A Study of Post-Suburbs

Abstract

This paper proposes to discuss some aspects of what we can call 'post-suburbs', which refer to a new suburban growth in the fertile soil of post-World War II suburban boom. In various industrially developed countries, suburbanization has been so extensive that the 'suburb' has become a 20th century urban myth. The 'suburb' has been recognized as the prototype for contemporary living in the United States of America and Australia. Urban policies that enhanced this rapid suburbanization supported the improvement of physical milieu with the resultant evolution of infrastructural supports, including systematic housing construction. After the war, middle-class status exponentially grew, whose value-systems were, likewise related to the establishment of their own home according to the idealistic suburban mythology.In some metropolises, noticeable sub-centers have emerged on the urban fringes. In the greater Melbourne region, especially, as a result of the growth at the fringes of the 'urban sprawl', in the 1990s, governments at all levels have adopted policies that center upon the 'compact city'. Such a development in the kind of growth in the suburbanization process of the urban sprawl has changed the urban structure due to the emergence of such sub-centers in the metropolitan peripheries. Is it the dawn of the suburban century, or is a just that the suburban era has come to an end? To adequately confront these 'post-suburban' developments, the former view identifies fringe dwellers as a kind of suburbanites because they appear in the extension of suburbanization. The latter focuses upon the new urban form as having come about due to a structural change in the greater metropolitan configuration itself.