Sorting Out the Suburbs: Patterns of Land Use, Class, and Culture

Abstract

IN AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY PUBLISHED IN 1979, JOSEPH ZIKMUND II and Deborah Ellis Dennis characterized much of the scholarship on suburbia as fugitive, faddish, and doctrinaire. In their view too many works are not clearly labeled, and those that are too often address issues of immediate concern that bear little relation to earlier studies and that prompt scholars to bias their findings. I Yet if we concentrate on those studies considered lasting contributions and add several others published in the 1980s, a coherent core of suburban scholarship emerges. Despite the fragmentary nature of most research, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and geographers have all attempted to analyze suburban patterns of land use and social class and the mosaic of differing class cultures that these patterns have created. Although suburban life has a number of visible symbols, such as the detached house surrounded by lawn and the commuter car and freeway system, the assumption that a uniform suburban culture exists has never received much support among scholars, except in a few works published in the 1950s. One of these, The Organization Man (1956) by William H. Whyte,2 proved especially influential, providing an air of authenticity to what Scott Donaldson has called the suburban