Extended urbanization, “disjunct fragments” and global suburbanisms

Abstract

Urbanization today, now that it has become generalized, is mainly suburbanization in its manifold differentiation. As suburbanization becomes the form and suburbanism becomes the life of much of the urban revolution, we are entering an age of postsuburbanization. This means, for example, that the notion of suburbanization as dependent on one centre has to be discarded as the form and life of the global suburb take shape in a general dynamics of multiple centralities and decentralities. It includes a maturation of classical suburbia, a more splintered and fragmented urbanism. This paper reviews aspects of a Lefebvrian discussion around these issues and focuses in on the explosion and subsequent reassembly of “disjunct fragments” of the urban in a world of global suburbanisms. In so far as it challenges the traditional view of the central-peripheral urban dialectics, it intersects with debates on planetary urbanization. The paper ends with speculations on the horizontalization of sub/urban form and practice in a globalizing world.

Suburban studies: State of the field and unsolved knots

“…In order to deal with such global heterogeneity, attention on suburbanization has been recently addressed by way of the themes of governance, land, and infrastructure (Ekers, Hamel, & Keil, 2012;Hamel & Keil, 2015;Harris & Lehrer, 2018;Keil, 2013;Phelps, 2017). The international research "Global Suburbanisms: Governance, Land and Infrastructure in the 21 st Century" 1 has produced a large body of empirical, thematic, and conceptual insights and acknowledges that suburbs are today outcomes of multi-scale, multi-topological process and various modalities of governance that involve worldwide interactions and aspirations in a global world (Hamel & Keil, 2015;Keil, 2017a). In this respect, the field of "suburban governance" (Keil 2012;2017b) deals with the complexity of the worldwide suburbanization phenomenon by referring to the variety of governance modes (state-led, capital-led and authoritarian-led) and stimulating at the same time new conceptual perspectives of suburban spaces beyond a "methodological cityism" (Connolly, 2019).…”

“…The discussed multitude of concepts and theories calls for a conceptual order beyond those traditional dichotomies of urban fields that still hamper our understandings of urbanization overall (Keil, 2017a(Keil, , 2017bMerrifield, 2012;Schafran, 2013). Cities and suburbs are not built by academic debate but by struggles in space and time (Keil, 2018).…”

“…As argued by Bontje and Burdach (2005), European suburban developments can be conceived as a typical variation of the American "edge city," albeit the adaption of such concept needs to be calibrated in light of institutional European transformations at different territorial scales (Phelps & Parsons, 2003). Although this comparison is limited to a Western observation, it reveals how suburbanization comes today as a global process shaped by site-specific economic, demographic, geographical, institutional, and cultural conditions (Pagliarin & De Decker, 2018) leading to collective complex governance articulations (Ekers et al, 2012;Hamel & Keil, 2015;Keil, 2017a).…”

“…This difference between various perspectives deserves a little more attention to account in detail the epistemology of the suburban. Differently, this review goes beyond Lefebvre's vision of the urban and the subsequent debate that it sparked in the 1970s revolving around the twofold process of implosion–explosion that produced an increase of population and activities beyond the existing form of the city (see Keil, ). In so doing, the article reflects on critical outlooks to shed light on the complexity of contemporary “suburban century”.…”

“…Nevertheless, an “epistemological fragility” (Vaughan, Griffiths, Haklay, & Jones, ) has historically affected the suburban, both as a concept and in spatial identification. A primary definition of “suburbs” comes from P. H. Douglass (, p. 8) who identified them as “those communities within the total metropolitan areas which have a suburban identity of population, and from which, in addition, the heart of the city can be reached conveniently, quickly, at low‐cost.” Today, suburbs are widely conceived as one part of the fabric of housing, commerce, and industry in contemporary urban settlements (McGee, ), although they might not be viewed as the linear expansion of metropolitan cores, but rather as the product of a combination of dynamics (Keil, , ) such as—inter alia—neoliberal accumulation regimes (Peck, ), the rescaling of statehood (Brenner, , ) and the decentralized regional economies (Storper, ). In this respect, suburban as a field of study does not represent a new category, but rather, it comes as a critical perspective in the light of a complete urban revolution.…”