Abstract
At first glance, Still Detached and Subdivided? has the look of a beautiful coffee table book. The majority of the book consists of full-page, color images of suburban landscapes, maps, and figures. A closer read reveals that editors Markus Moos and Robert Walter-Joseph have packed the book with innovative ways to think about the future of suburban planning. With its enticing aesthetic, Still Detached and Subdivided? makes for a fun and insightful read.
Moos and Walter-Joseph construct a unique premise for organizing the book. They begin with four fictional planners who are working with a suburban municipality. Their client wants to remake its central area in a “less suburban” image (11). The book follows these four planners as they discuss what suburban is and the different forms that suburbia can take. The planners grapple with how to plan for suburbs that are socially inclusive and environmentally friendly while still respecting traditional suburban ways of life. Also, they consider how recent trends, such as the aging of the population, increase in the number of autonomous vehicles, and calls for suburban retrofitting, might factor into their plans. This premise enables the editors to highlight the diversity of suburbanisms that exist and the possibilities for the future of suburbia.
Still Detached and Subdivided? is organized thematically in five sections. Each chapter features dialogue among the planners. The planners share pieces they have recently read, which allows Moos and Walter-Joseph to incorporate excerpts from journal articles and original writings from several Canadian professors and students. In many cases, the planners then discuss what they think of the articles and how the ideas they have read about might inform the way they think about planning in the suburban context.
The first chapter (“Suburban Imaginaries”) is structured around considerations of what is suburban. The four planners discuss their differing views of suburbia, ranging from boring monocultures to diverse multigenerational neighborhoods. The planners’ dialogue covers the environmental impact of traditional suburban development and the issues they see with recent New Urbanist development in the suburbs. Their conversation culminates with the agreement that they should be “thinking about suburbs in their own terms, not just as a problem to be fixed, and not just as low-density landscapes waiting to be urbanized” (15). This elides into the planners exploring suburbs as a malleable social construct that can have different forms globally but emerges from a common process.
In the second chapter (“Defining Suburbanisms”), the planners delve into how to define suburbs and suburban ways of life. Their conversation centers around a coauthored paper by Moos and several colleagues published in the Canadian Journal of Urban Affairs. The planners and authors consider suburbs as a way of life, breaking down the urban-suburban binary to acknowledge that suburban ways of life are present in the central city as well. The planners reflect on the concept that suburbs have their own lifestyles, often embodied in the postwar suburban characteristics that the article’s authors describe as a culture of automobility, domesticity, middle-class socioeconomic status, and homogeneity. The planners consider how to keep positive elements of suburban lifestyles while planning for suburbs that are more equitable and environmentally friendly. They highlight the importance of finding solutions that actually respond to the needs and diversity of the suburban population while departing from the exclusion on which the suburbs were built.
The chapter concludes with a lengthy excerpt of the published article in which the authors find that postwar suburban ways of living continue to be reproduced, reaffirming the ideals of privacy and independence. The authors suggest that concerns over social exclusion and environmental degradation can only be properly addressed through solutions that incorporate the privacy and homeownership opportunities that suburbs provide. The excerpt concludes with the finding that suburban ways of living continue to appear in decentralized places as well as some central city areas.
The third chapter (“Planning the North American Suburb”) looks at planning North American suburbs. The planners start by again discussing how to make suburban ways of living more sustainable, pointing out that sustainability should be the goal rather than urbanization just for the sake of urbanization. They begin to ponder the role that planning has played in shaping suburban communities and the role that it might play in reimagining them. The conversation serves as an introduction to an essay by Pierre Filion. The essay examines planning paradigms that have shaped and dispersed metropolitan regions from the end of World War II until today. Filion notes that planning commitment alone will not be able to induce a major shift in suburban form and dispersion. Transformative metropolitan changes in previous decades came about when several societal factors aligned and new transportation technologies were introduced.
The penultimate chapter (“Mapping Suburbanisms”) contains nearly forty pages of maps, and it certainly lives up to its name. The chapter again starts with the four intrepid planners. This time, they coincidentally run into each other at a gallery, which happens to be displaying an Atlas of Suburbanisms exhibit. They briefly reflect on the extent of suburbanization in many metropolitan areas. The planners set up the central question of the exhibit: Instead of taking suburban geographies as a given, what if the characteristics associated with suburbia were mapped across metropolitan areas? The following pages display the Atlas of Suburbanisms maps, which document housing age and structure type, commuting mode, demographic composition, and tenure in twelve North American metros. The maps show that suburban ways of living are not limited to the geographies most readers typically delineate as suburbs.
The chapter concludes with two essays and corresponding sets of maps. The first essay is an excerpt of Markus Moos and Pablo Mendez’s paper published in Urban Studies, which operationalizes suburban ways of living based on the level of commuting by car, homeownership, and single-family housing in neighborhoods relative to their metros. The final essay by Sarah Godfrey and Jennifer Dean maps suburban soundscapes. The authors argue that suburban planners in particular may need to be cognizant of dissonant sounds and create buffers. While this essay poses an interesting consideration for planners, it seems disjointed from the rest of the chapter.
In the final chapter (“Suburban Futures”), the planners meet with their clients on site to share what they have learned. The chapter contains several interesting proposals for making suburbs more sustainable and pedestrian-friendly, including a reimagining of culs-de-sac, using infill housing to promote densification and affordability, public community spaces for food trucks, and programs to encourage community gardening. The planners implore the client to think about ways to nudge the neighborhood in a more sustainable direction without demonizing the way their community currently lives. At the end of the chapter, the planners share a packet on suburban futures consisting of seven short writings. These include planning ideas for youth engagement in suburban spaces, planning for intergenerational living and aging in suburbs, redesigning big box developments with infill to make pedestrian-friendly shopping centers, creating opportunities for suburban agriculture, and thoughtfully incorporating autonomous vehicles into future plans.
The unorthodox style of Still Detached and Subdivided? adds to its allure but also makes the book a challenging read at times. At various points, the fictional dialogue detracts from building a cohesive, developed argument. The conversations are not utilized to their fullest capacity, leaving some of the presented excerpts and images without proper contextualization. As a result, I finished some sections or chapters wondering what the main takeaway should be and how some of the writings fit together. While the larger premise and narrative hold together, the fictional dialogue could have further strengthened the connections between the interspersed writings.
Despite this drawback, Still Detached and Subdivided? contributes meaningfully to the growing literatures on suburban neighborhood change, New Urbanist suburban redevelopment, and gentrification. Moos and Walter-Joseph move beyond pointing out the problems with the suburban landscape to proposing workable solutions. The book functions as a guide for planners who want to reimagine the suburban landscape in a way that acknowledges the primacy and value of suburban ways of life. Still Detached and Subdivided? is a particularly good text for planning students and practitioners. The authors introduce several planning concepts and theoretical perspectives in an accessible way. For academics, Still Detached and Subdivided? provides an example of how to creatively package scholarly work in a way that appeals to a broader audience. Moos and Walter-Joseph have managed to assemble a book that is mesmerizing to look at and fun to read while expanding the vision of suburban futures.