Remains of the Day

Suburbs, cities, and conventional wisdom

Great essay in Design Observer trying to advance the discussion about suburbs versus cities.

Whether in art or architecture, the suburbs seem to lack cultural authorship and a “back story” — the suburban landscape simply unfolds ex nihilo — out of nowhere and out of nothing. This lack of identity also represents a lack of history. Suburban time is strangely suspended, literally an arrested development frozen in its initial phases of construction: no wonder most people conjure an image of suburbia as a series of new housing starts and barren landscapes. From William Garnett’s photos of Lakewood Park in California to Robert Adams’ pictures of suburban Denver, there is a long tradition of using photography to record these processes of transformation, and because they are focused on an early moment in the life cycle of suburbia, they do not typically provide any evidence of human settlement, aspiration, or inhabitation. Most suburbs are now old enough to have a history, and enough inhabitants over time to establish an identity. A perceived lack of identity and history, however, accounts for the proliferation of rebranded suburbia: the creation of new pedestrian streetscapes, “downtowns,” and town centers.

The inability to situate a suburban aesthetics or to develop a language and theory to assess suburban forms as anything but an aberrant urbanism is clearly one of the crucial hurdles in constructing a more objective and less judgmental approach. The continued reliance on urban theories, assumptions, biases, and practices as a lens for viewing suburbia only compounds the problem. Rem Koolhaas can theorize the Generic City and Junkspace, and Sarah Susanka, author of the Not-So-Big franchise, can write about the virtues of downsizing, but there is very little between these extremes. Another difficulty in developing a suburban aesthetics is the issue of popular taste. Most forms of criticism and artistic practice cannot perceive suburbia without the posture of ironic distance or cynical dismissal. Historian John Archer in his essay from the catalogue, “Suburban Aesthetics Is Not an Oxymoron,” undermines the conventional assumption that suburbia represents an empty, thin, and inauthentic form of consumption — a paucity of experience — a myth that is contradicted by the richness of suburbia’s symbolic universe, an experience lived by its occupants rather than viewed by its critics. The greater social and cultural context has shifted for both urbanites and suburbanites. The oft-claimed alienation of the suburbs and the supposed close-knit communities of the city are both myths — convenient stories we tell about the other in the hope that the world next door will be kept worlds away.