Suburbs in transition: New approaches to suburban history

Urban History

Volumn 34, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 317-337

  McManus, Ruth ^a,b   Ethington, Philip J ^a,b  

^a DUBLIN CITY UNIVERSITY   (Ireland)

^b UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

NINETEENTH CENTURY; SUBURBAN AREA; TRANSITIONAL ECONOMY; TWENTIETH CENTURY; URBAN DEVELOPMENT; URBAN HISTORY;

EID: 34347397588     PISSN: 09639268     EISSN: 14698706     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S096392680700466X     Document Type: Article

References (105)

1. H.J. Dyos, Victorian Suburb: A Study of the Growth of Camberwell (Leicester, 1961);
2. K. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York, 1985).
3. S. Bass Warner, Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870-1900 (Cambridge, 1962).
4. African-American suburbs have been explored in A. Wiese, Places of their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (Chicago, 2004).
5. M. Clapson's Suburban Century, Social Change and Urban Growth in Fngland and the USA (Oxford, 2003) includes a chapter on Jewish and Asian suburbanization.
6. E. Diamond has examined suburban Jewish Orthodox lifestyles in And I Will Dwell in their Midst: Orthodox Jews in Suburbia (Chapel Hill, 2000)
7. and in 'The Kosher lifestyle, religious consumerism and suburban Orthodox Jews', Journal of Urban History, 28, 4 (2002), 488-505.
8. A great deal of both the classic and the revisionist scholarship has now been collected in B. Nicolaides and A. Wiese, The Suburb Reader (London, 2006).
9. Important titles include the following: A.M. Edwards, The Design of Suburbia: A Critical Study in Environmental History (London, 1981);
10. T. Gardner, 'The slow wave: The changing residential status of cities and suburbs in the United States, 1850-1940', Journal of Urban History, 27, 3 (2001), 293-312;
11. P.H. Mattingly, Suburban Landscapes: Culture and Politics in a New York Metropolitan Community (Baltimore, 2001);
12. R. Baxandall and E. Ewen, Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened (New York, 2000);
13. J. Borchert, 'Cities in the suburbs: Heterogeneous communities on the US urban fringe, 1920-60', Urban History, 23, 2 (1996), 211-27;
14. L. McCann, 'Suburbs of desire: The suburban landscape of Canadian cities, c. 1900-1950', in R. Harris and P J. Larkham (eds.), Changing Suburbs (London, 1999), 111-45;
15. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920 1965 (Chicago, 2002);
16. R. Lewis 'Running rings around the city: North American industrial suburbs, 1850-1950', in Harris and Larkham (eds.), Changing Suburbs 146-67;
17. A. Wiese, 'Suburbia: Middle class to the last?', Journal of Urban History, 23, 6 (1997), 750-8;
18. R. Harris, Unplanned Suburbs: Toronto's American Tragedy, 1900 to 1950 (Baltimore, 1996);
19. O. Zunz, The Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial Development, and Immigrants in Detroit, 1880-1920 (Chicago, 2000).
20. D. Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000 (New York, 2003). Each stage to some extent grew out of the unsatisfactoriness or contradictions of the one before, and the last three stages in particular have depended on public subsidies, most notably the home mortgage interest deduction. It is worth noting that the US Technical Bulletin for the National Register of Historic Places (National Park Service) on Evaluating Suburbs as Historic Landscapes attempts a chronologically based typology (see the website at http://www.cr.nps.gov/NR/publications/bulletins/suburbs/index.htm, accessed 1 Jul. 2004).
21. A rare exception is Mattingly's (2001) thick history of Leonia, New York, from the eighteenth century through the present, conceived not merely a place history (of which there are many), but as a study of a genuine 'suburb' as typified by suburban scholarship, in which idiom Mattingly writes. Another is Z.L. Miller's Visions of Place: The City, Neighborhoods, Suburbs, and Cincinnati's Clifton, 1850-2000 (Columbus, OH, 2001) which explores changes in the social, physical, civic and political structure of Clifton, as well as providing a policy analysis of current and future prospects for the neighbourhood.
22. C.A. O'Connor's study of New York's Scarsdale in A Sort of Utopia: Scarsdale, 1891-1981 (New York, 1983) also utilizes a scholarly longitudinal approach which charts the factors which led to the emergence of Scarsdale as a preferred residential area and those which have maintained its status as a desirable place to live.
23. G. Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales: A Facsimile and Transcription of the Hengurt Manuscript with Variants from the Ellesmere Manuscript, ed. P.G. Ruggiers (Norman, OK, 1979), Tale 48, The Canon Yeoman's Prologue, lines 103-8. In modern English: 'Where do you dwell, if you may tell me? Within the suburbs of a town, said he Lurking in corners and alleys blind Wherein these thieves and robbers every kind/have all their privy fearful residence/As those who dare not show men their presence' from full text online: www.canterburytales.org (23 Jun. 2004). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earlier occurrence was Wyclif, Works, c. 1380, six years before The Canterbury Tales.
24. Henry VIII V. iv. 76.
25. F. Engels, 'The great towns', in R.T. LeGates and F. Stout (eds.), The City Reader (London, 1996), 49.
26. Harris and Larkham (eds.), Changing Suburbs, 8-14.
27. Throughout, it is important to avoid confusion between the noun 'suburb, which is the denotative, or objective location and built form, on the one hand, and the culturally connotative noun 'suburbia', which refers to the way(s) of life of the people living in suburbs, portrayed as an identifiable group, community or class in society: 'suburbanites'.
28. J. Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New York, 1991);
29. R. Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York, 1987);
30. J.C. Teaford, Post-Suburbia: Government and Politics in the Edge Cities (Baltimore, 1996). The spread of automobility and electronic communications networks have further vitiated the core-periphery relationship between work places and domestic places. Just as department stores succumbed to regional shopping malls, the latter are facing steep competition from online shopping and an endless landscape of low-density outlets and mini-or strip-malls, whose lessees are usually transnational chain corporations.
31. In The New Urban Sociology (New York, 1999), M. Gottdiener and R. Hutchison argue that the distinction usually made between city and suburb (which often is meant to stand for urban versus suburban) is misleading, not very accurate and probably counter-productive. They argue for the reintroduction and use of 'metropolitan' rather than urban, suburban and the like. The Edge City and technoburban developments are most pronounced in North America, but even in England, where greenbelt restrictions are an important constraint on further development, the tendencies towards sprawl are evident.
32. Indeed, Bruegmann, in Sprawl: A Compact History (Chicago, 2005), has argued that sprawl is inherent to urbanisation and that, despite planning stringent regulations, increasing affluence in cities across Europe in recent decades has led to a quickening of suburban and exurban development, a sharp rise in car ownership and a proliferation of single-family houses and suburban shopping centres.
33. M.A. Stern and W.M. Marsh, 'Editors' introduction. The decentred city: edge cities and the expanding metropolis, Landscape and Urban Planning, 36 (1997), 245.
34. R. Freestone's article in this issue, 'New suburban centers: An Australian perspective', 247-57, points out that while suburban edge cities are an international phenomenon, they assume culturally specific forms. His case study of North Ryde in the Sydney metropolitan area is used to highlight differences between the Australian and United States edge-city environments. That the articles are sourced from Canada, Germany, Britain and Australia in addition to the United States is further testimony to the widespread transformation of urban forms.
35. C.D. Harris, 'Suburbs', American Journal of Sociology, 49, 1 (1943), 1-13.
36. R. Harris and R. Lewis, 'The geography of North American cities and suburbs, 1900-1950: A new synthesis, Journal of Urban History, 27, 3 (2001), 262-92.
37. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven.
38. See also R. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, NJ, 2003).
39. J.B. Freeman, 'Workers, suburbs, and labor geography: Introduction', International Labor and Working-Class History, 64 (2003), 3-7.
40. Gardner, 'The slow wave.
41. Richard Harris' exploration of Canadian suburbs in the twentieth century has argued that many suburbs were settled by workers before World War I and that social exclusivity of suburbs increased after the post-war boom (Creeping Conformity: How Canada became Suburban, 1900-1960, Themes in Canadian History, 7 (Buffalo, NY, 2004)).
42. In Australia too, the suburban working class had emerged before World War II, although in the early postwar period the state financed the erection and sale of inexpensive houses on what were to become working-class estates (see T. Dingle, '"Gloria Soame": The spread of suburbia in post-war Australia', in Harris and Larkham (eds.), Changing Suburbs, 187-201).
43. For a detailed exploration of the suburban myths pertaining in North America, Britain and Australia, see Richard Harris and Peter J. Larkham, 'Suburban foundation, form and function', in Changing Suburbs, 6-8.
44. Nevertheless, there has perhaps been a greater recognition of alternative suburban forms in the nomenclature sometimes used in European cities specifically to define working-class suburbs and railway suburbs as 'inner city suburbs'.
45. The extensive construction of suburban housing estates for workers by local councils in the 1920s is outlined by M. Swenarton in Homes Fit for Heroes: The Politics and Architecture of Early State Housing in Britain (London, 1981),
46. while in Working-Class Housing in England between the Wars, the Becontree Estate (Oxford, 1997) A. Olechnowicz explores London County Council's Becontree Estate which was the largest public housing scheme ever undertaken in Britain, and, at the time of its planning, in the world.
47. A. Ravetz has examined the twentieth-century council house experience in Council Housing and Culture, the History of a Social Fxperiment (London, 2001).
48. For Ireland, see R. McManus, 'Blue collars, "red forts", and green fields: Working-class housing in Ireland in the twentieth century', International Labor and Working-Class History, 64 (2003), 38-54.
49. M. Clapson's Invincible Green Suburbs, Brave New Towns: Social Change and Urban Dispersal in Postwar England (Manchester, 1998) focuses on centrally planned suburbanization for the working classes after World War II.
50. Some retain their former stigmatization when sold off, continuing to be referred to as 'former council housing estates, although in the Irish experience many older local authority housing estates have become highly desirable and command high prices.
51. Whitehand and Carr's recent work is prominent in the first area (this includes their monograph and a series of papers in Urban History); a range of case studies can be found in F.M.L. Thompson, ed., The Rise of Suburbia (Leicester, 1982), while design aspects are included in a number of works including Edwards, The Design of Suburbia;
52. P. Oliver, I. Davis and I. Bentley, Dunroamin: The Suburban Semi and its Enemies (London, 1994);
53. and P. Newby and M. Turner, 'British suburban taste, 1880-1939, in Harris and Larkham (eds.), Changing Suburbs, 32-55.
54. Greater London Authority, A City of Villages: Promoting a Sustainable Future for London's Suburbs, SDS Technical Report 11 (London, 2002).
55. P. Clark, 'Demythologising the suburbs', Town and Country Planning 72, 1 (2003), 10. One outcome of the City of Villages research has been the modification of the Lord Mayor's London Plan, published in June 2002, to give greater recognition to the role and potential of the suburbs.
56. C. Ward, 'Prophet in the suburbs', Town and Country Planning, 72, 4 (2003), 116. This claim seems to hold true for Irish suburbs also, as reflected in the dearth of published academic research on their evolution and current status. Relatively recently, the Department of Sociology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, has established a research cluster which incorporates suburban studies, and a project entitled 'New urban living: An investigation of civic and social life in the suburbs' is currently underway.
57. Borchert, 'Cities in the suburbs', 226.
58. Harris and Lewis, 'The geography of North American cities and suburbs', 284.
59. M. Pastor, 'Looking for regionalism in all the wrong places, demography, geography and community in Los Angeles county', Urban Affairs Review 36, 6 (2001), 747-82; recent planning debates in Britain have similarly recognized the need for renewal and regeneration to be targeted at suburbs as well as in central city areas (see Clark, 'Demythologising the suburbs').
60. R. Lewis, 'The industrial suburb is dead, long live the industrial slum: suburbs and slums in Chicago and Montreal, 1850-1950', Planning Perspectives, 17 (2002), 123-44.
61. S. Lewis, Babbitt (London, 1922).
62. G. Grossmith and W. Grossmith, The Diary of a Nobody (Harmondsworth, 1995).
63. Harris and Larkham, 'Suburban foundation, form and function', 5, have illustrated how the term suburb has 'not always carried the associations of idyllic, quasi-rural and highly private life-style that are presently current in much of the English-speaking urban tradition'. Instead, they outline its parabolic trajectory, ascending the social hierarchy from low to high, and then falling.
64. S. Donaldson, The Suburban Myth (New York, 1969), 2. Other influential early challenges were made by B. Berger (Working-Class Suburb: A Study of Auto-Workers in Suburbia (Berkeley, 1960))
65. and H. Gans (The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community (New York, 1967)), showing that certain elements of the myth were erroneous.
66. D.C. Thorns, Suburbia (London, 1972).
67. Thorns argued that the popular image of the suburb in Britain 'more correctly should be seen as a middle-class style of living rather than as a suburban style in that it is based upon occupational, educational and status criteria as much if not more than upon those of residence' (from 'Suburbs: Myth or reality', in A. Blowers, C. Brook, P. Dunleavy and L. McDowell (eds.), Urban Change and Conflict (London, 1981), 100).
68. More recently, Thorns has considered New Zealand's suburbs in works including Fragmenting Societies? A Comparative Analysis of Regional and Urban Development (London, 1992).
69. A.A. Jackson, The Middle Classes, 1900-50 (Nairn, 1992).
70. M. Corbin Sies, 'North American suburbs, 1880-1950: Cultural and social reconsiderations', Journal of Urban History, 27, 3 (2001), 313-46.
71. See D. Muzzio and T. Halper, 'Pleasantville? The suburb and its representation in American movies', Urban Affairs Review, 37, 4 (2002), 543-74;
72. L. Spigel (ed.), Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Durham, NC, 2001).
73. R. Beuka, Suburbianation: Reading Suburban Landscape in Twentieth Century American Film and Fiction (New York, 2004);
74. R. Silverstone, Visions of Suburbia (London, 1997). The interdisciplinary essays in R. Webster (ed.), Expanding Suburbia (Oxford, 2001), also consider a range of representations of suburban life from the late nineteenth century to the present day, including fiction, film and popular music, drawn from Britain, America and Australia. They also explore and challenge traditional views of suburbia, recognizing that, rather than a location of conformity and stereotypicality, it can be viewed as a site of social conflict, division and ambiguity as well as a source of significant creativity across a range of cultural texts.
75. C. Jurca, White Diaspora, the Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel (Princeton, 2001), 3.
76. A. Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of a Theory of Structuration (Berkeley, CA, 1986), 1-40.
77. For example, Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Evidence of Experience (Minneapolis, 2001).
78. J.W.R. Whitehand and P.J. Larkham (eds.), Urban Landscapes: International Perspectives (London, 1992).
79. J.W.R. Whitehand, 'Development cycles and urban landscapes', Geography, 79 (1994), 5.
80. M.R.G. Conzen, 'The use of town plans in the study of urban history', in H.J. Dyos (ed.), The Study of Urban History (London, 1968), 116.
81. H. Hoyt, The Structure and Growth of Residential Neighborhoods in American Cities (Washington, 1939). Based on an analysis of housing rental and value data in over 200 US cities in the 1930s, this work suggested that residential patterns developed through the growth of high-rent sectors which expanded outwards from the central business district along major routeways (i.e. the sectoral model of urban land use).
82. W. Firey, Land Use in Central Boston (Cambridge, MA, 1947).
83. For example, in R.G. Quercia and G. Galster, 'Threshold effects and neighborhood change', Journal of Planning Education and Research, 20, 2 (2000), 146-62, the authors examine empirical evidence on changing neighbourhood attributes such as racial group composition, income group composition, social and economic conditions and housing investment. The identification of such thresholds is seen as offering guidance to planners for the spatial targeting of reinvestments to neighbourhoods which may be approaching critical thresholds.
84. Lewis, 'The industrial suburb is dead', 131.
85. J.W.R. Whitehand and C.M.H. Carr, Twentieth-Century Suburbs: A Morphological Approach (London, 2001). Factors included the fact that building was at a standstill during war, new firms were emerging, the introduction of the Tudor Walters report and introduction of mass local authority house building, with knock-on impact on private enterprise in terms of density etc.
86. B.M. Kelly, Expanding the American Dream: Building and Rebuilding Levittown (Albany, 1993), 3.
87. L.J. Evenden, 'Wartime housings as cultural landscape, national creation and personal creativity', Urban History Review, 25, 2 (1997), 41-52.
88. L.J. Evenden, 'The expansion of domestic space on Vancouver's North Shore', in G.M. Robinson (ed.), A Social Geography of Canada (Toronto, 1991), 220-44.
89. See T. Clark, Blacks in Suburbs: A National Perspective (Somerset, NJ, 1979);
90. and R. Lake, The New Suburbanites: Race and Housing in the Suburbs (New Brunswick, NJ, 1981).
91. B.K. Ray, G. Halseth and B. Johnson, 'The changing "face" of the suburbs: Issues of ethnicity and residential change in suburban Vancouver', International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 21, 1 (1997), 75-99, evaluates the social and physical changes brought about within the 'white' middle-class suburb of Richmond by a relatively recent arrival of Chinese immigrants. This paper also notes the suggestion that Canadian suburbs were generally more ethnically heterogeneous than their American counterparts from an early date.
92. B. Badcock, 'Thirty years on: Gentrification and class changeover in Adelaide's inner suburbs, 1966-96', Urban Studies, 38, 9 (2001), 1559-72.
93. Ibid., 1568.
94. B. Horstman, 'Outer belt vs. inner belt: The first suburbs', Cincinnati Post, 10 Oct. 2000.
95. The need for suburban renewal is addressed by W.H. Hudnut in Halfway to Everywhere: A Portrait of America's First-Tier Suburbs (Washington, 2003). His work explores how residents of nine older suburbs are tackling the issue of decline.
96. Greater London Authority, City of Villages.
97. Lewis, 'The industrial suburb is dead', 137.
98. Children usually leave their natal homes in North America, as demographers long observed. Where do they go and do they come back?
99. T. Dingle, 'People and places in post-war Melbourne', in G. Davison, T. Dingle and S. O'Hanlon (eds.), The Cream Brick Frontier: Histories of Australian Suburbia (Monash, 1995), 30. His paper identifies two key phases of the suburban life-cycle. The first is a pioneer phase where 'families set up home as the suburb was physically assembled around them' (35), and during which time he hypothesizes a scarcity of resources and relative material privation. Dingle's second key phase occurs when the children leave home, often to become a new generation of suburban pioneers in outer suburbs. This generally results in population decline in the original suburb, a relative over-provision of public facilities and probably also fuller purses as the mortgage is likely to have been paid off and the children have left home.
100. B. Davison and G. Davison, 'Suburban pioneers', in Davison, Dingle and O'Hanlon (eds.), The Cream Brick Frontier, 42.
101. Nevertheless, difficulties exist, particularly concerning the nature of the units available in census statistics. In the Dublin context, for example, the smallest available 'small area' population statistics refer to wards or district electoral divisions which have fairly large populations, averaging over 3,500 persons in the sub-region as a whole. These therefore tend to be socially quite heterogeneous internally. See A. MacLaran, Dublin: The Shaping of a Capital (London, 1993), 175.
102. D. Timms, The Urban Mosaic: Towards a Theory of Residential Differentiation (Cambridge, 1971).
103. R. McManus and J. Brady, 'Recent trends in the Irish urban system with particular reference to Dublin and Cork', Acta Universitatis Carolinae, Geographica, 1 (1994), 31-46.
104. In 1969, Murdie synthesized the work of a number of factorial ecologists to produce a set of three hypotheses, presenting a diagram which suggests three significant factors influencing the residential structure of cities: Economic status (associated with measures of income, occupation and education, which tends to be distributed sectorally), family status (associated with fertility, type of household, labour force participation by women, which tends to be distributed concentrically) and ethnic status (which tends to form 'groupings' superimposed on the existing structure created by the previous two patterns). R.A. Murdie, 'The factorial ecology of Toronto, University of Chicago, Department of Geography Research Paper no. 116 (Chicago, 1969).
105. In their 1979 paper, Collver and Semyonov demonstrated a method for the quantitative analysis of changes in the socio-economic status characteristics of suburban communities in Long Island, which demonstrated that a simultaneous examination of a range of dimensions of suburban differentiation would lead to a more complete understanding that was provided by any one approach, and stressing that three different variables (education, occupation and income) had different patterns of change. A. Collver and M. Semyonov, 'Suburban change and persistence', American Sociological Review, 44, 3 (1979), 480-6.