Working Paper Series No. 02
Suburban Imaginaries and Metropolitan Realities in North America
Jan Nijman and Tom Clery
© Jan Nijman & Tom Clery
Centre for Urban Studies
Working Paper
October 2013
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Editorial Committee CUS Working Paper Series
Prof. Jan Nijman
Dr. Wouter van Gent
Dr. Rivke Jaffe
Dr. Richard Ronald
Dr. Darshan Vigneswaran
Centre for Urban Studies
University of Amsterdam
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of Amsterdam
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Suburban Imaginaries and Metropolitan Realities in
North America
Jan Nijman and Tom Clery
Abstract
North America may be considered the ‘birthplace’ of the prototypical 20th century suburb. From there,
common usage of the terms suburb and suburbanization spread to the rest of the Western world, and then across the
globe. It has become commonplace to say that the world is experiencing an urban revolution but one could well argue
that, more precisely, most of the present-day growth of urban populations occurs in suburbs or other peri-urban areas.
In more highly urbanized societies such as North America, large urban regions have formed in part through
amalgamation of previously distinct cities, with major parts of these regions generally considered as suburbs of one sort
or the other. It is important to reassess the notion of suburb and suburbanization in North America; to question the
historical evolution of suburbs; and to debate whether the archetypal suburb ever really existed. This is important with
regard to our understanding of the configuration of North American cities in their own right but also in terms of the
application of suburban concepts elsewhere in the world.
1
Introduction
North America, and especially the United States, may be considered the 'birthplace' of the
prototypical 20th century suburb. It was in the wake of the Second World War that the
process of suburbanization accelerated to such unprecedented levels that it fundamentally
reordered the US city. During this time, common usage of the terms suburb and
suburbanization spread to the rest of the Western world, and then across the globe.
Suburbanization in the US was perhaps more forceful than anywhere in the world – for
reasons discussed below– but that does not make the phenomenon any easier to grasp. The
archetypical ‘sitcom’ suburb of the 1950s –white, middle class households with male
breadwinners in single family homes— assumed near mythical proportions; in itself, good
reason to question its veracity. While it is evident that the archetype did not last more than
a couple of decades, it is not so clear what took its place. Moreover, its alleged ubiquity
may have reflected a sort of (ideological) fixation on one particular feature in a much more
varied and restless urban landscape.
A reconsideration of the notions of suburb and suburbanization, of their validity at present
times, and of the general governance structures in which they unfolded, requires attention
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to historical evolution as well as geographical variation. In the short space of this chapter,
we must do so succinctly, concentrating on the most salient turns in the development of
US suburbs from the late 18th century to the present. The fact that suburbanization
predates the 1950s is often overlooked; it is important to track the origins and evolution of
the process if we are to make sense of its meaning, in the context of the city at large.
Our focus is on the formation of suburbs (including their physical and social characteristics)
but also on suburban governance: the “modalities and mechanisms” that are instrumental
to their emergence and evolution (Ekers, Hamel and Keil 2012). These modalities and
mechanisms pertain to the realms of the state (and regulation), the market, and nongovernmental authority structures such as homeowner associations and gated communities.
Broadly speaking, it is through the concept of governance that we seek to understand the
logic of suburbanization. To be sure, suburban governance varies across space and over
time, also within the United States.
There is a considerable literature on suburbanization in the United States and along the way
we shall point to some of the key debates. First, it is important to distinguish between the
suburban ideal versus its material expressions; second, we must acknowledge the
distinction between suburban form and suburbanization process; third, the literature
divides between
voluntaristic
(choice, agency) and
structuralist conditions of
suburbanization; and, finally, there is the question as to whether suburbanization has
primarily been a residential phenomenon or also involved, from the start, an industrial
component.
Our discussion will for the most part adhere to chronological order: beginning with the
origins of the suburban ideal; leading to incipient suburbanization in early industrial times
and accelerating in late industrial times; followed by the postwar suburban tide; and then
entering the present era of polycentric or post-polycentric metropolitan regions. Most of
the second half of the chapter focuses on recent trends and the present state of US suburbs
and prevailing modes of governance.
An interesting aspect of the notion of the suburb is that it connotes a settled, stable,
situation. Certainly this was important to the 1950s idea of the suburb where white middle
class families had ‘arrived’. The suburb embodied the achievement of an ideal, the good life;
it was harmonious, predictable, and secure, and change was not a part of that dreamy
constellation. However, in reality the suburb as a spatial entity is a momentary piece of an
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urban puzzle that is always reconfiguring, spatially, economically, socially, and in terms of
governance. In the United States, at least, urbanization (and suburbanization) is an ongoing
process following, in large part, the coupled logics of investment and (re)development (Coe,
Kelly and Yeung 2007). It implies a ceaseless construction of the new and reconstruction of
the old. It appears that, in the United States at least, the traditional idea, or imaginary, of
the suburb has proven a great deal more tenacious than its material counterpart.
2
Escape from the Industrial City
The term suburb, in the meaning of a place on the urban fringe, is of English origins and
can be dated back as far as the 14th century, even if it did not really acquire currency until
the 18th century – in England as well as in the United States. In preindustrial times, suburbs
were viewed as undesirable and shady places on the edge of town; marginal neighborhoods
with a mix of the poor and people with licentious habits. The word “urbane” instead
referred to sophistication, elegance, and high-class. The elites occupied the center of these
compact pre-industrial cities that mixed residential and economic functions (trade, services).
This arrangement came to an end with the industrial revolution. Cities became sites of
industrial production, often with detrimental environmental effects, and they grew much
more dense. According to authors like Fishman (1987), Hayden (2003), and others, this
resulted in a growing interest of the elites in new housing on the urban periphery: home as
a refuge from work, as a source of happiness and goodness. Upper class status became
associated with mansions on large estates in a quiet, lush, suburban environment while the
city center turned into a scene of congestion, pollution, crime, and crowded working class
residential areas. If industrialization is commonly associated with urbanization, it should be
added that it was associated, too, with the beginnings of suburbanization as we know it.
The new suburbia of the mid-19th century in places such as West Philadelphia, says
Fishman (1987, 21), represented a “collective assertion of class wealth and privilege.” It was
based on exclusion and segregation. If bourgeois demand for grand suburban living drove
the process, this cultural impetus was soon accompanied by economic motives: the
transformation of agricultural lands just outside the city into residential building plots was
by definition a lucrative business (see, e.g., West Philadelphia Community History Center
2012). In some cities, the newly forming suburbs had a strong ethnic identity and involved
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recent (successful) immigrant communities, such as German-dominated northwest
Milwaukee of the 1890s (Kenny 2008).
At this time, suburbanization was by and large conditioned by the market and driven by
choice for the few who had the luxury to afford it. Suburbanization proceeded faster in the
United States than in England or elsewhere in Europe because industrialization was more
vigorous and sustained, and as such fueled a more significant response by way of
suburbanization. By the late 19th century, the US had become the biggest industrial power
in the world.
But there was another, cultural reason that suburbanization became such a salient
expression in the American landscape. The individualized, nuclear, family was very much
an American institution (closely related to the ‘American Dream’) and demanded a single
family home – which was easier to realize in the spacious suburbs than in the city center.
Hayden (2003, 5-6) observes that, “Unlike any other affluent civilization, Americans have
idealized the house and yard rather than the model neighborhood or the ideal town.” The
possible realization of this ideal in the green suburbs, at a time when existing cities had
rapidly lost their appeal, was at times imbued with religion: in 1921 the National Real
Estate Journal wrote that the “Garden of Eden” was the “first subdivision” (National Real
Estate Journal 1921, 22). The new suburb, in this ideology, was at once frontier and destiny.
3
Towards Metropolis: Streetcars and Automobiles
If the invention of the new suburb reflected bourgeois imaginaries of utopia, in reality the
process of suburbanization quickly assumed broader significance and a more complicated
spatiality. First of all, the elite’s escapism from inner city chaos applied not only to
residential preferences but also to work. The (re)location of industrial activity to the edges
of these still compact cities –even more so than the suburbanization of residential
functions—often required newly built infrastructures (canals, roads, sewers, etc.) and relied
on the ownership classes garnering local or state government funding.
By the mid-19th century, a system of dense industrial districts were embedded throughout the
Philadelphia metropolitan area, Boston contained a set of distinct industrial suburbs specializing in
such products as shoes, machinery, and textiles, and a distinct set of manufacturing districts quickly
developed in cities such as Baltimore, Montreal, Toronto, and Los Angeles. If these districts were close
enough to the centre to be confused for a single manufacturing core, by the turn of the century,
urbanization had reached the metropolitan scale. Since at least 1850, the North American city has
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grown largely through the accretion of new industrial districts at the urban fringe, becoming multimodal
in the process. (Walker and Lewis 2001, 9-10; also see Taylor 1915)
The number and kinds of residential suburbs increased, too (Douglass 1925). Since the
1890s, the introduction of the electric streetcar in cities across the United States, from
Portland to Miami, pushed suburbanization along (Warner 1962). Increasingly, it was the
middle and lower middle classes who followed the elite out of the central city, to form
streetcar suburbs, continuous built-up corridors from the core to the edge of town. The
suburb of West Philadelphia, probably one of the biggest of that era, doubled in population
between 1890 and 1910 to reach 200,000 (West Philadelphia Community History Center
2012).
Thus, notwithstanding the powerful and more or less autonomous forces of the market,
the state soon became indispensable: the suburbanization of factories demanded
infrastructural projects, regulation of peripheral urban land markets, and zoning. And as
residential suburbanization increased, the state came in to facilitate public services such as
garbage collection and water provision. Gradually, suburbanization became embedded in a
governance structure where market and state functioned in tandem – but with the market
always leading.
The land development and real estate industry became more organized and pro-active and
began to target potential first-time homebuyers. So-called “Why Pay Rent” campaigns from
around the turn of the century promoted suburban living to middle and working class
households. Not unlike the fate met by home buyers in the early 21st century (!), many were
lured into homeownership they could barely afford, struggling “up a down escalator”
entranced with dreams of economic security, saddled with debt, and confused by a false
sense of social mobility (Edel et al 1984).
Increasingly, it seems, demand for suburban living was being stimulated and fabricated on
the supply side. Between 1870 and 1920, developers enlarged their area of operations, took
a broader view of the urban, and began to promote urban peripheries, often working in
partnership with transit owners, utility companies, and local government.
The building boom of the ‘Roaring Twenties’ accelerated the creation of suburbs, made
possible by the rise of the powerful real estate and construction lobby, in conjunction with
new federal regulations that helped subsidize “private development of residential and
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commercial property on a national basis – largely though tax, banking, and insurance
systems...” (Hayden 2003, 4).
It was also made possible, of course, by the introduction of the automobile, which rapidly
increased spatial mobility and allowed access to a greater number of potential suburban
designations. Prior to World War Two, cars were a luxury item out of reach for the bulk of
the working classes. In the 1910s and 1920s some new suburbs were designed specifically
for the use of automobiles and they were emphatically upscale with big lots, winding roads,
lush vegetation, and lacking sidewalks. Such suburbs were exclusive, to be sure, and very
different in appearance and composition from a range of other suburbs that had already
formed by this time.
The exclusivity of the suburb, the former bourgeois utopia, was under pressure from the
very beginning. Indeed, it has been argued that “prewar suburbs were as socially diverse as
the cities that they surrounded, and it is doubtful whether the city-suburban dichotomy was
very significant” (Harris and Lewis 2001, 263). Indeed, some have suggested that, from the
1860s to World War Two, “suburbs were generally of lower status than central cities in all
but the most populous metropolitan areas” (Gardner 2001, 311). In many big cities,
suburbs had formed with a strong working class identity, such as South Gate in southern
Los Angeles (Nicolaides 2004; Harris 1992).
Whilst exclusive upper-middle suburbs based around the automobile were booming in the
1920s, suburban enclaves of self-built informal communities were also spreading, especially
in fast growing industrial cities like Detroit or Cleveland. During the first half of the
twentieth century, lower-income suburban settlers, despite often holding legal title to their
property (Harris 2001), sometimes inhabited unregulated, unplanned and self-built
residential areas. To these suburbanites (not rarely congregations of recent foreign
immigrants), being marginalized from public view was a means to escape societal
denigration while procuring low and affordable property prices. At the same time, the
‘invisibility’ of these informal settlements allowed traditional suburbs to maintain their
pristine image whilst obscuring governmental responsibilities to implement infrastructure
and facilities in such ‘irregular’ areas.
In all, on the eve of World War Two, a new urban form had emerged due to
decentralization of not just a broader part of the urban population but also of industries,
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services, and retail activities. The process was conditioned by changing technological,
economic, and regulatory conditions. Thus far, it had been a relatively slow process
(Gardner 2001), and massive changes were still ahead.
4
Runaway Suburbanization after 1945
Suburbanization after World War Two took on such massive proportions that it
fundamentally altered the urban order. In the words of Hayden (2003, 10), “Suburban
trends in the mid-1920s became a suburban tide in the 1950s.” From 1950 to 1980, the
suburban population of the United States tripled; by 1970, more people lived in suburbs
than in either central cities or in the countryside; by the year 2000, the suburban population
exceeded that of central cities and rural areas combined. Suburbanization was not new, but
sometimes enough of a quantitative change implies a qualitative transformation. The
United States had become a “suburban nation” (Duany et al. 2000).
Reacting to these landmark changes, the 1960 Census adopted the category of Metropolitan
Statistical Area with a ‘central city’ versus commuting hinterland or ‘suburbs’ (U.S. Bureau
of the Budget 1964; Champion 2001). It provided, for the first time, an official definition
of the suburb and it did so in opposition to the central city, thereby forging a dichotomy
that corresponded to traditional imaginaries but that in reality had never been so clear-cut.
The dichotomy was reinforced as central cities in many parts of the United States declined,
economically and socially, as a result of deindustrialization (loss of jobs) and selective
outmigration (suburbanization) since the early 1960s. Inner city decay, thus, had the effect
of reinforcing earlier idealistic visions of the suburb. The suburb was everything the city
was not: clean, green, spacious, safe, quiet, harmonious, predictable, and homogeneous.
The deeply American and ideologically inspired notion of the suburb was revitalized and
readied for mass-commodification. There is no doubt that the traditional imaginary of the
exclusive suburb played an important role in increasing the desirability of suburbs
following the war to many of those (working and middle classes) that had previously been
excluded.
Writing about the suburbanization in the mid-20th century, Hanlon et al. (2010, 6) observe
that, far from a restricted elitist bourgeois ideal, the suburbs were now part of an American
Dream for all:
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There are two mythic journeys in the US. The first … was the trek to the West, ending in
California. The second, the archetypal journey of the mid-20th century, was from the city to the
suburbs. … it was a quest signifying acculturation, Americanization, and ultimately success. In
this second mythic American journey, the family car replaced the covered wagon, and the singlefamily home displaced the family homestead as iconic representations.
At a more mundane level, it was hardly a trivial coincidence that typical family cars
marketed in the US since the 1960s were wagons and (later) vans and SUVs, carrying such
designations as Explorer, Journey, Odyssey, or Caravan. The new suburban imaginary was
ingrained in the American psyche on television in a number of wildly popular 1950s
sitcoms that would be replicated in the following decades (Sharpe and Wollock 1994). The
typical suburb was portrayed as the peaceful and comfortable home of white middle class
families with traditional gender stereotypes.
The renewed suburban imaginary very much articulated the desires and choices of
American households, and at a time that demand for housing was significantly up
(unfulfilled demand in the wake of the Great Depression followed by World War Two and
the baby boom). But there is no doubt that the process of suburbanization was, more than
ever, driven and facilitated by corporate interests and government intervention. The
construction of Levittown, the archetypal 1950s suburb, was the well-documented result of
these new governance modalities. The Levitt family planned this Long Island subdivision at
the scale of a town but did not include any of the necessary services such as garbage
collection, schools, or roads – these responsibilities were passed on to government and
were financed through tax-dollars. It was a new kind of business, made possible through a
shifting regulatory environment, and served as a blueprint for developments across the
country:
Postwar suburbs represented the deliberate intervention of the federal government into the financing
of single-family housing across the nation. For the first time, the federal government provided
massive aid directed to developers (whose loans were insured by the Federal Housing
Administration, FHA) and white male homeowners (who could get Veterans' Administration
guarantees for mortgages at four percent, with little or nothing down, and then deduct their
mortgage interest payments from their taxable income for 30 years). (Hayden 2001)
Suburbanization, one might say, had become the business of an extremely powerful
industrial conglomerate that employed (and helped generate) the American suburban
imaginary to full effect. It included huge corporations such as General Motors (which
offered a helping hand in the demise of the electric streetcar) and General Electric (which
had embarked on the mass production of household appliances for single family homes);
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local “growth machines” (Molotch 1976) consisting of developers, builders, and banks;
local governments that provided conducive zoning and building regulatory frameworks,
and sometimes direct subsidies; and, last but not least, a federal government that was
central to the financing of homeownership, the construction of highways, and which in
various ways espoused suburban ideologies. In extreme form and with Cold War
intonations, such ideologies were articulated by the likes of Joseph McCarthy, who “hated
multifamily designs as well as public funding for shelter” and declared public housing “a
breeding ground for communists.” (Seal 2003).
Previously ignored informal residential areas on the urban fringe increasingly came within
range of voracious developers and regulatory state agencies. By implementing various
housing regulations and redevelopment initiatives many informal suburban settlements
were disbanded and removed. The implementation of stricter building regulations for
example meant that self-constructed housing was discouraged or destroyed rather than
promoted and assisted. Sometimes, the construction of freeway systems through these
informal areas caused further displacement.
This post-war rise in regulation brought about the demise of many self-built settlements
but it also ushered in another irregular housing trend in US society – the rise of the mobile
home. For some lower income households, trailer-ownership has been a cheap and flexible
(movable) alternative to either renting or buying a regular home. By 1956, four million
Americans had opted to make them their primary form of residence. Predictably, trailer
parks quickly became seen as another threat to permanent suburban communities (Field,
2005) and they have been effectively zoned out of the more upscale suburban landscapes.
Besides the massive acceleration of population shifts to the suburbs (along with shopping
malls, hospitals, schools, and other service and retail activities), there was a significant
increase in the suburbanization of office work. It was another episode, one might say, of
corporate “escapism from capitalist reality” (Walker 1981, 396). Until World War Two,
offices tended to be located either in central business districts or near factories away from
the center. Neither of these locations was particularly attractive and they became
unnecessary with the introduction of more flexible and separated corporate functions and
new management structures since the 1950s and 1960s (Mozingo 2011). The suburbs were
considered more representative, easier traversed, more predictable and less risky, and better
for business. It was a trend that gathered momentum over the decades and resulted in the
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proliferation of suburban office parks and corporate campuses. Once again, economic logic
was entwined with esthetic values:
And while the restructuring of activities and transport made sense in the efficiency calculus of
capitalism, the inclusion of green space reflected a more ineffable yet deeply ingrained value – the
ideal of the pastoral in the American landscape. (Mozingo 2011, 8)
The accelerated suburbanization of work, the formation in the suburbs of clusters of
economic activity, and the apparent lessening of interdependence between suburb and
central city led some observers to declare the arrival of a new metropolitan era. Already in
1975, Birch spoke of a transition “from suburb to urban place” (Birch, 25). By 1981, Muller
referred to suburbia as "the essence of the late-twentieth century American city," and
argued that the "burgeoning new centers" of the suburbs had transformed it into an
“increasingly independent and dominant outer city." It represented, he asserted, "a wholly
new metropolitan reality" (Muller 1981; also see Berry and Cohen 1973).
5
Suburbs of the Last Resort
To some, the transformation of the United States into a suburban nation (Jackson 1985;
Duany et al 2001) actually signaled the end of the suburban ideal. In 1987, Fishman argued
that:
the suburb since 1945 has lost its traditional meaning and function as a satellite of the central city.
Where peripheral communities had once excluded industry and large-scale commerce, the suburb now
becomes the heartland of the most rapidly expanding elements of the late 20th century economy. … As
both core and periphery are swallowed up in seemingly endless multi-centered regions, where can one find
suburbia? (Fishman 1987, 29)
In his view, the days of the classic suburb, the bourgeois utopia, were long gone and had
made way for the “post-suburb” or “technoburb.”
Since the 1960s, architectural critics had begun to depict suburbs as lowbrow, boring, and
banal. The monotonous, mass-produced subdivisions of the postwar years certainly were a
long way from the carefully designed elite suburban mansions of the early 19th century.
More importantly, suburban culture as a whole came to be regarded as uninteresting,
conservative, and spiritless. It is not hard to discern elitist undertones in such critiques,
even if the critics themselves were very much socially engaged. Examples include “Jane
Jacobs's (1961) picture of her own idyllically bohemian Lower Manhattan neighborhood in
The Death and Life of Great American Cities and the wild anger at suburban piggery that
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pervades James Howard Kunstler's (1993) The Geography of Nowhere” (Seal 2003).
Perhaps we are now past such clichéd critiques of the suburbs, but it is important to note
that the esthetic devaluation of suburbs among critics coincided with increased access to
suburbs by lower income strata of the population – and a home in the suburbs was still
sold as a privileged place in the sun along with all the traditional narratives of the past
(Knox 2008). In other words, there emerged a clear disparity of (changing) discourses
about the suburb. If this could in some ways be reduced to a typical class-based urge for
distinction (Bourdieu 1984), it also reflected a real decline in the standard of living in many
suburbs.
Suburban living increasingly attracted lower income strata; became increasingly
standardized; and a number of negative qualities thus far associated with the decaying
central city had gone suburban as well. Suburban poverty increased, as did fiscal stress,
crime and social problems like housing deterioration, homelessness or drug abuse (Sharpe
and Wollock 1994; Hanlon 2010). By 2010, more people lived in poverty in the suburbs
than did in central cities and there has also been a convergence in crime rates. Between
2000 and 2008, suburbs in the country’s largest metro areas saw their poor population grow
by 25 percent—almost five times faster than primary cities and well ahead of the growth
seen in smaller metro areas and non-metropolitan communities. At the same time, the last
decade witnessed gentrification of the city, wealth moving back in (Brookings Institution
2011).
The suburban population continued to grow apace but increasingly it wasn’t because
Americans were passionately pursuing their dreams and seeing them fulfilled – it was
because many people did not have anywhere else to go. As gentrification started to take
shape in some parts of the central city, pushing prices up, while other parts of the center
continued to be problematic, many turned to the suburbs because of affordability. If
homeownership was the goal, there was little else than the suburbs, and at an ever-greater
distance from the city. Increasingly, then, suburban living was less a matter of choice and
more a matter of financial constraints and necessity. Even then, homeownership (in the
suburbs) proved a risky proposition. The mortgage crisis that began in 2008 and that still
left (in 2013) nearly 20 percent of homeowners “under water” with negative equity is
particularly widespread in US suburbs (Ellis 2010; CoreLogic 2013).
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New Metropolitan Realities
This new and increasingly complex metropolitan reality, with regard to suburban form, can
be encapsulated in four points. First, there has been, at the aggregate level, a progressive
blurring of the distinction between city center and suburb in terms of social composition.
This convergence was mostly due to the suburbanization of hitherto excluded lower
income strata and ethnic minorities (Brookings Institution 2011). While suburbs are still
less ethnically diverse than central cities, they are quickly gaining in diversity (more so than
central cities), with the 2010 Census reporting that well over a third of the suburban
population is now ‘non-white.’ The proportion of foreign immigrants, too, is increasing
faster in suburbs than in central cities.
It is important to remember that the suburbanization of the working classes and of ethnic
minorities was often crowded out of the prevailing suburbanization narratives in the past.
Wiese (2006) wryly observed that “historians have done a better job excluding African
Americans from the suburbs than even white suburbanites.” And Kruse and Sugrue
(2006:4) refer to the “working-class world of modest houses, apartments, and trailer parks
[which] was central to suburbia, but nonetheless remained on the periphery of suburban
historiography”. In other words, this diversification of the suburbs is not quite as radical a
change as it is sometimes portrayed.
Second, while suburbs are becoming more diverse in the aggregate (at a larger scale), the
variety of suburbs has also increased significantly and this actually means that diversity
within suburbs remains very limited. There are now many types of suburbs, but they are
generally not very diverse in themselves. Indeed, as we will see in the next section, there is
strong evidence of growing segregation and exclusion between suburbs. This, in turn,
implies continued contrasts between central cities and most individual suburbs, also in
terms of governance:
Most suburban jurisdictions are small and have relatively homogeneous populations, which makes
it easier to secure consensus on exclusionary policies than is commonly the case in larger and more
heterogeneous cities. (Sharpe and Wollock 1994, 12)
Third, the suburban landscape has witnessed the creation of relatively high-density clusters
of economic activity and residential functions. In his book Edge City, Garreau argued that
“density is back.” Edge cities, high-rise clusters of office space and apartment living along
with urban amenities, had sprung up across suburbia, contributing in another way to the
blurring of city-suburb distinctions. And this was not just a matter of form; it also eroded
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the city-suburb relationship. By the mid-1990s, about twice as many people commuted to
work within suburbs as commuted between them and cities.” (Sharpe and Wollock 1994, 2).
The classical monocentric city belonged to the past; the polycentric metropolis had arrived.
This view was nuanced by Lang (2003) who introduced the notion of “edgeless cities.” He
does not so much argue against the existence of edge cities but points to what he considers
a more widespread (and therefore more significant) phenomenon: free-form clusters of
office space of various sizes and configurations that can be found across suburbia. Edgeless
cities are not as conspicuous as edge cities (especially big edge cities like Tysons Corner,
Virginia, or Coral Gables in South Florida) and do not have the density or cohesiveness of
edge cities. They are made up of free-standing buildings, office parks, or small clusters of
buildings of varying densities, strung along suburban interstates, and major arterials. They
are not as big as edge cities and, more importantly, not as dense. Their distribution varies
from one metro area to the other. Moreover, it is argued that such clusters had been there
all along, at least since the 1960s: “the longstanding presence of edgeless cities means …
that sprawl never went away” (Lang 2003, 1). As edge cities emerged, so did edgeless cities
– but as edge cities slowed since the late 1980s, edgeless cities continued to proliferate.
Lang’s research indicates that edgeless cities, in most metropolitan areas, now contain
double the office space of edge cities. He emphasizes that edgeless cities are not “edge cities
waiting to happen” but constitute a crucial dimension of the 21st century metropolis:
Suburbia’s economy reached an unprecedented diversity by the 1980s, as specialized service
enterprises of every kind were established outside central business districts. …Yet even as they
become more urban, suburbs maintain a distinct pattern. A new metropolitan form therefore has
emerged in the past several decades: low density, automobile dependent, and dispersed. Not quite the
traditional city, suburb, or exurb, but with elements of all three, it is the still-emergent America on
the mall, the beltway, the subdivision, the multiplex movie theater, the drive-through fast-food outlet,
the low-rise office cube, and the shopping strip. (Lang 2003, 9)
The significance of edge cities and edgeless cities is illustrated in the fact that by 2010,
nearly half (45.1 percent) of the US metropolitan population is working in locations more
than ten miles from downtown and only about one-fifth has a workplace within three miles
of downtown (Brookings Institution 2011).
5
Splintering Urban Governance
One of the strongest indications of the growing diversity among suburbs, and of their
exclusiveness, is found in the enormous proliferation of sub-local government and
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governance in the past three or four decades, As metropolitan areas expanded, government
became ever more fragmented and this fragmentation was compounded by the rescaling of
state functions in the neoliberal era (also see Peck’s contribution to this volume). There are
in the United States presently about 90,000 local governments including municipalities,
towns, townships, school districts, water management districts, and so on – these are all
local government institutions. The combined number of municipalities and town(ships) is
about 19,500, compared to 16,800 in 1952. The difference points to roughly 2,700
municipal incorporations in the past half-century, most of which entail secession from
existing municipalities or new independence within a county. Incorporation, in the United
States, is almost always driven by consideration of fiscal independence and/or spatial
exclusion. As Kruse and Sugrue (2006, 6) note, “in postwar metropolitan America, where
you lived has determined your access to goods and services and how much they cost in the
form of your taxes.”
Recent decades have also witnessed a rapid increase in the number of ‘Community
Redevelopment Associations’ or ‘Business Improvement Districts’ (Nelson 2009). The
latter typically concern primarily business districts but often contain residential areas while
the former suggest a primary focus on residential communities but often contain a business
component. CRAs and BIDs are generally separate agencies created by local governments.
At the sub-local residential level, the trends are simply astonishing, as shown in the table
below. Between 1970 and 2011, the number of association-governed residential
communities rose from 10,000 to 314,200. By 2011, more than 62 million people in the
United States resided in association-governed communities: homeowners associations,
condominiums, cooperatives and other planned communities (but not, for example,
Charter Schools). Homeowners associations and other planned communities accounted for
50-53 percent of the totals above, condominiums for 45-48 percent and cooperatives for 34 percent.
Table 1: Estimated number of U.S. association-governed communities and individual housing units and
residents within those communities (source: Community Associations Institute, Falls Church, VA, 2012.
See http://www.caionline.org/info/research/Pages/default.aspx).
Year
1970
1990
2011
Communities
10,000
130,000
314,200
Housing Units
701,000
11.6 million
25.1 million
16
Residents
2.1 million
29.6 million
62.3 million
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The patterns of local and sub-local government and governance vary considerably across
the United States, especially between the older parts of the Northeast and more recent
Sunbelt cities. The gradual growth and expansion of older American cities has generally
resulted in a steady increase of the number of local governments (municipalities, school
districts, and other taxing authorities). The Chicago metropolitan area, for example
contains no less than 569 local governments. At the other extreme, the Las Vegas metro
area has only 13 local governments. This does not mean, however, that Las Vegas is less
fragmented and more centrally governed—in fact the opposite is true. The difference lies
in the relative importance of private sub-local governance. In more recent metropolitan
areas like Las Vegas, private sub-local governance is much more prevalent than in Chicago
and their territories tend to be smaller than the typical municipal suburb of Chicago
(Nelson 2009).
The most salient design that has accompanied the rise of private governance is, of course,
that of the gated community – which actually presents itself in a variety of forms (and
makes the phenomenon very difficult to quantify). Gated communities, as we know them,
originated with the advent of the master-planned retirement communities in the late sixties.
From there the idea spread to resorts and country clubs, and then to middle-class suburban
subdivisions:
In the 1980s, upscale real estate speculation and the trend to conspicuous consumption saw the
proliferation of gated communities around golf courses that were designed for exclusivity, prestige, and
leisure. The decade also marked the emergence of gated communities built primarily out of fear, as the
public became increasingly preoccupied with violent crime. Gates became available in developments of
suburban single-family tracts and high-density urban apartment complexes. Since the late 1980s,
gates have become ubiquitous in many areas of the country; there are now entire incorporated cities
that feature guarded entrances. Because gated communities in their contemporary form first began in
resort and retirement areas, they are most common in the Sunbelt states of the Southeast and
Southwest. (Blakely and Snyder 1997)
Gated communities, then, are a salient expression in the built environment of a process of
fragmentation and exclusion that applies across the metropolitan landscape and to places
where it is not quite so visible. The gated community is, in a sense, like the tip of the
iceberg.
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5
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Conclusion
It is clear that the simple city-suburb dichotomy is obsolete in the present day US urban
region. As noted in the introduction, the static nature that is inherent to the notion of
suburb is fundamentally at odds with the dynamic forces that continually shape and
reshape the urban environment. Many central cities, too, are subject to redevelopment,
gentrification, and the construction of private residential associations. The population of
older (inner) suburbs, sharply different from newly settled subdivisions on the urban fringe,
is often also more established than that of redeveloped downtowns.
It is hard to imagine an end to the continuing spatial fragmentation of the US metropolis
that accompanies the relentless logic of urban redevelopment and temptations of territorial
“opportunity hoarding” (Tilly 1999). The bourgeois elite of the 19th century have made way
for a more diversified upper middle class and the suburban utopia of yesteryear has been
replaced with a range of options across the metropolitan area, from downtown condos to
resort-style gated communities. But that hardly means that the privileged classes are
confined to their residential spaces. The urban experience of the affluent seems to link
small-scale residential exclusionary spaces with technology-aided access to and movement
in larger circumscribed metropolitan networks of malls, office parks, resorts, airports,
amenities, and other exclusionary spaces. The rapid advances in information and
communication technology may well have contributed to the explosive growth of smallscale private governance, as they allow exclusion and a sense of security without feelings of
isolation. At the same time, at the metropolitan scale, the “collapse of the coordinated
public enterprise … and comprehensive ‘public’ city planning” is replaced with increased
efforts at “making the poor and marginalized people less and less visible (and threatening)
to its interlinked constellation of premium networked spaces” (Graham and Marvin 2001,
302).
In the contemporary United States, a reference to ‘living in the suburbs’ can have widely
different connotations depending on the metropolitan area and on different geographies
within the same metropolis. One ‘suburb’ can still invoke all the positive and exclusive
associations of the classic suburb of times past while the other represents the sprawling
monotonous suburbs of the last resort, meant for those lower-income households who can
only afford a home on the remote urban fringe.
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The growing complexities of the US metropolis are in part a reflection of the changing
interplay of governance modalities. Until the early 20th century, residential (and industrial)
suburbanization was primarily driven by market forces with a relatively modest regulatory
role of governments. From the 1920s onward, the influence of government policies
increased, especially so in the first couple of decades after the Second World War. Then,
with the onset of neoliberalization in the early 1980s, private governance mushroomed,
resulting in socio-economic differentiation at ever-finer scales.
But neither the regulatory powers of the state nor the growing significance of nongovernmental authority structures such as home-owner associations have in any way
reduced the fundamental role of the market in US suburbanization; they have merely
enabled it.
Table 2: The Present Suburban Condition in the United States
Conditions of contemporary suburban development
Physical form and
characteristics
-
The main debates
The role of the state
-
The role of the
market
-
Single family homes
Continued sprawl, with scattered edge cities and pockets of
‘new urbanism’
Prevalence of gated communities
Growing variety of suburbs in terms of pricing, social
composition
Trailers/mobile homes continue to offer cheap housing for
segments of lower-income classes
Continued exclusivity and relative homogeneity of suburbs
Strict zoning (housing/shopping/offices/civic institutions)
The need for a larger-scale metropolitan approach
Choice versus structural determinants of suburbanization
Growing poverty in suburbs
Convergence of central-city and suburbs
Polycentric versus edgeless metropolitan areas
Federal government promoting homeownership / highways
State/local government promoting exclusionary zoning /
providing new infrastructure and public goods
Local government supporting urban growth machines,
seeking to expand property tax base
Exclusion, displacement or ignorance of informal or
irregular settlements
Traditionally, greenfield development a lucrative investment
opportunity
Large corporate interests ranging from single family home
appliances to automobiles to mortgage companies
Corporate interests dominate local/national growth
coalitions: developers, builders, banks
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Modes of
governance
-
-
Amsterdam Centre for Urban Studies
Growing significance of commerce and office work in
suburbs
Aggressive financing of suburbanization contributed to
recent mortgage/housing crisis
A very particular commodification of the suburb in terms of
the ‘American Dream’
Fragmented into differing (and often competing) scales
(municipal, regional, state, federal) and functions (municipal,
schools, water management, etc)
Continued municipal incorporation as a means to secede,
segregate and protect tax base
Proliferation of sub-local government: gated communities,
homeowner associations, community redevelopment
associations, charter schools, etc.
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