The [sub]Urban Complex
Highway #8, Edward Burtynsky
The rise of suburbanization began in the early years of the 20th Century as the Garden City movement expanded beyond the confines of the central city and spread to the peripheral, with city planners developing spacious neighborhoods that prioritized green space and leisure. The earliest of these garden suburbs provided affluent residents with an escape from the congestion and pollution of the industrial city, while maintaining communal elements and a connection to the city (Whitehand & Carr, 1999). This formed the foundational template of what would become suburban living in the 20th Century and beyond. However it wasn’t until the 1920s that the modern suburban era began in earnest, as rapid population growth within urban centers and an increase in working class income led to market demands in housing within communities which provided more space and greater access to amenities. Higher levels of disposable income allowed residents to pay daily transit costs, leading to the rise of so called ‘streetcar suburbs’, neighborhoods of moderately high density comprising walk-up apartments, row or townhouses, along with modest semi-detached and detached two-storey houses, connected to both the central city and industrial quarters via public transit (Bourne, 1996). While the 1920’s saw a substantial rise the popularity of these streetcar suburbs across North America, the Great Depression and Second World War halted the majority of new construction through the 1930-40s.
The postwar era saw massive population redistributions away from central cities’ towards peripheral suburban settings as the postwar economic boom lead to a growing and more prosperous middle class. As industries returned to the private sector, their expanded production volume from wartime efforts led to a decrease in the cost of consumer goods. This particularly affected the automotive industry, reducing the cost of personal vehicles and suddenly making them available to the growing middle class (World Economic and Social Survey, 2017). The resulting spatial freedom granted by widespread vehicular travel opening the periphery up to suburban developed unburdened by the needs for public transit, leading to the early mass subdivisions such as the Levittown Projects and Don Mills. The success of these projects solidified a new template for North America suburban growth, one defined by low density, car dependency, greater consumer agency and the promise of autonomy. By the early 1960’s more than half the United States’ population lived in suburbs, followed shortly by Canada, with the trend steadily increasing to over two-thirds by the end of the century (Bourne, 1996). Today more than 80% of the population within Canada’s largest metropolitan regions live within the suburban periphery, which is experiencing three to five times the growth rate compared to that of the urban cores (Gordon et al., 2018).
The rapid expansion of the car dominated subdivisions through the second half of the 20th Century coincided with rising consumerism and the increase in visual media. Suburban living became emblematic of the ‘American Dream’, with success being represented by a fancy car parked in front of detached house with a white picket fence. Thus, reinforcing consumer demand on the housing market during the 1970s to produce dwellings which fit this type of suburban living. The result was a transition from the pocketed garden and streetcar suburbs at the urban edge from the early century, and the car dominated suburbs encroaching onto rural land, towards a ubiquitous low-density fabric spreading across the peripheral landscape: suburbia.
The issue with suburbia is that it is cultural image, an assemblage of idealized abstractions of suburban living. Images which are based partially on the seas of repetitive houses from the early postwar suburbs, and partially from consumer marketing material design, yet have been upheld and continued to be used to describe contemporary suburban sprawl. This becomes problematic, especially within discourse, as it flattens the idea of suburban landscapes into a singular image, ignoring all of the nuance, complexity, and variety of typological form of any specific suburb in favour of an outdated generalization of suburbs (Mattingly, 1997).
This issue with suburbia is compounded by methodological cityism within urban geography and design, or a tendency to view all aspects of the build environment through their similarity or dissimilarity to ‘the city’. Methodological Cityism stems from the long-held city/rural binary, which had historically viewed everything beyond the confines of the city as ‘rural’. However, it disregards that’s suburbs are as old has cities themselves, denoting places that were physically or socially sub-standard to the rest of the city. While this may have captured the characteristics of the ‘other’ parts of the city prior to the industrial revolution, the changes to the urban fabric of industrial cities shifted the meaning of sub-urbs to reflect places beyond the ‘city’ not less than the city (Bourne, 1996). This becomes problematic within discourse as methodological cityism continued to be present, conflating everything that is not rural to be part of the city. The emergence of Urban Political Ecology within the 1990’s attempted to overcome this binary through a Lefebvrian framework to evaluate urbanization within the context of globalization (Angelo & Wachsmuth, 2014). However, this ultimately failed for two main reasons. Firstly, writers such as Swyngedouw used the terms ‘city’ and ‘urbanization’ interchangeably (Angelo & Wachsmuth, 2014), thus conflating the term urbanism and urban expansion with the ‘city’. This is problematic as city-status, and its boundaries, are largely determined though municipal and provincial/state government, jurisdictions, policies, and other political mechanisms. Not its urbanistic or morphological characteristics. Secondly, suburbs have vastly different connotations around the globe, therefore as allow for misinterpretations and semantic debates.
For example:
‘The City of London, which would be considered a “central city” in the US, is home to just 7000 people while Greater London’s 32 boroughs claim more than eight million residents. Potts, Falk, and Kochan (2007) estimate that 61% of Greater Londoners live in the suburbs, which comprise about 90% of its 607 square miles land area. At about 14,500 individuals per square mile, London’s suburbs are more densely settled than such central cities as Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, which average around 12,000 individuals per square mile.’ (pp.4, Grant et al, 2013)
Highlighting this comparison between cities and suburbs demonstrated why the comparison is not possible within a global context as differing densities, morphologies, building typologies, and physical connectivity create vastly different urbanistic conditions and prevent the establishment of a singular criteria. A singular definition of ‘suburb’. When this is viewed in conjunction with the North American suburban cannon since the turn of the century and the cultural imagery surround suburbia, it becomes clear why so many scholars have struggled to analyze and evaluate ‘the suburbs’ (Ewing et al, 2011; Forsyth, 2013; Gordon & al, 2018; Harris & Vorm, 2017; Shotwell, 2016).
Rather that continuing to be weight down by the polemic debate between city and suburb, I propose relegating those terms to simple nouns, recognizing that any specific place is either a city, or a suburb of that city. These nouns become categorical indicators of a place’s municipal status and geographic relationship within a metropolitan region. Instead the focus should be on the urbanistic and morphological qualities of a place, recognizing they exist within a spectrum between urban and suburban. This is particularly relevant for evaluating and discussing North American polycentric metropolis’ in which the distinction between city and suburb is less clear, particularly within smaller townships and older suburbs that have been annexed. In this way the complexity between urban and suburban can be explored as a duality, in which the unique identity of a neighborhood emerges from the interrelationship between its urban and suburban characteristics.
Urban settings possess complex socio-spatial relationships structured through clear spatial, urbanistic, and jurisdictional hierarchies, forming various intensive and extensive qualities within its built form. These typically take the form of porous yet dense ground planes, which leading to the creation of natural transition zones through the physical connectivity, spatial and material variation, and mixture of land uses that allows greater complexity to emerge over time. In contrast suburban settings tend to be highly striated with low building density, resulting in many extensive constraints but few intensive ones, which in turn creates fewer transitional zones. This is exacerbated by large areas of self-similar land uses and embedded car dependency which limits physical mobility. The result is a simplistic socio-spatial relationship which lacks complexity and secondary hierarchies. These distinctions become more clear when exploring how urban and suburban spaces accommodate growth. The complexity of urban space allows for greater internal dissipation of external forces, typically leading to densification. While the striated nature of suburban space limits its capacity to internally accommodate growth, resulting in duplication which manifests as [sub]urban sprawl. This concept is perhaps be best understood through Deleuze and Guitarri’s concept of smooth vs striated space (1987), which frames the distinction as a dualistic spectrum, rather than a binary in the vein of methodologically cityism.
Recognizing how urban and suburban spaces accommodate macro growth is critical for the long-term comprehensive planning of neighborhoods or wards, and provides an entry point when approaching contextual micro growth and establishing limitations on intensification. This becomes particularly relevant in areas that possess urban and suburban qualities or in areas where urban and suburban spaces intersect, such as major avenues. While the tendency under methodological cityism is to approached intensification through hard densification, or the construction of new residential buildings above the adjacent density, these are often met with community resistance or NIMBYism (not in my back yard) when introduced into settings dominated by suburban qualities. Rather than defaulting to a hard densification, internal growth within suburban settings is better accommodated through soft densification, or growth through building retrofit or contextual new construction. This is due to the striated nature of suburban spaces tending to result in a more homogeneous morphology in which significant deviation is more disruptive. By contrast, greater intensive variation within urban settings allows for urban transition zones to be introduced to mediate density variation. This framework requires recognition that ‘urban’ and ‘suburban’ exist within a spectrum and any specific site exists within a place that mediates between the two qualities. Therefore, a historic residential street adjoining a major avenue within a city may lean towards suburban, but with enough urban characteristic, to accommodate new construction a few storeys taller than the adjacent buildings without meeting community resistance. In contrast, a suburb’s ‘downtown’ may be able more able to construct significantly larger buildings than its residential areas due it its urban qualities and morphological separation from the surrounding suburban space.
In addition to differences in intensive and extensive qualities between urban and suburban space, the relationship and agency of residents within suburban and urban spaces differ vastly. Suburban residents tend to own the property on which their dwellings reside, while urban residents typically only have jurisdiction over their individual units while the building in which they reside is maintained and operated by separate entity. This drastically affects the type of agency residents have over their domestic environments and the means available to them to affect change. The autonomy of suburban buildings and individual ownership provide residents with a greater flexibility to customize and renovation their homes to meet their change personal needs. This includes expanding the building envelope, adding additional facilities, or renovating spaces to accommodate extended family members or adding secondary suites for additional income. In these cases, the limitations come from municipal zoning, bylaws, and provincial/state building codes. By comparison, urban residents lack the same autonomy as limitations on customization are set by building or property owners. Therefore, agency takes the form of community groups, either as tenant/co-op boards within a specific building, or larger groups within a ward or the city such as civic and community groups, or community land trusts. In these cases, the communal nature of urban living necessitates greater levels of organization, thus allowing for greater collective power and influence to affect change within the public sphere. In contrast, the smaller populations within suburban settings means that while individual voices may hold greater power, organized groups are comparatively smaller, thus having less power to affect broader change.
This is where the spectrum of suburban adaptation or post-suburbanization comes into play. Due to the individualistic nature of suburban space, owners have a great deal of flexibility to renovate or retrofit their houses, often with little to no oversight from the municipality, depending on its scope. This allows for a grass roots type of post-suburbanization to emerge as residents gradually convert their dwellings into better meet their changing needs. The early postwar veteran houses seen in Levittown or similar versions developed by the Canadian House and Mortgage Corporation (CMHC) are institutionalized examples of this. Small houses on large parcels designed to be renovated and expanded by their occupants over time, resulting in highly diverse housing emerging from a initially identical morphology (Chow, 2005). These types of renovations and gradual expansions can be seen at the gentlest form of post-suburbanization. Pushing this process further is substantive retrofit and reorganization of existing suburban housing into or to include different types of dwelling units. Such as converting a single house into a duplex or rental property with multiple separate units inside. Doing so often includes municipal involvement and oversight in order to facilitate any bylaw or zoning amendments, however doing so provides precedent within a neighbourhood for similar nearby adaptations in the future. These types of dwelling conversions are already often seen within existing prewar suburban areas with a housing demand that isn’t large enough to justify the construction of large urban buildings. While these types of conversions have yet to become popular within the metropolitan suburban periphery or ‘metroburbs’, rising housing prices, [sub]urban sprawl, and an aging-in-place population necessitate new approaches to the housing a growing population accustom to a largely suburban lifestyle.
Pushing beyond the limits of retrofitting the existing housing stock will require new construction. However, unlike methodological cityism’s proposal of housing growth through hard densification, the extreme end of post-suburbanization lies in soft densification. Contextual new construction occurring on assembled parcels. This provides a means of introducing medium density housing or what Daniel Parolek (2020) and other scholars refer to as the missing middle. The housing typologies ranging between single family detached homes and midrise buildings that have disappearing during the 20th Century’s great suburbanization. The key to reintroducing this missing middle into metroburbs’ suburban spaces is to insure that is architectural similar to its surroundings to conserve the existing morphology and avoid NIMBYist resistance, while providing sufficient density to be financially viable. The result is introducing new dwelling typologies into largely self-similar areas.
In turn this provides a means of diversifying existing suburban neighborhoods. Broadly speaking dwelling typologies coincide with wealth brackets, as larger houses are typically more expensive, therefore requiring more affluent occupants. This is to say nothing about the relationship between location and housing cost. However, recognizing that within a given neighborhood housing prices of the same typology will fall within similar bracket, introducing dwelling variety has the potential to introduce price-point variety. This in turn opens up existing neighbourhoods to residents from a broader socio-economic background and functions as mechanism to prevent financial polarization within suburban communities. In this way, reintroduction of the missing middle can provide a means of creation not only morphological or density transition zones, but intentional socio-economic transition zones between financially polarized communities.
North America’s journey through suburbanization over the course of the 20th Century is nothing short of complicated, but occasionally a faint glimmer of nuanced complexity shines through the car-fueled smog to reveal complete and utter brilliance. While global urbanization and North American suburbanization may have solidified the Anthropocene and led us to the climate crisis we are now facing, it as also demonstrated the unfettered potential of reshaping society around how and what we demand form our housing. While it may have led us to what Steven Jackson (2013) describes as a breakdown within the sociotechnic system we call ‘the suburbs’, it also provides us with the chance to repair it. To empower restructuring the existing world through the subtle acts of care in which order and meaning are maintained, and human value is preserved. We are living on compromised times, but as Alexis Shotwell put it: The point, however, is to change it.