They have not destroyed space; they have simply rendered it infinite by the destruction of its centre (hence these infinitely extendable cities).
—Jean Baudrillard, America
Global urbanization is heading toward infinite suburbia. Around the world, the vast majority of people are moving to cities not to inhabit their centers but to suburbanize their peripheries.1 Thus, when the United Nations projects the number of future “urban” residents, or when researchers quantify the amount of land that will soon be “urbanized,” these figures largely reflect the unprecedented suburban expansion of global cities.2 By 2030, an estimated nearly half a million square miles (1.2 million square kilometers) of land worldwide will become urbanized, especially in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.3 In the United States alone, an additional 85,000 square miles (220,000 square kilometers) of rural land will be urbanized between 2003 and 2030.4 Given that these figures represent the conversion of currently rural land at the urban fringe, these lands are slated to become future suburbias. Even so, many countries are already majority suburban. In the United States, 69 percent of the population lives in suburbs.5 As late as 2010, over 75 percent of American jobs lay outside the urban core.6 Many other developed countries are also majority-suburban. In the Global South, it is estimated 45 percent of the 1.4 billion people who become new urban residents will settle in peri-urban suburbs.7 The sheer magnitude of land conversion taking place, coupled with the fact that the majority of the world’s population already lives in suburbs, demands that new attention and creative energy be devoted to the imminent suburban expansion.
Despite all the evidence showing that the world’s most prevalent and rapidly growing form of urbanization will be suburbia, the fields of Planning, and especially Design, still lack a robust, unbiased intellectual and theoretical platform to examine and debate it.8 Not since rapid post–World War II suburban expansion in the United States was ushered in by the stewardship of landscape architecture has any design field taken the lead on suburban futures.9 The allied Planning and Design fields have proved unable to significantly shape suburbia, which has continued unabated and in forms primarily driven by economic policies, some consumer preferences, speculation, tax policies, and lax government regulation. The results are widespread suburban models that are wasteful, unsustainable, and inequitable for many social and economic reasons, but also spreading everywhere including China, Ireland, Spain, Turkey, Panama, Dubai, Ghana, Kenya, and many other countries.
Perhaps as a reaction to our own ineffectiveness, Planning and Design have overwhelmingly vilified suburbia. As the historian Robert Bruegmann describes in “The Antisuburban Crusade,” the intellectual elite has railed against suburbia primarily in three distinct waves in history, and particularly for aesthetic reasons (though the suburb has endless criticisms leveled against it). As a solution, many arguments call for a full return to high-density living, dismissing the suburbs altogether.10 However, most of America’s and many other developed countries’ populations currently live in suburbs, while the developing world is undergoing massive suburbanization, too. A truly “back to the city” future, as imagined by retro-urbanists, seems highly unlikely short of imposition of draconian planning regimes.
This book is construed for an alternative discourse around suburbia that can open paths to improvement and agency, rather than condemning it altogether or trying to stop it. As Bruegmann reveals, the long history of antisuburban crusades has shown that the latter strategies always fail. Changing the discourse entails abandoning ideological biases and critically examining nuanced research on suburbia that exposes both its flaws and its opportunities. In doing so, we find that suburbia contains many opportunities to be a more productive landscape than its current condition. As the largest form of new growth and settlement globally, it is a vast frontier awaiting innovation. Suburbia could be an experimental test bed for new typological forms, environmental retrofitting, clean water, home-based employment, energy production, novel ecosystems, social programs, and many other innovations yet unimagined. Moreover, in order to find innovative solutions for suburbia, the allied Design and Planning fields need a new intellectual framework.
The Infinite Suburbia project began in the summer of 2014 to find the most recent, cutting-edge research on suburbia that pointed toward more productive futures. Following a literature search involving over five hundred references by a team of researchers at MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism, over fifty authors were invited to contribute to the publication. We allowed authors to define suburbia on their own terms. We wanted to include contrasting perspectives and have a balanced approach to show there are advantages and disadvantages to the suburban condition.
Suburbia is complex. Its production, persistence, and expansion can best be explained as a nonlinear set of interrelationships. We cannot talk about one aspect of suburbia without considering how it might affect many other social, economic, political, or ecological factors. Any study of suburbia—just as any study of urbanization at large—is not bounded by any single discipline or argument. For these reasons, instead of conforming to a linear packaging of chapters, we have chosen a more unconventional structuring of this book.
To capture the complexity and richness inherent in the book’s content, we analyzed all essays to find common, reoccurring topics across authors. Initially, we identified nearly two hundred common topics creating over three hundred connections across the fifty-two essays in the book. When we mapped these topics and linked them to the book’s essays, we found a rich set of interrelationships between seemingly disparate essays and topics, exposing the multidisciplinary nature of suburban studies.
We reduced the topics from two hundred to twenty-one in order to distill the most important ideas in the book. Thus, the Infinite Suburbia Roadmap was born. The Roadmap is the navigational guide to this book. It maps the book’s essays and their connections to the twenty-one topics, which have been organized around five major themes: the drive for upward social mobility, polycentric metropolitan form, metropolitan economic relationships, harnessing ecological productivity, and scales of governance.
These themes are the five chapters of the book. The authors’ essays are placed in the chapter that is most closely related to their theses, indicated in the Roadmap by page, chapter, and essay number, plus a symbol marking the essay type: history, case study, research, or theory. However, most essays straddle multiple themes, and the Roadmap is useful in showing the connections between one essay or topic to another. In this way, the Roadmap allows readers to take their own improvised journeys through the material, starting at a topic of interest and following the threads that unfold. We invite readers to construct unique trajectories and to form their own paths derived from the material.
Since the topics and major themes emerged organically from the book’s content, they constitute the most important ideas in the book and potentially the beginnings of a new theory on suburbia. Suburbia—if not ignored altogether—has long been a niche subject within urban theory. Even when studied in its own right, suburbia has typically been geographically imagined as an extension of urban cores, which reinforces the city-suburb duality.11 Changing such deeply embedded dualism requires envisioning suburbia not as an “explosion” away from a center but as an emergence of new centers with different, and often unique, characteristics.12 Herein, we begin building a new theory of suburbia that is inclusive of old and new centralities. It is a theory that aims to understand the phenomenon of “complete urbanization.”13
Related fields have parallel theories already in development. In social science, new regionalism examines the effects of regional-scale urban agglomerations in terms of economic, political, and cultural effects. New regionalism accepts the polycentric structure of modern metropolitan areas. Yet the geographer Edward Soja admits that, “unfortunately, the new regionalism in an explicit and assertive sense has remained poorly articulated in the wider literature and not well developed empirically.”14 Moreover, as a social science theory, a spatial component tends to be missing from new regionalist literature. Designers and planners need a theory that also helps to explain the spatial structure and characteristics of metropolitan areas and even larger regions to serve as a framework for agency and intervention. As many of our authors explain, little physical Design and Planning agency exists at these larger scales, even though it is one of increasing focus and importance in our age of environmental concerns. It is because of their horizontality that suburban surfaces still have the capacity for retrofitting large, new designed systems that can alter regional sustainability. At the same time, heavy regulatory and financial constraints in urban cores, especially the challenges of infrastructural upgrades in congested spaces, make large-scale Design and Planning an anathema.
The purpose of this book is not to unveil a fully developed new theory of suburbia; rather, our ambition is to lay out a plausible roadmap that outlines the beginnings of such a theory. We start by prioritizing contemporary issues, the critical need for larger scales of physical Design and Planning, and opening new lines of research that planners and designers interested in the physical nature of urbanization would not typically follow. We hope that other urban scholars and practitioners expand on the conversations begun in this book to eventually shape a more full-fledged theory for understanding the future of suburbia.
The first chapter explores suburbia as a place of opportunity and upward social mobility for many, but also frequently a result or manifestation of social inequalities. Suburbia’s power as a place of opportunity comes from its dynamic and heterogeneous nature. As Robert Fishman describes, “Nothing is more hybridized—indeed, chaotic—than morphology and land uses at the edge of a rapidly growing city.” In “The Myth of Homogeneous Suburbia,” Jon C. Teaford expands on the hybridity of suburbia, outlining the ways in which suburbs have been socially and economically mixed since their inception. In fact, suburbia’s social diversity has radically increased over the past twenty years. Not only do 61 percent of foreign-born immigrants in America live in suburban areas of large metros, suburbia is home to more than half of all minority groups.15 Moreover, the number of large metro areas where suburbs are majority-minority has increased from eight to sixteen since 2000.16 In the United States, suburbs are diversifying at the national level, but the metropolitan dynamics also yield interesting insights into the movements of minority groups. In “Reexamining Race and Ethnicity in the Suburbs,” Ali Modarres’s research shows how minorities are continuing to move into formerly white areas in greater numbers. Where they originally inherited inner-city areas during white flight, now minorities are moving into the inner-ring suburbs vacated by white populations moving to gentrified inner-city areas. In doing so, minorities are gaining access to homeownership and amenities that enhance their quality of life.
The movement of minority groups into formerly white suburbs is more than just an American phenomenon, and adjustments need to be made to handle these migrations depending on where they are located. From Norway’s Grorud Valley, outside Oslo, Espen Aukrust Hauglin and Janike Kampevold Larsen discuss in “The Grorud Valley: Borderline Suburbia” how the valley’s landscape structure needs reconsideration now that new demographic groups have moved in. These groups have a different relationship to nature and recreational needs than the native Norwegians the Grorud Valley was designed for.
Contrary to popular press, millennials are also finding homes in suburbia in great numbers. Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais, in their essay, “Millennials’ Hearts Are in the Suburbs,” argue that as millennials move from urban cores into suburbs, they will dramatically reshape its landscape.
And yet, while suburbia is a place of opportunity for many, it can also be the manifestation of social inequalities of many kinds. Robert Fishman, in “The Divided Metropolis: The Suburb and the Explosion of Global Urbanization,” explains the now familiar tendency to enclave the rich in suburbia, leaving the disadvantaged in the city center, as originally devised in the Anglo-Saxon model. Historically, France has done the reverse, pushing its poor to the periphery (housing them in modernist grands ensembles), keeping the urban core gentrified. Only Ebenezer Howard’s garden city model attempts to break class divisions, but its implementation has been limited. Most other models are predicated on divisions between the rich and the poor, resulting in asymmetrical provision of infrastructure and services. Thus fragmentation in metropolitan areas arises between therich (frequently in gated communities) and the poor (frequently in slums) that exist side by side in many developing world cities.
Mexico City is a metropolitan area known for its divisions along economic lines, in part fueled by the concerns of security and exclusivity of the upper classes. Guénola Capron and Martha de Alba’s essay “Mexico’s Suburban Dream” recounts how Mexico City’s first middle-class suburbs emerged in the 1940s and 1950s at a time when suburbs were initially associated with poverty. They describe how the fusion of international and local architectural ideas produced the designs for the first developments, which normalized suburban middle- and upper-class development in Mexico City.
As the central parts of cities become denser, land on the fringe often provides a cheaper alternative. Housing affordability is a major driver of suburban growth, without which America risks becoming a “rentership society” with degradation of wealth and quality of life, according to Joel Kotkin in “Suburbia as a Class Issue.” Kotkin argues that homeownership is a way for Americans to achieve middle-class status, and the suburbs are the place where homes are most accessible to buyers. In “Australia’s Misplaced War on the Suburban Dream,” Ross Elliott explains how policymakers have sought to increase density in the urban cores by creating aggressive tax policies to curb suburban expansion, leading to record high property prices that have made it impossible for young first-time home-buyers to buy. Similarly, in the United Kingdom, strict greenbelt and rural development policies have created social costs in the form of poor housing quality and high housing prices, as explained by James Heartfield in “How Britain’s Greenbelts Choke Suburbs and Force Up Prices.” As Joel Kotkin reminds us, there will always be people who prefer suburban living. Kotkin and other authors see suburbanization as an innate human desire (most likely for privacy and ownership) that may be repressed, but will burgeon when given the opportunity.
Yet as suburbia has offered homeownership, amenities, and higher quality of life for the masses, the elite have consistently voiced strong opposition to suburbs:
There are major problems with suburban development including everything from the cost of providing services to the problem of protecting species habitat. But it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the existing criticism has, more often than not, been based on traditional aesthetic notions about “proper” urban form deeply rooted in the model of the traditional European city, with its focus of power and authority at the center.17
While there are many valid criticisms of suburbia, Robert Bruegmann in “The Antisuburban Crusade” explains that the heart of the criticisms tend to rest on the elites’ judgments of suburban aesthetics and taste, often leading to negative characterizations about suburban neighborhoods and their residents. We rarely hear the voices of suburban residents themselves. In the rare personal narrative “Suburban Holy Land,” the author D. J. Waldie shares his perspective of being a lifelong resident of Lakewood, California, a tract-house suburb that originally offered working-class families a chance to own a home and have a new life. And yet, places such as these are described as the “anti-place” or “where evil dwells” by some elite urban critics.
This second chapter explores the sheer scale of suburban expansion in the United States and the world, the characteristics of polycentric metropolitan areas, and the implications of this condition on mobility. For many decades, suburbia has been the predominant fabric in the United States, as well as in other countries. But exactly how much of the world is suburban? Although suburbia is the most prevalent form of urbanization, it is notoriously difficult to measure. One issue is the multiplicity of definitions of suburbia.18 There are no universal categorizations of suburbia that define its geography. Although the term principal city is used by the United States Office of Management and Budget as an attempt to designate urban cores, many of our authors argue that it is inaccurate because principal cities often include places that are a mix of high and low densities (such as Irvine or Tustin, California), and often function more like suburbs than traditional core cities.19 Instead, our authors have sought to create their own ways of capturing suburbia. David L. A. Gordon, in “Transport Defines Suburbia,” discusses his pioneering methodology to more precisely categorize suburbia based on transportation modes in Canada, finding that 67 percent of the population lives in suburbs. Wendell Cox, in “Measuring US Cores and Suburbs in the United States,” also uses Gordon’s methodology, finding that approximately 69 percent of the American population is suburban, 14 percent urban, and 17 percent exurban. Clearly, the vast majority of America lives in suburbia.
What kind of architecture exists in suburbia? The American Housing Survey of 2013 found that 64 percent of all occupied American homes are single-family structures.20 Jed Kolko’s analysis of suburban housing in “The Continued Suburbanization of America” shows that household growth in the United States between mid-2011 and 2014 was growing the fastest at 5.3 percent in the lowest density neighborhoods in the United States. In the same time period, urban neighborhoods grew by 2.5 percent and all suburbs by 3.1 percent. The production of this housing type, and more important, its infrastructural and landscape needs, does not appear to be slowing.
Spanning the globe, Shlomo Angel and colleagues analyze a sample of 4,245 cities, primarily in developing countries where 95 percent of future urban growth will occur. Their analysis in “Engaging with the Planet’s Urban Expansion” shows that these cities between 1990 and 2000 physically expanded at an annual rate of 3.6 percent, while population growth was 1.6 percent. This horizontal growth translates to residential density declining worldwide at a rate of 2.1 percent per year. Their pending results for 2000 to 2014 suggest continued declining densities and quite drastic decreases in some developing cities such as Accra, Ghana. Angel concludes that denying suburban expansion (or peri-urbanization) leads to worse outcomes than planning for it. “Urban expansion,” Angel warned in Planet of Cities, “must be prepared for in advance or not at all.”21
Around the world, China’s suburban development has far outpaced any other country’s. According to Thomas J. Campanella in “Sprawl of the Century: Contemporary Chinese Suburbia,” China’s urban footprint in the 1990s increased by an area ten times that of New York City. However, he notes important differences between American and Chinese suburbia, namely, that China’s suburban development and urban cores are more closely unified.
Most of the past century’s suburban expansion would not have been possible without transportation infrastructure. The resultant system is dominated by automobiles and roads as the primary means of mobility. Today, the largest segment of American commuters move between two suburbs (rather than from suburb to city center), and nearly 80 percent drive alone. Alan E. Pisarski’s “Driving While Suburban” shares quantitative evidence to reveal how commuting patterns are becoming increasingly complex, interacting across scales from the local to the regional, and often extending across state lines. The spatial implications of these new commuting patterns are coined into a new term Interburbia in the essay by Kenneth P. Laberteaux, Casey L. Brown, and Alan M. Berger titled “Interburbia: Ground Truthing US Metropolitan Urbanization.” Their case studies of Denver and Atlanta outline the need for infrastructural investment that targets inter-suburban connections—where almost everyone is driving—and argues for major changes to regional governance and federal support necessary to implement metropolitan-scale transport plans, noting that most funding goes to the wrong problem.
As these new commuting patterns make clear, the vast global suburban expansion has forced a reconsideration of the regional structure of metropolitan areas, moving away from models of radial expansion away from the historic urban core toward those that acknowledge the growing polycentricity of metropolitan areas. In the United States, the concept of polycentric metropolis was first introduced by the geographer Jean Gottmann in his 1961 book, Megalopolis, which focused on the Northeast corridor of the United States.22 Regionalism later became another framework to understand metropolitan areas. In Europe, other scholars, such as Thomas Sieverts, proposed concepts such as the Zwischenstadt to describe the extensive, nonhierarchical expansion characteristic in Europe.23 For Southeast Asia, Terry McGee termed the highly mixed-use peripheries of cities like Jakarta desakota.24 Richard Weller and Julian Bolleter offer a new design vision for a future polycentric metropolitan fabric based on regional-scale transport in “Megaregional Australia in the Twenty-First Century.” Acknowledging continuing high levels of population growth in Australia and the insufficiency of infill development, they propose an extended urban area where major cities and smaller settlements of 1.2 million people are linked together by high-speed rail with interwoven productive landscapes.
Several authors mention electric or autonomous vehicles as a potentially revolutionary change in suburbia. Michael Brauer in “Health, Transportation, and the Community-Built Environment” mentions that such technologies could substantially reduce vehicle air pollution, as well as the health impacts of noise. Echoing air quality and transportation concerns, Bridget Catlin, in “Health Advantages in Suburbs,” explains that at the county level, suburbs have the highest levels of particulate matter and long commutes compared with urban and rural counties. Yet she also notes that in the County Health Rankings study, suburbs rank the highest in ten out of twenty-nine measures. The study exposes differences between urban, suburban, and rural health outcomes and behaviors. For example, it is rural counties that have the highest levels of obesity and physical activity, not suburbs, as so many prejudiced urbanists and New Urbanists have purposefully misstated.25
If autonomous vehicle technology was adopted at a large scale in metropolitan areas, then some of suburbia’s biggest negative impacts could be diminished. However, the improved efficiency of autonomous vehicles and the cut in commute times may drive suburban expansion even farther afield, as may already be the case in terms of home-based telecommuting. Some speculate that even more remote areas could be brought into the metropolitan fold.26 More research is needed to understand the potential impacts of autonomous vehicles on metropolitan structure.
The economic complexity and significance of suburbs is often underestimated. This chapter explores the economic diversity, interconnectedness of suburbs to urban cores, and how economic policy can have substantial impacts on the spatial form of suburbs. William T. Bogart presents a theoretical essay on cities and suburbs in “Trading Places among Cities and Suburbs,” describing how cities and suburbs engage in the exchange of goods and services within the metropolitan area. In “Why Should Suburbs Care about Cities?” Michael Hollar finds quantitative evidence of the economic links between urban cores and suburbs, finding that the economies of urban cores and suburbs within a metropolitan area will grow or shrink together unless they are highly specialized around one industry.
Within metropolitan areas, suburbs are economic powerhouses where the vast majority of jobs are located. Nicholas A. Phelps’s essay, “Suburbs in the Metropolitan Economy,” offers a nuanced look at economic activities in different kinds of suburbs, from new suburbs to inner-ring suburbs, airports, and shopping malls. Centering on one of these activities, Ann Forsyth’s “Six Types of High Technology Districts” outlines the ways that such economic districts can be planned for long-term sustainability.
Mark Gibson and colleagues offer another example of suburban economic diversity and how suburbs can fuel innovation in “Creative Suburbia: Cultural Innovation in Outer Suburban Australia,” which presents primary research on creative workers. Since the advent of the so-called creative class concept, investment has been pouring into urban cores, which are presumed to be hotbeds of creativity and innovation. Gibson and colleagues show that creativity in suburbs is significant and neglected. From their research, we learn that creative workers greatly value the suburbs for housing affordability, space and tranquility, amenities, and the high level of social diversity that spurs creativity. Interestingly, some of the creative workers interviewed stated that they preferred working in the suburbs because they were freer from the “pressures to conform” that “inhibit creative freedom” they would otherwise be subjected to in urban cores, which they allude to being more socially homogeneous.
With globalization, neoliberal economic policy has expanded throughout the world. Roger Keil, in “The Global Suburb: Divesting from the World’s White Picket Fences,” describes neoliberalism as “the privatization of economic decision-making and responsibilities over collective solutions” and lists the outcomes as increased economic segregation, boundaries between public and private spaces, and the commodification of sustainability through “green developments” such as those that New Urbanism claims as sustainable.
Multiple case studies illustrate the results of economic policies on spatial form. Martin J. Murray, in “Postsuburban Johannesburg,” explains the concept of real estate capitalism, whereby Johannesburg’s suburban form and governance is dictated by private interests. Christopher Marcinkoski, in “Spain’s Speculative Urbanization,” tells a cautionary tale of how urbanization and infrastructure building were “instrumentalized” into an economic development tool in Spain, resulting in extensive ghost towns and underutilized infrastructure. In “Navi Mumbai: From New Town to Suburbia,” Rahul Mehrotra and Kanika Arora Sharma discuss how a lack of regional planning and specific economic policies in Mumbai led to the dissolution of the original vision for Navi Mumbai. Originally intended to be an independent satellite city near Mumbai, Navi Mumbai instead became a bedroom suburb.
In the United States, a recent and palpable example of economic policy and spatial form is the foreclosure crisis of 2010, whereby the image of suburbs became associated with large areas of abandoned homes. Partly a response to this crisis, Keller Easterling, in “Subtracting the Suburbs,” speculates on how relationships between spatial form and economic policy can be reconfigured to conserve the value and wealth of suburbs in times of flux. She describes a theoretical set of rules that interrelates “building and un-building” across the full fabric of cities and suburbs, which could also create resiliency in the face of new stressors such as flooding and sea-level rise.
The large amounts of landscape surface in suburbia create the greatest opportunity for sustainability through retrofitting and different forms of ecological production. With today’s pressing challenges of climate change and natural resource constraints, this chapter exposes the ecological and productive potential of suburbs. In “The Cosmopolitan Ecology of Suburbia,” Sarah Jack Hinners describes suburbs as “novel ecosystems” that are “more heterogeneous and dynamic over space and time than natural ecosystems…loci of novelty and innovation.” She explains that the combination of differentiated suburban lawns (where each neighbor plants according to his or her preferences) and patches of native ecosystems of a certain minimum size has been found to yield higher biodiversity for certain species than purely native habitats alone. Other ecologists have come to similar conclusions. In the book Welcome to Subirdia, the ornithologist and urban ecologist John M. Marzluff finds in a study of the Seattle metropolitan area that bird diversity peaks in suburbs due to the availability of many different habitats, which echoes the ecologist Robert Blair’s earlier work.27 While undoubtedly some species will simply vanish, Hinners acknowledges, “We don’t have all the answers yet, because we are still in the middle of the experiment.” We see this as one of the great opportunities of suburbia’s youth and open-endedness: suburban experiments can be designed to maximize biodiversity potential as well as the production of many other kinds of ecologically derived needs, such as clean and renewable energy generation, water storage, air filtration, and the metabolizing of wastes.
Landscape architects and architects have constructed many models to conceptualize the design of a future productive suburb. In “Metabolic Suburbs, or The Virtue of Low Densities,” Susannah Hagan outlines how suburbs can be used to grow food and fuel, clean water, modify microclimates, and save and generate energy. Celina Balderas Guzmán, in “Suburban Wetlandia,” elaborates on the potential for constructed wetlands in suburbia to improve water quality and resiliency in metropolitan areas at large. Margaret Grose emphasizes the need to reduce unintended consequences and break disciplinary silos to arrive at better ecologically productive designs. She outlines three new conceptual techniques in “Designing Backward for Suburbia.” Joan Iverson Nassauer shows how carbon sequestration by large trees in suburbia can be increased through specific development layouts, whose viability she explores through developer and homeowner preferences in “Greening Sprawl: Lawn Culture and Carbon Storage in the Suburban Landscape.”
Christopher Sellers, in “Rediscovering the Nature of Suburbia,” explores another antisuburban crusade, the one aimed specifically at the environment. He notes the irony of environmental critiques against suburbia today, given that the history of the environmental movement was born in the suburbs, specifically out of a desire to protect the nature enveloping suburban neighborhoods. He notes how the wealthy have always had access to lush, vegetated suburban settings, which offer better health for residents and improved ecological outcomes over the long-term. In contrast, the working class is often relegated to areas with smaller lot sizes and less vegetation, which offers them fewer health and environmental benefits.
Alex Wall, Paola Viganò, and Alan M. Berger present design models that integrate ecology into the megalopolis scale of many contemporary urban areas. Wall proposes the concept of a low-density city as a sustainable megalopolis, with high- and low-density areas and ecological areas to promote circular metabolism and ecosystem services in “Sprawl Is Dead! Long Live the Low-Density City.” Viganò’s “The Horizontal Metropolis” explores three examples in Europe to show how dispersed networks of water, transportation, and energy can create new hybrid spaces of multifunctionality. In “Belting Future Suburbia,” Berger revamps the outdated concept of the greenbelt into “wastebelts,” or highly functional landscapes that consolidate and metabolize wastes from urban cores and suburbs and form regional connective tissues between polycentric developments. Unlike the greenbelt, the wastebelt allows metropolitan areas to continue horizontally expanding, but uses the dross of expansion to build an eloquent and sophisticated armature for environmental functions.
Harnessing the ecological productivity of suburbia will entail rethinking the way we currently use common open spaces, private lawns, and even building surfaces. Hugh Byrd, in “The Power of Suburbia,” offers quantitative research on Auckland (a predominately suburban New Zealand city similar to American cities) to show how rooftop solar power in suburbia (due largely to the greater exposure of rooftops per capita) could be substantial enough to power not just suburbia but the whole metropolitan region.
Also focusing on technology, Bruce Tonn and Dorian Stiefel, in “Willow Pond: Technologies for a Future Suburban Form,” offer a sociotechnological scenario of a retrofitted suburb in 2050 where climate change and volatile energy and labor markets have forced suburban neighborhoods to assemble into self-sufficient communities. Tonn and Stiefel sketch the myriad of agricultural, manufacturing, building, energy, and ecological technologies that will allow suburbs to become independent centers of production.
Ultimately, the advantage of suburbs with regard to productivity is the vast availability of space, which makes it possible to interweave functions and landscapes at a scale large enough to be effective yet in proximity to people. To accomplish this, new governance models will be needed.
Many of the issues raised up to this point in the book can be traced back to shortcomings of the regulation and governance systems that underlie suburbia’s form and function. In this chapter, authors outline the need for more flexible forms of regulation to improve and capitalize on suburbia’s strengths. Suburbia is ripe for experimentation in part because it represents a tabula rasa with “no past, no precedent, no settled conventions,” as noted by the journalist David Brooks.28 Additionally, this chapter discusses the advantages and disadvantages to local versus regional metropolitan governance. The scale of governance is increasingly debated as issues of regional importance have emerged but the relevant governance mechanisms may not be present to address them.
Innovations in suburbia are extinguished by restricting rules and form-based code types of regulations. In “Between Power and Appearance: The Enterprise Suburbs of Silicon Valley,” Louise A. Mozingo recounts how Silicon Valley’s suburban zoning strategies created flexibility in building typologies that allowed businesses to flourish. Many authors argue that if suburbia is to evolve, it must accommodate new forms of production, with more flexible codes that incorporate ecological thinking. Fadi Masoud, in “Coding Permanent Flexibility,” exposes how America’s suburban single-use zoning tradition is based on early ecological ideas, which claim that “end states” are possible. Today, ecological thought has outgrown that notion and instead emphasizes the dynamic, ever-changing nature of ecosystems. Masoud outlines the ways that designers could explore some of these principles to create process-based codes intended to help neighborhoods adapt as ecological imperatives change.
What should the scale of governance be for metropolitan areas today? This is one of most intensely debated questions being played out in metro areas globally, as suburban areas have accumulated new wealth and inequality gaps have broadened. Depleted urbanized cores now want to share in that wealth by changing their governance structures to capture outlying suburbs. Whether or not regional or local governance is the answer to entrenched problems of social inequality, economic development, transportation planning, and environmental protection is unanswered, but is explored as part of our emerging suburban theory. On the local governance side, Howard Husock, in “Suburban Government and the Virtues of Local Control,” explains the multitude of ways that independence can create healthy competition between municipalities in America. On the regional governance side, Richard Briffault, in “Cities, Suburbs, and the Challenge of Metropolitan Governance,” exposes the social inequalities that emerge in fragmented metropolitan areas. Unfortunately, regional government as a model has largely failed in America, and few scholars seem convinced that it is possible to implement successfully. Instead, Briffault recommends regional governance instead of regional government, whereby agencies and partnerships are created for specific functions. Important questions remain as to which functions should be governed by regional bodies and which should be left to local governments.
Globally, governance is a major stumbling block to equitable and sustainable metropolitan planning as seen in our case studies. Martin Coy and colleagues explain the difficulties of planning at the macro-metropolitan scale in “Brazilian Suburbs: Marginality, Informality, and Exclusivity.” In spite of authorities in Brazil creating agencies at this scale, they have failed to produce meaningful change due to institutional weakness, struggles about responsibilities, political conflicts, and lack of democratic legitimization. Robert J. Mason and Liliya Nigmatullina’s case study of Moscow, “Dachascapes and Dystopias,” describes Russia’s emerging suburbanization, noting how regional planning could secure better outcomes in terms of transport infrastructure, emissions, and local food production. In post–civil war Angola, the government funds large-scale housing projects for the working class in the periphery of Luanda with oil revenues, but fails to provide the necessary transport infrastructure to connect them to the urban core and financing mechanisms for low-income buyers. In the end, the housing shortage in Luanda persists, according to Anne Pitcher and Sylvia Croese in “Turbo-Suburbanism in Luanda.”
Designers and planners may come up with more sustainable models and planning strategies for development, but how do we ensure that they are uniformly implemented across social classes? This difficulty is explained in “Beyond Suburbia? Urban Transitions across the Global South,” where Adriana Allen describes how three common planning strategies for promoting sustainability in peri-urban areas in the Global South result in sustainability for the rich at the expense of the poor. Given that working classes are more numerous worldwide, meaningful change with regards to sustainability will only happen if it affects all sectors of society.
In a similar vein, Nicole Stelle Garnett, in “Old Suburbs Meet New Urbanism,” explains the repercussions of New Urbanist form-based code on struggling inner-ring suburbs, which she conceives as another example of elite imposition of aesthetics. Form-based code is frequently touted as a pathway to urban regeneration, but she explains how it comes with high costs that innerring suburbs may not be able to bear.
Finally, Rafi Segal describes how governance mechanisms can have a direct physical manifestation. “The Dark Side of Suburbia: Israeli Settlements of the West Bank” describes how mountaintop Israeli suburbs in the West Bank are designed to reinforce territorial control and surveillance of Palestinian villages in the valleys below. This narrative of power and control is revealed through stunning drawings and photographs in his essay.
Suburbia’s homogeneity is soundly rebutted in Jon C. Teaford’s “The Myth of Homogeneous Suburbia,” where he explains that “suburbia has not been a world apart from the metropolitan norm. Instead, it has been, and is, a diverse reflection of the heterogeneous world of the modern metropolis.” Passages such as this remind us that the homogeneity often attributed to suburban environments comes from outsider’s views of one dimension or fixated scales.
Arguably, suburbia’s most digestible scale is the mesoscale, which tends to capture coherent neighborhood forms, such as the aerial obliques of the photographer William Garnett. It is plausible, through this angled view, that suburbia appears predominately homogeneous. Yet at larger and smaller scales, a vast heterogeneity exists. The heterogeneity of suburbia is a concept that arises time and time again in these essays and demands strong consideration in our developing theory: from wildlife biodiversity to social diversity, to myriad economic activities, to the multiplicity of typologies worldwide. Whether it is Hinners referring to suburbs ecologically or Keil referring to suburbs socially and typologically, both agree that suburbs are “new assemblages.”
With vast global suburban expansion the polycentric metropolis unfolds, and a new convergence between urban cores and suburbs persists. As Keil states, “There are no essential differences anymore between centers and suburbs. The suburban is not a derivative.”29 Bruegmann rightly calls this phenomenon of convergence one of the ironies of the “triumph of the city” movement and the criticism of the suburbs.30 While city centers have grown more affluent, they have also grown more socially and economically homogeneous, while suburbs are rapidly diversifying. Suburbs are experimenting with new models of sustainability, some recoding to increase pockets of density, while struggling to retain affordability. Simultaneously, many urban cores are accumulating either vacant lots or luxury high rises, squeezing out socioeconomically disadvantaged populations. There is an economic reversal happening, as Phelps argues: “American suburbs present a potentially immense laboratory in which to observe the remaking of the suburban economy, in which not only will suburbs become more urban in certain respects, but also, cities may acquire suburban attributes.” Because each urban form presents advantages and disadvantages, it is not a matter of choosing one over the other. Rather, it is about exploiting the potential of each to optimize polycentric metropolitan areas.
For the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, designer of several iconic suburban neighborhoods and city plans, suburbs were a natural progression of urbanization:
It thus becomes evident that the present outward tendency of town populations is not so much an ebb as a higher rise of the same flood…It would appear then, that the demands of suburban life, with reference to civilized refinement, are not to be a retrogression from, but an advance upon, those which are characteristic of town life, and that no great town can long exist without great suburbs. (italics added)31
Olmsted challenges us to make great suburbs in order to envision the true potential of full urban life, a challenge that is even more imperative today than it was in 1868.
Alan M. Berger, Joel Kotkin, and Celina Balderas Guzmán, 2017
1 Although rarely loudly proclaimed, this phenomenon has been noted in the press as well as in scholarly literature, albeit in disparate places. One reason for the disparate sources is that global suburbanization is often called by other terms (e.g., peri-urbanization in the Global South) and studied by scholars specializing in those specific conditions. As a result, what is a global phenomenon is often divided into multiple niche topics (or specific geographies), and thus the global picture is harder to discern and figures are difficult to come by. More study on the global phenomenon is needed. Nonetheless, the dominance of suburbanization worldwide has been noted, for example, in “A Suburban World,” Economist, December 6, 2014, http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21635486-emerging-world-becoming-suburban-its-leaders-should-welcome-avoid-wests; Mark Clapson and Ray Hutchison, eds., Suburbanization in Global Society (Bingley, UK: Emerald, 2010). In 2010 the United Nations (UN) declared that “suburbanization is becoming more prevalent,” and that “more and more people both in the North and South are moving outside the city to ‘satellite’ or dormitory cities and suburban neighborhoods.” See UN-HABITAT, “State of the World’s Cities 2010/2011, Bridging the Urban Divide,” ix, 10–11, http://mirror.unhabitat.org/pmss/listItemDetails.aspx?publicationID=2917.
2 Within professional and popular design culture, there is a strange propagation of facts used to distort the dominance of “cities.” When the UN declared that by 2030, six out of every ten people would live in an urban area, and seven out of ten by 2050, they carefully defined that “there is no common global definition of what constitutes an urban settlement. As a result, the urban definition employed by national statistical offices varies widely across countries, and in some cases has changed over time within a country.” See United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, “World Urbanization Prospects: The 2014 Revision, Highlights” (United Nations, 2015), http://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/Highlights/WUP2014-Highlights.pdf. Albeit a minor conflation of language, the term urban, as specified by previous UN documents, was swapped out for “cities” by those outlets reporting on the UN’s publications. These figures were uncritically adopted by foundations that have funded initiatives and spent hundreds of millions on this topic. See “100RC Announces Opening of 2014 100 Resilient Cities Challenge,” accessed December 7, 2015, http://www.100resilientcities.org/blog/entry/. It is impossible to trace the exact origins of this conflation, but it is certainly ubiquitous now. The subtle swap in terminology has been malignant and has permeated the corporate world and popular media in an uncritical cycle of repetition. Thought leaders, such as Bill Ford, the chairman of Ford Motor Company, declared at his TED talk that 75 percent of the world will be living in cities. See Bill Ford, A Future beyond Traffic Gridlock, TED Talks, March 2011, https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_ford_a_future_beyond_traffic_gridlock. Hundreds of other media outlets regularly use the same statistic and incorrect language. Consider USA Today’s headline “U.N.: By ’09, Half the World Will Live in Cities,” which incorrectly states the content of their own article and UN report! The article goes on as follows: “The (UN) report predicts that there will be 27 ‘megacities’ with at least 10 million population by mid-century compared to 19 today, but it forecasts that at least half the urban growth in the coming decades will be in the many smaller cities with less than 500,000 people…Thus, the urban areas of the world are expected to absorb all the population growth expected over the next four decades while at the same time drawing in some of the rural population,” which completely obfuscates the differences between “urban areas” and “cities.” See “U.N.: By ’09, Half the World Will Live in Cities,” USA Today, February 26, 2008, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/newsworld/2008-02-26-cities-population_N.htm. Using the same family of UN reports, Fast Company reported with its own headline: “By 2050, 70 percent of the World’s Population Will Be Urban. Is That a Good Thing?” The article, however, gets its content confused with terminology again, saying: “Once you get over the fact that, by 2050, both China and India will have about a billion people living in cities alone, you can mine the image for thoughtful comparison. For instance, since the 1990s, more than 75 percent of the US population has lived in cities…By 2050, somewhere between 50–75 percent of their population will live in cities.” This is factually incorrect, but it is fascinating to see such a blatant misunderstanding between the use of urban in the headline and cities in all of these varied outlets. See Mark Wilson, “By 2050, 70 percent of the World’s Population Will Be Urban. Is That a Good Thing?,” Fast Company, Co.Design, March 12, 2012, http://www.fastcodesign.com/1669244/by-2050-70-of-the-worlds-population-will-be-urban-is-that-a-good-thing.
3 Karen C. Seto, Burak Güneralp, and Lucy R. Hutyra, “Global Forecasts of Urban Expansion to 2030 and Direct Impacts on Biodiversity and Carbon Pools,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, no. 40 (October 2, 2012): 16083–88.
4 Eric M. White, Anita T. Morzillo, and Ralph J. Alig, “Past and Projected Rural Land Conversion in the US at State, Regional, and National Levels,” Landscape and Urban Planning 89, nos. 1–2 (January 30, 2009): 37–48.
5 Wendell Cox, “Measuring US Urban Cores and Suburbs,” in Infinite Suburbia (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2017).
6 Elizabeth Kneebone, “Job Sprawl Stalls,” Metropolitan Opportunity Series (Brookings Institute, Metropolitan Policy Program, April 2013), http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/reports/2013/04/18%20job%2sprawl%20kneebone/srvy_jobsprawl.pdf.
7 Douglas Webster, Summary of Peri-urbanization: The New Global Frontier (Enschede, Netherlands: International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation, 2004).
8 The start of the “suburban century” was noted in an influential article by William Schneider, “The Suburban Century Begins,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1992, http://www.theatlantic.com/past/politics/ecbig/schnsub.htm.
9 Garrett Eckbo, Daniel Kiley, and James Rose, “Landscape Design in the Primeval Environment,” Architectural Record 87, no. 2 (February 1940): 74–79.
10 Vishaan Chakrabarti, A Country of Cities: A Manifesto for an Urban America (New York: Metropolis Books, 2013).
11 Roger Keil, “Suburban,” in Urban Theory: New Critical Perspectives, ed. Mark Jayne and Kevin Ward (London: Routledge, 2016).
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 Edward Soja, “Accentuate the Regional,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 39, no. 2 (March 1, 2015): 373, doi:10.1111/1468–2427.12176.
15 Foreign-born statistic, from Jill H. Wilson and Nicole Prchal Svajlenka, “Immigrants Continue to Disperse, with Fastest Growth in the Suburbs,” Brookings Institution, accessed March 5, 2015, http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2014/10/29-immigrants-disperse-suburbs-wilson-svajlenka; William H. Frey, “Melting Pot Cities and Suburbs: Racial and Ethnic Change in Metro America in the 2000s,” State of Metropolitan America (Metropolitan Policy Program, Brookings Institute, May 2011).
16 William H. Frey, “The Rise of Melting-Pot Suburbs,” Brookings Institution, May 26, 2015, http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/the-avenue/posts/2015/05/26-melting-pot-suburbs-frey.
17 Robert Bruegmann, “The Antisuburban Crusade,” in Infinite Suburbia (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2017), 57.
18 Ann Forsyth, “Defining Suburbs,” Journal of Planning Literature 27, no. 3 (August 2012): 270.
19 US Census Bureau, Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Areas Main, http://www.census.gov/population/metro/; http://www.census.gov/population/metro/data/def.html.
20 United States Census, “Table C-01-AH, American Housing Survey,” 2013, http://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/ahs/data.html.
21 Shlomo Angel, Planet of Cities (Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2012), 7.
22 Jean Gottmann, Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1961).
23 Thomas Sieverts, Cities without Cities: An Interpretation of the Zwischenstadt (London; New York: Spon Press, 2003).
24 T. G. McGee, “The Emergence of Desakota Regions in Asia: Expanding a Hypothesis,” in The Extended Metropolis: Settlement Transition in Asia, ed. Norton Ginsburg, Bruce Koppel, and T. G. McGee (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991), 3–25.
25 As “Honorary Chair” of the Congress for the New Urbanism’s 2009 and 2012 meetings, respectively, the noted urban health researchers Howard Frumkin and Richard Jackson have served as CNU’s plenary speakers. Their bias was noted by the author of a critique of Frumkin and his author group in a 2012 book review from the Berkeley Planning Journal. The reviewer states that a “lack of clarity” pervades the book and makes the reader wonder “if they are getting the whole story” (249). The review goes on to call some of the content “overly deterministic” by jumping past the “complex web” of causation (249). For the review, see William Riggs, “Making Healthy Places: Designing and Building for Health, Well-Being, and Sustainability,” Berkeley Planning Journal 25, no. 1 (January 2012): 248–51; original publication in Andrew L. Dannenberg, Howard Frumkin, and Richard J. Jackson, eds., Making Healthy Places: Designing and Building for Health, Well-Being, and Sustainability (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2012). See also the following quote by new urbanist Ellen Durham Jones: “Dr. Frumkin’s work and that of his CDC colleagues have helped recognize the links between automobile-dependent development patterns and obesity, chronic diseases, injuries, and air and water quality degradation…The confluence today of the economic crisis, health-care crisis, and environmental crisis mean we can’t afford to return to gas-guzzling development patterns.” The Eighteenth Annual Congress for New Urbanism, titled “New Urbanism: Rx for Healthy Places” (which took place on May 19–22, 2010 in Atlanta, Georgia), explored links between development patterns and health. Available online at http://cnu.civicactions.net/cnu-news/2009/12/cdc’s-dr-howard-frumkin-named-honorary-chair-cnus-18th-congress. See also Chakrabarti, A Country of Cities.
26 Joseph Coughlin and Luke Yoquinto, “The Long Road Home,” Slate, May 19, 2015, http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/05/autonomous_cars_and_the_future_of_the_commute.html.
27 John M. Marzluff, Welcome to Subirdia: Sharing Our Neighborhoods with Wrens, Robins, Woodpeckers, and Other Wildlife (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014); Libby Sander, “‘Subirdia,’” Chronicle of Higher Education 61, no. 5 (October 3, 2014): 7; Robert B. Blair and Elizabeth M. Johnson, “Suburban Habitats and Their Role for Birds in the Urban-Rural Habitat Network: Points of Local Invasion and Extinction?,” Landscape Ecology 23, no. 10 (September 30, 2008): 1157–69.
28 David Brooks, On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (and Always Have) in the Future Tense (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 48; as noted in Jamie Peck, “Neoliberal Suburbanism: Frontier Space,” Urban Geography 32, no. 6 (2011): 892.
29 Keil, “Suburban.”
30 Edward L Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (New York: Penguin Press, 2011).
31 Frederick Law Olmsted, Preliminary Report upon the Proposed Suburban Village at Riverside, Near Chicago (New York: Sutton, Bowne, 1868), 7.