Suburban Diversity in Postwar America

Abstract

This essay introduces a special section in the Journal of Urban History that explores the concept of suburban diversity in the United States during the post-World War II decades. Recent scholarship has emphasized themes of suburban heterogeneity during the prewar and post-1970 periods, but the literature on postwar suburbia still revolves around the tropes of “white flight,” the urban–suburban divide, and the hegemonic middle-class cultural ideal. Through studies of community formation, the contributors to this forum examine the racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and political diversity of the postwar metropolitan landscape, with particular attention to the various meanings that suburbanites attached to their homes and neighborhoods. This introduction argues that making suburban diversity central, rather than exceptional, to the study of the postwar era requires scholarship that moves beyond the myth of white middle-class homogeneity and critically assesses the racialized binary of urban-suburban divergence. We propose a model of metropolitan diversity that highlights multiple dimensions of heterogeneity alongside the persistent patterns of neighborhood-level racial and class segregation in cities and suburbs alike.