Suburbanism as a Way of Life,Slight Return

Abstract

Much attention has been given to increasing dominance of the post-war suburbs, and the concomitant rise of ‘suburbanism’ in ways of life in the ‘post-metropolis’. However, the meaning of suburbanism is rarely specified and there have been insufficient attempts to theorise its relationship to the urban. Drawing on the dialectical analyses of Henri Lefebvre, this article presents a theory of suburbanism as a subset of urbanism, with which it is in constant productive tension. Six distinct dimensions of the urbanism–suburbanism dialectic are identified, derived from extrapolating Lefebvre’s urban theory into second- and third-order analyses. These aspects of suburbanism are conceptualised not as static characteristics but as qualities that dynamically flow through, rather than define, particular places. Suburbanism is thus conceptualised separately from those places often termed suburbs, opening up the potential for interaction between these dimensions and the lived realities of everyday urban life and politics.

As the world continues to urbanise and the metropolis becomes the salient form of settlement for the urban population, there is renewed focus on ‘the suburbs’ and what they mean for social life. The majority of urban development around the globe has occurred since the end of the post-war period, in the high-fordist age of the automobile, producing new forms of ‘global sprawl’ (Keil, 1994). Scholars suggest that this has led to a new form of ‘dispersed’ (Bunting and Filion, 1999) or ‘edgeless’ (Lang, 2003) city in which traditional logics of urban space and place are reconfigured. Various names have been proposed for this new, outer city, including ‘technoburbs’ (Fishman, 1987), ‘boomburbs’ (Lang and LeFurgy, 2007), ‘metroburbia’ (Knox, 2008), ‘post-modern urbanism’ (Dear and Flusty, 1998; Ellin, 1996), ‘post-suburbia’ (Lucy and Phillips, 1997) and ‘exopolis’ within the ‘post-metropolis’ (Soja, 2000).

It is in the post-war suburbs of the new dispersed city that much of the urban population across the developed and developing worlds now lives. ‘Suburbanism’ would thus appear to have become the dominant mode of urban existence. Such a post-metropolitan suburban world is one beset by demographic transition and new forms of vulnerability, unregulated and scattered new growth, and the rise of new proposals for retrofitting and redesigning the modern city (Baldassare, 1988; Danielsen et al., 1999; Lucy and Phillips, 1997). The suburbs, and suburbanism, have thus received increasing attention and have inspired new debates. The ‘suburban question’ (Lupi and Musterd, 2006; Modarres and Kirby, 2010) touches on whether post-war suburbs are environmentally and socially sustainable, whether they are fountains or deserts of social capital and social cohesion, and whether they are drivers of, or parasitic on, urban economic growth, among other things (Duany et al., 2000; Kruse and Sugrue, 2006). Scholars are paying increasing attention to the kinds of politics that might spring from the new world of ‘post-suburbia’ (Peck, 2011; Phelps and Wood, 2011; Teaford, 1997; Walks, 2004).

However, despite much scholarly interest, the concept of ‘suburbanism’ has not been adequately theorised, whether in relation to suburban development, the sociological concept of ‘urbanism’, or metropolitan development patterns more generally. The meaning of suburbanism is rarely specified in the literature, but often appears as a secondary term indicating the tendency towards continued suburbanisation, or as an implied outcome, the result of the growth and dominance of ‘suburbia’. Even Kotkin (2006), who has received much attention for his advocacy of a ‘new suburbanism’, does not define suburbanism other than implicitly as the tendency to live in the suburbs.¹ This lack of a conceptual grounding constitutes a significant gap in scholarly knowledge, and begs the question: how might suburbanism be defined and understood? What are its parameters? Is it conceptually derivative of processes of suburbanisation and the spread of suburbia, or alternatively is it conceptually distinct? What is its relation to urbanism? Might there be distinctive and/or competing processes producing and mediating different forms of suburbanism and, if so, what might they be?

This article theoretically interrogates what ‘suburbanism’ might actually mean and how it is reproduced. Drawing on the work of Henri Lefebvre, suburbanism is conceptualised as an inherent aspect of urbanism that is both distinct yet inseparable from it—urbanism’s internal ever-present anti-thesis that, in dialectical fashion, stands in productive tension with it, producing interleaved dimensions of ‘urbanism–suburbanism’. The article delineates a series of such dimensions, the properties of which are characterised as relations and flows that inscribe and inhabit particular places and spaces at different times, but do not necessarily define them. Suburbanism, it follows, should not be understood as a static characteristic of particular places and spaces, but as a multidimensional evolving process within urbanism that is constantly fluctuating and pulsating as the flows producing its relational forms shift and overlap in space. Different places are thus infused with varying levels and hybrid forms of suburbanism. This formulation holds the ‘suburbs’ as conceptually distinct from processes of suburbanism and it may not always be the case that the former is characterised by strong degrees of the latter. The ways in which processes of suburbanism infuse and influence everyday life vary depending on the levels and intensities of the flows producing them. The article concludes by commenting on the implications of this analysis for ways of life and politics in the contemporary metropolis.

Suburbanism, Then and Now

In the first scholarly use of the term ‘suburbanism’, Fava (1956) sought to differentiate a distinct third way between the established concepts of ‘ruralism’ and ‘urbanism’. These concepts, Wirth (1938) famously argued, constituted and reproduced distinct ‘socio-psychological’ states and patterns—ways of life—as a result of differences in population size, density and heterogeneity. Fava (1956) focused on neighbouring and neighbourliness, which she categorised as originating from ‘rural values’, as the socio-psychological features that potentially distinguished suburbanism from urbanism. Neighbouring and a collective orientation towards community, she argued, resulted from the ‘ecological’ concentration of young middle-class families with children in lower-density, owner-occupied residential spaces in the suburbs. It also produced a self-selective migration into such places on behalf of those who were looking for neighbourliness and community (what Tonnies had earlier called Gemeinschaft).

Meanwhile, and ironically, a very different view of the suburbs, and by implication of suburbanism, soon developed. Ways of life in the suburbs came to be associated with individualism, consumerism, middle-class homogeneity, lack of diversity and conformism: Geshelleshaft over Gemeinschaft (Baumgartner, 1988; Jacobs, 1961; Whyte, 1956). Prevailing urban forms characterised by dependence on the private automobile, coupled with reliance on the television for entertainment and social information, are said to have reinforced the withdrawal from public life, the decline of social cohesion and social capital, and the decline of place identity (Jackson, 1985; Kunstler, 1993; Putnam, 2000; Sennet, 1977). In the suburb studied by Baumgartner (1988), a lack of conflict avoidance and a veneer of tolerance produced superficial social networks that hid tendencies towards social disintegration, alienation and ‘moral minimalism’.

Bracketing for now the question of whether such claims could be true, it remains to ask whether it even makes sense to view such traits as distinctly or predominantly suburban, as opposed to representing universal features of the urban, or even the human, condition. Bourne (1996) has noted how the suburb as a category or designation has long been laden with assumptions, images and imposed meanings that do not fit reality, and that it is widely abused and unjustly maligned as a result. Before the post-war suburbs existed, many of the traits often presently associated with suburbanism, including individualism, consumerism, superficiality, lack of community and alienation, were markedly associated with urbanism in general and large central cities in particular (Wirth, 1938; Simmel, 1903/1967). As various critics have continually pointed out, suburban populations are highly diverse and often demonstrate similar characteristics to city dwellers (Berger, 1960; Gans, 1967; Lupi and Musterd, 2006). Many inner-city dwellers watch television, for instance, while many suburban dwellers are tenants. Furthermore, some of the assumed characteristics of suburbs might be fleeting. Clark (1966) noted that, while neighbourliness and communalism were clearly associated with newly built suburbs in Canadian metropolises, after the first generation of children had grown and the neighbourhoods had matured, these social tendencies withered and the suburbs soon exhibited similar social traits and problems as established inner-city areas.

These works raise the question of the relationship between suburbanism and urbanism. Should suburbanism, as a socio-psychological formation, be considered a third way, distinct from both ruralism and urbanism, or is it a hybrid formation, incorporating selected elements of both? Alternatively, might suburbanism be considered a subset of either one of these pre-existing conceptual formations? Is it a contingent form of contemporary urbanism, or a new form of settlement? The literature has yet to adequately address these questions and has provided very little upon which to base an answer. However, the work of Henri Lefebvre provides a theoretical foundation upon which to build an understanding of the forms of suburbanism as inherent dialiectical properties of urbanism. It is to these questions that next section is addressed.

Theorising Urbanism and Suburbanism

The theorising of suburbanism outlined in this article is built from Lefebvre’s dialectical approach to the production of urban space.² Space, Lefebvre argued, is a ‘dialectical product’ in that it exists (and must exist) as both a localised physical expression and an abstract concept reproduced through systems of social processes and practices (Lefebvre, 1974/1991; see also Kipfer et al., 2008; Merrifield, 2006; Schmid, 2008; Stanek, 2008). As in Cloke and Johnston (2005), Lefebvre rejected the use of binaries, arguing instead for the constant co-presence of both the thesis and its anti-thesis, and the continuous production of urban space through their evolving syntheses. This is evident in Lefebvre’s theorising of processes of ‘continuity–discontinuity’ in which temporal permanence and rupture overlap, and ‘isotopy–heterotopy’ through which place identities and spatial logics interact to create differentiated space

Isotopies: places of identity, identical places. Neighbouring order. Heterotopy: the other place, the place of the other, simultaneously excluded and interwoven. Distant order (Lefebvre, 1970/2003, p. 128).

Urbanism, as a particular process of the production of space, constitutes a series of forces continually engaged in a dialectical synthesising of new spatial forms through processes of variegated creative destruction that are simultaneously physical and social-cultural. This dialectical “movement, produced by the urban, in turn produces the urban. Creation comes to a halt to create again” (Lefebvre, 1970/2003, p. 118). The constant productive tension between thesis and anti-thesis means that urban reality (and thus urbanism) “becomes a productive force, like science” (p. 15) in altering spatial and social relations.

Lefebvre’s Urban Dialectical Theory

According to Lefebvre, in his book The Urban Revolution, the urban phenomenon is dialectically produced through the tensions between contradictory and simultaneous primary tendencies. The first is centrality, through which economic production, political decision-making, culture, population, social power and ‘attraction and life’ become agglomerated in space

Piles of objects and products in warehouses, mounds of fruit in the marketplace, crowd, pedestrians, goods of various kinds, juxtaposed, superimposed, accumulated—this is what makes the urban urban (Lefebvre, 1970/2003, p. 118).

This might be termed Lefebvre’s first-order thesis of urbanism. The general hypothesis linking urbanism with centrality is well supported by the academic literature on agglomeration economies and conforms to dominant historical scholarly perceptions of urbanism and urbanity in which the city is organised around a concentrated centre or centres (see Glaeser, 2010; Rae, 2004).³

Countering the force of centrality is centrality’s antithesis: centrifugal dispersion, the rupture of the centre, the tendency to polycentricity and fragmentation (Lefebvre, 1970/2003). The global ‘urban revolution’ that Lefebvre suggests is/has been transforming industrial society into ‘completely urbanised’ society and thus the root of metropolitanisation should be understood as resulting from these two forces coming together in an historical dialectical process of ‘implosion–explosion’ in the aftermath of industrialisation which has unleashed

the tremendous concentration (of people, activities, wealth, goods, objects, instruments, means, and thought) of urban reality, and the immense explosion, the projection of numerous, disjunct fragments (peripheries, suburbs, vacation homes, satellite towns) into space (Lefebvre, 1970/2003, pp. 14, 15).

This is similar to, but distinct from, the post-modern urban condition, under which it is sometimes claimed that the edge has come to organise the centre (Dear and Flusty, 1998).

This confluent tension and creative rupture between centrality and dispersion then produces in synthesis the basis for what could be considered Lefebvre’s second-order thesis of urbanism: differential space, or simply, difference

The city creates a situation, the urban situation, where different things occur one after another and do not exist separately but according to their differences (Lefebvre, 1970/2003, p. 117).

Lefebvre discusses this in terms of the “dialectic of content” (p. 119), in which diverse and mutually exclusive objects, people, situations, signs and symbols are brought together through the “modulations and ruptures of the everyday”, in turn producing “contrasts, oppositions, superpositions, and juxtapositions” (p. 125).

The presence of the other, presence–absence, the need for a presence that is never achieved—these are also the characteristics of differential space (Lefebvre, 1970/2003, p. 131).

The resulting tendency within urbanism towards difference is what leads to the urban as a place of encounter, assembly, partnership, innovation and simultaneity, as well as plurality, complexity, co-existence and tolerance (Lefebvre, 1970/2003, pp. 109 and 118). This is confluent with much urban scholarship in which a high density of potential chance encounters with strangers is a defining characteristic of urbanism and is productive of sub-cultural innovation and expansion (Fischer, 1995). This aspect of urbanism produces much of its energy and creativity

As a place of encounters, focus of communication and information, the urban becomes what it always was: place of desire, permanent disequilibrium, seat of the dissolution of normalities and constraints, the moment of play and of the unpredictable (Lefebvre, 1967/1999, p. 129).

However, the difference and heterogeneity fostered by centralised urbanism also have their antithesis: compartmentalising rationality and universalising homogeneity. The growth of chaotic urban impulses provokes the desire to impose an order, while the centralisation of power (socially and geographically) provides the means for controlling space. The urban is thus also the site of hierarchy and the compartmentalisation of space on behalf of the state and capital. Ordered space in the form of a “‘programmed’ and ‘structured’ equilibrium” (Stanek, 2008, p. 75), what Lefebvre would later call ‘representations of space’ (Lefebvre, 1974/1991), is reproduced in the city through the imposition of land use and social planning, grid and radial circulation, the division of space into land use commodities for market exchange, the bureaucratisation and fragmentation of urban governance, and the construction of the city as a ‘system’ that can be engineered. Social and cultural rationality produce and are produced through the logic of separation and segregation, which are the “enemy of assembly and encounters”. Lefebvre takes pains to argue that difference and segregation are conceptually opposed and incompatible

When we speak of difference, we speak of relationships, and therefore proximity relations that are conceived and perceived, and inserted in a two-fold space–time order: near and distant. Separation and segregation break this relationship. They constitute a totalitarian order, whose strategic goal is to break down concrete totality, to break the urban. Segregation complicates and destroys complexity (Lefebvre, 1970/2003, p. 133).

Segregation is destructive of the positive information contexts and flows necessary for producing the complex order of urbanism

Difference is informing and informed … Separation and segregation isolate information … The order they provide is merely apparent (Lefebvre, 1970/2003, p. 133).

Urbanism itself is thus productive of the social power from which both state and market rationality arise—centrality of decision-making and information, as well as the object of imposed rationality—difference and unpredictability. However, the imposition of rationality and apparent order does not eliminate the tendencies towards urbanism, but subverts and distends them, while also producing new forms of centralisation. The result is what we might term Lefebvre’s second order synthesis: the concentration of urban contradictions in the form of fragmented uneven development

From this situation is born a critical contradiction: a tendency towards destruction of the city, as well as a tendency towards the intensification of the urban and the urban problematic (Lefebvre, 1967/1999, p. 129).

Furthermore, the historical process of dialectical urbanism does not cease

Social relations continue to become more complex, to multiply and intensify through the most painful contradictions. The form of the urban, its supreme reason—namely, simultaneity and encounter, cannot disappear. Urban reality, at the very heart of its dislocation, persists and become more dense in the centres of decision-making and information (Lefebvre, 1967/1999, p. 129).

Extrapolating Lefebvre: Theorising Suburbanism

‘Sub’ when used as a prefix traditionally indicates a situation of subordination, via the imputed meanings ‘less than’, ‘partial/limited’, ‘secondary’ or ‘beneath/under’. ‘Suburb’ literally means less than, or only partially, urban. Suburbanism, definitionally, might then be understood as constituting limited or subordinate urbanism. When defined as ‘under’urbanism, the meaning of suburbanism would go even further, as the qualitative negation of full urbanity but not the lack of urbanism (in the same way that underdevelopment refers to the negation of full development, or a development of partial quality, but not a lack of development). Along these lines, Peck (2011) and Teaford (2008) playfully contemplate how the suburbs could be conceived as subversive of the urban, to run counter to the urban, even as they constitute a secondary form of the urban.

The latter conceptualisation is compatible with Lefebvre’s dialectical understanding of urbanism as beset by sets of forces in constant tension which then work to produce new urban syntheses. These forces, we have seen, can be placed on separate but related theoretical axes: one related to the tension between centrality and its antithesis, centrifugal dispersion, and a second related to the tension between difference and its antithesis, compartmentalisation (rationalised separation). If the first terms in each axis represent the movements towards urbanism, the second represent those opposing movements that Lefebvre argued worked to negate, rupture or ‘break’ the full expression of contemporary urbanity in a qualitative sense. When understood in terms of partial or underurbanism, these opposing tendencies fit well the term ‘suburbanism’. Suburbanism is always expressed together with urbanism, hence the constant co-presence of urbanism–suburbanism.

Note that in this schema suburbanism does not have anything necessarily to do with the rural, ruralisation or the transmutation of rural values, as originally suggested by Fava (1956). Lefebvre argued against the proposition that the new low-density suburbs being built at the fringes of large cities somehow combined properties of rural and urban into a ‘rurban’ space. The suburbs were a creation of urbanisation and the rural is distinct from both

Within this [rurban] hypothesis, the expansion of the city and urbanization would cause the urban (the urban life) to disappear. This seems inadmissible … There is no theoretical reason to accept the disappearance of centrality in the course of the fusion of urban society with the countryside. The ‘urbanity–rurality’ opposition is accentuated rather than dissipated (Lefebvre, 1967/1999, p. 120).

Indeed, Lefebvre saw continued urbanisation as leading to the “complete subordination of the agrarian to the urban” (Lefebvre, 1970/2003, p. 15). A similar argument is made by other scholars, who argue against conceptualising the suburbs or suburban life as incorporating qualities of rural life, or constituting any marriage between rural and urban (Harris, 2004, p. 49). Suburbanism is clearly a property of the urban phenomenon. The work of those attempting to understand the encroachment of suburbanism into rural spaces conforms to Lefebvre’s hypothesis—the suburban is conceptually an extension of urbanism, even when it mixes with the remnants of rurality in formerly rural areas or small towns (Carmo, 2010; Salamon, 2003).

Furthermore, Lefebvre’s dialectic implies that the forces of urbanism–suburbanism, and the tensions they produce, are in constant flux. Urbanism is always reacting in the moment, in a ‘permanent disequilibrium’ that is constantly disrupted through “the work of social ‘agents’ or ‘actors’, of collective ‘subjects’ acting in successive thrusts, discontinuously (relatively) releasing and fashioning layers of space” (Lefebvre, 1970/2003, p. 121) including planners, developers and the state

Urban life hovers, ambiguous and uncertain …The city writes itself on its walls and on its streets. But that writing is never completed … It is nothing but a draft, more a collection of scratches than writing (Lefebvre, 1970/2003, p. 121).

This writing, scratching and hovering performed by the forces of urbanism–suburbanism are best theorised as flows that move in and through particular places and spaces, inhabiting them for distinct yet indeterminate lengths of space and time, much like the flows of capital through investment networks, or information across the nodes of the Internet. Conceptualising the forces of urbanism–suburbanism as flows allows conceptually for them to interact, oppose, rupture and/or combine with each other in new hybrids, thus (re)producing the dialectic at more abstracted meso levels and spatial scales. This opens the possibility of multiple suburbanisms with different qualities, some of which may be emergent in certain times and places, while others wither or dominate in others. The interactions of these multiple suburbanisms (and urbanisms) are then productive of new urban realities.

This theorisation of a dialectical process operating along transects of urbanism–suburbanism helps to facilitate the deeper and more nuanced theoretical understanding of contemporary urban reality that Lefebvre advocated and potentially provides new theoretical tools for urban analysis. This is because it conceptually separates the forces and qualities of urbanism–suburbanism, from the places known as cities and suburbs, or small towns or rural areas for that matter. The latter places are social and cultural signifiers, determined via cultural custom, legal jurisdiction and/or empirical observation, while the former are conceptual processes, flowing forces defined in terms of the factors dialectically producing them. The forces of urbanism–suburbanism have a life of their own as productive forces, separate from the spaces they produce. Such a theorisation opens the potential for places known as ‘suburbs’ to manifest strong degrees or elements of urbanism. Likewise, it leaves open the possibility that neighbourhoods within the downtown cores (for example, those that have been abandoned and/or rebuilt as gated or condominium communities) could exhibit strong tendencies to certain forms of suburbanism. Lefebvre himself hinted at such an analysis when he proffered that under the ‘urban revolution’ the “extension of the city produced suburbs, then the suburbs engulfed the urban core” (Lefebvre, 1967/1999, p. 128). This informs an historical understanding of metropolitanisation as the synthetic product of the tension between the forces of urbanism and suburbanism, one that varies in character depending on the local strength and mix of their different forms and flows.

Six Dimensions of Urbanism–Suburbanism

We have seen how Lefebvre’s dialectical urbanism hinges on a first-order theoretical tension concerning centrality–dispersion and a second-order theoretical tension regarding difference–compartmentalisation. The extension of the dialectical method need not stop at this point, and indeed cannot, if these axes of tension are to be distilled into meaningful concepts describing the different processes at work producing urban space. Lefebvre’s first- and second-order syntheses can be extended to delineate a third-order thesis. And, as each dimension contains a dual character, six separate dimensions of urbanism–suburbanism can be distinguished (Table 1). Lefebvre argued that the theoretical

structures are also twofold: they are morphological (sites and situations, buildings, streets and squares, monuments, neighbourhoods) and sociological (distribution of the population, ages and sexes, households, active or passive population, socioprofessional categories, managers and the managed) (Lefebvre, 1970/2003, p. 116; original emphasis).

Table 1.

Six distinct dimensions of urbanism–suburbanism

Dimension	Ideal type properties
	Urbanism	Suburbanism
Centrality (1)—agglomeration	Clustering, form, distance decay, concentration	Formlessness, dispersion, flat gradients, fragmentation
Centrality (2)—power	Co-ordinated decision-making, political influence, overt authority, control	Marginalisation, subordination, order-taking, dependence unco-ordinated, latency
Difference (1)—juxtaposition	Connectivity, simultaneity, fine-grained, complexity, mixed use, sponteneity	Compartmentalisation, simplicity, separation, imposed order
Difference (2)—social diversity	Plurality, social connectivity, encounter, co-existence, strangers	Division, segregation, avoidance, isolation
Functionality (1)—auto-mobility	Multifunctionality, choice, interdependence	Autonomy, system singularity, auto-mobile dependence
Functionality (2)—domesticity–publicity	Public sphere, publicism, division of labour, politics, exteriority	Domestic sphere, privatism, family, neighbouring, interiority

Note: This listing of properties of urbanism and suburbanism is not meant to suggest that they sit in opposition and never touch. Instead, these properties are of forces of urbanism and suburbanism that are always interacting in a simultaneous constant co-present productive tension. This is the basis of Lefebvre’s dialectic.

The distinct sociological and morphological attributes of our conceptual axes of tension thus distinguish and define separate dimensions of urbanism–suburbanism. In doing so, “urbanism, when examined closely, breaks into pieces. There are several urbanisms…” (Lefebvre, 1970/2003, p. 151).

Of course, the boundaries between the social and the physical are always fluid: the urban landscape is socially produced, and identity and practice are by necessity wrapped up in place and thus difficult to separate. Yet, the sociological and morphological dimensions of each axis need not operate in conjunction. One can easily imagine, for instance, a situation in which there is a high degree of centralisation in the physical form of the city, but social power is highly diffuse (or, alternatively, an edgeless formless city in which social power is highly concentrated). Similarly, one can imagine a situation of rigid land use compartmentalisation, yet accompanied by a lack of social segregation, as well as the obverse, a thoroughly mixed-use physical form characterised by absolute social segregation.

Differentiating the main theoretical axes of tension into distinct physical and social dimensions provides for a nuanced understanding of the forces of urbanism–suburbanism, as each will have its own distinct geography. First of all, centrality can be conceptualised in terms of the centralisation and concentration of structures, infrastructure, networks and production. This is represented by the twin concepts of agglomeration and accessibility, key features of the logic of the city going back to the writings of Marshall and Weber (see Yeates, 1998)

Indeed, it [the city] … becomes productive (means of production) but initially does so by bringing together the elements of production. It combines markets … The city brings together whatever is engendered somewhere else, by nature or labour: fruits and objects, products and producers, works and creations, activities and situations. What does the city create? Nothing. It centralizes creation. And yet it creates everything (Lefebvre, 1970/2003, p. 117).

Such centralising tendencies involve or result in a certain amount of fixing of the built environment for the purposes of ensuring flows of profits (Harvey, 1985). Its rupture evolves (flows) slowly, through the rise of polycentrality and dispersion in the development of physical infrastructures, production and economic activities: the flattening of urban space and form (this is indeed one form of ‘spatial fix’—see Harvey, 1985; Walker, 1981). Because the image and institutions of centrality are often “of very ancient origins” (Lefebvre, 1970/2003, p. 106), there is a tendency for this physical-morphological dimension of centrality to favour continually older existing urban centres. Yet this empirical tendency is just that—related to the layering of old patterns of everyday life and politico-cultural traditions onto the new, and to the speed at which creative destruction is allowed to be unleashed on the urban landscape (the slower, the more likely cherished traditions and icons tend to be maintained in the face of urbanisation).

At the same time, centrality can be understood in terms of the concentration of social power, on behalf of institutions, élite class fractions, social networks, etc. This sociological dimension of centrality is distinct from its morphological/physical counterpart.⁴ The centralisation of social power is more fluid. It reacts not only to shifts in social and political structures, but to ideas, cultural mores and flows of information. Lefebvre argued that “one can conceive polycentric cities, differentiated and renovated centralities, even mobile centralities (cultural ones for example)” (Lefebvre, 1967/1999, p. 120). In terms of this quality of power-centrality, on the axis of urbanism–sububurbanism, urbanism signifies the overt power to influence, to control, to co-ordinate, whereas suburbanism encompasses marginal and diffuse social power, a social power of dependence, subordinate. Note here that suburbanism does not necessarily denote a lack of power, but a particular quality of power that is dispersed, unco-ordinated, yet latent. It is always co-present with centralised power.

Lefebvre’s conception of difference can likewise be delineated by its morphological and sociological dimensions. ‘Juxtaposition’ here refers to the propinquity of mix and heterogeneous assemblage of different physical elements of the urban landscape: land uses, structures, urban forms, activities, services, infrastructures. These lead to the simultaneity and encounter of the urban. Indeed, a fine-grained mix of land use is, for Lefebvre and for many planning theorists, a defining trait of urbanity. Combined with the agglomeration and accessibility wrought by centrality, it is one of the urban origins of innovation and creativity (Glaeser, 2010; Yeates, 1998). This can be contrasted with the mono-functional land use and ‘bubble diagram’ planning that came to dominate the rationalism of high modernist, fordist post-war (sub)urban development (Duany et al., 2000). Physical compartmentalisation and the imposition of ‘Cartesian’ land use planning—which Lefebvre associated with the new modernist town of Mourenx (see Merrifield, 2006)—thus sit in opposition to urban juxtaposition.

The fourth dimension dealing with social diversity speaks to the tensions between (social) connectivity and isolation, encounter and evasion, co-existence and segregation, in the production of urban social space

The city constructs, identifies, and delivers the essence of social relationships: the reciprocal existence and manifestation of differences arising from or resulting in conflicts (Lefebvre, 1970/2003, p. 118).

A high probability of chance encounters with strangers, which necessarily involves contact, confrontation and negotiation, is of course not primarily a property of physical space but of social relations. It flows into and out of particular spaces depending on the socio-spatial forces that bring different social groups together in the course of everyday life. While it might be considered more likely in areas with fine-grained mixes of land uses, and thus correlated to juxtaposition, the latter is nonetheless an empirical question dependent on predominant social relations, social structures, cultural mores and the social aspects of economic activities. In a city in which only one class, or only one race, ever occupies the areas of fine-grained mixed use (due to privilege or exclusion/discrimination), juxtaposition of the physical attributes of urbanism can do little to produce true social encounter, plurality, partnership or tolerance. Likewise, the question of how such difference is negotiated—for instance, through confrontation or moral minimalism and conflict avoidance (Baumgartner, 1988)—is an empirical question related to flows of social forces present in a particular place.

Finally, using his dialectical method, we can extend Lefebvre’s first- and second-order theses further, into a third order, and in doing so identify two additional conceptual dimensions of urbanism–suburbanism related to the functionality of urban space. While Lefebvre did not explicitly extend his thinking past any second order, he nonetheless hints in numerous places at how the tensions between the elements of urbanism already described, and the urban revolution they were producing, might synthesise new forms of urban functionality. Thus far, the concepts discussed have been one level abstracted from the everyday, by virtue of our starting-point in Lefebvre’s dialectic. By moving to a third order, we get ever closer to those factors affecting more common notions of reconstituted ways of life under urbanism and suburbanism, or what Habermas (1984) terms the ‘lifeworld’. This third order is derived from the syntheses of the key elements of the primary- and secondary-order dimensions and it is at the level of this third order that the morphological and sociological once again interact in productive ways.

First of all, there is the dual tension between, on the one hand, concentrated and dispersed forms of accessibility (centralisation–dispersion) and, on the other, the simultaneity of connectivity wrought by morphological juxtaposition and the mono-functionality created through compartmentalisation and the rigid application of planning controls (what might be termed simultaneity–separation). For Lefebvre, such tensions are brought about by the bringing together of ‘indifferent’ spaces which both unite and separate, and which beget new productive dialectics between isotopy and heterotopy, the linear and the circular, the continuous and the discontinuous, leading to new spaces of functional mobility that act as

cuts/sutures (like the broad street or avenue that simultaneously separates and joins two neighbourhoods, two contrasting heterotopies). Spaces marked by different functions are superimposed on one another (Lefebvre, 1970/2003, p. 128).

When the tensions between these different logics are resolved in terms of centralised accessibility and juxtaposition, they produce the conditions encouraging fluid systems of multiplicity and multifunctional mobilities

Isotopy is associated with multifunctionality … Animated environments, especially streets are multifunctional (passage, commerce, entertainment). In the case of small streets, the suture is more important than the cut, and the reverse is true for large thoroughfares and highways, which crisscross and slice through urban space. The isotopy–heterotopy difference can only be understood dynamically (Lefebvre, 1970/2003, pp. 128–129).

Multifunctionality fosters, and is fostered by, augmented levels of social difference, spontaneity, plurality and encounter, but also dispersed social power.

When these tensions are, on the other hand, resolved in favour of a coupling of dispersed accessibility with rationalised mono-functionality, conditions instead encourage discontinuities and systems of singularity (dominated by particularity and dependence). In the field of mobility, this entails automobility, a concept which encompasses the emergent spatial and social architecture built in relation to automobile dependence, the dominance of the automobile-based industry and infrastructure, and the accompanying rise of a social and cultural ideology focused on the autonomous (auto-mobile) individual (see Urry, 2004). Automobility incorporates both social system and desire, cyborg-automaton (melding of machine and human) and agentic autonomy. Lefebvre was clear in positing automobility in conflict with multifunctional urbanity, arguing that “the invasion of the automobile and the pressure of the automobile lobby” destroyed the complex functionality of streets and were “harmful to urban and social life” (Lefebvre, 1970/2003, p. 18).

Because such systems of mobility are by necessity social constructions, they are mediated by tensions in the fields of social power and social difference. Automobility might be expected in contexts of heightened levels of social segregation, as well as concentrated social power among those who control the dominant system (this is the essence of Henderson’s (2006) concept of ‘secessionist automobility’). However, automobility remains conceptually distinct from these other dimensions. While conditioned by the resolution of tensions put in play by other axes of urbanism–suburbanism, it is nonetheless possible to imagine, for instance, a high level of automobility (mono-functional mobility) at the same time as a high degree of either social or morphological centrality and/or a lack of segregation. Automobility can animate urban distinctions even in the absence of social difference, segregation, agglomeration effects and land use fragmentation.

Likewise, the last of our six dimensions—pertaining to social functionality—originates in the interaction among, on the one hand, tensions between the creativity of social heterogeneity and the uneven distribution of costs and benefits arising from social segregation (which mediates the social structures of those groups whose participation is implicated, including those related to social reproduction)⁵ and, on the other hand, tensions between agglomeration of employment and social power and the spatial dispersion, fragmentation and marginalisation of subservient socio-political functions. This produces a dimension on which levels of publicity, domesticity and other related facets vary. These elements are, of course, mediated by morphological questions concerning accessibility and centrality (the ability to assemble, collectively organise, interact with and influence others), and in turn the effects of the resolution of such questions in terms of the location of places of work, institutions and the mobilities that cut or suture them.

This last dimension produces conceptual distinctions, regarding publicity versus privatism, the political versus the personal, production versus reproduction, that are perhaps the most steeped (among our six dimensions) in established traditions of urban analysis (going back to Tonnies, Simmel, Wirth, etc.). Nonetheless they retain their salience both conceptually and empirically. For Lefebvre, the promotion of publicity is one of the outcomes of plurality, encounter, assembly, spontaneity, but also contestation, negotiation, and thus spaces of politics. Isolation, homogeneity, consensus, predictability, all lend themselves to the concentration and segregation of domesticity, even (as has happened) into mono-functional social spaces produced for this purpose which many today call ‘suburbs’. Note again, that on this scale suburbanism indicates a different quality, rather than lack, of publicity. Urbanism connotes exteriority, a politics of collective consumption, public policy and weaker but wider connections developed among acquaintances, colleagues and social groups, upon which the polity is advanced. Suburbanism, meanwhile, entails a cultural logic of interiority (Park, 2012), a politics of the local, of intimacy, and connections with family. Publicity–domesticity as a dimension of urbanism–suburbanism thus harbours specific qualities reflecting the tensions produced by the urban and, while empirically it may be more likely to correlate with particular dimensions and their characteristics over others (particularly those of morphological compartmentalisation re residential neighbourhoods, etc.), it is nonetheless conceptually distinct from them. One can imagine domesticity occurring in dense, walkable, neighbourhoods just as in formless areas dominated by automobility, for instance. Very different spaces can harbour similar functionalities, while spaces of similar surface appearance can fulfil different functions.

From Urbanism to Suburbanism: On Ways of Life and Politics

This theorising of suburbanism opens up new productive avenues for understanding relationships with ways of life. First and foremost, with six separate dimensions interacting and overlapping to varying degrees, there is a multiplicity of suburbanisms that are possible. Each place (re)produced through flows of these multiple forms of urbanism and suburbanism constitutes a hybrid form of ‘in-between’ city (Young and Keil, 2010). Conceptually, there is an almost infinite variety of such in-between urban spaces and, because the dimensions are conceptualised as flows, a place could exhibit some continuity (or slow change) along one dimension (say, agglomeration), while fairly rapid change along another (such as mobility). One cannot determine the location of a place along one dimension from its place on another dimension. Empirically, however, certain forms are likely to dominate in particular locations and these will be path-dependent upon the local legislative, planning, cultural, economic, social and political histories that have shaped the settings in such places at multiple scales. The degree of presence and absence of aspects of the state in such histories is but one important factor in their evolution (Young and Keil, 2010), and this is likely to feature strongly in how flows move into and out of these various in-between places in the future.

Thus, the questions relating various forms of suburbanism to particular ways of life must be answered in relation to the flows animating given types of spaces and places. For instance, ways of life in spaces strongly influenced by flows of domesticity or automobility, which are often taken to define the lifeworlds of post-war North American suburbanism, will also significantly depend on their degrees and flows of social heterogeneity, social power, publicity and accessibility. There are, and will be, auto-mobile suburbanisms, secessionist suburbanisms and exclusionary suburbanisms, but also diversifying suburbanisms, innovative suburbanisms and multifunctional, multimobile suburbanisms. Metropolitan realities may of course, in particular social and economic contexts, continue to reproduce dominant suburbanisms of domesticity and neighbourliness, dispersed social power and isolation, or alternatively concentrated racialised social power or marginality. Yet the immanent inherent forces within urbanism at the same time allow an opening for suburbanisms of creativity, community and collective mobilisation. Empirical operationalisation of the six dimensions conceptualised herein can be used to identify the forms that suburbanisms take in different cities and nations, and thus enable a better understanding of suburban diversity.⁶

This brings us to the political question. Many have asked what kinds of politics might arise out of suburbanism, or a post-suburban world (Phelps and Wood, 2011; Young and Keil, 2010). Lefebvre himself saw in the simultaneous centralisation and rupture of urban space, and thus in metropolitanisation and suburbanism, the tendency for the emergence of a disconnected, regressive politics

(Social) relationships continue to deteriorate based on the distance, time and space that separate institutions and groups. They are revealed in the (virtual) negation of that distance. This is the source of the latent violence inherent in the urban (Lefebvre, 1970/2003, p. 118).

Lefebvre identified one of the key political contradictions wrought by suburbanism, that between the appearance of democratic equality in the form of the edgeless, auto-mobile city devoid of centralised hierarchy and concentration, and the reality (which through ideology becomes masked and hidden) of a disempowering, homogenising and isolating social world begat by segregation and injustice

Can uniform space, without “topoi”, without places, without contrast, pure indifference, a caricature of topoi the relation between the urban and its components, stifle urban reality? It can. It can even assume a mantle of democracy. Urban democracy would imply an equality of places, equal participation in global exchanges. Centrality would produce hierarchy and therefore inequality. And yet, wouldn’t dispersion result in segregation? (Lefebvre, 1970/2003, pp. 124–125).

Indeed, the Tieboutian/neo-liberal justification of the dispersed post-suburban US metropolitan form is built on this very appearance of democratic equality, by virtue of its supposed origin in the voluntary choices of free participants operating in and through the marketplace (Peck, 2011). Not only does this perspective overlook the very present role of the state (at multiple scales) in producing such metropolitan forms and their land markets, but it is ideologically blind to the divisions, segregations and mono-functionalities (and their choice-constraining aspects) generated by such forms of metropolitanisation.

There indeed is evidence linking the evolution of particular forms of auto-mobile suburbanism to a neo-liberal politics of privatisation, individualism, privilege and segregation (Duncan and Duncan, 2003; Henderson, 2006; Peck, 2011; Walks, 2004). One of the contradictions of neo-liberalism is that, by promoting particular immanent dimensions of suburbanism (privatisation and privatism, automobility and dispersion, deregulation and individualism), the forces of agglomeration, heterogeneity, accessibility, mixing and encounter upon which economic growth, innovation and creativity are derived in the capitalist metropolis are then undercut (Walks, 2006). However, the multiplicity of suburbanisms that are immanent within contemporary urban reality imply the potential for a multiplicity of forms of politics. The rise of American neo-liberal suburbanism has its roots in specific historical circumstances (Peck, 2011), which are related to peculiar constellations, combinations and flows of particular dimensions of urbanism–suburbanism. The way that such flows combine in other contexts depends upon both urban imaginaries and the mobilisation of state resources (Phelps and Wood, 2011). The Lefebvrian theorising of suburbanism presented here suggests the possibility for new, progressive forms of politics to emerge in the post-suburban metropolis, as the tensions between different dimensions of urbanism and suburbanism produce new hybrid urban spaces, ways of life and forms of political consciousness.

Conclusion

This article has interrogated the meanings and parameters of what might constitute suburbanism and has briefly explored its implications for understanding ways of life and politics in the emergent post-suburban metropolis. This has been accomplished through a Lefebvrian analysis of the dialectical production of urban space and the bases of the morphological and social tensions undergirding different dimensions of what I term, in Lefebvrian fashion, urbanism–suburbanism. The latter is understood as the meta dialectic producing new, hybrid, ways of life in the contemporary metropolis. Suburbanism is, according to this dialectical logic, both a form of urbanism produced by and through it, and its anti-thesis, separate and inseparable. Six distinct dimensions of urbanism–suburbanism are identified, derived from extrapolating Lefebvre’s urban dialectic into second- and third-order analyses. These dimensions are conceptualised not as static characteristics or signifiers, but as flows that move in and out of particular places, and with varying intensity and capacity, types of spaces. These theoretical dimensions of urbanism and suburbanism are therefore conceptually separate from the grounded areas of settlement known as cities and suburbs. This not only opens up the possibility that varying forms and dimensions of urbanism–suburbanism might flow in and out of different urban and suburban spaces at different times, but also the potential for interaction between the flows of these dimensions and lived urban space in producing new hybrid ways of life and consciousness. This means, that alongside neo-liberal suburbanisms, exclusionary suburbanisms and auto-mobile suburbanisms, there is the potential for diversifying suburbanisms, innovative suburbanisms and suburbanisms of progressive collective mobilisation. The theorising of suburbanism does not shut out any of these possibilities, but instead provides a multidimensional theoretical basis for their comprehension and realisation within processes of contemporary urbanism.

Footnotes

Notes

Funding Statement

The ideas in this paper arose out of research that was originally funded by a standard faculty research grant by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Participation in a project on Global Suburbanisms funded by the Major Collaborative Research Initiative (MRCI) further stimulated their development and led to their articulation in this paper. The researcher would thus like to thank SSHRC and MCRI for their support.

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