Laura Vaughan, Sam Griffiths and Muki Haklay

I. Introduction

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. An increasingly large academic literature across a wide range of disciplinary fields strongly suggests that they do indeed exist, and it is probably true to say that there are few people in the developed and developing worlds who would not claim to know a suburb when they saw one. If further reassurance were needed it can be found statistically: for example by 2000 the UK had 84 per cent and the USA (on a narrower definition) 50 per cent of its population classified as resident in suburbs according to government data (ITC 2004; Pacione 2005: 87). The question then, is not metaphysical; we are content with widespread scholarly and common-sense agreement that suburbs are characteristic aspects of the built environment. Rather, it is intended to draw attention to the epistemological fragility of the term ‘suburb’. Beyond the most perfunctory level of definition, it is far from clear as to what this term actually means or indeed, whether it can be thought to possess meaning at all. A pronounced tendency to neologism in suburban studies highlights the underlying theoretical weakness. This justifies the original question: if there is widespread agreement that suburbs exist, a fog of competing representations tends to obstruct the possibility of meaningful generalisation. All too often it seems as though the language of the suburban floats free from the suburban streets and the people who live in them. This disjunction means that a particular focus on the suburbs can appear as a distraction, rather than an essential bearing, for research into the relationship of the built environment with everyday social practices. Given the ubiquity of suburban living in contemporary society, this seems an undesirable state of affairs. This chapter revisits many of these ideas, originally laid out in our 2009 article, in order to set them within the context of this book’s consideration of the suburb as a long-standing and essential part of the city. This chapter is accordingly updated both to reflect recent scholarship in the field, but also to position the piece within a more explicitly international context than in the original journal article.

Growth at the urban periphery has in recent times assumed whole new patterns in South America and southern Asia. Brazilian favelas, for example, and similar forms of informal settlement elsewhere in the global south, with their emergent patterns of economic activities, give a whole new meaning to Garreau’s (1992) notion of edge city. Indeed, they have given rise to whole new socio-spatial shapes on the ground, such as the ‘spatial segregation of peripheral neighbourhoods’ (Monteiro 2008). Whilst the phenomenon of suburbanisation extends world-wide, it can fairly be said that its contemporary origins lie in the UK, North America and Australia. It makes sense, therefore, that a large proportion of the academic literature which provides the basis for the critique advanced in this chapter is drawn from the English-speaking countries where suburban topics have generated the most debate. This de facto emphasis notwithstanding, the wider aim, both of this chapter and of the collection as a whole, is to contribute to the development of suburban studies as a coherent research domain in human geography and urban studies. Indeed, since we started work in this domain, several major research projects have sprung up, such as ‘Re-imagining the Australian Suburb’ project at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia and Roger Keil’s international comparative study at York University, Toronto, Canada. Each has its own emphasis, with the former primarily focused on housing and the latter on development and economics. Our approach differs from these. It stems from a proposition inherent to our specialist field of research, space syntax, that the specificity of suburban space and the complexity of its historical development need to be the starting point in understanding the nature of the suburb. Acknowledging the great variety of ways in which the suburbs have been addressed in the academic literature means challenging, in a more fundamental sense, conventional descriptions of the urban fringe as tabula rasa. We propose that the key theoretical significance of suburban space lies in its potential to undermine dominant historical–geographical narratives of city and periphery, which are premised on a series of fixed, culturally specific, representations where the suburb is typically viewed as an entity distinctly and measurably different from the city. Such images are essentially static and militate against the asking of important questions, such as what happens to an edge city when it is no longer at the edge, and what is it like to live in one over an extended period of time? We propose therefore to articulate the dynamic spatio-temporal principle through which built environments become differentiated and adapt to changing socio-­economic conditions over time, suggesting that suburbanisation is a process, rather than a fixed state. Moreover, exactly because they do not receive the close attention of the centre, suburbs have their own dynamic scope in which ideas, forms and practices can evolve and become part of new urban futures. Massey (2005) argues that space constitutes interconnected and open-ended space–time trajectories of social relations, so events in a suburb create the opportunity of social interaction which might shape future events in and around the area. From an architectural perspective, this broad socio-spatial perspective allows one to consider how a generic description of suburban built form might serve as a prelude to the development of a more effective theory of the suburbs; one articulated in terms of the relationship between the emergence of suburban space in particular socio-cultural contexts and the range of social practices that are reproduced there over time. To explore this proposition further, this chapter reviews a wide range of research into suburban subjects in order to examine the different ways in which the relationship between suburban space and society has been represented in the literature. Four such ‘suburban imaginations’ are identified, which are then discussed in the following sections. The chapter concludes with the proposition that the suburb should be considered as a distinctively dynamic domain that shapes and is shaped by society over time.