The Suburbs As Urbs

http://www.citylab.com/2016/01/suburbs-are-urban-places-too/421971

Walthamstow, a suburb northwest of London, England
Photograph by Andrew Reid Wildman/Flickr
citylab.com

Hello Everyone:

Today we go back to the suburbs to consider how they can be urban spaces.  There is the perception of suburbs as these bucolic places with nice houses, green lawns, happy people, and plenty of parking spaces.  Laura Vaughn reports, in her article "Suburbs Are Urban Places, Too" in CityLab, review of writer Peter Ackroyd's book, Suburban Urbanites: Suburbs and the Life of the High Street.  Mr. Ackroyd posits that "suburbs are as old as the city itself,"  He asks us to consider the suburbs from a different perspective, arguing that suburbs actually possess "complex urban qualities, but they are poorly understood."  Although the study of urban and rural places continue to thrive in academia, the study of suburbs is still a fairly new field.  Regardless, Suburban Urbanites: Suburbs and the Life of the High Street. gives the reader new perspectives on the suburbs from a historical perspective.

Relief of Madaktu with suburban villas outside the city walls
Project Gutenberg
citylab.com

  One example from history is the carved stone relief of the ancient city of Madaktu, in Iran, from the 600s BCE.  The relief presents an incredible demarkation between the city with its neatly organized buildings and the suburban villas arrayed outside the city walls.  Contrast this with the trope that continues that is regularly featured in urban studies.

Typical academic research into suburbs considers suburbs a separate undefined mass within the urban edges.  The recently published  Suburban Urbanites takes a different approach.  Rather than take the city out of the suburbs and vice versa, the book considers the two together-"the suburb as a continuum of the city's spatial-social complexity."  The book is intent on making the argument "...for suburban urbanity.  It counteracts the binary opposition between city and suburb and challenges the perception that urbanity only exists in the city."

The Surrey Street Market, Croydon south London, England
SouthEastern Star/Flickr
citylab.com

Taking into consideration the suburbs as part of the city's continuum, Mr. Ackroyd's book focuses attention on the "...metropolitan suburban centers-both in their relation to other centers, an in the role they play within their locality."  This strategy is born out of the desire to shed light on full scope of non-domestic activity: people with home businesses, start-up, internet businesses, weekly markets, casual labor, and so forth as well as a diverse range of leisure activities that happen outside the home.

Laura Vaugh writes, "For example, London like most urban spatial systems, consists of interdependent network of linked centers which, when studied in detail on the ground, reveal a level of detail and complexity more normally attributed to cities."  If we look at the suburban built environment as a stand alone subject and as distinct element of the "...spatial and temporal growth of cities,"  Suburban Urbanites reveals that Main Street is the core of non-domestic suburban activities.  A special type of space with real potential for creating the beating heart of the suburb.

The suburban idyll
Vintage car promotion
treehugger.com

Laura Vaugh reports, "In spite of (or perhaps because of) the fact that the majority of people in English-speaking countries live in it, suburbia has remained 'the love that dares not speak its name.'"  Indeed, one must be careful about admitting a liking for suburbia.  Suburbia has long been the butt of academia, "...trapped by a historical legacy of aesthetic distaste from the cultural elite,..."  Let Blogger come right to the point, who among us has not looked at the suburbs with a certain amount disdain.  Maybe not quite the disdain like the 1933 Congress of Modern Architecture which declared the suburbs, "a kind of scum churning against the walls of the city" and "one of the greatest evils of the century."  You start to get the idea that suburbia has long been the frequent and favorite punching bag of critics who deride it as leading to alienation, homogeneity, and apathy.  Regardless of all this venom, suburbia still remains the aspirational destination for people-the proverbial nice house in the suburbs and a safe place to raise the kids.

Suburban development
Photograph © Dan Reed/Flickr
Creative Common license
blog.nature.org

Writer Robert Putnam's opinion that we all are "bowling alone," has been picked up wicked delight by critics and turned into a cudgel with which to mercilessly beat suburban life.  Despite the pervasive influence of the suburbs-as-incubators-of-alienation, a number of scholars have undertaken an initiative to refute Mr. Putnam's findings.  Ms. Vaughn reports, "Jan Bruekner and Ann Largey, for instance, have that social interaction is less related to the density of residential areas than to the life situation of the people living within them"  Yet, the myth of suburban malaise persists.

Will America be urban, suburban, or both?
fast company.com

Unfortunately, the studies of suburbs, its history and life often provide anecdotal information instead of "...appreciating the cumulative effect of small-scale changes over time or the influences of wider spatial change...social change...on the locality itself."  Peter Ackroyd's book, Suburban Urbanites: Suburbs and the Life of the High Street, explains how spatial change and micro-anthropological phenomena intersect at the suburban scale of social life.  It demonstrates "...that to attribute a lack of social engagement is purely to a crude residential typology ignores the variability of suburban environments and the messiness of modern life..."

Suburbia with urban lights
newsgeography.com

Looking at the suburbs from an architectural perspective, there are good reasons why suburbia is considered a poor remedy to mass housing.  Excessive automobile use and low densities mean that suburbia represents an inefficient use of natural resources and unsustainable planning.  While these are valid criticisms, Mr. Ackroyd makes this point: "it offers an alternative conceptualization of suburbs and proposes that suburbs are shaped by a process that appears in many different contexts."

This is both a spatial and temporal process that present the way in which "the built environment adapts to changing socioeconomic conditions by maintaining a balance between stability of the street network over time with a degree of adaptability of the shape and pattern of buildings themselves.  This follows urban growth, based on the spatial logic go the successful existing network.  Ms. Vaughn posits, "Indeed, suburban growth as been a positive solution for inner-city crowding, albeit reinforcing social class divisions in some instances."

Marylebone, London, England
placemakers.com

Railroads, historically speaking, have not only helped shape European cities such as London or Brussel (American cities as well) but also helped alleviate urban conditions such as: deprivation, overcrowding, and disease.  As transportation technology shape the lines, it also formed social change along said lines.  For example, in 1770 eight coaches departed from Central London to the suburbs.  By 1809, communities like Camberwell in south London was within easy reach.  The advent of the railways in the 19th century and the growth of private car ownership in the 20th century (and federally funded road construction) also had important spatial and social impact on the communities that fed of the railways and roads.

The Sir Richard Steele
Hempstead, London, England
pubhistory.com

 In the United Kingdom, existing communities like Hempstead, originally outside of London's core, helped ease the rawness of suburban development "so that main roads which formerly might contain linear developments...subsequently were in an ideal position to develop as London's network of high streets.  One example is the Sir Richard Steele Pub in Hempstead, London.

When the Sir Richard Steele was built in the 19th century, it was located on Haversack Hill and catered to travelers from London.  The continues to operate in this capacity to this day, despite the incorporation of Hempstead into the London urban-scape.  The continuous use of the pub building itself indicates a kind of "path dependency" that, in one respect, cities like London have been able to adapt to change.

Cities are routinely acknowledges as complex and organic environments, but this description is hardly used in reference to the suburbs, typically dismissed as the byproduct of the urbs, thus of little interest interest.  In his opening chapter, Peter Ackroyd presents a detail critique of this widely held belief by demonstrating "how the idea of 'the suburbs' as an essentially non-complex domain has been perpetuated by a range of discipline and perspectives."  He argues for a more substantive concept of the suburban built environment "as one in which socioeconomic processes and cultural identities can be contested and negotiated over time."

Nighttime aerial of Central London
telegraph.co.uk

The theory and methodology of "space syntax," combined with those of urban anthropology are helpful for understanding the complexities of suburbia and an integral part of Suburban Urbanites: Suburbs and the Life of the High Street.  Mr. Ackroyd's book also presents a broad range of empirical case studies in Europe and the Mediterranean, demonstrating how these theories play out in different locations.  For example, in the chapter on Gothenburg, Sweden, the analysis highlights the "importance of the spatial connections from the suburbs across the city, showing how the redesign of public spaces...can contribute to daily social interaction and help to overcome social exclusion by improving access both to people from elsewhere as well as to urban resources."


Suburbs and cities have co-existed throughout history.  While cities have been hailed as complex, organic entities, Peter Ackroyd gives use pause to consider that suburbs behave in a similar manner.  Cities continue to change and adapt.  The suburbs are part of the process.

This post is based on an edited except from Suburban Urbanites, published by UCL Press and available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial NonDerivative license ©2015.