heavily urbanised regions. For some, these
heavily urbanised regions mean that ‘‘traditional concepts and labels—‘city’, ‘suburbs’,
metropolises—are ‘zombie categories’’’
(Lang and Knox, 2009, p. 790). This expansive urbanisation of capital has generated a
burgeoning terminology describing both the
character of these heavily urbanised regions
and their newest constituent settlements
(Lang, 2003). In Europe, too, these developments find their expression in morphologically and functionally polycentric patterns
of urban development (Hall and Pain, 2006;
Musterd et al., 2006) and even muted, distorted, European versions of the likes of
edge cities (Bontje and Burdack, 2005).
What is clear is that the likes of historical
cities, their suburbs, outer suburbs, edge
2593
cities, edgeless cities and technoburbs are
specialised locales within wider multinodal
metropolitan or megalapolitan systems
(Bogart, 2006; Shearmur et al., 2007; Lang
and Knox, 2009).
It is to the differences among settlements
and their different growth trajectories that
we need to attend in order to speculate on
and distinguish the ‘new’ post-suburban
politics. Table 1 represents a very simple
scheme in which we present a number of
scenarios of settlement evolution within the
modern city, late modern city-region and
what might be labelled, for simplicity’s
sake, the city-region of a ‘second modernity’ (Beck, 1992; Beck et al., 2003). In contrast to the relatively predictable linear
outward patterns of growth apparent in the
modern and late modern periods, we stress
the highly variable settlement dynamics
apparent within the era of second modernity which, in turn, underlines the need to
rework established theories of urban politics. In particular, a number of insights can
be more delicately linked to considerations
of settlement type, settlement evolution and
structural change. In Table 2 and associated
discussion, we therefore make a greater
effort to distinguish between different types
of suburbs when discussing some of the key
determinants of the nature of urban politics
across settlements. For the purposes of elaborating the argument in this paper, we do
not delve into the question of whether—in
line with the variety of suburban experiences
that have become apparent—the category of
post-suburban settlements itself could usefully be decomposed and differential patterns of post-suburban politics more fully
specified. Here it should also be noted that
our scheme may be critically exposed by the
extreme rapidity of urbanisation in, for
example, east Asia and the immediacy of its
exposure to consumption patterns and real
estate and planning models in what is, by
now, an era of unprecedented international
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2594
NICHOLAS A. PHELPS AND ANDREW M. WOOD
Table 1. Urban development processes and
past and possible future relationships among
settlement types
Modern city
i. City ! suburb
Late modern city region
ii. City ! suburb ! post-suburb
City region of second modernity
iii. Post-suburb ! city
iv. Growing suburb ! post-suburb ! city
v. Stable affluent suburb ! stable affluent suburb
vi. Declining suburb ! sub-suburb?
vii. City ! suburb
economic integration. Notably, the outer
suburbs of metropolitan areas in, for example, China (Wu and Phelps, 2008) and
Indonesia (Leaf, 1996) actually display a
mixing of mass residential suburban and
post-suburban (gated communities, retail,
office and leisure complexes) elements that
commonly are regarded to have occurred
sequentially over time in the West.
We are less interested here in commenting on the scenarios associated with the
modern city focusing instead on the variable growth dynamics in city-regions of
late and second modernity (iii and iv). Our
point here is that contemporary developments highlight a trajectory that is very different from the predictable and linear
outward growth of the modern cityregion—a pattern outlined in work on
post-modern urbanism (Dear, 2004; Dear
and Dahmann, 2008) and signalled in
recent calls to take seriously questions of
the evolution of individual suburbs over
time (McManus and Ethington, 2007). We
are also less concerned with aspects of settlement stasis and decline. In the continued
growth within post-modern city-regions,
there is ample evidence of the stasis and
decline of suburbs and indeed cities (scenarios v–vii in Table 1). Stereotypical
notions of suburban homogeneity have
contributed to a sense of stability in the
residential character of seemingly affluent
suburbs. Such notions have been undermined in the US where divergence in suburban social and ethnic complexion and
economic performance has been apparent
for quite some time (Hanlon et al., 2006;
Orfield, 2002). They continue to have
greater salience in Europe although here
too changes in the distribution of employment and populations have also begun to
signal an urbanisation of the suburbs
(Musterd et al., 2006). Other scenarios
include the pathway by which cities (notably small former industrial centres), in
losing most of their economic function and
fiscal capacity, might regress into suburbs
or dormitory settlements for nearby cities
(vii) and, lastly, the somehow subsuburban futures facing some severely
declining industrial suburbs (vi).
We can begin by speculating on some of
the differences between suburban and outer
or post-suburban growth in the late modern
city-region (ii). Arguably the most notable
functional difference centres on the more
‘balanced’ employment and residential character of post-suburbia.1 The balancing of
economic, residential and other functions
was apparent in the US as early as the 1950s
and is taken by Teaford (1997, p. 44) to be
the signature of post-suburbia. The evolution of suburbs into post-suburbs was also
described by Massotti who noted that
While many of the older, established, and
affluent suburbs are able to maintain their
‘residential only’ character ... some of the
older, and all of the new ‘frontier’ suburbs
have tried to provide for industrial parks,
office complexes, major retail (shopping)
centers, or some combination of the three
(Massotti, 1973, pp. 16–17).
More recently ‘‘the renewed linkage of work
and residence’’ (Fishman, 1987, p. 190)
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THE NEW POST-SUBURBAN POLITICS?
provides the single basic principle of the
technoburbs that Fishman sees as signalling
the end of the suburban era. The sorts of
manufacturing, retail and office complexes
often associated with outer suburbs and
‘edge cities’ actually have a long history.
Nevertheless, post-suburbia may well
embody an employment concentration of
national significance in qualitative let alone
quantitative
terms
(Phelps,
2010).
Accordingly we can already point to evidence
of suburbs evolving into post-suburbs (Table
1, option ii).
We can also speculate on the further evolution of the post-suburban settlements visible in late modern city-regions. Alongside
the growing economic gravity of postsuburbia, we can consider whether such settlements have become more fully urban in
other respects. Arguably some of these new
settlements have begun to acquire governmental functions and civic spaces alongside
the greater density and mixed use of developments and buildings. In some instances
these settlements have been the subject of
conscious efforts to plan and ‘retrofit’ such
elements (Dunham-Jones and Williamson,
2009). If successful, such developments
more broadly signal the genesis of cities
from something as traditionally un-urban
as a suburban office park-based edge city—
the sequence depicted in Table 1 (iv).
Urban Politics, Structural Change and
Settlement Evolution
To this point, we have emphasised the diversity of different settlement types and the various pathways which settlements can follow
as they evolve. However, this is not to argue
that each scenario generates a distinctively
different urban politics. Rather, the autonomy of urban politics—central to both the
growth machine and regime concepts—is a
relative one such that we need to specify the
place of urban politics within the wider
2595
process of capital accumulation (Harvey,
1985; Swanstrom, 1993). However, the traditional frameworks for examining urban
politics are poor at specifying these relations,
reflecting both their inductive origins and
the weight they attach to local agency. As
Harding notes
in their enthusiasm to underline the importance of human agency in urban development . they pay less attention to historical
and structural factors that predispose local
public officials, as well as profit-seeking business interests, to support growth strategies
and the interest coalitions that promote and
sustain them (Harding, 1994, p. 359).
This, in turn, poses problems both for analysing change over time and for considering
differences among settlement types. The differences necessarily entail a parallel analysis
of the role of the capitalist state in shaping
land and property markets. The problematic for urban politics is, as Swanstrom
(1993) has suggested, not a question of
growth versus no growth—as posited in the
classic growth machine model—but rather
what kind of growth. Urban regime theory,
as Harding (1994) notes, is more sensitive
to how growth politics vary over time and
space, although empirical studies have typically focused on single stable regimes.
Neither of the traditional concepts is linked
in explicit analytical terms to a conception
of structural change in capitalism nor to
different classes of settlement.
There are various ways in which we can
conceptualise historically the processes of
capital accumulation and their contradictions, including short-term business cycles,
longer-term regimes of accumulation
(Aglietta, 1979), crises (O’Connor, 1973;
1984) and broad secular trends. The question then becomes how best to interpret the
mode of urban politics in relation to these
aspects of structural change (Goodwin and
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2596
NICHOLAS A. PHELPS AND ANDREW M. WOOD
Painter, 1997; Lauria, 1997; Ward, 1996) so
that regulation theory becomes more capable of ‘accounting for the dynamic spatial
diversity in unity’ apparent in processes of
accumulation (Feldman, 1997). We know,
for example, that the business cycle can precipitate changes in the character of local
political representation, although growth
machine and urban regime theory are premised on the fact that such short-term
movements are unlikely to have a determinant bearing on the coalitions of interests
at the centre of urban politics.
In examining the relationship between
urban politics and structural change, we
might note how the growth machine concept
(Molotch, 1976) surfaced during a period in
which the Fordist regime of accumulation
had reached its limits. It is little wonder that
the growth machine concept emphasises
exchange values compared with use values
and largely neglects issues of consumption,
including state intervention for collective
consumption and the reproduction of
labour. Much of the post-1945 growth in
advanced capitalist economies, not least in
the US, was produced from the suburbanisation of capital (Harvey, 1985). It follows that
the classic growth machine politics of the
Fordist era was not strictly urban per se but
rather suburban: the intensive Fordist regime
of accumulation was underpinned by landextensive patterns of development and accumulation in the secondary circuit of capital
released via significant federal and state
interventions licensed by suburban growth
machine politics (Walker, 1981). It is also in
suburban settings that landed interests have
tended to be least encumbered in the development process and, moreover, are often
aided and abetted by government and local
politics. Accordingly, we can argue that the
growth machine represents a mode of urban
politics most closely associated with Fordistera suburbanisation (Table 2).
There are also secular changes in the
urbanisation of capital that can usefully be
linked to the mode of urban politics. The
growth machine concept pays particular
attention to the geography of development,
arguing that
We need to see each geographical map—
whether of a small group of land parcels, a
whole city, a region, or a nation—not merely
as a demarcation of legal, political or topographical features, but as a mosaic of competing
land interests capable of strategic coalition
and action (Molotch, 1976, p. 311).
However, we know that geographical patterns of urban landownership and lease
evolve over time. Settlements represent
patchworks of private, club and public
realms (Webster, 2002, p. 409) which tend
to become more complex over time, serving to make the development process itself
more protracted and longer-term for both
the private and public sectors. The growing
complexity of property ownership and leasing may serve to militate against strong
ideologies associated with development. It
also suggests a relative shift in the collective
interests of a growth coalition from the
exchange values of land and property
towards their use values. Greater complexity, as we indicate in Table 2, is likely to
favour modes of urban politics that resemble
urban regime-style arrangements whereby
‘‘in a world of limited and dispersed authority, actors work together across institutional
lines to produce a capacity to govern’’
(Stone, 1989, p. 8). In this respect, power
lies in the capacity to allocate small opportunities (Stone, 1989, p. 221).
The suburban growth machine, arguably
the purest form of Molotch’s concept, seems
to be the most likely mode to have contributed to future deficits in the infrastructures
required for collective consumption and
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Ownership of
capital
Term over which
urban capital is
fixed
Developmental
regime
Post-suburbs
Local state concerned Potential land values
to preserve status quo altered by piecemeal
local state
intervention
Caretaker or antigrowth regime
Stable/ affluent
Local
Medium-term
Short-term
Land ownership and
lease patterns are
mixed
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Medium-term
Local/national
Land ownership and
lease patterns are
mixed
Local state struggles
to maintain collective
production and
consumption
expenditures
Intensive: use of
urban land is intense
(near or at ‘best use’)
Regime politics
Cities
Local/national/
international
Medium-term
Local/national/
international
Long-term
Land ownership and Land ownership and
lease patterns become lease patterns impede
complicated
radical
redevelopment
Extensive: stable low- Extensive: stable low- Intensive: use of
density urban land
density urban land
urban land is
use
use
intensified
Progressive or
developmental
regime
Local state is unable
to maintain collective
consumption
expenditure
Declining
Local
Extensive: raw land is
converted into low
density urban land
uses
Patterns of land
Land ownership and
ownership and use lease patterns are
simple
Land use
State intervention Potential value of
land impacted by
significant non-local
state intervention
Suburban (pure
growth machine)
New suburbs
Settlement type
Mature suburbs
The urbanisation of capital and changing modes of urban politics
Mode of urban
politics
Table 2.
Growth machine or
developmental
regime
Local and non-local
state intervenes
strongly to facilitate
private-sector
redevelopment
Intensive: use of
urban land is intense
but with large pockets
that are devalorised
Land ownership and
lease patterns are
reconfigured by
private sector and the
state
Local/national/
international
Long-term
Cities experiencing
significant decline
THE NEW POST-SUBURBAN POLITICS?
2597
2598
NICHOLAS A. PHELPS AND ANDREW M. WOOD
production. However, suburbs evolve and
mature. Accordingly, there is considerable
diversity in the contemporary trajectories of
different types of suburb (Orfield, 2002;
Persky and Wiewel, 2000) such that it is
simply not possible to speak of the suburbs
as sharing a single unified interest (Frug,
1999, p. 83). In very general terms, and for
the purposes of elaborating on the simple
schemes presented in Tables 1 and 2, there
are a set of (mostly inner) suburbs that have
been subject to significant economic decline
and a set of (primarily outer suburbs) whose
economic and fiscal position is healthier.
Moreover, it may be possible to see some of
these suburbs as evolving from affluence or
decline towards a class of distinctively postsuburban settlement (Phelps et al., 2006b;
Teaford, 1997) engaged in a local politics of
‘retrofit’. In this way, local interests are connected to wider tiers of government in order
to make good shortfalls in expenditures on
collective consumption and production
while in the process attracting city-like functions and qualities. In this particular category of post-suburban settlements, some of
which began life ostensibly as employment
centres and have evolved towards more
balanced communities or mature suburbs,
the conservative politics and ideology of
suburbia have been adulterated (Teaford,
1997). Settlements that might be characterised as fully urban (whether city or postsuburb) are, we suggest, more likely to be
characterised by regime-style politics centring on the struggle to maintain existing
expenditure commitments to collective consumption and production needs as well as a
greater interest in issues of amenity and the
use values of land.
Finally, we can also entertain some oscillation in the mode of urban politics in that
growth machine and developmental regimes
may be re-ignited during periods of intense
economic crisis. In such times, a major devalorisation of inner-city urban land can create
a structural ‘rent gap’ incentive (Smith,
1982), driving processes of gentrification
and comprehensive redevelopment. As we
have indicated in Table 2, local and nonlocal state expenditures are often vital to this
spatial switching of capital through the creation of special-purpose development and
delivery organisations, improving locational
accessibility via the provision of new transport and communications infrastructure
and the purchase, assembly and servicing of
land into parcels available to developers.
What’s New in the ‘New’
Post-suburban Politics?
The preceding discussion combined notions
of structural change in capitalism with the
growth machine and urban regime concepts
in order to sensitise urban political theory
to the variety of settlement dynamics that
exist within heavily urbanised regions. We
distinguished a class of settlements that
might be considered post-suburban and in
this section we now go on to highlight three
potentially novel ingredients that may figure
in the politics of a range of post-suburban
political regimes. As we seek to illustrate,
there are also important interrelationships
among these three ingredients.
The Shifting Centre of Gravity of the
Metropolitan Economy and the
New Post-suburban Politics
The traditional suburb is seen to have played
an exclusively residential role in the metropolitan division of labour. However, we
should note that the conservative ideology
and politics of suburbia have been subject to
slow and subtle transformation even from
the moment of the quintessential 1950s
mass suburban developments in the US.
Teaford (1997) describes the transformation
of suburbs into post-suburbs as one in
which economic development objectives
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THE NEW POST-SUBURBAN POLITICS?
have gradually come into greater balance
with those centring on the protection of residential amenity and a preference for ‘small
government’. Such instances of pro-growth
suburban politics have also been visible in
Europe and the UK (Charlesworth and
Cochrane, 1994; Phelps et al., 2006a), perhaps most conspicuously in settings where
anti-growth sentiments prevail in large
swathes of affluent and stable suburbs. At
the same time, we need to recognise a class
of declining suburbs and post-suburbs in
which the pursuit of growth has assumed a
much more central place in local politics.
Moreover, these classes of settlements—
declining suburbs, aspiring post-suburbs
and stable affluent suburbs—and their
divergent politics are commonly the product
of heightened sensitivities produced by juxtaposition and spillovers within the same
metropolitan area.
If we follow the argument developed by
Teaford (1997), Massotti (1973) and
Fishman (1987) concerning the increasing
economic gravity of suburbia, then it is clear
that, in the post-suburbs, a wider range of
business interests beyond the landed interests of the traditional models is liable to
engage in urban politics (Phelps et al.,
2006a). In the UK, places like Croydon with
an apparently suburban complexion have,
by virtue of the organised decanting of
industries and offices, been home to collections of employment that are comparable
with free-standing towns and cities (Phelps,
1998). In the US, edge cities are more
diverse in their employment composition
than is often appreciated (Bingham and
Kimble, 1995) while the largest edge cities,
although suburban in location, are of a
national significance—comparable in terms
of total employment with the downtowns of
established cities. Moreover, there is just a
little evidence to suggest that suburbs
and post-suburbs have not simply grown
in quantitative significance—to house
2599
cost-sensitive extant divisions of labour—
but qualitatively, as the loci for innovative
activities and the sorts of external economies that will sustain economic activity over
the long term. In turn, this leads us to consider the extent to which a whole range of
private- and public-sector activities might
be regarded as more or less locally dependent and hence drawn into the local political
arena (Cox and Mair, 1988, 1991). Given
the diversity of business interests in the
post-suburbs, it follows that post-suburban
politics may be less concerned with the
exchange values of land and property associated with the conversion of agricultural land
into new suburbs in the classic growth
machine mould. In its place, local politics is
likely to centre on the longer-term use value
of land and even its amenity for businesses
as well as residents. Private-sector interests
in the process of land development extend
to questions of use value since the ‘structured coherence’ of places (Harvey, 1985)
and their competitive position with respect
to other localities rest partly in the qualities
of the urban environment. In western
Europe, the politics of collective consumption, which dominated academic analysis in
the 1970s and 1980s, is now placed within a
more generalised urban politics of consumption which, in turn, is infused with
(neo-)liberal place marketing and interlocality competition.
Even in the US, it is clear that consumption issues cannot be ignored in considering the production of the restless urban
landscape (Knox, 1991). Suburbanisation
as the collective expression of individually
held residential preferences mediated
largely by the private-sector developer and
house building industry has evolved to
embody a greater degree of market segmentation of these preferences including the
lucrative vulgar niches of city-regions
(Knox, 2008). This is acknowledged by
Molotch et al. (2000) in their dynamic
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2600
NICHOLAS A. PHELPS AND ANDREW M. WOOD
rendering of the political economy of place.
More recently again, some have discerned
evidence of a politics of amenity driving
urban growth agendas (Clark et al., 2002),
where amenity, by definition, is collectively
consumed with a concomitant politics to
its collective production. In the US, these
sorts of issues are crystallised, for example,
in current debates regarding the replanning
of Tysons Corner—the archetypal edge
city—into a more pedestrian-friendly, civic
destination.
Difficult to Place: The Geography of the
New Post-suburban Politics
As we have already indicated, the term postsuburbia has been commonly used to refer to
a new form of settlement space (Kling et al.,
1995). Ironically, the difficulty of defining
and delimiting post-suburbs can be seen as
critical to the politics of post-suburbia.
Regulation theory and established theories of
urban politics tend to refer to distinct and
bounded cities or city-regions with little
regard to the extent to which local politics is
entangled within a wider set of non-local
political relations. As Feldman (1997, p. 31)
observes, ‘‘Neither does a particularly good
job with different scales’’. In short, theories
of the growth machine and the urban regime
reflect an era of modern city-regions in
which suburbs and even the emerging postsuburbs remain oriented to the central city
by way of patterns of economic interaction
along with transport, communications and
water and sewer infrastructures. The importance of non-local relations has been referenced in the extant literature, most notably
in Molotch and Logan’s (1984) incorporation of the role of non-local capital in the
growth machine; however, this says little
about the non-local governmental relations
and political arenas in which settlements are
enmeshed. This is surprising given that postsuburban settlements are at least partially
outside and at best only loosely coupled with
the administrative, infrastructure and service
hierarchies of the modern unitary cityregion. Increasingly, these post-suburbs are
woven into webs of economic relations that
are independent of established cities and
their older suburbs.
In contrast to traditional suburbs,
Fishman describes how the technoburb is
‘‘at first . impossible to comprehend. It
has no clear boundaries’’ (Fishman, 1987,
p. 203). Garreau (1991) similarly highlights
how edge cities rarely coincide with existing
governmental jurisdictions, while Lang
(2003) describes how ‘‘edgeless cities’’ are
‘‘not even easy to locate’’ given that they
spread almost imperceptibly throughout
metropolitan areas, filling out central cities,
occupying much of the space between more
concentrated suburban business districts,
and ringing the metropolitan areas’ built-up
periphery (Lang, 2003, pp. 1–2).
Edgeless cities represent diffuse urban
forms that sprawl from the inner to the
outer suburbs—helping to symbolise in
physical terms the continuities between
modern and, what some regard as, postmodern urbanism. The difficulty of delimiting post-suburbia implies at the very
least the need to embrace non-local political relations in theorising urban politics
and, perhaps more profoundly, a sense of
the relational nature of this politics. In the
case of Los Angeles, Hise (1997) notes how
the private development interests producing urban sprawl were conscious of their
impacts at multiple scales across the metropolitan region. Along similar lines, Frug
(1999, p. 108) argues that the multiple
scalar interests of individuals must be
recognised in any renewal of local government and politics in the US. In short, not
only do ‘‘The new topologies in urban
regions . call for a new relational politics’’
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THE NEW POST-SUBURBAN POLITICS?
(Young and Keil, 2010, p. 94) they also
speak to the need for a more fully relational
urban political theory. However, just as
‘‘the politics surrounding and constituting
in-between infrastructure is in flux and not
yet geared towards the relational reality of
the in-between city’’ (Young and Keil,
2010, p. 93), traditional urban political
theory remains rooted in notions of firmly
bounded territorial processes.
The failure of traditional models of urban
politics to incorporate non-local governmental relations is widely recognised. Yet the
mutation of suburban into post-suburban
ideology and politics has entailed governance
at new spatial scales—most notably the
county (Teaford, 1997), but also larger pancounty regions in the US. Such non-local
governmental relations stem in significant
part from the way in which traditional suburban localist conservative and exclusionary
ideology have been compromised by recognising the need for economic development
and investment for collective consumption
and production. This has necessarily entailed
the leveraging of resources from non-local
tiers of government (Althubaity and Jonas,
1998). All of this should come as little surprise given that post-suburbia has derived
from, and continues to be reshaped by, a
framework of investment in infrastructure
networks funded by non-local (for example,
federal and state-level in the US) tiers of government intervention.
In Europe, the relative stasis in the
redrawing of local government boundaries
actually presents some of the same pressures for and challenges associated with the
mobilisation of resources and opportunities
across territories. In France, these pressures
are dealt with through formal contractual
arrangements among authorities with associated streams of finance (Phelps et al.,
2006b). In the UK, local government
boundaries have never been redrawn to
reflect adequately the functional economic
2601
regions associated with established cities.
The urban extensions and more recent outof-town retail and office developments that
have occurred since the 1960s constitute
something of a latent framework for future
development that necessarily will have to be
addressed in the emergent cross-authority
planning and service delivery approach signalled by the new Local Area Agreements
and Multi Area Agreements.2
Furthermore, we suggest that the ‘in
between-ness’ of the edge cities, edgeless
cities and technoburbs that comprise the
post-suburban economy—an economy
caught between forces of centrality and
dispersal (Phelps, 2004)—is parallelled by
an in between-ness of political relations
(Young and Keil, 2010). Since the in
between-ness of post-suburbia registers as
a nexus of, primarily automobile-dependent, flows, it is little surprise that a significant substantive focus of the new postsuburban politics is connected with transport (and other) infrastructure issues. As
Young and Keil note
the forgotten infrastructural politics of the
inbetween city implies a de-colonization
from the forces that built the glamour zones
at both ends of its existence: the urban core
and the classical suburb (Young and Keil,
2010, p. 87).
The politics of post-suburbia are in-between
in one further sense. Garreau (1991) adds to
his observation that edge cities rarely coincide with existing government jurisdictions
by noting the presence of shadow or private
governmental forms.
If we can’t democratize Tysons Corner .
when so many American downtowns have
been superseded by developments of this
kind—a vast amount of American life will
never be subject to popular participation and
control (Frug, 1999, p. 106).
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2602
NICHOLAS A. PHELPS AND ANDREW M. WOOD
In Europe, the sorts of outer suburban
development coming forward and that
might be considered the functional equivalent of the likes of edge cities are, if not
contained by, then more closely aligned to
what is a more complete set of local government boundaries. Nevertheless, in the
South East region of the UK, for example,
their location and scale are now contested
primarily through participatory channels
and hence pose significant issues regarding
the role of representative democracy.
There is a sense then in which the in
between-ness of post-suburbia, rather like
the emergent regional governance arrangements in the South East of England
described by Allen and Cochrane (2007), is
made up of contingent assemblages of
agencies (including different tiers of government). Not the least among these agents
are those of a burgeoning private sector
technocratic strata in society which, once
largely within the public sector and in the
service of the state and its policies and
administrative hierarchies, is now just as
often mobilised in the service of highly particularistic interests in society. The question
remains then as to whether coherent political coalitions can emerge and sustain themselves in the face of such fragmentation of
interests, let alone coalesce around a new
politics of suburban and post-suburban retrofit (which we discuss later) given the relative absence of representative democracy.
This leads on to questions of how the
relational nature of suburban and postsuburban politics might be understood. It is
important here to try to reconcile a purely
topological view of networks of relations
with imaginaries and practices that adhere
to the territorial jurisdictions of elected government and other government agencies
(see also Allen and Cochrane, 2007, p. 1172).
Here, Feldman’s (1997) notion of ‘spatial
structures of regulation’—through which
different flows (materials, value, personnel,
information, property rights and authority)
and means of orchestrating those flows
(such as command, exchange, reciprocity,
altruism and custom)—coalesce comes very
close to the sort of territorial assemblages
alluded to by Allen and Cochrane.3 We are
familiar with the ways in which flows (notably materials, information, personnel) coalesce to become to a greater or lesser degree
place-bound by virtue of the extensive literature on the theory of agglomeration (Phelps,
2004; Phelps and Ozawa, 2003) and notions
of the scalar dependence of business and
government (Cox and Mair, 1991). We are
perhaps less familiar with the extent to
which the means of orchestrating these flows
congeal to create the sorts of territorial
assemblages of power referenced by Allen
and Cochrane. However, it seems certain
that something of the geographical fixity
implied in ‘vertical’ means of government
(such as coercion and command) has been
eroded not only by the continual flux of the
exchange of private transactions, but also by
the growing significance of ‘horizontal’
means (such as reciprocity, modelling and
seduction) of orchestrating flows and what
they imply for the mobility of ideas of, and
policies and practices within, suburban and
post-suburban governance.
Continuity in Change: The State and the
New Post-suburban Politics
Insights from examining the emerging
gravity of post-suburbia and its relational
geography can be related to the role of the
state in the unfolding contradictions in the
urbanisation of capital. In exploring the
new post-suburban politics, we seek to
make a connection between analysis of the
logic of the late modernist capitalist state
(Habermas, 1988; Offe, 1975, 1985) and the
contradictions of capitalist (sub)urbanisation (Harvey, 1985; Scott and Roweis,
1977; Walker, 1981) which now appear to
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THE NEW POST-SUBURBAN POLITICS?
be promoting a politicisation of side-effects
within a second modernity (Beck, 1992).
State intervention arises out of the contradictions and crisis tendencies associated
with the accumulation of capital in general
and the urbanisation of capital in particular
(Scott and Roweis, 1977). Whilst identifying
the dominant role of the private sector in
shaping such interventions, work in the
growth machine tradition has relatively
little to say about the state’s subsequent
unintended and contradictory impacts and
their effects on the private sector and urban
politics going forward. These unintended
effects of state intervention tend to become
magnified over time: ‘‘the state continually
recreates this contradiction [between private and collective action] at successively
higher levels of complexity’’ (Scott and
Roweis, 1977, p. 1110). Related to this is the
manner in which the ‘localist’ orientation of
the growth machine and urban regime concepts can obscure the intergovernmental
relations and extralocal state interventions
(and their unanticipated consequences) that
impinge on localised growth and growth
politics (Harding, 1994, 1997). We describe
this in Table 2 in terms of the relationship
of both the forms and tiers of government
intervention to urban politics in different
settlement types. The extent, timing and
legacies of state interventions significantly
shape the mode of urban politics in different places and in a single place over time.
The growth machine idea speaks to the
prominence of private-sector interests and,
more particularly still, landed business
interests in urban politics. However, even
in the US—in what we take as perhaps the
best concrete approximation of a free
market in land and property—state intervention has played a significant role in
shaping real estate markets and, as a result,
urban politics. Suburbia and post-suburbia
can themselves be seen as manifestations of
the contradictions apparent in the
2603
urbanisation of capital in which all tiers of
the state are implicated. Indeed, the state
and its interventions represent a critical
continuity between suburbia and post-suburbia. The suburbs formed part of a Fordist
‘spatial fix’ (Walker, 1981) that has itself,
and in its unanticipated consequences
(such as the extreme separation of land
uses and provision for automobility),
become a barrier to further accumulation
(Harvey, 1985, p. 122). There is a sense
here in which
it is not the crises, but ... the victories of capitalism which produce the new social form ... it
is ... normal modernization and further modernization which are dissolving the contours
of industrial society (Beck, 1994, p. 2).
The emergence of post-suburbia—seen as a
rounding-out of traditional suburbs into
cities in function but not form—and a new
politics associated with this might be seen as
embodying the search for a new (postFordist) spatial fix (Keil, 1994). Here, we see
continuity between the suburbia facilitated
by modern state interventions that now generate a host of unanticipated side-effects as
barriers to accumulation and the attempts of
a new post-suburban politics to ameliorate
them via the contemporary state interventions of a second modernity. Post-suburbia,
or what Young and Keil refer to as the inbetween city, can be contrasted to urban
spaces alternatively vacated by the state or
produced and sustained almost entirely by
the state. In this sense, post-suburbia represents a settlement form which is a ‘‘mixed
product of both, state presence and state
retreat’’ (Young and Keil, 2010, p. 90).
Moreover, these continuities can be seen
to have been parallelled by an evolution in
the mode of decision-making associated
with a transition in state interventions
from modernity to a second modernity or
what Offe (1975) terms the shift from
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2604
NICHOLAS A. PHELPS AND ANDREW M. WOOD
‘bureaucratic’ and ‘purposive-rational’ to
‘participatory’ modes of decision-making
within capitalist states. Each of these modes
has its unintended side-effects. Indeed, the
unintended, unsettling and publicising
effects of modern state interventions
weaken ‘traditions’ surrounding those
same interventions which, in turn, serves to
politicise areas of life previously regarded
as private (Habermas, 1988, p. 72). This has
led Beck (1992, p. 47) to argue that a
second modernity with a ‘‘grass-roots
developmental dynamic’’ has seen the politicisation of the burgeoning side-effects of
modernity. Arguably, this implies that participatory modes have become the signature of the state decision-making logic in
this second modernity while politics comes
to centre increasingly on participatory
rather than representative democratic
channels. Of course, these ‘participatory’
modes of decision-making reflecting and
responding to the politicisation of such
demands will have their own side-effects,
albeit perhaps as yet only barely discernible
(Beck et al., 2003). For a start, the ‘autonomisation’ of the consensus-building process under such participatory modes—
what planning theorists term collaborative
(Healey, 1997) or communicative planning
(Forester, 1989)—places the state under
pressures that overburden it (Offe, 1975, p.
140; 1985, p. 313). Gottdiener highlighted
this some time ago with respect to the evolving local politics of suburban development, arguing that
the outcome of the present pattern of political
response may very well be organized politicization of every single interest in the society as
the unanticipated environmental effects of
growth continue to proliferate (Gottdiener,
1977, p. 167).
Beck’s analysis of reflexive or second modernity is multifaceted and includes an
emphasis on the politicisation of the burgeoning environmental risks (the sideeffects) of modernity and processes of individualisation in society associated with the
rise of special-interest groups and identity
politics. What we wish to take from Beck’s
analysis at this point, in the context of the
new politics of post-suburbia, is the notion
of the politicisation of the side-effects of
modernity including not least the sideeffects of state interventions in that period.
Beck concentrates on politicisation of some
of the biggest and most risky side-effects of
modernist state interventions—such as
environmental pollution and nuclear technologies. Yet the unanticipated effects of
state interventions in promoting lowdensity suburban development can hardly
be understated, not least given their significant contribution to inducing global climate
change and their origin in the systemic
properties of automobility (Sheller and
Urry, 2000). They can also hardly be understated given how residential and associated
consumption patterns in the city-regions of
developing countries are rapidly converging
on those found in developed countries
(Leichenko and Solecki, 2005) as the export
of the US suburban lifestyle—actually a very
recent phenomenon—begins in earnest
(Beauregard, 2006). In short, one key aspect
around which the new post-suburban politics (as an emerging response to the sideeffects of modernist suburbanisation) will
coalesce, concerns the ‘retrofitting’ of suburbia into post-suburbia and the further urbanisation of post-suburbia.4
Dunham-Jones and Williamson suggest
that
The systematic development of suburban
sprawl was the big architectural project for
the last fifty years . the redevelopment of
sprawl into more urban, more connected,
more sustainable places is the big project for
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THE NEW POST-SUBURBAN POLITICS?
this century (Dunham-Jones and Williamson,
2009, p. v).
Some of this retrofitting might well be
insubstantial in function—a consciously
post-modern affectation in which
‘city centres’ become almost an externality of
fragmented urbanism; they are frequently grafted
onto the landscape as a[n] . afterthought by
developers and politicians concerned with identity and tradition (Dear, 2004, p. 503).
However, in other instances such retrofitting is potentially much more substantial in
nature, signalling the recasting of new settlements thought to lack sufficient agglomeration economies or to transform placeless
settlements into more self-contained urban
places. One example can be seen in the current planning proposals in the archetypal
edge city Tysons Corner, Virginia, seeking
to increase urban density and add new functions, such as additional public amenities.
These, in turn, are modelled on earlier
increases in building density in the older
Roslynn-Ballston suburbs in Arlington
County (Gardner, 2008).
Nevertheless, the obstacles to retrofitting
and increasing the density of relatively compact edge cities, let alone the vast expanses of
residential suburbs in the US, are immense.
Leinberger (2008, p. 75, cited in Young and
Keil, 2010) suggests that suburban transport
and utility infrastructures are both difficult
and costly to re-engineer or redevelop in
order to support greater density of development and population. In any case, such
retrofitting assumes a political will and popular support which is questionable in a context
in which the vestiges of suburban politics
and ideology remain at large. Dunham-Jones
and Williamson (2009, p. 177) cite the lack
of strong political leadership, neighbourhood
resistance to change and preference for slowgrowth policies among the reasons that serve
2605
to prohibit the urbanisation of edge cities. To
these, we would add the previously noted
slow progress of suturing together the intergovernmental relations required to deliver
the significant infrastructure improvements
enabling direction to the market.
In Europe, concerns over the future
prospects of suburban developments have
also been apparent. In the UK, these include
older residential suburbs and their district
centres. They also include recent ‘out-oftown’ retail and office developments which
might be regarded as the very muted
approximation to the edge city-style development of the US. In providing a latent
framework for future development pressures, these out-of-town developments
present a significant threat to compact
urban forms and the extension of infrastructure and public transport networks
(see Gwilliam et al., 1998). In addition, the
comprehensive nature of the redevelopment
challenge posed by the decline of a particular set of suburbs in the UK with Fordistera mass employment and public residential
developments is akin to that presented by
the large public housing banlieue complexes
found more frequently in the suburbs of
mainland European city-regions.
The curious politics of ‘middle’ England
represents a significant barrier to suburban
and post-suburban retrofit. Taken as a
whole, the porous but highly urbanised
South East of England largely functions as
one great suburb for the London economy
in which nevertheless cities, towns, suburbs
and even partial parallels to edge city development have their own local institutions,
governments and wider political networks
(Charlesworth and Cochrane, 1994, p.
1725). Here, a significant and politically
populist suburbanisation curiously co-exists
with an essentially middle and aristocratic
class politics attached to notions of preserving the character and separate identity of
historical villages, towns and cities. In this
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2606
NICHOLAS A. PHELPS AND ANDREW M. WOOD
context, local authorities in Croydon,
Milton Keynes and South Hampshire with a
significant suburban complexion are conspicuous in actively seeking to accommodate further growth and leverage state
funding for infrastructure improvements.
To be sure, the politics of place-making
here and elsewhere in Europe is subject to
the same pressures derived from interlocality competition in the US. However, there is
anecdotal evidence to suggest that such retrofitting can have a more substantial and
progressive basis, not least as a result of the
greater planning powers of local governments, the remnants of a stronger role for
representative democracy in a politics of
place-making and state provision for collective consumption. To take one example, the
socialist politics enduring from the grassroots political movements of the 1960s has
seen Getafe transformed from a dormitory
suburb for Madrid to a city now regarded as
the ‘capital of the South’ of the Madrid metropolitan region. It has been transformed
from a 1960s settlement lacking basic amenities and services into a settlement that is
now more integrated as a single place by
virtue of major infrastructure remediation
and investment in major facilities such as a
university, hospital and cultural centres
(Phelps et al., 2006b). This politics of (post-)
suburban retrofit is not simply a matter of
local politics but centrally involves the
mobilisation of political and administrative resources and imaginaries at multiple
territorial scales.
Conclusion
The question of a distinctively postsuburban politics can be considered part of
a broader need to sensitise urban political
theory to differences in settlement types and
to the evolution of individual settlements.
In this paper, we have sought to address this
issue by linking a discussion of urban politics in different settlement types to structural changes in capitalism. We have
deliberately avoided talk of a post-Fordist
politics that might somehow apply in all
settlements everywhere, but have attempted
instead to consider how the role of the state
and the unfolding contradictions of past
state interventions bring forward new political objects and interventions that are geographically differentiated with regard to
settlements within metropolitan regions.
We have done so in a necessarily interdisciplinary way, drawing upon literature from
sociology, geography and urban planning.
Sociological perspectives might yet usefully
begin to explore in greater detail subtle
changes in the ideology associated with suburbia as the socioeconomic complexions of
declining and stable suburbs and those that
have somehow become post-suburban continue to diverge. Geography is central to
understanding the new post-suburban politics not least because post-suburbs, as a new
and hard-to-define form of settlement
space, force us to consider the relational
nature of politics at work across the heavily
urbanised regions that are now apparent in
many advanced nations. We have returned
to the urban planning literature as one that
is essential in providing an appreciation of
the important continuities in the role of
state intervention and the unintended consequences of such intervention in the eras of
late and second modernity.
If the retrofit of suburbia is truly taken
up as the architectural, engineering and
planning project of this century (DunhamJones and Williamson, 2009), then it is one
that is truly vast with a corresponding array
of questions for urban politics, policy and
political theory that go well beyond those
covered in this paper. Among the questions
considered in this paper, several stand out
as particularly worthy of further investigation. It seems obvious that the prospect of
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THE NEW POST-SUBURBAN POLITICS?
suburban retrofit re-ignites analytical consideration of the politics of collective consumption and production, notably, but not
exclusively regarding the sorts of fixed infrastructure developments that may have been
considered passé with the splintering urbanism of a post-modern era (Graham and
Marvin, 2000). Any retrofits of the suburban
expanses of the heavily urbanised regions
that are now the primary organising ‘containers’ of advanced capitalism also raise the
prospect and possibilities for constructing a
distinctly decentred (Frug, 1999) postsuburban regional-level consciousness and
politics in order to ameliorate the worst
excesses of interauthority competition characteristic of suburbs of the late modern era.
This is far from a simple question as views
divide on the necessity for and value of a
specifically regional-level reimaging of government and redistributive arrangements
(Orfield, 2002) when set against the possibly
forlorn hopes for a decentred, relational
ethics in local politics and government
(Frug, 1999).
Notes
1. Suburbs have rarely been residentially or
industrially mono-functional (Hise, 1997;
Muller, 1981; Walker and Lewis, 2001).
2. LAAs ‘‘set out the priorities for a local area
agreed between central government and a
local area and other key partners at the local
level. LAAs simplify some central funding,
help join up public services more effectively
and allow greater flexibility for local solutions to local circumstances’’. MAAs extend
this principle covering ‘‘the economic footprint of an area and are an important
mechanism for driving growth and managing economic shocks’’ (see: http://www.com
munities.gov.uk/localgovernment/performan
ceframeworkpartnerships).
3. Other means of orchestrating flows can be
distinguished. Allen’s (2002) discussion of
the relational properties of power introduces
2607
the notion of seduction, while Braithwaite
and Drahos’ (2000) work on the rise of
global regulatory practices highlights the
likes of modelling.
4. The piecemeal retrofit of infrastructure, local
services and amenities has also featured in
the history of modern suburbs. In Europe,
this has occurred with modest impact on the
morphology of suburbs tied closely to compact city-regions. If the US case is indicative,
post-suburban retrofit may be of a different
order entailing the significant re-working of
suburban space and morphology.
Funding Statement
This paper arises out of the research ‘Governing
post-suburban growth’ funded by the UK
Economic and Social Research Council (RES062-23-0924).
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to Martin Jones, Gordon
MacLeod and participants in sessions on ‘the new
urban politics two decades on’ at the annual conference of the Association of American Geographers
in Las Vegas 22–27 March 2009 as well as to Danny
MacKinnon and referees for their comments on an
earlier version of this paper.
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