Suburbia

Suburbs are geographical areas that are part of a larger functional urban unit but located beyond the central core of the city. The original usage of the term suburb was associated with the cities of ancient and medieval Europe, referring to those places outside the city walls, often associated with low-status and marginalized social groups and with polluting or dangerous activities, but also in some cases with elite, semi-rural villas, situated a short distance from the city. Such geographies were a common feature of most premodern urban civilizations. However, the modern sense of the suburb is closely associated with the remarkable expansion in population and physical area of major cities in some parts of the Western world from the eighteenth century onward, and particularly with vast extensions of zones of predominantly private housing during the twentieth century. The associated term suburbia connotes not just a particular geographical environment but also forms of culture and ways of life. Almost from their inception, modern suburbs have been represented and understood as spaces of consumption, and consumer culture has been regarded as intrinsic to their character and analysis. A particularly long-running and pervasive critique of suburbs in both academic writing and in popular culture has treated them as the locus of the worst excesses of shallow consumerism and conspicuous consumption. Such criticisms of suburbia have drawn on a wide range of intellectual perspectives, ranging from conservative attacks on the coarsening and trivializing effects of mass society, through Marxian and leftist critiques of commodity fetishism and the erosion of solidaristic working-class communities, to feminist critiques of the patriarchal entrapment of women in the domestic order of the suburbs. Suburbia has been attacked as both a betrayal of the vitality and civilizing power of great cities and an environmental catastrophe covering the countryside with unsustainable sprawl. There has been a lower-profile countertradition of writing that has emphasized positive aspects of suburban life, particularly in terms of domestic security, comfort, and self-determination, and a more recent academic reevaluation of their success and popularity, which has emphasized the significance of mundane consumption practices.