Suburban place, mythic thinking, and the transformations of global cities.

Publication: Urban Anthropology & Studies of Cultural Systems & World Economic Development

Publication Date: 22-DEC-06

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Suburbs are settlements outside cities, whether walls, citizenship, planning or ideologies define these boundaries. Despite this spatial separation, suburbs nevertheless remain remarkably salient in shaping urban politics and consciousness worldwide. This presence of the suburban "other" has had significant ramifications for American culture, where post-World War II suburbia has gained an iconic, albeit schizophrenic, cultural power. Decades of academic critiques, pervasive mass media imagery and experiences of diverse suburban built environments where many work and live have made suburbs concrete and ubiquitous. Suburbs haunt American cities with their temptations and threats, presence and absence. As a consummate dystopia of the antiurban, suburbs evoke privatization, white flight, conformity, environmental waste and even melancholy. Yet, these same places, read by buyers (and developers) as utopias, also suggest family, comfort, nature and revitalization, images that long have guided the historical development of Anglo-American suburbs (Fishman 1987; Beauregard 2006).

This divisive imagination of suburbs pervaded politics and imagery in the 2006 comments of Ben Domenech, ephemeral right-wing blogger for the WASHINGTON POST:

Yet even in a climate where Republicans hold command of every branch of government, and advocate views shared by a majority of voters, the mainstream media continues to treat red state Americans as pachyderms in the mist--an alien and off-kilter group of suburbanite churchgoers about which little is known, and whose natural habitat is a discomforting place for even the most hardened reporter from the New York Times ... (Domenech 2006, emphasis added).

This citation stressed not only the supposed differences that make suburbia a cradle of power for conservative Republicans but also the alienation imputed to an archetypical urbanite in understanding this place. Yet, given such territorial conservatism (questionable in the light of 2004 election results), why did a conservative commentator insist so on the differentiation of suburbs and urbanism? Domenech evoked the barrier between suburb and city as a mythic dichotomy that explained and promoted a political agenda. In this essay, I argue that anthropologists, trained for decades in the careful reading of myths, context and contradictions, have a central role to play in understanding this contemporary myth and its consequences, as well as integrating such local and comparative knowledge into metropolitan change.

Nor is the cultural construction of suburbs as value-laden alternatives to cities and its implications for metropolitan politics uniquely American, even if one foundation of global imagery of "suburbia" seems to be its threatening "Americanness" (generally encompassing Canada, Australia and British forebears; see Beauregard 2006: 145-171). After explosions of rage among immigrant suburban youths across urban France in 2005, commentators demanded explanations of "ces banlieues qui nos fan peur" ("these suburbs that frighten us," Lancon and Buchoud 2003), which some have compared to American "inner cities" (Wacquant 1993; Boyer 2000). Rapid explanations of why banlieues are bad, ranging from polygamy and the absence of male role models to architecture to problems of youthful assimilation, resonated with centuries of identification of extramural populations as different, dangerous and criminal (Merriman 1991; Fourcaut 1992; Harvey 2005). In fact, mass media as loci of modern mythmaking had spread and contested this opposition, even before post-colonial demographics introduced new elements of difference into metropolitan politics.

Elsewhere, squatter settlements around Latin American capitals, government-sponsored satellite cities that have housed and pacified Chinese refugees in colonial Hong Kong and many other suburban / urban formations provide different but comparative vantages on the socioeconomic spatialization of difference, political action and mythic geographies in which suburbs and cities are separated yet still actively intermesh. In Buenos Aires, for example, Laura Podalsky provides a striking image of the dangerous suburbs at a critical transition, as historian Felix Luna recalled working-class Peronistas marching through the central Plaza de Mayo in 1945: "As if they wanted to show all their power, so that nobody could doubt that they really existed. There they were all over the city, shouting in groups which seemed to be the same group multiplied by hundreds.... Had they really come on foot from those suburbs whose names made up a vague unknown geography, a terra incognita through which we had never wandered?" (cited in Podalsky 2004: 12; see Auyero 2001, Guano 2004 for contemporary reverberations). While suburbs in this passage are unknown rather than bucolic and bland, the intense meaning of the opposition of city and suburb within metropolitan life is equally compelling.

My examination of American suburban myth, place and power, in fact, forms part of a longer term comparative study focused on Philadelphia, Paris, Hong Kong, and Buenos Aires. Each case exemplifies different historical features, structures of power and governance, social constructions and complex myths of growth around the city, within global contexts ranging from burgeoning colony to post-colonial global city. In this study, I have looked at structure and visual forms, processes of political economic development and the social and mythic meanings of places outside the city (McDonogh and Wong 2005; McDonogh 2006). Here, to underscore links between suburban myths and American questions of space and politics raised in other papers in this issue, I first explore myth, space and politics in the racialization of Unived States suburbia and cities and the politics of public versus private spaces. I complement these with analysis of the imagery and politics of French suburbs, underscoring the need to look at metropolitan myths, spaces and politics worldwide to understand and act upon the American metropolis.

Place, Race and Myth

"It is called the suburbs now, but when black people lived there it was called the Bottom" (Morrison 1973: 3). Suburbs, whether mythic or political, entail spatial differentiation vis-a-vis cities. Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison distilled powerful elements of this differentiation in her novel Sula, where a poor, outlying African-American district beside her mythical small Ohio city of Medallion combined the segregation of incorporated and unincorporated spaces, of rich valleys and hardscrabble hills, with unequal divisions of race, rights and memory. In the U.S., in fact, many commentators have read postwar suburban development through "white flight": stark geographies of race and class that distorted differences in governance and form that had created an earlier, more utopian imagery of suburbs (e.g. Orser 1994; Seligman 2005; Beauregard 2006). Suburbs as abandonment of the impoverished racialized city embodied fundamental political questions about inclusive and exclusive social visions. Yet Morrison posed another question as well: what if African-Americans already inhabited early suburban places? What does this mean for the framework in which metropolitan politics and their interpretation take place?

Andrew Wiese' pathbreaking work has shown that African-Americans had created suburban spaces in the late 19th and early 20th century (2004). Often, working class blacks were moving towards the city (from rural settings) as much as escaping from it. In suburbs, they built homes and communities that brought together work places, productive gardens and rental sites for kin and others (the kind of mixed uses New Urbanists now champion). Mass suburban development after World War II, however, eclipsed many working-class areas, regardless of race (see Nicolaides 2002). Through this elision, postwar suburban development could claim more upper-class residential retreats from the city as their "model," despite the mass transformations of new spaces.

The disappearance of African-American voice and examples from narratives of suburbia did not mean actual displacement of African-Americans or their suburbs. As Wiese shows, during the Great Migration (1910-20), one-sixth of all black migrants moved to suburbs rather than cities in the North; by 1940, there were one million black suburbanites nationwide, 20% of the total black population; this rose to 2.5 million before the Civil Rights era. Today, 12 million African-Americans (one-third of the total black American population) live in suburbs. Still, Wiese laments that "black suburbanites remain a 'people without history,' to borrow a phrase from anthropologist Eric Wolf" (2004: 2). Emphasizing the power of myth, Wiese notes that even scholars who have fought to integrate suburbs, including Kenneth Jackson and Herbert Gans, often have accepted suburbia's intrinsic whiteness (Wiese 2004: 4).

In my work in the Philadelphia Main Line, a traditionally elite railroad suburb, and earlier work in Savannah, Georgia, it became clear that the power of this imagery of race, class, and space continues to shape urban and suburban political issues. In Savannah, for example, "black" suburbs formed through both incorporation of older rural communities into the city and modern...

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