Disneyfied Sprawl, Blue-Collar Bogeymen, and Bourgeois Jeremiads: The Legacy of Investment in Suburbia

Abstract

In a turn of events that perhaps only Jean Baudrillard could have foreseen, a video game called The Sims has recently become the number-one best seller of all time based on its unique premise the re-creation of contemporary suburban culture within an interactive computer simulation.1 The Sims offers an eerily familiar portrayal of life in the American suburbs: players enjoy crafting personal lifestyles for their electronic avatars through intense consumerism at virtual malls, completing the mundane household tasks that the game insistently throws before them, and socializing at house parties with their electronic peers. As a representation of suburban life that also reproduces its object, The Sims might be best understood via a contrast with suburban studies, a multidisciplinary academic project that has developed significantly in the last two decades. Rather than produce yet another suburbia-as-text as the game does, the research done in this subfield attempts to render visible the events and relationships that have shaped suburbia's self-production and social construction.2 By examining such diverse sources as blueprints, advertisements, personal narratives, and now video games, critics seek to account for suburbia under its various guises, as an architecture, an economic pattern, a politics or