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The new suburban history, New Urbanism and the spaces in-between

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AndrewFriedman, Covert Capital: Landscapes of Denial and the Making of the US Empire in the Suburbs of Northern Virginia. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013. 416pp. £19.95 pbk.
ElaineLewinnek, The Working Man's Reward: Chicago's Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 239pp. 20 b&w illustrations. £30.99 hbk.
BenjaminRoss, Dead End: Suburban Sprawl and the Rebirth of American Urbanism. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 249pp. £20.99 hbk.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2016

MARK CLAPSON
MARK CLAPSON*
Affiliation:
University of Westminster, London
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Extract

What a word we live in. The existential reality of being ‘suburban’–an unpopular adjective at the best of times – has been subject to some astounding criticisms recently. People who choose to live in a suburban home are still deemed to be contemptible by a self-consciously urbane commentariat who could never live somewhere so vacuous. According to one newspaper journalist, the religious fascists who attacked Paris in November 2015 were at heart suburban, exhibiting contempt for the diversity and heterogeneity of the sophisticated metropolis because it upset their reactionary world view. The transatlantic celebrity-historian Simon Schama, appearing on BBC Television's Question Time in October 2015, denounced a critic of unfettered refugee migration to Europe for turning away his ‘suburban face’ to human tragedy. Can a suburbanite possibly find the wherewithal to bounce back from such criticism? Sadly, there is no great volume of historical literature to give them much inspiration, and more recent scholarship offers little that is truly revisionist.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Urban History , Volume 43 , Issue 2 , May 2016 , pp. 336 - 341
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

1 S. Moore, ‘Gentrification means the world is a giant flat white’, Guardian, 18 Nov. 2015.

2 D. Murray, ‘Simon Schama's use of the word “suburban” on Question Time was very revealing’, Spectator, 16 Oct. 2015.

3 Kruse, K.M. and Sugrue, T.J. (eds.) The New Suburban History (Chicago, 2006)Google Scholar.

4 Nicolaides, B.M., My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 (Chicago, 2002)Google Scholar.

5 Martinson, T., American Dreamscape: The Pursuit of Happiness in Postwar America (New York, 2000), pp. 41–3Google Scholar.