1
Introduction

c1-fig-0001 — Nova Lima, Belo Horizonte, Brazil

‘[T]he tremendous concentration (of people, activities, wealth, goods, objects, instruments, means and thought) of urban reality and the immense explosion, the projection of numerous, disjunct fragments (peripheries, suburbs, vacation homes, satellite towns) into space.’

(Lefebvre 2003: 14)

When it comes to how and where we dwell, work and have fun, we live in times of rapid change. Few periods in history, barring the industrialization of Europe, the urbanization of Latin America and the suburbanization of North America, have seen as much change as the period we are currently going through. We can assume that urbanization marks the moment of our shared experience as planetary citizens. The United Nations' World Urbanization Prospects (United Nations 2014) estimates that while in 1950 a total of 746 million lived in urban environments, by 2045 more than 6 billion are expected to be urbanized. This development has been widely understood now to be shaping global development goals in what some have referred to as the Urban Age (Burdett and Sudjic 2007; 2011; Brugmann 2009). Such thinking has been subject to some serious methodological criticism as scholars have pointed out that we ought to think less of people in cities than people in urban society, less in categories such as global and megacities and more in terms like ‘planetary urbanization’ (Brenner and Schmid 2015; Gleeson 2014; Ren and Keil 2017).

While these critiques are incisive and important, the current book aims at an intervention on a different terrain. The notion of an urban age suggests in its core a move of urban populations from more dispersed into denser environments for residence, work and recreation. This move towards more compact spatial patterns for work and life is certainly borne out by the world's ‘final migration’ to move to the ‘arrival cities’ of the twenty-first century (Saunders 2011). The global migration of millions of first time urbanites in less developed countries is mirrored by a distinct move towards re-urbanization in industrialized countries that had been going through half a century of de-industrialization, suburbanization and urban decline. What is more, these processes have been welcomed and normatively prescribed by planners and urbanists responding to challenges of climate change and sustainability that are said to be met more readily in compact, denser cities. While such processes of re-urbanization, densification and compactness are real and imagined features of the urban age, this book occupies itself with questions of urban growth that are better understood if we take into account tendencies towards urban expansion, de-centralization and suburbanization. As we will explore in a sequence of historical, conceptual and thematic chapters, much of the urban age is, at closer inspection, rather a suburban age. We live on a suburban planet. This observation is supported by statistical evidence that shows, as has the work of Shlomo Angel and colleagues (Angel, Parent and Civco 2010; Angel, Parent, Civco and Blei 2010) among others, that the growth of cities' populations and activities is characterized by a disproportional expansion of those cities' territory. In other words, as the world urbanizes, cities also become less densely populated, their spaces less intensively used.

It is expected that in 2030 urbanized land on the planet will cover 1. 2 million square kilometres. That is twice as much as in 2000. Urbanization at this incredible rate must give everyone pause. This ubiquitous trend will imply significant consequences for climate change, biodiversity and so forth (Seto, Güneralp, Hutyra 2012). In the near future, another three billion humans will have to be housed.¹ Most of the future inhabitants of the earth's crust will be living in entirely new cities that run the spectrum from Corbusian nightmares to ‘broadacre’ campuses and squatter camps and many more of those who already live in cities will move to those new, mostly suburban environments, too. None of them, perhaps with the exception of the odd historicizing Chinese new town, will look like nineteenth-century Manchester or Paris, or the heart of Amsterdam or Barcelona (Swilling 2016). Two aspects stand out in this perspective: first, this projected urbanization will be extremely unequal, with China and Africa absorbing the lion's share of global urbanization during the next generation; second, we can expect that the majority of the urban expansion we face in the next generation or two will not mirror the current trend towards re-urbanization, widely celebrated in the urban North, but will continue to be extensive in nature. This will take wildly different forms in places such as China or Turkey, where more dense, high-rise type suburban developments are driven by large-scale state-sponsored programmes and (most of) Africa or India, where we see continued and continuous lower density suburbanization prevail (Bloch 2015; Gururani 2013; Mabin 2013; Wu and Shen 2015; Wu 2013). At the same time, there will also be additional suburban extension of cities in North America, Europe and Australia, where half-hearted growth controls can barely withstand the tide of further sprawl – residential, commercial and industrial –, often now driven by aggressive infrastructure development, including airports, private motorized transportation and public transit that now reach the far corners of the commuter shed and extend the urban region (Addie and Keil 2015).

The notion of an urban planet is not new. Manuel Castells, for example, notes as early as 1976 that American elites were operating on the assumption that an urban world had dawned. He quotes Senator Abraham Alexander Ribicoff, who observed : ‘To say that the city is the central problem of American life is simply to know that increasingly the cities are American life; just as urban living is becoming the condition of man across the world ….’ (quoted in Castells 1976: 2–3). Ribicoff emphasizes a qualitative, rather than a mere quantitative shift towards urban life: ‘The city is not just housing and stores. It is not just education and employment, parks and theaters, banks and shops. It is a place where men should be able to live in dignity and security and harmony, where the great achievements of modern civilization and the ageless pleasures afforded by natural beauty should be available to all’ (quoted in Castells 1976: 3). Henri Lefebvre, had preceded Castells by a few years to announce the coming of an ‘urban society’. In his book La revolution urbaine, first published in English in 2003, Lefebvre predicted that society was going to be irreversibly urban as the production of urban space was becoming the central process through which capital was accumulated and the reach of the city extended far beyond its immediate physical borders through metabolic relationships that spanned the world (Lefebvre 2003).

In the half-century that has passed since these early premonitions of an urban world, many have jumped on the bandwagon of pronouncing the onset of the urban age. An entire industry of Lefebvre scholarship has sprung up to celebrate the possibilities of claiming the Right to the City in an urbanized world. Most recently, perhaps, the declaration of an epoch of ‘planetary urbanization’ has been the most influential mode of carrying Lefebvre's message forward (Brenner 2014). In this wave of urban enthusiasm for the revolutionary potential of urbanization and sharp critique of mainstream urbanism, the idea that cities both ‘explode’ and ‘implode’ as expressed in the epigraph at the top of this chapter has gained ground to describe that processes of densification ‘here’ stand in direct relationship with processes of de-centralization ‘there’. An ‘oscillating growth dynamics’ (Keil and Ronneberger 1994) has been characteristic of the waves of urbanization that have swept the world's metro areas: as the centres gain in population and economic activity, so do the peripheries. When the Frankfurt Airport at the city's edge expands, so do the activities of the financial industry in the core. As the fringe of Toronto is stretched into the fields abutting the protected Oak Ridges Moraine (Gee 2017), the condominium towers in the inner city mushroom into the sky. As Los Angeles makes one attempt after another to anchor a resident population in its gentrifying downtown (Dillon 2017), its desert frontier continues to be pushed out indefinitely despite the (subprime) crisis writings on the wall.

John Friedmann, the great American planner, has used the terms ‘prospect of cities’ and ‘the urban transition’ to point out the irreversible inevitability of the world turning urban (2002). The urban transition is the unstoppable movement from the rural and agricultural to the urban. Already in the 1960s, he saw the urban field as the spatial form of the urban transition: ‘It is no longer possible to regard the city as purely an artifact, or a political entity, or a configuration of population densities. All of these are outmoded constructs that recall a time when one could trace a sharp dividing line between town and countryside, rural and urban man. ’ (Friedmann and Miller 1965: 314). This transition is, of course, not just one of brick and mortar, infrastructures and technologies, it involves urbanization of the world's ways of life: ‘We are headed irrevocably into a century in which the world's population will become, in some fundamental sense, completely urbanized’ (2002: 2). The expansion and consolidation of global capital can be assumed to continue and the urban transition to be completed over the course of this century. Friedmann and Miller note in their once pathbreaking piece on the urban field: ‘The pattern of the urban field will elude easy perception by the eye and it will be difficult to rationalize in terms of Euclidean geometry. It will be a large complex pattern which, unlike the traditional city, will no longer be directly accessible to the senses’ (1965: 319). This expansion of urban form and urban imaginary is akin to the explosions noted by Lefebvre (2003).

In Time Magazine Bryan Walsh (2012) notes that ‘The urbanization wave can't be stopped – and it shouldn't be’ but pleads for a change in the way we build cities in the future in order to make urbanization sustainable. But how are we really building cities? It seems that over the past two hundred years, not to mention for thousands of years before, we have been mostly building cities in a manner of concentric expansion of rings around a typically religious or secular seat of power and around a market place. Many core cities have experienced ‘Haussmannization’ of one kind or another throughout the twentieth century, with added axes, corridors and central intensification and structuration. Others have been altogether invented as products of a modern age, as have Brasilia or the bombed out European cities after the Second World War. But most of modern urbanization has been an ongoing process of suburban extension. Over time, those suburbs became cities themselves. They tended to become denser, less informal, more reliant on technologies of mobility. In pre-industrial times, the extension was minimal. Much of it had to do with limited technologies of mobility. Militarily the city's compact form was also an advantage as it could be defended better. In the industrial and automobile city of the twentieth century, the extension is celebrated not just as a temporary state that would soon be giving way to a more traditional form of urbanism. On the contrary, the extension was now considered a legitimate, if not preferred form of urbanism: in the periphery, more than in the centre, the true expression of society's success was to be found, whether that was the single-family home subdivision of the American dream, the new towns of the Soviet empire or the housing estates of social democratic Europe and Canada. That there would be a way back to the core from the garden cities, satellite towns and subdivisions of the automobile metropolis would have sounded implausible or even undesirable to mid-century planners and city builders. Yet, for the most part, those consecutive waves of twentieth century suburbanization were still dependent on and related to the urban centre, whether it was for financing of infrastructure, jobs or government services. Towards the end of the millennium, though, this changed. Often discussed in the context of the Los Angeles School of urban studies, we are beginning to see the dissolution of centrality as we knew it. Instead, the urban form becomes polycentric and the suburbs themselves appear more as free-floating units (Soja 1996; 2000).

The argument I am putting forward in this book is that under the conditions of current trends in technology, capital accumulation, land development and urban governance, the expected global urbanization will necessarily be largely suburbanization. Yet, we (as in urban professionals, planners, scholars of urban studies, etc.) have collectively embraced centralism and compactness as the guiding idea of twenty-first-century urbanism, just at a time when there is a massive explosion in the way land around existing cities is used. Suburban land, as one of the chief products of post-neoliberal capitalism, continues to be readied for settlement whether it is in the form of subdivisions in North America or squatter settlements in India or Africa. Around the globe, suburbanization now occurs without the automatic assumption that this may lead to denser, more central forms of urbanization later – although it may.

Following Andy Merrifield's (2012) call for a new conceptual register beyond the traditional dichotomies of urban studies and for a re-theorization of urbanization more fundamentally, this book on global suburbanization is by no means intended to reify and mark differences between the category of ‘suburb’ and the rest of the dimensions through which general urbanization moves ahead. The traditional dichotomy of city and suburb has itself presented an obstacle to a better understanding of urbanization overall (Schafran 2013). Yet it has also been at the core of what we take to be the difference between the good city and the bad, which Alex Schafran has called an ‘ongoing duel between utopian and dystopian visions [that] has been constructed discursively, at least in the American context, through the defining dialectic of the past century of American metropolitan thought – the city versus the suburb’ (Schafran 2013: 136). In this sense, the book understands its place to be part of what Merrifield (2012) names a ‘reloaded urban studies’ that dispenses ‘with all the old chestnuts between North and South, between developed and underdeveloped worlds, between urban and rural, between urban and regional, between city and suburb and so forth’. Therefore, the book is as much a specific intervention into suburban debates as it is a contribution to a rejuvenated conversation on urban theory overall (see, for example, Judd and Simpson 2011; Robinson and Roy 2016).

This, then, is a book about global suburbanization as a particular and pervasive process of urban expansion. That said, let me do away with a few misconceptions right at the start. This book is not a normative plea for suburbanization. While ostensibly about suburbs and suburbanization, it is not a book against cities and urbanization. Recognizing the sustained and perhaps growing significance of suburban forms of life and peripheral modes of urbanization, does not mean discounting the remarkable push of development towards the city centres, the tendencies towards re-urbanization and the recovery of urban cores in many parts of the world. Much of that inner-city regeneration is tied into waves of gentrification and expulsions of poorer populations from city centres as a new spatial fix – that of a creative knowledge economy – is taking hold in the de-cored manufacturing metropoles of the past.

So, this book is primarily about Lefebvre's ‘explosions’ that are part of the urbanization processes we are currently undergoing. The metaphor of ‘implosions/explosions’ is itself marred by severe limitations due to its particular time-specific use in the age of astrophysics but for now, let's assume that suburbanization is part of that centrifugal movement that creates unstructured communities of usually lower densities beyond the classical core of the city that both contracts and increases in height and scale. Yet, when we emphasize the importance of suburbanization and while we are doing this without denying the continued or even increasing metropolitanization and re-urbanization that occurs at the same time, we are also not talking about the kind of suburbanization that has traditionally given the process its name. In order to follow me down the road of my argument in this book, I will at least temporarily and partly have to ask the reader to suspend images of white picket fences and single-family homes on cul-de-sacs when reading the words suburb, suburbanization and suburbanisms.

What do I mean by sub/urbanization and sub/urbanism more generally and suburbanization and suburbanism more specifically in this book? In the first instance, suburbanization ‘is a combination of non-central population and economic growth with urban spatial expansion’ (Ekers et al. 2012: 407). Suburbanism(s) refers to suburban ways of life. The definitional simplicity must not overshadow, however, the vast diversity of processes and forms we find in suburbanization and suburbanisms worldwide. Importantly, then, this book is not about suburbs as things but about suburbanization as a process. Suburbanization is a process of active production and reproduction. This includes discursive processes of world production. A process of worlding in the sense of being the process that makes the world today. The trope harkens back to what David Harvey said about the need to focus on urbanization as a process instead of the city as a thing (1996). This book attempts to help recognize the role of the periphery in these processes. Specifically, suburbanization is seen as a product of self-built, state-led and private-led development; these three styles can and mostly do exist simultaneously and in combination and are not to be understood as occurring in historical sequence (Ekers et al. 2012). This leads to an insight that is fundamental to the methodological approach that underlies this book: ‘In contrast to periodizing suburban expansion and decline, distinguishing between self-led, state-led and market- or private-led development, avoids taking the Euro-American case as fundamental and highlights divergent yet comparable processes in different spaces’ (Ekers et al. 2012: 411).

While other books, approaches, views are seeing ‘a world of suburbs’ (Harris 2010), this book sees the world through suburbanization. Suburbanization is not an epiphenomenon of the way the world evolves/revolves. It is the very looking glass through which we see the world today critically. As Lefebvre's urban revolution turns, the suburbanization of the city region takes over the planet. Whatever view one holds of urbanization processes – and I am taking a relational, topological view here – the reality of life as we know it today is marked by multi-scalar everydayness (Alltäglichkeit). This book is not a short history of suburbanization and not a systematic review of suburban studies. It is also not an atlas of suburbanism. A large number of recent publications provide those aspects of the study of suburbs (Moos and Walter-Joseph 2017). What the book provides instead is a set of arguments about suburbanization and suburban ways of life. The very concept of suburb or suburban has recently received renewed attention. Some guidance will be obtained from work by authors who have attempted to distil ‘meaningful types in a world of suburbs’ (Harris 2010). Taxonomies and lexicons of suburbanization have been developed. ‘The suburb’ has been in the centre of these considerations (Harris and Vorms 2017). Building on but also in contrast to these important contributions, this book attempts a less defining and more inquisitive approach. While less interested in laying out the conceptual boundaries of a thing called ‘suburb’ I am keen, instead, on contextualizing the continuous suburbanization of our world in a general project of urban theory building.

As for the specific proliferation of the global suburban, there is some convergence: tracts of single-family suburban homes behind gated walls; malls and freeways and airport warehousing landscapes; flood control infrastructures that concrete regional waterways into suburb-compatible flows and streams; edge cities with offices and condominiums, etc. But the real domain of convergence in form and function remains the inner city with its shared ambitions of creativity, capital accumulation and culture and its hyper-gentrification that flattens all difference across the globe. By contrast, the range of suburban and post-suburban developments we can register is filled with surprises throughout. Whether we look, for example, at the rebuilding of suburban modernist tower neighbourhoods in the East and West, the bustling horizontal slums and squatter settlements as well as new middle-class neighbourhoods of African urban peripheries (Bloch 2015; Mabin 2013), the vertical suburbs of Chinese megacities (Fleischer 2010; Wu and Shen 2015), the ‘classical’ Levittown suburbs, the foreclosure-ridden ‘vulgar’ exurbs in the deserts and woods of the USA (Knox 2008), the transition towns in English greenbelts, edge cities, ethnoburbs or any other form of suburban settlement, there is more diversity to be found there than perhaps anywhere else in the modern history of city-building and re-building.

This helplessly incomplete list also reveals that this book is not about a particular type of suburb, in the least about the North American suburb which has long been considered the model case for the phenomenon and has caught the majority of interest among writers and thinkers on the subject. While the single-family home residential suburb of the post Second World War era in the United States (and to a degree Australia, Britain, Canada) gets its share of attention in this book, its specific problematiques will not be a stand-in for the suburbanization of the world or, to invert this notion: globalized suburbanization. The book presents a state-of-the art sketch of critical thinking on the suburban question and pushes beyond the empirical and conceptual evidence presented by the world's leading thinkers on suburbs into the speculative terrain of new theorizing on the urban more generally. In doing so, the book takes a stance much different from most of the existing literature that sees suburbs as derivative (of the ‘city’); as problematic and lacking (as in social life and environmental sustainability) and as uniform (as in built form). Much more, the book gives the suburbs their rightful place in the conceptual imaginaries and real worlds through which we must understand the global urbanism in which our lives now are being lived.

The book is naturally critical of the conventional suburb-boosting arguments emanating usually from American libertarian scholars and pundits. They deserve their day in court but there is not much here to pursue in good faith. Yet it is also not another tired tirade against the suburbs as the place of all things wrong with today's cities (cars, malls, boredom, sprawl, etc.). While not mincing words on the toll exerted by suburbanization on human and natural environments, the book explores the suburbs without moral judgement applied. Calling urbanization peripheral is just a starting point for a larger discussion about the changing urban geographies of centre and periphery. In debates as different as classical rent theory, Chicago School urbanism or critical urban theory (most notably of the kind influenced by Henri Lefebvre), centrality is often taken literally. Suburbanization, then, has historically been seen as a move away from the core of society and city in more than just a spatial sense. This book will interrogate this shift from centre to margin and discuss ‘the right to the city’ in light of recent dynamics in urbanization.

Much or even most of what we see today as the building, re-building and un-building of cities is suburban. Moreover, much of urban expansion and urban change (including shrinkage) occurs in a post-suburban environment where classical suburban expansion is just one in a range of ways in which cities' peripheries are being reformed and rearranged. Complex post-suburbanity, more than just primary or original suburbanization, is the topic of this book (Phelps and Wu 2011).

The book is not about any specific suburb. While experiences and data from many real places inspire and fuel the narratives in this book and while I will strongly rely on my own research and lived experience over the past twenty-five years in Frankfurt, Los Angeles, Toronto and Montpellier, no particular place/case studies are being presented here.

The book will return periodically to three areas of interest: physical form/built environment; social relationships/process/governance; (sub)urban political ecologies. Materially, the book orients itself through a critical look at the governance, land and infrastructure of suburbanization as three relevant dimensions through which real suburbanization proceeds. Following Ekers, Hamel and Keil (2012) I pursue the production of suburban space as a combination of state, capital and private (often authoritarian) action.

The book is not meant to be an encyclopedia of suburbanization. Rather, it is a long essay on the subject. Respectful of the work done so far in urban studies on the subject of suburbanization, Suburban Planet pushes beyond the ‘state of the art’. While subjective and argumentative, it is based on information from perhaps the largest globally scaled research project on suburbanization and suburbanisms: ‘Global Suburbanisms: Governance, Land and Infrastructure in the twenty-first Century’ of which I have been the principal investigator. This Major Collective Research Initiative housed at York University is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and lasted from 2010 to 2018. Empirical research from this project and other foundational work by likeminded researchers will be processed and critically engaged with through the chapters of this book as appropriate.

In short, the book will argue that:

The urban century is really the suburban century. In a majority urban world, most activity in terms of the expansion and contraction of urban population, built form and economic activity will occur in peripheral areas.
As the world continues its ‘urban revolution’ (Lefebvre 2003), attention needs to be paid to how this is related to the specific processes of spatial, economic and social peripheralization characterizing urbanization today.
Whether we call these forms suburban, peri-urban, peripheral, post-suburban, exurban or employ any equivalent concepts, the phenomenon, to borrow from Lefebvre, ‘is universal’ (Lefebvre 2003: 54).
It is through the lens of suburbanization (broadly defined) that the process of urbanization reveals itself in the twenty-first century.
The book will provide a strong argument about the possibility of an expanded comparative perspective on global suburbanization and to move away from the ‘classical’ case of the North American suburb as the assumed benchmark for suburban studies.

What kind of world do we live in? A world of suburbs!

The global suburban landscape now has a kaleidoscopic appearance. There is great multiplicity in the rapidly suburbanizing geographic regions all over the world. But this multiplicity is also somewhat deceptive. There is much blurring and bleeding among and between the different world regions. In a post-colonial, post-suburban world, the forms, functions, relations, etc. of one suburban tradition get easily merged, refracted and fully displaced in and by others elsewhere, near or far. Our optics have changed accordingly and we have collectively been challenged to abandon historically privileged spots for observing urbanization. That includes both the privilege of the urban centre and the privilege of the Global North, long considered – and inherently treated – as the norm in trajectories of global urbanization.

I am profoundly respectful of the ultimate unknowability of the urban and implicitly of the suburban. In David Mitchell's 2004 novel Cloud Atlas Luisa, one of the protagonists, moves through a fictional city – modelled perhaps on San Diego or Los Angeles in the 1970s:

Angry horns blast as Luisa fumbles with the unfamiliar transmission. After Thirteenth Street the city loses its moneyed Pacific character. Carob trees, watered by the city, give way to buckled streetlights. Joggers do not pant down these side streets. The neighborhood could be from any manufacturing zone in any industrial belt. Bums doze on benches, weeds crack the sidewalk, skins get darker block by block, flyers cover barricaded doors, graffiti spreads across every surface below the height of a teenager holding a spray can. The garbage collectors are on strike, again, and mounds of rubbish putrefy in the sun. Pawnshops, nameless laundromats, and grocers scratch a lean living from threadbare pockets. After more blocks and streetlights, the shops give way to anonymous manufacturing firms and housing projects. Luisa has never even driven through this district and feels unsettled by the unknowability of cities.

(Mitchell 2004: 419)

The impossibility of really knowing cities that disturbs Luisa stems primarily from our habit of following well-known paths when we move through the urban field. We don't know the neighbourhoods where we don't usually live, work and party. That we are not familiar with those is the result of complex imbricated influences of the deliberate sequestration and self-segregation, of the exclusion of certain spaces for reasons of social and economic difference, as an outcome of internalized ways of life.

In the area of our spatial perception, we usually remain on our normal terrain, in our comfort zone, where we know our way around. Fictional Luisa has left this zone, as she finds herself driving through the suburbs of fictional San Diego. But also the conceived space, identical often with the corporate and state and planning space of capitalist accumulation, confronts Luisa as alienated, because she fails to understand, the fetishized causal processes that lead to social segregation, de-industrialization, to state retreat and so forth (Lefebvre 1991). We can add that Luisa's gaze betrays a focus on the normal and ordered life in the coherent city, which she misses in the impoverished and de-industrialized suburb. But Luisa's individual experience of ignorance (or alienation) plays into the general insight that these complex processes of urban creative destruction in the post-suburban age cannot be understood as long as we train the categories of the familiar onto the unfamiliar, i. e. approach the rapidly changing instances of sub/urbanization in the twenty-first century with the perspective of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During the nineteenth century, urbanization and industrialization were considered as one in the industrializing European and American nations where city dwellers began to make up about fifteen per cent of the population by 1900; in the twentieth century, metropolitanization went along with the massive industrial shift that included rapid technological change, mechanization, automobilization, mass production etc. from which emerged the regionalization of the city and its apparent ‘dissolution’. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, a bifurcation ensues which sees on one hand the re-urbanization of the sprawling metropolis – which Alan Ehrenhalt (2012) has called ‘the great inversion’ in North America. To some degree, we can also observe this ‘inversion’ in Europe – which has traditionally kept its wealthy downtown and has exported its poor to the periphery – where now the hyper-gentrification of the city cores is accompanied by a massive decomposition of urban order in sprawling inbetween cities, or Zwischenstädte (Sieverts 2003). On the other hand, we see new modes of metropolitanization, suburbanization and de-urbanization in Africa and to some extent in Asia that don't follow the assumed trajectory of urbanization known to Europeans and Americans since the nineteenth century (Phelps and Wu 2011; Mabin, Butcher, Bloch 2013).

The literary example from Cloud Atlas also points to further connected problematiques of sub/urban ontology and epistemology: at the start, this concerns our capacity to have knowledge about the city. The predominant question here is in how far we, as users and everyday producers of urban ways of life, can know the city beyond our own experience. Of course, experience is a limited and limiting category of knowledge acquisition. Limited because it is subjective and never encompassing. In the Lefebvrian sense, the experience is ‘space of perception’ and the dimensions of the conception and of the lived space are not accessible through it. Although impressions gained from art, literature, music, documentation, etc. that the urban dweller carries with him- or herself belong to the rich experience that influences perception, the process remains subjective. Scientific analysis, on the other hand, builds on hedging in the subjective, experimental, personal dimensions of knowledge, in favour of codified and normed forms of the appropriation of reality.

Experience is always limiting since one's own view might block access to knowledge on other, unknown aspects of the urban. The bourgeois prejudices on urbanity align with certain spatial images and are taken for granted after a while. Beyond these assumed categories of the urban, openings are rarely created for us to know the city in ways that are different from what the canon would suggest. In Europe, this means that the urban is taken as a given for the inner cities, while it is denied to the suburbs. In the USA, the urban exists as a dreamworld and world of nightmares beyond the suburbs, which act as the privileged position from which ‘the city’ is experienced. But here also, the racialized and classed perspective inherent in this position blocks a more comprehensive view of the city as a form of life. In this sense, then, suburbanization and suburbanism appear as an epistemological filter. Their felt specificity and their assumed less-than-urban status present obstacles to suburbanites and non-suburbanites alike, to seeing the urban for what it is: a place of contradiction and spatialized plurality (structured and segregated by state power, market dynamics and private authoritarianism) in which both centrality and peripherality are related values on a continuum and antitheses in a dialectics of ongoing urbanization.

My argument in this book follows a suggestion by Ananya Roy to approach urbanism in a four-dimensional manner. First, ‘urbanism refers to the territorial circuits of late capitalism’ (2011: 8). Privileging the political economy of land production in our analysis is a critical statement in an environment where often lifestyle choice and consumer privilege is seen as the driving force of urbanization. Second, there is the acknowledgement that while capital tends towards structuring urban space in its image, it is unable to structure it at will. In contrast, ‘urbanism indicates a set of social struggles over urban space’. Here we deal with the claim to the right to the city, or as we will see, the right to the suburb. Third, we can discuss urbanism as a ‘formally constituted object, one produced through the public apparatus that we may designate as planning’. While this book is not about planning per se, this includes the recognition of state action, coordinated effort and contested processes of rule-making around the production of urban space. And fourth and lastly, Roy notes that ‘urbanism is inevitably global’ (2011: 9). This is the pervasive theme of the narrative presented here.

Looking at suburbanisms as global phenomena creates the uneasy necessity of having to step out of the secure space of national and known trajectories of urbanization in regions and cities and out of the safety zone of positivist linearities of urban growth (and decline). Rather, following Roy, we are adding ‘unthinkable space’ to the already established term ‘unknowability’ of the city. For that, Roy borrows from Derek Gregory and describes this space as ‘seemingly unplanned, seemingly undecipherable, marked by unimaginable fragmentation and extraordinary violence …that may speak to some of the most prevalent urban and thus human conditions of the twenty-first century’ (2011: 9).

Roy uses yet another operative term in her analysis that becomes a key methodological concept for understanding the urban process today. It is the notion of ‘worlding’. She develops this notion from the insight that not all cities are following a preordained path with declared outcome: ‘In contrast, the concept of worlding seeks to recover and restore the vast array of global strategies that are being staged at the urban scale around the world’ (2011: 9).

The chapters that follow take up the topic of global suburbanization through a variety of conceptual and empirical lenses. Chapters 2–4 look at how suburbs have been explained, theorized and studied. Chapters 5 and 6 examine the changing composition of the traditional suburb and the proliferation of the suburban around the world. Chapter 7 discusses suburban infrastructures. Chapter 8 explores suburban political ecologies through the lenses of density, boundaries and the Anthropocene. A chapter on the political suburb concludes the volume.

Urban Futures Series

Copyright page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

1
Introduction

What kind of world do we live in? A world of suburbs!

Note