American Suburbs Research Articles

Suburban Identity in the Poetry of John Updike

Abstract This paper provides a close reading of a representative selection of suburban poems by the American writer John Updike (1932–2009). It also draws upon the existing scholarship by suburban studies historians (including Kenneth Jackson, Dolores Hayden, John Archer, and James Howard Kunstler), who have argued for the cultural importance of American suburbia in fostering identity, and develops the argument by literary critics including Jo Gill, Peter Monacell, and Robert von Hallberg, who have championed the existence of a viable suburban tradition in postwar American poetry. By scrutinizing poems from Updike’s early poetry, represented by “Shillington”, up to his closing lyric opus, “Endpoint”, the paper argues that Updike’s unrecognized importance is that of a major postwar poet whose lyric work chronicles, in memorable, diverse, and important ways, the construction of individual identity within suburbia, in a dominant setting for most Americans from the 1950s up to the present.

Driving after Class: Anxious Times in an American Suburb

Driving after Class: Anxious Times in an American Suburb

Do cities or suburbs offer higher quality of life? Intrametropolitan location, activity patterns, access, and subjective well-being

Critics deride American suburbs as dull, aesthetically displeasing, socially isolating, unhealthy, environmentally unsound, and lacking in accessibility. However, the dramatic shift of the American population to the suburbs in the post-WWII period suggests suburban living may have advantages. Using data from the American Time Use Survey, this paper examines whether residence in a principal city versus the suburbs offers a more emotionally satisfying lifestyle. First, the findings show that demographically similar city residents and suburbanites engage in a very similar amount and composition of out-of-home activities. Second, the ratio of travel time to activity time for specific travel/activity couplets is lower for city residents for a few activities, and lower for suburbanites for others, but on the whole the differences in accessibility implied by these travel time prices are minor. Third, the activities in which city residents and suburbanites engage are associated with very similar degrees of subjective well-being (SWB), including both life satisfaction and affect. The most noteworthy difference between the two geographies is that suburbanites have modestly but measurably higher SWB than demographically similar urbanites in terms of feelings of happiness (hedonic affect), a sense of meaning (eudaimonic affect), and life satisfaction. These findings suggest that there may be advantages to suburban living.

Alexandra Nickerson, Reimagining Suburbia

Since their origins in the post-World War II decades, American suburban communities have been battlegrounds for racial and socioeconomic conflict. Serving as enclaves for White privilege, many were purposefully designed to keep working class and minority residents out. Willow Lung-Amam's Trespassers? Asian-Americans and the Battle for Suburbia examines the bitter social and cultural tension that has plagued the affluent Silicon Valley suburbs since an influx of Asian-American immigrants in the 1970s. Her narrative illustrates how, by their very nature, suburban communities regress toward homogenity, enforcing ideas of who is welcome through their physical landscapes. However, it also inadvertently suggests that if we can use community planning, town ordinances, and other tools and practices to deliberately exclude, we too can use them to include. As our country continues to diversify, but also stratify, it is important that we create suburban landscapes that foster diversity, welcome newcomers, give everyone a shot at achieving their version of the American dream.

Gothic Discourse in Jeffrey Eugenides’s 'The Virgin Suicides' – Challenging Suburban Uniformity and (Re)Imagining “The Other”

This paper argues that Jeffrey Eugenides, in his début novel, The Virgin Suicides, first questions and then challenges ‘the homeliness’ of the American suburbia by adopting an unsettling gothic discourse and by creating gothic subjects (the Lisbons). Gothic discourse includes the gothic tropes of confinement, persecution, alienation and contagion. My approach to the American Gothic tends to side with Siân Silyn Roberts who convincingly argues that this literary phenomenon questions the place of the individual in what he calls “a diasporic setting” (7). In eighteenth century Great Britain, Gothic fiction differentiates a literate middle class from “the other”, meaning other nationalities, ethnicities and cultures. The individual becomes a container of “cultivated sensibility” (Roberts 3). In America, this model was seriously challenged due to “a climate of ontological uncertainty and rapid demographic change” (Roberts 5). The cosmopolitan city, a place of invasion, of close proximity to the other, has become the perfect setting for gothic subjects, characterised by Roberts as mutable and adaptable. However, suburbia, with its apparent idyllic life, tries to uniformize the heterogeneous tendencies of the cosmopolitan city.

Automobile Commuting in Suburban High-Rise Condominium Apartments: Examining Transitions toward Suburban Sustainability in Toronto

While North American suburbs remain largely dispersed and auto-dependent, they are also increasingly heterogeneous. Although some suburbs have long been punctuated with high-rise developments, for instance rental apartments in the Canadian context, there are now a growing number of new high-rise condominium developments in suburban settings in both the US and Canada. While much is known about downtown high-rise condominium developments, there has of yet been little to no analysis of this trend in the suburbs. We offer such an analysis using Statistics Canada census data from 2016 in the Toronto metropolitan area. We focus on commuting patterns as an indicator of auto-dependence to test whether suburbs with larger shares of new high-rise condominium apartments (high-rise condo clusters) exhibit lower shares of auto commuting. The focus on auto-dependence is important because development and land use plans commonly use environmental concerns arising from heavy automobile use as a rationale for high-rise development. Our findings suggest that in Toronto suburban high-rise condo clusters offer a less auto-intensive way of living in the suburbs than traditionally has been the case in the suburban ownership market. However, this seems to be limited to particular demographic groups, such as smaller households; and suburban high-rise condos are not an evident sign of a broader transition toward suburban sustainability among the population as a whole in the Toronto case. The potential for transitions toward suburban sustainability could be enhanced with greater investments in transit infrastructure and building higher density mid-rise and ground-oriented dwellings that accommodate larger households still commonly found in low-density, auto-dependent suburbs.

Enduring Features of the North American Suburb: Built Form, Automobile Orientation, Suburban Culture and Political Mobilization

As any social phenomenon, the evolution of suburbs can be seen as at the confluence of two contradictory sets of forces. There are first forces of change, which propel suburbs in new directions. Much of the present literature on suburbs highlights suburban transitions in the form of social and economic diversification, and of new forms of development. The article attempts to rebalance the discourse on suburbs by emphasizing forces of durability. It does not deny the importance of observed suburban transitions, but argues that there is, at the heart of North American suburbs, an enduring automobility-induced transportation dynamic, which reverberates on most aspects of suburbs. The article explores the mechanisms undergirding suburban durability by linking the suburban transportation dynamic to the self-reproductive effects of a suburban lifestyle and culture and their political manifestations. These forces impede planning attempts to transform suburbs in ways that make them more environmentally sustainable. To empirically ground its argument, the article draws on two Toronto region case studies illustrating processes assuring the persistence of the durable features of North American suburbs: the layout of large suburban multifunctional centres and the themes raised by Rob Ford during his successful 2010 mayoralty electoral campaign.

Suburbia reimagined: Asian immigration and the form and function of faith-based institutions in Silicon Valley

ABSTRACTRapid immigration has caused dramatic social and spatial reconfigurations of American suburbs. This study examines how Asian immigrants reshaped the form and function of one Silicon Valley suburb through the building of faith-based institutions. It shows how immigrant faith-based institutions challenge scholarly understandings of suburbia as space of immigrant assimilation, and instead underscore their role in facilitating immigrant integration, community building and place-making. These institutions connect immigrants with social services and networks that help them adapt to new communities, promote intra- and interfaith alliances among diverse ethnic and national groups, and help immigrants stay connected with their countries of origin.

On-Premise Signs and the North American Suburban Enclosed Shopping Mall

The first fully enclosed modern suburban shopping mall, Southdale Center, opened in 1956 and immediately established a standard for how retailers and signs were to operate within their confines. Enclosed Malls were one of the first unique building types designed for suburban automotive environments and have been a key retail economic driver in the United States for seventy years. The mall also reflected economic changes in the country and the increasing separation of income classes. Malls established a variety of sign innovations over the years, from developing strict sign guidelines, to creating formal zones with shared modular systems. This report will explore the sign advances that marked each of the five stages of mall evolution impacted design and development. The report will also show how precedents established early in the history of mall development as a center for a broad range of incomes changed as malls began to segment by class.

On-Premise Signs and the North American Suburban Enclosed Shopping Mall

The first fully enclosed modern suburban shopping mall, Southdale Center, opened in 1956 and immediately established a standard for how retailers and signs were to operate within their confines. Enclosed Malls were one of the first unique building types designed for suburban automotive environments and have been the retail economic drive in the United States for seventy years. They established a variety of sign innovations over the years, from developing strict sign guidelines, to creating formal zones with shared modular systems. This report summary will explore the sign advances that marked each of the five stages of mall evolution as well as how the current changes with a new retail revolution is impacting design and development. The report will also show how precedents established early in the history of mall development has been continually reinvented with economic change and design trends.

Last Stop: This Town. Sameness, Suburbs and Spectrality in Daniel Clowes's Ghost World

Ghost World (1997) is a graphic novel by Daniel Clowes. Two teenage girls, having ended high school, confront with the passage to adult life in a spectral American suburbia scattered with non-places: diners, shopping malls, vinyl and comic stores. From their own bedrooms, the two spend their time cynically commenting the fatuity of US pop culture, trapped between a haunting past and an uncertain future. This contribution intends to discuss space in Ghost World from three main perspectives, concerning the material book, the visual level (page layout, framing, colors) and the diegetical one (investigating spaces inside the story).

“Irreversible Torpor”: Entropy in 1970s American Suburban Fiction

Although entropy has been identified as a theme in urban American fiction of the 1960s, it is far more significant in a strand of 1970s suburban fiction, in Joseph Heller's Something Happened (1974), John Updike's Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and the stories of Raymond Carver. I argue that in these texts the suburbs function as closed systems, subject to entropy, and that the suburbanite protagonists have a heightened sense of physical and metaphysical entropy, a reflection in part of the prevailing sense of irreversible economic and cultural decline and decay in that decade

Suburbanisation and Suburbanisms – Making Sense of Continental European Developments

This paper provides a brief overview of recent developments and debates concerned with suburbanisation in continental Europe. While current discourses in urban research and practice still focus on processes of reurbanisation and the gentrification of inner-city areas, suburbia continues to exist and thrive. Depending on the definition applied, suburban areas still attract a large share of in-migration and employment growth in cities of the developed countries. Given that popular meta-narratives on suburbia and suburbanisation are often spurred by, or refer to, North American suburban studies, we take a different perspective here, one based on continental European trajectories of development in and across city-regional areas that are considered to be suburban, and on social processes that are associated with suburbanisation (suburbanisms). Thus, we aim to avoid a biased understanding of suburbia as a spatial category, which is often considered mono-functional, non-sustainable, or in generic decline. Instead, we observe that suburban variety is huge, and the distinction between urban core and fringe seems to be as ambiguous as ever. The paper, which also introduces the theme of this special issue of “Raumforschung und Raumordnung | Spatial Research and Planning”, bundles our findings along four themes: on suburbia as a place of economic development, on the shifting dynamics of housing between core and fringe locales, on the life-cyclic nature of suburbanisation, and on strategies for redevelopment. Finally, we discuss certain topics that may deserve to be addressed by future research, particularly on the European variant of suburbanisation and suburbs.

The Trans-Pacific Status Seekers across the Straits: American suburban status United Taiwan and China

Disregard the divided national status, this paper explores in more depth the role status plays in the transnational process of suburbanizing Taiwan and China. It describes how the social homogenous American suburb is becoming the most influential force within new developments in Taiwan. It records the stories of astronaut engineer families and these new 'model developments' and how status objects like lower density suburbs, homogeneity segregated and gated enclaves removed from existing city centers have arisen in Hsinchu, Taiwan and Shanghai, China.

Lorrie Frasure-Yokley, Racial and Ethnic Politics in American Suburbs

Les banlieues residentielles (suburbs) des Etats-Unis n'ont plus qu'une ressemblance lointaine avec les stereotypes herites des annees 1950 et 1960 — homogeneite « raciale », conformisme social et conservatisme politique. La dichotomie traditionnelle entre villes et banlieues s'estompe avec la suburbanisation massive des pauvres et des minorites ethno-raciales qui resident desormais majoritairement en dehors des centres urbains. Comment la diversite sociale et culturelle croissante des banlieues americaines se traduit-elle dans les orientations politiques et choix de politiques publiques de ces territoires ? Telle est la question centrale de l'ouvrage, plusieurs fois prime, de la politiste Lorrie Frasure-Yokley, professeure associee a l'Universite de Californie. Combinant approches quantitative (exploitation des donnees du recensement) et qualitative (entretiens avec des acteurs des politiques publiques, focus groups avec des personnes appartenant a des minorites), l'auteure etudie trois comtes (Fairfax en Virginie, Prince George et Montgomery dans le Maryland) situes dans l’aire metropolitaine de Washington DC, l’une des plus dynamiques des Etats-Unis en matiere d’immigration.

Henry Ford’s Plan for the American Suburb: Dearborn and Detroit by Heather B. Barrow

Henry Ford’s Plan for the American Suburb: Dearborn and Detroit by Heather B. Barrow

Remodeling the American Suburb, Obesity, Parklets and Social Media

Remodeling the American Suburb, Obesity, Parklets and Social Media

Suburban Black Lives Matter

This article explores the range of experiences and meanings of Black life in suburban space. Drawing from educational, historical, and sociological literatures, I argue that an underconsideration of suburban space has left many portraits of educational inequality incomplete. The article outlines the emergence of American suburbs and the formation of the city suburb divide which governs much framing of educational inequality and why this frame has limited thinking about what suburbs are and who lies within them. I follow with a discussion of the contemporary state of the suburbs which are now often more racially, ethnically, and economically diverse than their proximal central cities. There are a variety of suburb types, and this article explores three: majority–minority suburbs, exclusive enclaves, and gateway communities. Each suburb type leads to unique challenges such as demographic mismatch between leadership and school population to considering how ethnicity and race interact with Afro-Latino communities. A discussion of how racialized poverty in suburbia shapes the school and social experiences of Black youth is offered. The article closes with the consideration of the directions researchers should consider and areas of policy that are ripe for reengagement given the diversity of Black experiences in suburban schools.

Editorial: The European City as a Place of Coexistence

The European urban institutions have always negotiated a balance between collective control and individual initiative. However, over the last seven decades this balance has been challenged. In the aftermath of World War II, the utopia of the functional city was hijacked to serve the welfare policies of the states sponsored by the Marshall Plan. Both in urban extension as in urban renewal, technocratic planning approaches were encouraged to back up a political program of de-urbanization inspired by the nemesis of the European city, the American suburbia. Eventually, in the 1980s, the paradigm of the state as provider shifted to the paradigm of the state as enabler. The European city became nothing but a commodity where the state performs as facilitator for the consolidation of the hegemony of the markets. Against this background, the articles published in this issue of Joelho offer critical contributions to understand the production and reproduction of approaches to the (re-) definition of the identity of the European city. With insightful approaches springing from different intellectual perspectives, they expand the debate on one of the fundamental achievements of Western civilization: the European city as a place of coexistence.

Between hosts and guests: Conditional hospitality and citizenship in an American suburban school

ABSTRACTThis article utilizes the idea of hospitality to explore how educative practices contribute to the making of citizens at Light Falls High School (LHS), a suburban American secondary school that professes a strong commitment to racial equity and global awareness. The data are derived from an ethnographic case study which took place in 2013–2014. I primarily draw upon the classroom experiences and narratives of transnational youth – those with social lives, cultural practices, and notions of self that are not bounded by one nation – and several educators to tell the story of hospitality at LHS. Three techniques emerged by which conditional hospitality shaped the possibilities of welcome and recognition of transnational students – questioning attachment, conditioning speech, and conditioning space – and these in turn constitute normative thresholds that fix these students in difference, delimit their belonging, and constrain their possibilities of membership. The gift of welcome meant to make non-normative students feel welcome often comes with caveats that uphold narratives of benevolence and superiority of the United States as an exceptional nation, affirm the notion of White indigeneity, and allow for mitigation in acknowledging structural racism.