Table Of ContentSuburban Urbanities
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Suburban Urbanities
Suburbs and the Life of the High Street
Edited by
Laura Vaughan
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First published in 2015 by
UCL Press
University College London,
Gower Street,
London WC1E 6BT
Available to download free: www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press
Text © Contributors 2015
Images © Contributors and copyright holders named in the captions
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available
from The British Library
This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial
Non-derivative 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). This license allows you
to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work for personal and non-commercial
use providing author and publisher attribution is clearly stated. Further details about
CC BY licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
ISBN: 978-1-910634-14-1 (Hbk.)
978-1-910634-13-4 (Pbk.)
978-1-910634-17-2 (PDF)
978-1-910634-15-8 (epub)
978-1-910634-16-5 (mobi)
DOI: 10.14324/111.9781910634134
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To Neil and Daniel from ‘U’
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Foreword
In recent years there has been much debate within urban studies as to
which came first in the evolution of human settlements, the countryside
or the city. There was always a third context to this discussion, however,
and that was the suburb. Life beyond the city walls was a distinctive feature
of ancient urban civilisations from Persia to Minoan Crete, and today in
the Anglophone world the suburban population is a majority. How surpris-
ing, then, that few scholars have attempted to understand the nature and
agency of suburban living as a dominant characteristic of human settle-
ments. This was symptomatic of a wider academic indifference and even
hostility towards ‘the suburban’ which has only (ridiculously) recently been
challenged by a new generation of scholars who take suburbs seriously.
Suburban Urbanities is a hugely important contribution to understand-
ing our suburban world. Drawing upon scholarship within the now rapidly
expanding field of suburban studies, synthesising historical geography with
space syntax theories and methods, and the sociology of everyday life, it
sheds new light on the historic and spatial evolution of the city. It shows
that suburbia is not a synchronic caricature of a life-less-lived, but a dynamic
context of metropolitan agency and creativity. As an historic process, sub-
urbanisation is not something that evolved beyond the city to suck the life
out of it, but was intertwined with trajectories of growth, with the socio-
economic patterning and structuring of cities large and small. It is impossi-
ble to grasp the meaning of class relations, of gendered lifestyles, of ethnic
segregation and integration, of urban economies and patterns of mobility
and communications, without placing suburbia at the forefront of the anal-
ysis. The universality of the themes of Suburban Urbanities is obvious: the
dynamics of growth are significant historically because suburbs are starting
points in change over time, not the end of the line. Old suburbs were once
new, and today’s new suburbs, springing up rapidly across the world, will
one day be old. As dynamic environments they continue to act as vectors of
social, economic and political development, locally, nationally and globally.
The book is timely in another important sphere, and that is the per-
sonal subjectivity of suburbanites. To those who live in them, suburban lives
FOrEWOrD vii
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have meaning. Back in 2013, I went for a walk in Fort Totten, an African-
American suburb of Washington, DC. On a sweltering August lunchtime,
as I took photographs of the comfortable suburban homes of middle-class
black people in roads that were empty except for flowering trees and parked
cars, a woman’s voice called out to me with a gentle but audible ‘good after-
noon’. Across her neatly trimmed front lawn I began chatting with a woman
in her sixties who was taking tea with a friend on her veranda. She had left
downtown DC in 1976 and as she stated with some passion, ‘I couldn’t
wait to get out’. Fort Totten had its problems, but it was an attractive and
spacious place to raise children, and well connected to the city. Her story is
an important one because it is one of millions of inconvenient truths being
ushered out of view by the current urban policies that demonise suburbia,
and by the retro-fitting of suburbs that were, until very recently, doing just
fine. Myriad examples of successful suburban living and suburban happi-
ness and of triumph over social exclusion can be found if academics want
to look for them. Suburban Urbanities looks for them, and understands that
they are part of an ongoing pattern of human settlement that stretches from
the ancient past to the present, and will persist long into the future.
Mark Clapson
reader in History
University of Westminster
viii FOrEWOrD
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Preface
This book has taken shape over many years, as part of an ongoing con-
sideration of the way in which society and urban form interact over time.
My research focus on the suburbs was first sparked by Professor Bill Hill-
ier, who liked to tease me, as his student on the Bartlett’s MSc Advanced
Architectural Studies, as being ‘just a girl from Edgware’ (despite my hav-
ing spent much of my life till then in the suburbs of Jerusalem). This very
much echoes the experience of my predecessor at the Bartlett, Ian Davis,
almost exactly forty years earlier. In ‘Dunroamin’, Davis describes his own
first day at the Bartlett School of Architecture in 1953, putting down ‘Edg-
ware’ as his address and being advised by his tutor that he should make
rapid plans to move from there to a more ‘civilised address, such as Cam-
den Town’.1 Subsequently, my reading of Mark Clapson’s essential histories
of the working-class suburb opened my eyes up to alternative narratives of
the twentieth-century suburban experience. I should also mention the series
of exchanges with Vesna Goldsworthy, whose ‘The Good Life’ conference
at Kingston University in 2004 formalised suburban studies as a field of
academic research in its own right. Shortly after the conference Vesna and
I wrote a proposal for a multidisciplinary book on suburban studies, which,
although never realised, helped seed the idea for this book in its current
guise.
The urban theories of Bill Hillier, Julienne Hanson and Alan Penn
at the UCL Space Syntax Laboratory, Bartlett School of Architecture, have
deeply influenced my thinking about how cities grow and change. Amongst
many of my other colleagues elsewhere at UCL I would like to particularly
mention the work on high streets by Matthew Carmona of the Bartlett
School of Planning. Last, but not least, I would like to mention the vital con-
tribution that my research colleagues Muki Haklay and Sam Griffiths have
made to the creation of this book. Our weekly discussions over coffee and
cake influenced my own reflections of the suburbs as being as complex as
the city itself. Essential to this understanding was Muki’s thinking regarding
interdisciplinary research and the nature of space in geography, as well as
Sam’s urban historian’s conception of the temporality of urban form.
PrEFACE ix
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Description:ing, then, that few scholars have attempted to understand the nature and segregation and integration, of urban economies and patterns of mobility .. Meta Berghauser Pont is Senior Lecturer in Urban Design at Chalmers Uni- . has said – suburbs are as old as the city itself (Ackroyd 2000: 727).
