Do the suburbs exist? Discovering complexity and specificity in suburban built form

Abstract

In human geography cities are routinely acknowledged as complex and dynamic built environments. This description is rarely extended to the suburbs, which are generally regarded as epiphenomena of the urbs and therefore of little intrinsic theoretical interest in themselves. This article presents a detailed critique of this widely held assumption by showing how the idea of ‘the suburban’ as an essentially non‐problematic domain has been perpetuated from a range of contrasting disciplinary perspectives, including those that directly address suburban subject matter. The result has been that attempts to articulate the complex social possibilities of suburban space are easily caught between theories of urbanisation that are insensitive to suburban specificity and competing representations of the suburb that rarely move beyond the culturally specific to consider their generic significance. This article proposes that the development of a distinctively suburban theory would help to undermine one‐dimensional approaches to the built environment by focusing on the relationship between social organisation and the dynamics of emergent built form.

Suburban Urbanities

“…The spatial notion of the urban or suburban can thus be seen to be a continuum of a diverse set of social and economic relationships occurring across space. Creating definitions of suburbs is not necessarily useful, and a better approach is to generate local understandings of places and their relationships across all spatial scales, from their hinterland to the wider urban region, and over time (Vaughan et al 2009a).…”

“…This common perception would state that the suburbs are boring; the heart of middle England where nothing happens. Despite the fact that around 84 per cent of the UK population live in suburbs (Vaughan et al 2009a), they are still seen as places 'where the life of the mind curls up in front of the fire in a comfy pair of M&S [Marks and Spencer, the stereotypical middle-class chain store] slippers' (The Big Issue 1999, 22 February: 16-17). They are places with an interstitial identity, neither escaping the crush of the city nor thriving in the idyllic green openness of the English countryside, they are a mundane blend, and with their archetypal mock Tudor vernacular they are everywhere and nowhere at the same time (Mace 2013).…”

High Streets and the Pedestrian Realm

“…The peripheries of urban areas have been the focus for varied discourses within academic studies and representations within popular culture, ranging from the utopian to the dystopian (Vaughan et al 2009a(Vaughan et al , 2010a. Previous studies have tended to situate this discourse in the present, rather than taking an historical view of how the peripheries of urban areas function in relation to the whole city, and how they have developed over time.…”

“…The commonly accepted thinking that local centres primarily function as retail locations is slowly being overturned by studies which explore their wider spatial, economic and social role (Vaughan et al 2009a;, and new studies of changes in consumption patterns brought about by internet shopping are starting to assess whether local centres within areas considered to be suburban can provide useful economic drivers both locally and for a wider region.…”

“…A 2009 article co-authored by the present authors posed the question of 'whether the suburbs exist' (Vaughan et al 2009a). The question was posed rhetorically -but not facetiously.…”