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I’m from the suburbs. Cities are for the rich, the poor, the hip and the childless:

So much for white flight. Today American suburbanisation is driven by middle-class family flight. The cities are for the rich, who can afford private schools and safe neighbourhoods, the poor, who dream of escaping to the suburbs, and the hip and childless.

So, I guess that leaves the comfortable, the reasonable, the banal – and families – for the suburbs. This describes my upbringing fairly well.

There are loads of reasons to hate the suburbs. Jane Jacobs writes persuasively about them, for instance (the reasons rather than suburbs). What I hate most is the paradox there being so little ‘dead’ space and so little life; plus the monotony and the so-rational-it’s-insane-ness of it all. I don’t trust any place where there’s no space to open up a junk shop. They’re one of the few places which would be made happier by a higher Gini Coefficient.

Ross Racine produces amazing images of suburban landscapes. They’re hand-drawn:

BLDGBLOG points me to Christopher Gielen’s unedited photos in culturehall:

The similarities between the art and the vérité are striking.

Here’s some shots from a book called empty LA, which come to me via science fictional:

I’m not so naive to think that Empty LA looks like fun, but it would be kind of interesting to wander through a dead city. And a dead city doesn’t look that dissimilar to a live suburb. . .

Peter Funch captures the contradictions of great cities perfectly:

Henry Ford tried to build a suburb from scratch once. It was called Fordlandia and it ended in fiasco.

When you speak to suburban types and they describe the cities they’ve fled from, they conjure up images of cramped poverty. Like this:

But the biggest difference between a favela and most suburbs is the roads. It’s the roads that make suburbs – without them they’d be shanty towns with little or nothing in the way of amenities or culture.

Suburbs have always had their critics, both among the people who have to live there. . .^[1]

And from, erm, critics:

In 1951, critic Cyril Connolly said, “Slums may well be breeding-grounds of crime, but middle-class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.” In 1961, Lewis Mumford condemned the American suburb, specifically Levittown, for its preference of homogeny in look and class and income over individuality; suddenly, he said, people were sitting in the same blueprinted rooms, eating the same microwave-tray dinners, discussing the same television shows. And in 1980, Charles Haar wrote that “Suburbs…have become the heirs to their cities’ problems. They have pollution, high taxes, crime. People thought they would escape all those things in the suburbs. But like the people in Boccaccio’s Decameron, they ran away from the plague and took it with them.”

Although it’s fair to say that, like the suburbs themselves, feelings about them are contradictory. Here’s a summary of Charles Haar’s book, Suburbs under Siege:

In Suburbs under Siege Charles Haar argues passionately that all people–rich or poor, black or white–have a constitutional right to live in the suburbs and that a socially responsible judiciary should vigorously uphold that right.

Some people think suburbs are sexy:

The Mythical “Demise” of the Suburbs: Nearly since the pace of suburbanization increased, following World War II, critics have been foretelling the demise of the suburbs. During the 1950s and 1960s, some planning “visionaries” such as Peter Blake were predicting widespread municipal bankruptcies in the suburbs and for residents. This was occurring even as other urban planners were tearing up cities with urban renewal projects and freeways, setting the stage for “block-busting” and an ever-widening racial divide. The early criticisms have been repeated through the years, justifying a paraphrase of the old saw about Brazil (“Brazil is the country of the future and always will be”): “The suburbs are the wasteland of tomorrow and always will be.”

The Real Decline of the Cities: In fact, it has more generally been the central cities that nearly went bankrupt, not the suburbs. Examples include New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and that jewel of municipal consolidation, Indianapolis, rescued last year by $1 billion in state taxpayer funds. There are hopeful signs of a renaissance in most central cities, however their financial difficulties remain intractable and large swaths of their land area remain desolate. Meanwhile, the lawns were mowed in the suburbs, the houses painted and a strong sense of community developed among residents that was far too subtle for the prophets of suburban doom to perceive.

But their arguments are rendered invalid by illustrating their piece with this image:

^[1](Although, in fairness, you should read this review of Radiant City to get a truer picture. . .)

You can buy Empty LA from Blurb.

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