Suburban Space Research Articles

Social Space and the Suburb in Mike Cahill’s King of California : Mapping Race, Neoliberalism, and Narratives of the Past in the Southern California Landscape

Social Space and the Suburb in Mike Cahill’s King of CaliforniaMapping Race, Neoliberalism, and Narratives of the Past in the Southern California Landscape Emily Cheng (bio) Introduction Mike Cahill’s 2007 comedy-drama film, King of California, tells the story of a father and daughter’s quest for a previously unknown treasure trove of gold doubloons lost by the fictional Father Juan Florismarte Torres in the seventeenth-century Spanish exploration of California. The main characters, Charlie (Michael Douglas) and sixteen-year-old Miranda (Evan Rachel Wood), undertake this adventure inspired by the Spanish explorers, and in doing so navigate a constantly shifting landscape of suburban sprawl. From their position as modern-day “explorers,” Charlie and Miranda offer a critical perspective on their Southern California suburban space of Santa Clarita, located outside Los Angeles. Their use of historic maps and descriptions of the seventeenth-century physical geography to navigate the present space of strip malls, freeways, and mass housing developments highlights the environmental loss wrought by suburban sprawl. The film associates this physical devastation with the social, political, and economic terrains organized by capitalist development. At stake in this quest is the imagination of a California dream that celebrates the individual against its corruption by consumerism and conformity. The film frames Charlie and Miranda as critics of suburban social and physical conformity. This approach particularly plays out in their position of resistance to the consumerism and privatized space of family valorized by the dominant ideologies of neoliberal [End Page 25] capitalism. Their social distance from the community living in newly built tract housing is signified from the beginning of the film through the visual contrast of their old house falling into disrepair. Diverging from the normative nuclear families around her, Miranda has been living alone since she was fourteen and has dropped out of high school in order to work a low-wage job at McDonald’s to support herself. Charlie, who masterminds the quest, is framed through his difference from the beginning of the film as we are introduced to him upon his discharge from the county mental health institution where he has spent two years in treatment for bipolar disorder. While Miranda initially doubts Charlie’s quest as insanity, she goes along with it and by the end comes to realize the validity of Charlie’s viewpoint that the “sane” world is blind to the constraints and consequences of capitalist conformity. While the overt narrative of the film might be understood as a critique of neoliberal consumer capitalism that celebrates individual thought, this essay suggests that this narrative is complicated by neoliberalism’s central focus on the politics of privatization and responsibility at the level of the individual. By approaching the film through a critical race lens, my reading addresses King of California as a cultural text that embodies the contradictions of the centrality of the individual to neoliberal ideology. The film launches a progressive critique that defamiliarizes the dominant valorization of social conformity and consumerism; however, it does so by focusing narrowly on the economic terrain as a largely separate category. In a sense, the film makes use of the very terms of neoliberalism by leaving normative ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality uninterrogated. As Lisa Duggan writes: Neoliberalism, a late twentieth-century incarnation of Liberalism, organizes material and political life in terms of race, gender, and sexuality as well as economic class and nationality, or ethnicity and religion. But the categories through which Liberalism (and thus also neoliberalism) classifies human activity and relationships actively obscure the connections among these organizing terms. (3) By stopping its critique short of engaging the complex interconnections of the social, political, and economic terrains, the film [End Page 26] performs the racialized privilege of whiteness in regard to the construction of the US liberal individual. This neoliberal separation of social and political categories underwrites the film’s appropriation of racialized histories and memories of California in constructing its filmic world. Through addressing the racial thinking embedded in the romanticized narratives of California history, for instance of Spanish exploration rather than conquest, this essay examines the racialization of the notion of the individual constructed in these mythologies of the West. In...

Decommissioned micro urban structures. Urban regeneration and architectural design: the case of Fidenza (PR)

The subject of this research, on the issue of urban regeneration, concerns the phenomenon of the decommissioned micro urban structures, a situation extended to many small European cities that requires the application of specific proceedings. In the current situation of economic contraction, the micro decommission of urban structure phenomenon is broad and extended to different city levels. However, thought economic cycles have shown the ability to allow the redistribution and the recovery of the de-industrialized large areas in a consolidated metropolis, in small European cities, referring to more restricted areas, the urban disposals progression goes on, as a result of the dispersion of urban functions in the suburban space, called sprawl. This research aims to address this issue through the development of unitary process for small cities belonging to metropolitan areas.

The suburbanization of poverty? An alternative perspective

A popular and powerful narrative focuses on a crisis of suburban decline in the United States. However, a consensus regarding the scope and scale of one dimension of suburban decline—poverty—is hindered by the use of contradictory definitions of suburban space. This research presents an alternative approach to measuring suburban poverty that is less computationally intensive yet capable of capturing complex shifts in the spatial distribution of poverty within metropolitan areas. An analysis of the distribution of poverty in the largest 100 metropolitan areas between 1990 and 2007–11 concludes that while poverty is increasing in the low-density suburbs of a handful of large metropolitan areas, the more general trend in most other metropolitan areas is an increase in poverty in moderately dense residential areas. Implicated in these trends are long-term trends in metropolitan area economic growth, a secular decline in inner-ring suburbs, and the impact of gentrification on housing opportunities for at-risk populations in large cities.

The Natural Limits of Segregation and Re--Integraton: The Case of PosttApartheid South Africa

Racial segregation results from economic, political, and social forces. We propose a new channel: natural geography may have an enabling effect on segregation. Natural physical barriers may enable states, or citizens of powerful in-groups, to partition urban and suburban spaces by race. We study the South African context, in which the fall of Apartheid in 1994 allowed for a rapid influx of black South Africans into previously exclusively white urban areas. We show that the presence of natural physical barriers enabled sustained segregation, differentially retarding the re-integration of diversity into former racial enclaves. We then explore the political consequences of sustained segregation by considering the effect of changes in the white share of the population on political behavior. We find that sustaining segregation leads whites-only areas to become less likely to vote for a non-white party, evidence in favor of recent theories that see racial contact as a positive force.

On user perception of private transport in Barcelona Metropolitan area: an experience in an academic suburban space

The negative externalities of the massive use of private transport have been widely studied and verified by the scientific community. However, the use of the automobile is still widely accepted and even vindicated among a high number of citizens. Solving this social dilemma requires analysing the reasons behind private transport use along with the perceptions of its users. This paper examines the individual motivations for using private transport to reach the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB); a single suburban node inside Barcelona’s Metropolitan Region. We used data gathered by the Mobility Survey of the UAB to measure the use of private transport and to select a group with homogeneous characteristics for which we could perform qualitative analysis based on in-depth interviews. The analysis was focused on university staff (teaching, researchers and administrative) the university group which is using the private transport the most. Qualitative methodology identified three main stages of travel by private car upon which interviewees projected their perceptions. A strong link between car commuting and social status was revealed but unlike other studies, on this case users were compelled to use private transport because of their social standing, and not as a way to progress. Finally, time travel and convenience were also found significant but always in relation with social position.

Sandboxes and Heavenly Dwellings

ABSTRACTFinnish housing was fundamentally transformed during the postwar period of (re-)construction. The emergence of new kinds of urban spaces entailed radical changes in the landscape, housing customs, and details of everyday life. The article explores suburbs as lived spaces, where architecture, environment, and inhabitants come together. I consider the built environment, discussions in the media regarding the new suburbs, and the written memories of inhabitants collected between 1995 and 2000. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the new suburbs symbolized a new way of life and were described enthusiastically in the media. However, from the late 1960s onwards criticism grew increasingly louder. By contrast, inhabitants' accounts present a multifaceted and mainly positive view in tension with media representations, offering a radically different perspective on suburban habitation. In my article, I explore the relations of suburban space and gender through two cases: the modern dwelling described as “heavenly” in the written memories; and the playground with the sandbox as its nucleus. These sites were crucial both in the narratives of suburban living and the planning of new residential environments. I pay particular attention to the figure of the suburban housewife and the agency of inhabitants as well as suburban social networks (claimed to be nonexistent in the then current criticism). My analysis proposes that meaningful social relations were formed in the suburbs, but they were constructed mainly by women and children. I suggest that instead of being the antithesis of modernity, suburbs were key spaces for the formation of the postwar Finnish housing environment, society, and gender relations.

Atlanta Unbound: Enabling Sprawl through Policy and Planning by Carlton Wade Basmajian (review)

Reviewed by: Atlanta Unbound: Enabling Sprawl through Policy and Planning by Carlton Wade Basmajian Amanda Rees ATLANTA UNBOUND: Enabling Sprawl through Policy and Planning. By Carlton Wade Basmajian. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. 2013. Born at the confluence of two railroads in the 1830s, today the city of Atlanta is home to less than 500,000 residents (US Census Bureau, 2012). However, metro Atlanta (Atlanta-Sandy Springs Roswell Metropolitan Standard Area), the focus on Carlton Wade Basmajian’s book, has almost 5.5 million people. Containing over half the population of Georgia (an otherwise rural state), metro Atlanta covers an area the size of Massachusetts, and is frequently cited as a remarkable example of sprawl in the United States. It certainly offers a powerful case study to explore twentieth century low-density urban expansion in the United States. A quick review of Atlantan urban histories over the last twenty-five years indicates that Atlanta has been interpreted through three primary lenses: race (as in R. Bayor’s Race and the Shaping of 20th Century Atlanta [1996]); political economy (as in D. Whitelegg’s “A Battle on Two Fronts: Competitive Urges ‘Inside’ Atlanta” [End Page 125] [2002]); and regime theory (as in C. Stone’s Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946-1988 [1989]). Claiming that previous scholars of Atlanta’s urban history, like scholars of US urban expansion more generally, have ignored the active role of regional planning, Basmajian explores how regional planners engaged with Atlanta and post–World War II expansion. Swimming in the archival seas in and around Atlanta, Basmajian has masterfully charted the course of the Atlanta Regional Commission (est. 1971): the 1976 Regional Development plan of metro Atlanta; 1980s “growth management” efforts; and the 1990s battle over the regional transportation network. The penultimate transportation chapter comes across as the most animated of the book. Sprawl-oriented assumptions underlying computer modeling drove the relentless building of major highways into suburbia. Threaded with both thoughtful analysis and rambunctious newspaper accounts, this chapter also stands as a useful reflection on Roy Barnes governorship of the state. Basmajian offers the concept of planning as an “imprint of ‘regional thinking,’” examining three scales of infrastructure policy (local, state, and federal) that, “together managed the urban development process” (2). Basmajian offers a way of understanding regional planning as a discourse of planning growth in northern Georgia (2). However, a more fully fleshed out theoretical articulation of regional thinking and institutional discourse would have been welcome. Several theorists who might have offered useful spatial and legal perspectives to theorize the various planning discourses materializing urban and suburban Atlanta spaces include: Duncan and Duncan’s always thoughtful reflections on power and landscape (as in Landscapes of Privilege: The Politics of the Aesthetic in an American Suburb [2004]); Richard Schein’s work on the work various formal and informal organizations shape urban spaces (as “A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting an American Scene” [1997]); and Lewyn’s reflections on legal spaces (as in “Zoning and Land Use Planning: Plans are Not Enough” [2013]). More broadly, Basmajian follows in the footsteps of Americanists engaged in understanding the cultural production of urban and suburban spaces. This book offers American Studies practitioners a useful example of what the cultural geographer Richard Schein calls materialized discourse and discourse materialized. Atlanta Unbound provides a powerful resource for considering an evolving relationship between ideology and material landscapes. It also leaves this reader to wonder about the next step of both recognizing the unique elements of individual metropolitan regions, while also drawing larger conclusions about sprawl in twentieth century American cities. Amanda Rees Columbus State University. Copyright © 2014 Mid-America American Studies Association

Exile on the Commercial Strip: Vietnam War Memorials in Little Saigon and the Politics of Commemoration

Exile on the Commercial StripVietnam War Memorials in Little Saigon and the Politics of Commemoration Erica S. Allen-Kim (bio) In 1999 Consul General Phong Xuan Nguyen denounced the creation of a Vietnam War memorial in Orange County, California. Although dozens of memorials have been constructed since the dedication of the national Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1982, the memorial in Westminster caused particular offense to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam because of its depiction of a South Vietnamese soldier. In a letter to Mayor Frank Fry, Nguyen argued that the project would “dredge up a bitter past … that both sides have decided to leave behind.”1 In a bid to take control from the Vietnamese refugees funding the project, he suggested replacing the proposed South Vietnamese soldier with a North Vietnamese, thereby transforming the project into a monument to reconciliation between the two nations. In an interview published in the Orange County Register, Nguyen argued, “We should have a statue that represents our relationship today.”2 At stake was not only the communist country’s recently acquired standing with the United States but also its tenuous relationship with Vietnamese refugees. The completion of a memorial by the largest Vietnamese community in the United States challenged the existing discourse on Vietnam War commemoration.3 As the first officially designated Little Saigon, a term that broadly refers to an overseas Vietnamese community but in this case specifies a tourist and redevelopment zone, Westminster’s Little Saigon is considered the capital of the South Vietnamese diaspora. Prominent members of the Little Saigon business and political community initially envisioned a memorial that contrasted sharply with American and Vietnamese narratives of the war that marginalized the contributions of South Vietnamese veterans (Figure 1).4 Dedicated in 2003, it is the product of nearly thirty years of predominantly suburban community formation by Vietnamese in the United States. Two years later, a second memorial funded by Vietnamese Americans was installed in a shopping center’s parking lot in southwestern Houston (Figure 2).5 Both of these projects appropriate suburban space to make claims about the war’s legacy for Vietnamese refugees within a transnational context. They do so by countering the absence of South Vietnamese veterans in American Vietnam veterans’ memorials and the bulldozing of South Vietnamese military monuments and cemeteries following the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. In response to the official histories produced by the United States and Vietnam, Vietnamese refugees imagine their collective identity as political exiles through explicit references to other Vietnam War monuments in the United States.6 The two memorials critique the invisibility of South Vietnamese veterans and their implied inferiority to the American military. They also participate in the resurgence of overtly didactic monument designs since architect Maya Lin’s design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., was selected in 1981.7 Architectural historian Dell Upton notes that Lin’s black granite wall inscribed with the names of American casualties has spurred the recent period of “energetic commemoration,” in which monument builders negotiate between [End Page 31] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Westminster Vietnam War Memorial, Sid Goldstein Freedom Park, Westminster, California, dedicated 2003. Photograph by Erica S. Allen-Kim. Courtesy of Tuan Nguyen. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Houston Vietnam War Memorial, Universal Shopping Center, 11360 Bellaire Boulevard, Houston, Texas, dedicated 2005. Photograph by Erica S. Allen-Kim. Reproduced with permission from Thong Pham. [End Page 32] symbolic and literal truths by presenting what they claim are authoritative interpretations.8 In the case of the national Vietnam Veterans Memorial, additions of an American flag and two figurative sculptural groups, Frederick Hart’s Three Soldiers (1982-84) and Glenna Goodacre’s Vietnam Women’s Memorial (1984-93), illustrate this impulse toward didacticism. The memorials in Westminster, California, and Houston, Texas, also participate in this didactic commemorative impulse. More specifically, they express the anticommunist ideology that has dominated the Vietnamese refugee community and shaped its cultural landscapes.9 Their respective siting—in a civic center and in a shopping center parking lot—indicates the extent to which refugees have established a presence in suburbs, where the majority...

Expelled: Humans in Capitalism’s Deepening Crisis

As the Cold War was winding down, a new struggle began. Following a period of diverse versions of Keynesian-led relative redistribution in developed market economies, the United States became the point actor for a radical reshuffiing of capitalism. Key to this reshuffiing was expulsion - of people, places, and traditional economies (see Sassen 2014). While this is a socio-economic condition it is a critical, but invisible, element of the current political crisis. Measuring economic growth to understand whether government policies are working, or measuring political participation in terms of voting, excludes growing portions of our political economy - people, specific types of firms and economic circuits, and spaces. The Keynesian period was one of mass production and mass construction of suburban space: this brought with it an economic logic that valued people as workers and consumers, though not necessarily as human beings. The logic guiding the current phase of advanced capitalism does not value people as workers or as (mass) consumers. Thus, in the last two decades there has been a sharp growth in the numbers of people that have been "expelled" from the economy in much of the world. The active expanding of a middle class in that earlier period has been replaced by the impoverishment and shrinking of the middle class.

That “Monster House” Is My Home: The Social and Cultural Politics of Design Reviews and Regulations

Globalization and immigration have changed American suburbs both socially and spatially. In Fremont, California, a suburb of Silicon Valley, neighbourhoods that were once primarily the domain of single-family tract homes and white, middle- and upper-middle-class residents have given way to high-income Asian immigrant families and custom-built “McMansions”. While most scholars advocate strict regulation of these properties, this paper questions the seeming mechanistic neutrality of the design reviews, guidelines, and development standards used to regulate large-home development. In an analysis of Fremont's pro- and anti-McMansion debates and McMansion policies, this paper argues that design guidelines and development standards often employ dominant social and cultural norms about “good” and “appropriate” design. Planning and design professionals, public processes, and policies tended to privilege established, white residents' values and meanings for their homes and neighbourhoods, while marginalizing those of many middle- and upper-middle-class Chinese immigrants. The paper shows how dominant social and cultural norms regarding the proper use and design of suburban space are often reinforced through planning, design, and public policy, and shape the built environment as well as non-white residents' sense of place and belonging in it, even for those of means.

Satisfaction Not Guaranteed: Dilemmas of Progress in Modern Society. By Peter N. Stearns (New York: New York University Press, 2012. ix plus 270 pp. $35.00)

Books about happiness are a staple of mass-market retailers. Amazon currently lists more than three hundred titles on the topic, mostly in the mode of self-help pop-psychology and philosophy. Histories of happiness are unusual. Peter Stearns's new book, Satisfaction Not Guaranteed, chronicles the rise in expectations of happiness promoted by wholesale improvements in the quality of life for the average person since the eighteenth century and the curious backwash of disappointment that has followed. But Satisfaction is not so much a history of happiness, as a historically informed meditation on its pursuit in modern life and why it is so fraught and frustrated. Stearns poses a simple question with complicated answers: Why is the gulf between how happy we think we ought to be and how happy we actually are seemingly so unbridgeable, despite unparalleled long-term gains in affluence, convenience, education, and life expectancy? The societal expectation that people should be happy, that personal satisfaction and happiness are, in many societies, now normative aspirations, he observes, “emerged more than two centuries ago, as a product of a transformation in Western philosophy and a new belief in the way that material progress and human improvability might combine.” Advances forged by modernity “prompted a rapid escalation of expectations that masked progress and brought about their own dissatisfaction” (1-2). He names this paradox “the satisfaction gap.” Perhaps because the United States is foremost among societies mired in the “satisfaction gap,” most of Satisfaction dissects Americans' perplexing angst about everything from body image to boredom. The historical linking of happiness and personal comfort to progress, moreover, was most conspicuous in the United States. Stearns locates their convergence in a craze for umbrellas in mid-18th century Europe that spawned an emulative striving for comfort in colonial America that has never flagged. A society endlessly fascinated with the latest novelty, invention, or display of ingenuity, Americans were early adopters of everything from the relocation of cemeteries to suburban spaces to discourage contagion in the 1820s, to the mass use of automobiles in the early twentieth century. The post-World War II popularity of central heating and cooling or the current rage for cell phone applications offer more evidence of an undying cultural predilection. Americans lionized Edison and Ford no less fervently than they idolize Gates and Jobs.

Compositional development of spaces related to the fortification of cities from the point of view of garden art and landscape architecture

The article deals with the specific urban and suburban spaces where landscape design and garden art were confronted with existing or later disappearing fortification system. It analyses structures related to the landscape architecture from the baroque and classical times to the era of the pseudohistorical style, from the end of the 17th century to the end of the 19th century, with special interest devoted to the less known historical forms of the 18th century and their development. Using detailed historical maps and plans, the research reveals elements of landscape architecture in smaller or larger scale of several types – gardens close to the city walls, tree plantings and gardens on the fortification bastions, gardens and promenade alleys under them on the glacis or private gardens on the surrounding grounds, that were still influenced by the existence of the fortification system.Two historically important Moravian cities were used here as an example – Brno and Olomouc, where main types of green spaces (near the walls on their both sides) and several possible ways of their development were followed and analysed, and specific types of compositional and spatial development were defined. These could be understood as basic ‘evolution types’ specific for central European cities in general, and can be found in variations in other cities and towns in this region.

Oases of Discontent: Suburban Space in Takahashi Takako and Abe Kōbō

Oases of Discontent: Suburban Space in Takahashi Takako and Abe Kōbō

Moving to the Suburbs: Demand-Side Driving Forces of Suburban Growth in China

The existing literature contextualizes China's suburban growth with market-oriented reform and emphasizes the role of local entrepreneurial government. However, studies on the demand-based factors are still lacking. Drawing upon a random survey undertaken in Songjiang, an outer suburban district of Shanghai, this paper investigates the demand-side driving forces of suburban growth in China: Ie, who the suburban residents are, what has driven them to move to the suburbs, and how their differences have shaped suburban space. With local natives, residents from central districts and migrants from other places as their major resident groups, Chinese suburbs illustrate a case where diverse population and types of development are juxtaposed. While migrants have flocked to the suburbs for employment opportunities, the residential moves of the other two groups, even though in some cases involuntary, are more likely to be associated with consumption considerations. Notably, alongside the emergence of single-family villas and gated communities, the pursuit of suburban living ideals has begun to play a role in China, though it is confined to only a few extremely rich families rather than the masses. In addition, three patterns of suburbs characterized by different types of households and developments—white-collar suburbs, migrant suburbs, and well-planned new towns—are identified.

The Cinematic Land of Tapio: Suburban Finland Reimagined

The paper examines how the suburban spaces of Tapiola in Finland are cinematically reimagined in Jaakko Pakkasvirta’s film The Green Widow (1968). The film was produced during a time of rapid urbanization, the development of the Finnish welfare nation, and the birth of the Finnish suburb. The design, renaming, and construction of the Tapiola area especially became an excercise in creating a visual representation of the welfare policies and thus quite literally contributed to the building of a nation. This official vision of Tapiola is challenged by Pakkasvirta’s The Green Widow . The film focuses on the lived experience of the suburb from the point of view of a housewife and constructs a very different visual world. The relationship between the concrete built environment and the cinematically-imagined one become competing versions of reality.

The Ways to Construct Healthy of Ecological Infrastructure Base on Environmental Hazard

It is the key spatial pattern for city's ecological safety and health, and the basic guarantee of the city and citizens to attain the sustainable natural service. Those serious eco-environmental hazard affecting hilly city have appeared. we should input more investment into environmental protection, and develop green technology and recycling economy. In order to guarantee ecological security, the countermeasures for ecological infrastructure construction are put forward, establishing the green space system including suburban forest, farmland and green space, recovering wetland ecosystem, optimizing industrial structure and urban spatial distribution, and developing recycling economy, establishing ecological infrastructure monitoring network and information forecast system, carrying out ecological management.

Family Ideals

This article argues that parents of the post–World War II baby boom chose where to live based primarily on the characteristics of individual neighborhoods, rather than by making sharp distinctions between urban and suburban space. The scholarship on post–World War II domesticity and mass suburbanization usually presumes that these two phenomena went hand in hand as baby-boom parents sought the suburbs’ supposedly unique amenities for nuclear family togetherness. This case study of black and white families in Chicago reveals instead that diverse postwar parents described suburban and urban neighborhoods in remarkably similar terms. These families sought out friendly and supportive communities for themselves and their children, opportunities for homeownership, and space for recreation, which they found in a variety of metropolitan Chicago neighborhoods, urban and suburban alike.

Desakota and Beyond: Neoliberal Production of Suburban Space in Manila's Fringe

The term desakota, a mixed urban-rural space adjacent to a metropolitan area, has been substantially used to depict a distinct Southeast Asian urban phenomenon. Invoking the resistant and anti-essentialist aspect of this concept, I offer a critical interrogation of suburban developments in a Global South setting, in particular in Manila's urban fringe, by grounding it within neoliberal restructuring in the Philippines. As the Philippines continues to experience sustained real estate growth eliciting jubilant support from both the state and the market, vast tracks of land on Manila's fringe have been converted to multiple gated residential subdivision developments. Using the case study of Canlubang, I problematize the accelerated production of these suburban spaces in two ways. One, I foreground their historical economic, social, political, and geographical relations and contestations involving multiple actors, such as landed elites, taipans, Overseas Filipinos, dispossessed farmers, and indigenous peoples. Second, I unpack these highly preferred developments by linking them to the continued land struggles of farmers and persistent dominance of political-economic elites in the Philippines. As farmers face numerous acts of harassment, violence, and demolition to make way for these developments, several farming communities have managed to sustain their resistance to these projects. These spatial narratives offer possible theoretical and empirical trajectories that elucidate grounded contingencies between urbanization and neoliberalization in multiple contexts and illustrate the instability of urban futures projected by neoliberal visions.

Before the West Was West: Rethinking the Temporal Borders of Western American Literature

“Before the West was West: Rethinking the Temporal Borders of Western American Literature” Questions of how to define “Western American Literature” and how to define the “American West” have long occupied scholars of Western literary studies. As these definitions have evolved, the boundaries have been shifted to include more voices and more experiences of the West. Recent developments in criticism have expanded the purview of “Western American Literature” to include 21st-century texts and those that take place in urban and suburban spaces. Yet even in the face of constantly shifting and expanding boundaries, few scholars in the field have seriously studied texts written prior to 1800 through the lens of “Western American Literature.” Using Mary Rowlandson’s 1682 The Sovereignty and Goodness of God as a case study, this essay questions the scant critical attention paid to earlier texts and asks scholars to rethink what—or perhaps when —we mean by “Western American literature.”

Faith and suburbia: secularisation, modernity and the changing geographies of religion in London’s suburbs

Spectacular new religious buildings on London’s outskirts are often cited as evidence of London’s multicultural diversity. However, the suburban location of these new buildings is usually dismissed as incongruous, drawing on familiar tropes of the suburbs as sites of modernisation, materialism and secularism. This paper uses this assumed incongruity to address the complexity of relationships between religion and suburban space by tracing the significance of religion in changing suburban geographies through a focus on London’s suburbs. The paper begins with a critique of the absence of religion in suburban studies, which emphasise secularisation and homogeneity. The rediscovery of the creative potential of the suburbs gives little consideration to religious creativity. Similarly recent work on diasporas and religion have little to say about the significance of the suburban. Our paper uses three case studies, of different faith groups, from North and West London to explore three distinctive articulations of the relationship between religion and suburban space that we call ‘semi‐detached faith’, ‘edge‐city faith’ and ‘ethnoburb faith’. These examples are not intended as ideal types but as analytical categories that open up the relationships between space, faith and mobilities. We argue there is a need to more carefully theorise the ways in which faith communities have engaged with the challenges of suburban geographies including processes of secularisation and suggest that the study of faith in suburbia offers new ways of thinking about the complexity of suburban space.