Wps No.02 Jan Nijman and Tom Clery

8/13/2019 Wps No.02 Jan Nijman and Tom Clery

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Working Paper Series No. 02

Suburban Imaginaries and Metropolitan Realities in North America

Jan Nijman and Tom Clery

Jan Nijman & Tom Clery

Centre for Urban Studies

Working Paper

September 2013

www.urbanstudies.uva.nl/workingpapers


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CUS Working Paper Series WPS-No. 02 Amsterdam Centre for Urban Studies

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Editorial Committee CUS Working Paper Series

Prof. Jan Nijman

Dr. Wouter van Gent

Dr. Rivke Jaffe

Dr. Richard Ronald

Dr. Darshan Vigneswaran

Centre for Urban Studies

University of Amsterdam

Plantage Muidergracht 14

1018 TV Amsterdam

The Netherlands

Phone: +31 20 525 4081

Fax: +31 20 525 4051

Website: urbanstudies.uva.nl

Email:[email protected]

The Centre for Urban Studies(CUS) houses the Urban Studies Research Priority Area, a strategic initiative of the

University of Amsterdam. It brings together urban scholars in sociology, geography, planning, political science,

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Amsterdam Institute of Social Sciences Research,in the Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University

of Amsterdam

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Suburban Imaginaries and Metropolitan Realities in

North America

Jan Nijman and Tom Clery

Abstract

North America may be considered the birthplace of the prototypical 20th century suburb. From there,

common usage of the terms suburb and suburbanization spread to the rest of the Western world, and then across the

globe. It has become commonplace to say that the world is experiencing an urban revolution but one could well argue

that, more precisely, most of the present-day growth of urban populations occurs in suburbs or other peri-urban areas.

In more highly urbanized societies such as North America, large urban regions have formed in part through

amalgamation of previously distinct cities, with major parts of these regions generally considered as suburbs of one sort

or the other. It is important to reassess the notion of suburb and suburbanization in North America; to question the

historical evolution of suburbs; and to debate whether the archetypal suburb ever really existed. This is important with

regard to our understanding of the configuration of North American cities in their own right but also in terms of the

application of suburban concepts elsewhere in the world.

1 Introduction

North America, and especially the United States, may be considered the 'birthplace' of the

prototypical 20th century suburb. It was in the wake of the Second World War that the

process of suburbanization accelerated to such unprecedented levels that it fundamentally

reordered the US city. During this time, common usage of the terms suburb and

suburbanization spread to the rest of the Western world, and then across the globe.

Suburbanization in the US was perhaps more forceful than anywhere in the world for

reasons discussed below but that does not make the phenomenon any easier to grasp. The

archetypical sitcom suburb of the 1950s white, middle class households with male

breadwinners in single family homes assumed near mythical proportions; in itself, good

reason to question its veracity. While it is evident that the archetype did not last more than

a couple of decades, it is not so clear what took its place. Moreover, its alleged ubiquity

may have reflected a sort of (ideological) fixation on one particular feature in a much more

varied and restless urban landscape.

A reconsideration of the notions of suburb and suburbanization, of their validity at present

times, and of the general governance structures in which they unfolded, requires attention

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to historical evolution as well as geographical variation. In the short space of this chapter,

we must do so succinctly, concentrating on the most salient turns in the development of

US suburbs from the late 18th century to the present. The fact that suburbanization

predates the 1950s is often overlooked; it is important to track the origins and evolution of

the process if we are to make sense of its meaning, in the context of the city at large.

Our focus is on the formation of suburbs (including their physical and social characteristics)

but also on suburban governance: the modalities and mechanisms that are instrumental

to their emergence and evolution (Ekers, Hamel and Keil 2012). These modalities and

mechanisms pertain to the realms of the state (and regulation), the market, and non-

governmental authority structures such as homeowner associations and gated communities.

Broadly speaking, it is through the concept of governance that we seek to understand thelogic of suburbanization. To be sure, suburban governance varies across space and over

time, also within the United States.

There is a considerable literature on suburbanization in the United States and along the way

we shall point to some of the key debates. First, it is important to distinguish between the

suburban ideal versus its material expressions; second, we must acknowledge the

distinction between suburban form and suburbanization process; third, the literature

divides between voluntaristic (choice, agency) and structuralist conditions ofsuburbanization; and, finally, there is the question as to whether suburbanization has

primarily been a residential phenomenon or also involved, from the start, an industrial

component.

Our discussion will for the most part adhere to chronological order: beginning with the

origins of the suburban ideal; leading to incipient suburbanization in early industrial times

and accelerating in late industrial times; followed by the postwar suburban tide; and then

entering the present era of polycentric or post-polycentric metropolitan regions. Most of

the second half of the chapter focuses on recent trends and the present state of US suburbs

and prevailing modes of governance.

An interesting aspect of the notion of the suburb is that it connotes a settled, stable,

situation. Certainly this was important to the 1950s idea of the suburb where white middle

class families had arrived. The suburb embodied the achievement of an ideal, the good life;

it was harmonious, predictable, and secure, and change was not a part of that dreamy

constellation. However, in reality the suburb as a spatial entity is a momentary piece of an

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urban puzzle that is always reconfiguring, spatially, economically, socially, and in terms of

governance. In the United States, at least, urbanization (and suburbanization) is an ongoing

process following, in large part, the coupled logics of investment and (re)development (Coe,

Kelly and Yeung 2007). It implies a ceaseless construction of the new and reconstruction of

the old. It appears that, in the United States at least, the traditional idea, or imaginary, of

the suburb has proven a great deal more tenacious than its material counterpart.

2 Escape from the Industrial CityThe term suburb, in the meaning of a place on the urban fringe, is of English origins and

can be dated back as far as the 14thcentury, even if it did not really acquire currency until

the 18thcentury in England as well as in the United States. In preindustrial times, suburbs

were viewed as undesirable and shady places on the edge of town; marginal neighborhoods

with a mix of the poor and people with licentious habits. The word urbane instead

referred to sophistication, elegance, and high-class. The elites occupied the center of these

compact pre-industrial cities that mixed residential and economic functions (trade, services).

This arrangement came to an end with the industrial revolution. Cities became sites of

industrial production, often with detrimental environmental effects, and they grew much

more dense. According to authors like Fishman (1987), Hayden (2003), and others, this

resulted in a growing interest of the elites in new housing on the urban periphery: home as

a refuge from work, as a source of happiness and goodness. Upper class status became

associated with mansions on large estates in a quiet, lush, suburban environment while the

city center turned into a scene of congestion, pollution, crime, and crowded working class

residential areas. If industrialization is commonly associated with urbanization, it should be

added that it was associated, too, with the beginnings of suburbanization as we know it.

The new suburbia of the mid-19th century in places such as West Philadelphia, says

Fishman (1987, 21), represented a collective assertion of class wealth and privilege. It was

based on exclusion and segregation. If bourgeois demand for grand suburban living drove

the process, this cultural impetus was soon accompanied by economic motives: the

transformation of agricultural lands just outside the city into residential building plots was

by definition a lucrative business (see, e.g., West Philadelphia Community History Center

2012). In some cities, the newly forming suburbs had a strong ethnic identity and involved

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recent (successful) immigrant communities, such as German-dominated northwest

Milwaukee of the 1890s (Kenny 2008).

At this time, suburbanization was by and large conditioned by the market and driven by

choice for the few who had the luxury to afford it. Suburbanization proceeded faster in the

United States than in England or elsewhere in Europe because industrialization was more

vigorous and sustained, and as such fueled a more significant response by way of

suburbanization. By the late 19thcentury, the US had become the biggest industrial power

in the world.

But there was another, cultural reason that suburbanization became such a salient

expression in the American landscape. The individualized, nuclear, family was very much

an American institution (closely related to the American Dream) and demanded a single

family home which was easier to realize in the spacious suburbs than in the city center.

Hayden (2003, 5-6) observes that, Unlike any other affluent civilization, Americans have

idealized the house and yard rather than the model neighborhood or the ideal town. The

possible realization of this ideal in the green suburbs, at a time when existing cities had

rapidly lost their appeal, was at times imbued with religion: in 1921 the National Real

Estate Journal wrote that the Garden of Eden was the first subdivision (National Real

Estate Journal 1921, 22). The new suburb, in this ideology, was at once frontier and destiny.

3 Towards Metropolis: Streetcars and AutomobilesIf the invention of the new suburb reflected bourgeois imaginaries of utopia, in reality the

process of suburbanization quickly assumed broader significance and a more complicated

spatiality. First of all, the elites escapism from inner city chaos applied not only to

residential preferences but also to work. The (re)location of industrial activity to the edgesof these still compact cities even more so than the suburbanization of residential

functionsoften required newly built infrastructures (canals, roads, sewers, etc.) and relied

on the ownership classes garnering local or state government funding.

By the mid-19th century, a system of dense industrial districts were embedded throughout the

Philadelphia metropolitan area, Boston contained a set of distinct industrial suburbs specializing in

such products as shoes, machinery, and textiles, and a distinct set of manufacturing districts quickly

developed in cities such as Baltimore, Montreal, Toronto, and Los Angeles. If these districts were close

enough to the centre to be confused for a single manufacturing core, by the turn of the century,urbanization had reached the metropolitan scale. Since at least 1850, the North American city has

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grown largely through the accretion of new industrial districts at the urban fringe, becoming multimodal

in the process. (Walker and Lewis 2001, 9-10; also see Taylor 1915)

The number and kinds of residential suburbs increased, too (Douglass 1925). Since the

1890s, the introduction of the electric streetcar in cities across the United States, from

Portland to Miami, pushed suburbanization along (Warner 1962). Increasingly, it was the

middle and lower middle classes who followed the elite out of the central city, to form

streetcar suburbs, continuous built-up corridors from the core to the edge of town. The

suburb of West Philadelphia, probably one of the biggest of that era, doubled in population

between 1890 and 1910 to reach 200,000 (West Philadelphia Community History Center

2012).

Thus, notwithstanding the powerful and more or less autonomous forces of the market,the state soon became indispensable: the suburbanization of factories demanded

infrastructural projects, regulation of peripheral urban land markets, and zoning. And as

residential suburbanization increased, the state came in to facilitate public services such as

garbage collection and water provision. Gradually, suburbanization became embedded in a

governance structure where market and state functioned in tandem but with the market

always leading.

The land development and real estate industry became more organized and pro-active andbegan to target potential first-time homebuyers. So-called Why Pay Rent campaigns from

around the turn of the century promoted suburban living to middle and working class

households. Not unlike the fate met by home buyers in the early 21stcentury (!), many were

lured into homeownership they could barely afford, struggling up a down escalator

entranced with dreams of economic security, saddled with debt, and confused by a false

sense of social mobility (Edel et al 1984).

Increasingly, it seems, demand for suburban living was being stimulated and fabricated on

the supply side. Between 1870 and 1920, developers enlarged their area of operations, took

a broader view of the urban, and began to promote urban peripheries, often working in

partnership with transit owners, utility companies, and local government.

The building boom of the Roaring Twenties accelerated the creation of suburbs, made

possible by the rise of the powerful real estate and construction lobby, in conjunction with

new federal regulations that helped subsidize private development of residential and

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services, and retail activities. The process was conditioned by changing technological,

economic, and regulatory conditions. Thus far, it had been a relatively slow process

(Gardner 2001), and massive changes were still ahead.

4 Runaway Suburbanization after 1945Suburbanization after World War Two took on such massive proportions that it

fundamentally altered the urban order. In the words of Hayden (2003, 10), Suburban

trends in the mid-1920s became a suburban tide in the 1950s. From 1950 to 1980, the

suburban population of the United States tripled; by 1970, more people lived in suburbs

than in either central cities or in the countryside; by the year 2000, the suburban population

exceeded that of central cities and rural areas combined. Suburbanization was not new, butsometimes enough of a quantitative change implies a qualitative transformation. The

United States had become a suburban nation (Duany et al.2000).

Reacting to these landmark changes, the 1960 Census adopted the category of Metropolitan

Statistical Area with a central city versus commuting hinterland or suburbs (U.S. Bureau

of the Budget 1964; Champion 2001). It provided, for the first time, an official definition

of the suburb and it did so in opposition to the central city, thereby forging a dichotomy

that corresponded to traditional imaginaries but that in reality had never been so clear-cut.

The dichotomy was reinforced as central cities in many parts of the United States declined,

economically and socially, as a result of deindustrialization (loss of jobs) and selective

outmigration (suburbanization) since the early 1960s. Inner city decay, thus, had the effect

of reinforcing earlier idealistic visions of the suburb. The suburb was everything the city

was not: clean, green, spacious, safe, quiet, harmonious, predictable, and homogeneous.

The deeply American and ideologically inspired notion of the suburb was revitalized and

readied for mass-commodification. There is no doubt that the traditional imaginary of the

exclusive suburb played an important role in increasing the desirability of suburbs

following the war to many of those (working and middle classes) that had previously been

excluded.

Writing about the suburbanization in the mid-20thcentury, Hanlon et al.(2010, 6) observe

that, far from a restricted elitist bourgeois ideal, the suburbs were now part of an American

Dream for all:

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There are two mythic journeys in the US. The first was the trek to the West, ending in

California. The second, the archetypal journey of the mid-20th century, was from the city to the

suburbs. it was a quest signifying acculturation, Americanization, and ultimately success. In

this second mythic American journey, the family car replaced the covered wagon, and the single-

family home displaced the family homestead as iconic representations.

At a more mundane level, it was hardly a trivial coincidence that typical family cars

marketed in the US since the 1960s were wagons and (later) vans and SUVs, carrying such

designations as Explorer, Journey, Odyssey, or Caravan. The new suburban imaginary was

ingrained in the American psyche on television in a number of wildly popular 1950s

sitcoms that would be replicated in the following decades (Sharpe and Wollock 1994). The

typical suburb was portrayed as the peaceful and comfortable home of white middle class

families with traditional gender stereotypes.

The renewed suburban imaginary very much articulated the desires and choices of

American households, and at a time that demand for housing was significantly up

(unfulfilled demand in the wake of the Great Depression followed by World War Two and

the baby boom). But there is no doubt that the process of suburbanization was, more than

ever, driven and facilitated by corporate interests and government intervention. The

construction of Levittown, the archetypal 1950s suburb, was the well-documented result of

these new governance modalities. The Levitt family planned this Long Island subdivision atthe scale of a town but did not include any of the necessary services such as garbage

collection, schools, or roads these responsibilities were passed on to government and

were financed through tax-dollars. It was a new kind of business, made possible through a

shifting regulatory environment, and served as a blueprint for developments across the

country:

Postwar suburbs represented the deliberate intervention of the federal government into the financing

of single-family housing across the nation. For the first time, the federal government provided

massive aid directed to developers (whose loans were insured by the Federal Housing

Administration, FHA) and white male homeowners (who could get Veterans' Administration

guarantees for mortgages at four percent, with little or nothing down, and then deduct their

mortgage interest payments from their taxable income for 30 years). (Hayden 2001)

Suburbanization, one might say, had become the business of an extremely powerful

industrial conglomerate that employed (and helped generate) the American suburban

imaginary to full effect. It included huge corporations such as General Motors (which

offered a helping hand in the demise of the electric streetcar) and General Electric (which

had embarked on the mass production of household appliances for single family homes);

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local growth machines (Molotch 1976) consisting of developers, builders, and banks;

local governments that provided conducive zoning and building regulatory frameworks,

and sometimes direct subsidies; and, last but not least, a federal government that was

central to the financing of homeownership, the construction of highways, and which in

various ways espoused suburban ideologies. In extreme form and with Cold War

intonations, such ideologies were articulated by the likes of Joseph McCarthy, who hated

multifamily designs as well as public funding for shelter and declared public housing a

breeding ground for communists. (Seal 2003).

Previously ignored informal residential areas on the urban fringe increasingly came within

range of voracious developers and regulatory state agencies. By implementing various

housing regulations and redevelopment initiatives many informal suburban settlementswere disbanded and removed. The implementation of stricter building regulations for

example meant that self-constructed housing was discouraged or destroyed rather than

promoted and assisted. Sometimes, the construction of freeway systems through these

informal areas caused further displacement.

This post-war rise in regulation brought about the demise of many self-built settlements

but it also ushered in another irregular housing trend in US society the rise of the mobile

home. For some lower income households, trailer-ownership has been a cheap and flexible(movable) alternative to either renting or buying a regular home. By 1956, four million

Americans had opted to make them their primary form of residence. Predictably, trailer

parks quickly became seen as another threat to permanent suburban communities (Field,

2005) and they have been effectively zoned out of the more upscale suburban landscapes.

Besides the massive acceleration of population shifts to the suburbs (along with shopping

malls, hospitals, schools, and other service and retail activities), there was a significant

increase in the suburbanization of office work. It was another episode, one might say, of

corporate escapism from capitalist reality (Walker 1981, 396). Until World War Two,

offices tended to be located either in central business districts or near factories away from

the center. Neither of these locations was particularly attractive and they became

unnecessary with the introduction of more flexible and separated corporate functions and

new management structures since the 1950s and 1960s (Mozingo 2011). The suburbs were

considered more representative, easier traversed, more predictable and less risky, and better

for business. It was a trend that gathered momentum over the decades and resulted in the

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proliferation of suburban office parks and corporate campuses. Once again, economic logic

was entwined with esthetic values:

And while the restructuring of activities and transport made sense in the efficiency calculus of

capitalism, the inclusion of green space reflected a more ineffable yet deeply ingrained value theideal of the pastoral in the American landscape. (Mozingo 2011, 8)

The accelerated suburbanization of work, the formation in the suburbs of clusters of

economic activity, and the apparent lessening of interdependence between suburb and

central city led some observers to declare the arrival of a new metropolitan era. Already in

1975, Birch spoke of a transition from suburb to urban place (Birch, 25). By 1981, Muller

referred to suburbia as "the essence of the late-twentieth century American city," and

argued that the "burgeoning new centers" of the suburbs had transformed it into an

increasingly independent and dominant outer city." It represented, he asserted, "a whollynew metropolitan reality" (Muller 1981; also see Berry and Cohen 1973).

5 Suburbs of the Last ResortTo some, the transformation of the United States into a suburban nation (Jackson 1985;

Duany et al 2001) actually signaled the end of the suburban ideal. In 1987, Fishman argued

that:

the suburb since 1945 has lost its traditional meaning and function as a satellite of the central city.

Where peripheral communities had once excluded industry and large-scale commerce, the suburb now

becomes the heartland of the most rapidly expanding elements of the late 20thcentury economy. As

both core and periphery are swallowed up in seemingly endless multi-centered regions, where can one find

suburbia? (Fishman 1987, 29)

In his view, the days of the classic suburb, the bourgeois utopia, were long gone and had

made way for the post-suburb or technoburb.

Since the 1960s, architectural critics had begun to depict suburbs as lowbrow, boring, and

banal. The monotonous, mass-produced subdivisions of the postwar years certainly were a

long way from the carefully designed elite suburban mansions of the early 19 th century.

More importantly, suburban culture as a whole came to be regarded as uninteresting,

conservative, and spiritless. It is not hard to discern elitist undertones in such critiques,

even if the critics themselves were very much socially engaged. Examples include Jane

Jacobs's (1961) picture of her own idyllically bohemian Lower Manhattan neighborhood in

The Death and Life of Great American Cities and the wild anger at suburban piggery that

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pervades James Howard Kunstler's (1993) The Geography of Nowhere (Seal 2003).

Perhaps we are now past such clichd critiques of the suburbs, but it is important to note

that the esthetic devaluation of suburbs among critics coincided with increased access to

suburbs by lower income strata of the population and a home in the suburbs was still

sold as a privileged place in the sun along with all the traditional narratives of the past

(Knox 2008). In other words, there emerged a clear disparity of (changing) discourses

about the suburb. If this could in some ways be reduced to a typical class-based urge for

distinction (Bourdieu 1984), it also reflected a real decline in the standard of living in many

suburbs.

Suburban living increasingly attracted lower income strata; became increasingly

standardized; and a number of negative qualities thus far associated with the decaying

central city had gone suburban as well. Suburban poverty increased, as did fiscal stress,

crime and social problems like housing deterioration, homelessness or drug abuse (Sharpe

and Wollock 1994; Hanlon 2010). By 2010, more people lived in poverty in the suburbs

than did in central cities and there has also been a convergence in crime rates. Between

2000 and 2008, suburbs in the countrys largest metro areas saw their poor population grow

by 25 percentalmost five times faster than primary cities and well ahead of the growth

seen in smaller metro areas and non-metropolitan communities. At the same time, the lastdecade witnessed gentrification of the city, wealth moving back in (Brookings Institution

2011).

The suburban population continued to grow apace but increasingly it wasnt because

Americans were passionately pursuing their dreams and seeing them fulfilled it was

because many people did not have anywhere else to go. As gentrification started to take

shape in some parts of the central city, pushing prices up, while other parts of the center

continued to be problematic, many turned to the suburbs because of affordability. If

homeownership was the goal, there was little else than the suburbs, and at an ever-greater

distance from the city. Increasingly, then, suburban living was less a matter of choice and

more a matter of financial constraints and necessity. Even then, homeownership (in the

suburbs) proved a risky proposition. The mortgage crisis that began in 2008 and that still

left (in 2013) nearly 20 percent of homeowners under water with negative equity is

particularly widespread in US suburbs (Ellis 2010; CoreLogic 2013).

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5 New Metropolitan RealitiesThis new and increasingly complex metropolitan reality, with regard to suburban form, can

be encapsulated in four points. First, there has been, at the aggregate level, a progressive

blurring of the distinction between city center and suburb in terms of social composition.This convergence was mostly due to the suburbanization of hitherto excluded lower

income strata and ethnic minorities (Brookings Institution 2011). While suburbs are still

less ethnically diverse than central cities, they are quickly gaining in diversity (more so than

central cities), with the 2010 Census reporting that well over a third of the suburban

population is now non-white. The proportion of foreign immigrants, too, is increasing

faster in suburbs than in central cities.

It is important to remember that the suburbanization of the working classes and of ethnic

minorities was often crowded out of the prevailing suburbanization narratives in the past.

Wiese (2006) wryly observed that historians have done a better job excluding African

Americans from the suburbs than even white suburbanites. And Kruse and Sugrue

(2006:4) refer to the working-class world of modest houses, apartments, and trailer parks

[which] was central to suburbia, but nonetheless remained on the periphery of suburban

historiography. In other words, this diversification of the suburbs is not quite as radical a

change as it is sometimes portrayed.

Second, while suburbs are becoming more diverse in the aggregate (at a larger scale), the

variety of suburbs has also increased significantly and this actually means that diversity

within suburbs remains very limited. There are now many types of suburbs, but they are

generally not very diverse in themselves. Indeed, as we will see in the next section, there is

strong evidence of growing segregation and exclusion between suburbs. This, in turn,

implies continued contrasts between central cities and most individual suburbs, also in

terms of governance:

Most suburban jurisdictions are small and have relatively homogeneous populations, which makes

it easier to secure consensus on exclusionary policies than is commonly the case in larger and more

heterogeneous cities. (Sharpe and Wollock 1994, 12)

Third, the suburban landscape has witnessed the creation of relatively high-density clusters

of economic activity and residential functions. In his book Edge City, Garreau argued that

density is back. Edge cities, high-rise clusters of office space and apartment living along

with urban amenities, had sprung up across suburbia, contributing in another way to theblurring of city-suburb distinctions. And this was not just a matter of form; it also eroded

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the city-suburb relationship. By the mid-1990s, about twice as many people commuted to

work within suburbs as commuted between them and cities. (Sharpe and Wollock 1994, 2).

The classical monocentric city belonged to the past; the polycentric metropolis had arrived.

This view was nuanced by Lang (2003) who introduced the notion of edgeless cities. He

does not so much argue against the existence of edge cities but points to what he considers

a more widespread (and therefore more significant) phenomenon: free-form clusters of

office space of various sizes and configurations that can be found across suburbia. Edgeless

cities are not as conspicuous as edge cities (especially big edge cities like Tysons Corner,

Virginia, or Coral Gables in South Florida) and do not have the density or cohesiveness of

edge cities. They are made up of free-standing buildings, office parks, or small clusters of

buildings of varying densities, strung along suburban interstates, and major arterials. Theyare not as big as edge cities and, more importantly, not as dense. Their distribution varies

from one metro area to the other. Moreover, it is argued that such clusters had been there

all along, at least since the 1960s: the longstanding presence of edgeless cities means

that sprawl never went away (Lang 2003, 1). As edge cities emerged, so did edgeless cities

but as edge cities slowed since the late 1980s, edgeless cities continued to proliferate.

Langs research indicates that edgeless cities, in most metropolitan areas, now contain

double the office space of edge cities. He emphasizes that edgeless cities are not edge cities

waiting to happen but constitute a crucial dimension of the 21stcentury metropolis:

Suburbias economy reached an unprecedented diversity by the 1980s, as specialized service

enterprises of every kind were established outside central business districts. Yet even as they

become more urban, suburbs maintain a distinct pattern. A new metropolitan form therefore has

emerged in the past several decades: low density, automobile dependent, and dispersed. Not quite the

traditional city, suburb, or exurb, but with elements of all three, it is the still-emergent America on

the mall, the beltway, the subdivision, the multiplex movie theater, the drive-through fast-food outlet,

the low-rise office cube, and the shopping strip. (Lang 2003, 9)

The significance of edge cities and edgeless cities is illustrated in the fact that by 2010,

nearly half (45.1 percent) of the US metropolitan population is working in locations more

than ten miles from downtown and only about one-fifth has a workplace within three miles

of downtown (Brookings Institution 2011).

5 Splintering Urban Governance

One of the strongest indications of the growing diversity among suburbs, and of theirexclusiveness, is found in the enormous proliferation of sub-local government and

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governance in the past three or four decades, As metropolitan areas expanded, government

became ever more fragmented and this fragmentation was compounded by the rescaling of

state functions in the neoliberal era (also see Pecks contribution to this volume). There are

in the United States presently about 90,000 local governments including municipalities,

towns, townships, school districts, water management districts, and so on these are all

local government institutions. The combined number of municipalities and town(ships) is

about 19,500, compared to 16,800 in 1952. The difference points to roughly 2,700

municipal incorporations in the past half-century, most of which entail secession from

existing municipalities or new independence within a county. Incorporation, in the United

States, is almost always driven by consideration of fiscal independence and/or spatial

exclusion. As Kruse and Sugrue (2006, 6) note, in postwar metropolitan America, where

you lived has determined your access to goods and services and how much they cost in the

form of your taxes.

Recent decades have also witnessed a rapid increase in the number of Community

Redevelopment Associations or Business Improvement Districts (Nelson 2009). The

latter typically concern primarily business districts but often contain residential areas while

the former suggest a primary focus on residential communities but often contain a business

component. CRAs and BIDs are generally separate agencies created by local governments.

At the sub-local residential level, the trends are simply astonishing, as shown in the table

below. Between 1970 and 2011, the number of association-governed residential

communities rose from 10,000 to 314,200. By 2011, more than 62 million people in the

United States resided in association-governed communities: homeowners associations,

condominiums, cooperatives and other planned communities (but not, for example,

Charter Schools). Homeowners associations and other planned communities accounted for

50-53 percent of the totals above, condominiums for 45-48 percent and cooperatives for 3-

4 percent.

Table 1: Estimated number of U.S. association-governed communities and individual housing units and

residents within those communities (source: Community Associations Institute, Falls Church, VA, 2012.

Seehttp://www.caionline.org/info/research/Pages/default.aspx).

Year Communities Housing Units Residents1970 10,000 701,000 2.1 million1990 130,000 11.6 million 29.6 million

2011 314,200 25.1 million 62.3 million

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The patterns of local and sub-local government and governance vary considerably across

the United States, especially between the older parts of the Northeast and more recent

Sunbelt cities. The gradual growth and expansion of older American cities has generally

resulted in a steady increase of the number of local governments (municipalities, school

districts, and other taxing authorities). The Chicago metropolitan area, for example

contains no less than 569 local governments. At the other extreme, the Las Vegas metro

area has only 13 local governments. This does not mean, however, that Las Vegas is less

fragmented and more centrally governedin fact the opposite is true. The difference lies

in the relative importance of private sub-local governance. In more recent metropolitan

areas like Las Vegas, private sub-local governance is much more prevalent than in Chicago

and their territories tend to be smaller than the typical municipal suburb of Chicago

(Nelson 2009).

The most salient design that has accompanied the rise of private governance is, of course,

that of the gated community which actually presents itself in a variety of forms (and

makes the phenomenon very difficult to quantify). Gated communities, as we know them,

originated with the advent of the master-planned retirement communities in the late sixties.

From there the idea spread to resorts and country clubs, and then to middle-class suburban

subdivisions:

In the 1980s, upscale real estate speculation and the trend to conspicuous consumption saw the

proliferation of gated communities around golf courses that were designed for exclusivity, prestige, and

leisure. The decade also marked the emergence of gated communities built primarily out of fear, as the

public became increasingly preoccupied with violent crime. Gates became available in developments of

suburban single-family tracts and high-density urban apartment complexes. Since the late 1980s,

gates have become ubiquitous in many areas of the country; there are now entire incorporated cities

that feature guarded entrances. Because gated communities in their contemporary form first began in

resort and retirement areas, they are most common in the Sunbelt states of the Southeast and

Southwest. (Blakely and Snyder 1997)

Gated communities, then, are a salient expression in the built environment of a process of

fragmentation and exclusion that applies across the metropolitan landscape and to places

where it is not quite so visible. The gated community is, in a sense, like the tip of the

iceberg.

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5 ConclusionIt is clear that the simple city-suburb dichotomy is obsolete in the present day US urban

region. As noted in the introduction, the static nature that is inherent to the notion of

suburb is fundamentally at odds with the dynamic forces that continually shape andreshape the urban environment. Many central cities, too, are subject to redevelopment,

gentrification, and the construction of private residential associations. The population of

older (inner) suburbs, sharply different from newly settled subdivisions on the urban fringe,

is often also more established than that of redeveloped downtowns.

It is hard to imagine an end to the continuing spatial fragmentation of the US metropolis

that accompanies the relentless logic of urban redevelopment and temptations of territorial

opportunity hoarding (Tilly 1999). The bourgeois elite of the 19thcentury have made way

for a more diversified upper middle class and the suburban utopia of yesteryear has been

replaced with a range of options across the metropolitan area, from downtown condos to

resort-style gated communities. But that hardly means that the privileged classes are

confined to their residential spaces. The urban experience of the affluent seems to link

small-scale residential exclusionary spaces with technology-aided access to and movement

in larger circumscribed metropolitan networks of malls, office parks, resorts, airports,

amenities, and other exclusionary spaces. The rapid advances in information andcommunication technology may well have contributed to the explosive growth of small-

scale private governance, as they allow exclusion and a sense of security withoutfeelings of

isolation. At the same time, at the metropolitan scale, the collapse of the coordinated

public enterprise and comprehensive public city planning is replaced with increased

efforts at making the poor and marginalized people less and less visible (and threatening)

to its interlinked constellation of premium networked spaces (Graham and Marvin 2001,

302).

In the contemporary United States, a reference to living in the suburbs can have widely

different connotations depending on the metropolitan area and on different geographies

within the same metropolis. One suburb can still invoke all the positive and exclusive

associations of the classic suburb of times past while the other represents the sprawling

monotonous suburbs of the last resort, meant for those lower-income households who can

only afford a home on the remote urban fringe.

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The growing complexities of the US metropolis are in part a reflection of the changing

interplay of governance modalities. Until the early 20thcentury, residential (and industrial)

suburbanization was primarily driven by market forces with a relatively modest regulatory

role of governments. From the 1920s onward, the influence of government policies

increased, especially so in the first couple of decades after the Second World War. Then,

with the onset of neoliberalization in the early 1980s, private governance mushroomed,

resulting in socio-economic differentiation at ever-finer scales.

But neither the regulatory powers of the state nor the growing significance of non-

governmental authority structures such as home-owner associations have in any way

reduced the fundamental role of the market in US suburbanization; they have merely

enabled it.

Table 2: The Present Suburban Condition in the United States

Conditions of contemporary suburban development

Physical form andcharacteristics

- Single family homes- Continued sprawl, with scattered edge cities and pockets of

new urbanism- Prevalence of gated communities- Growing variety of suburbs in terms of pricing, social

composition- Trailers/mobile homes continue to offer cheap housing for

segments of lower-income classes- Continued exclusivity and relative homogeneity of suburbs- Strict zoning (housing/shopping/offices/civic institutions)

The main debates - The need for a larger-scale metropolitan approach- Choice versus structural determinants of suburbanization- Growing poverty in suburbs- Convergence of central-city and suburbs- Polycentric versus edgeless metropolitan areas

The role of the state - Federal government promoting homeownership / highways

-State/local government promoting exclusionary zoning /providing new infrastructure and public goods

- Local government supporting urban growth machines,seeking to expand property tax base

- Exclusion, displacement or ignorance of informal orirregular settlements

The role of themarket

- Traditionally, greenfield development a lucrative investmentopportunity

- Large corporate interests ranging from single family homeappliances to automobiles to mortgage companies

-

Corporate interests dominate local/national growthcoalitions: developers, builders, banks

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- Growing significance of commerce and office work insuburbs

- Aggressive financing of suburbanization contributed torecent mortgage/housing crisis

- A very particular commodification of the suburb in terms of

the American DreamModes ofgovernance

- Fragmented into differing (and often competing) scales(municipal, regional, state, federal) and functions (municipal,schools, water management, etc)

- Continued municipal incorporation as a means to secede,segregate and protect tax base

- Proliferation of sub-local government: gated communities,homeowner associations, community redevelopmentassociations, charter schools, etc.

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Wps No.02 Jan Nijman and Tom Clery

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