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huh. i didn't realize my dislike ot the burbs came through in what i wrote above. but it's true that i detest the suburban model as a space in which i personally would want to live--this based on 7 years having tried it out. but i also figured out pretty quickly that i am not of the demographic--primarily i don't have kids--and am not religious---so i didn't access the two primary frameworks of social solidarity that were available...this isn't to even start with my personal preferences. so what i concluded really was that the burbs are just not a space for me.
but that's different from the broader argument i was making--and is (i think) beside the point.
a. quality of life arguments lean on quality of life measures, which are constructs and so are obviously a problem. there's little in the way of agreed upon criteria that you can point to in order to measure it. and so there's little in the way of meaning that one can impute to them. so were you to try to make an argument on these grounds, chances are pretty high that it'd end up becoming an argument about what the measures are that you're relying on. and they'd matter, otherwise what we'd be talking about really is our individual attitudes toward the burbs, who likes them more, who less---which isn't uninteresting--but it also seems like the sort of conversation that would be best spread over a half dozen sentences made while consuming a beverage or 5 in a publick house.
b. the elements of the post-ww2 suburban model were self-evidently triggered by the extension of mass production techniques into areas like house design & construction, the development of appliances, the relatively low cost of an automobile at the time--so the whole model really floats on an ocean of debt--mortgages, consumer debt. but it was a great consumption engine, that model. and it had perverse political effects. but the fact is that over the past 10-15 years the demographic trends that shaped the burbs have started to reverse---it is no longer at all obvious that people, particularly younger people, want to live in these spaces in the same numbers as was the case 60 years ago. secondly--and probably more importantly--the development of the burbs coincided with a shift in urban planning that took quite a long time to take hold really that was geared around transforming cityscapes around automobiles as a way to accomidate increased flows of people into and out of cities---and this planning shift happened to privilege automobiles as a primary transportation system at the expense of public transit--and this is obviously a class move, every bit as obvious as putting gates up around a bunch of toll brothers houses. the burbs were about class homogeneity---that's one of the things that makes them unlivable for freaks like me. so they were built around the *separation* of class fractions through a form of geographic segregation--and thinking in terms of discrete towns was an aspect of this.
but the fact is that the suburbs were always parts of regions and these regions were characterized by networks of flows ---since we're talking about transport, flows of people---and that the automobile functioned to link and separate in a particular set of ways following on a particular type of logic of what amounts to class warfare. now that the demographic trends are reversing or have reversed in many areas--and as a function of a host of other, mostly unintended consequences of the planning logic that enabled this form of class warfare to operate---it makes no sense to simply stand the old model on its head--rather it's more sensible i think to undo it. and a step in that direction is to move toward thinking in terms of regional systems of public transit as the primary mechanisms for enabling population flows to shift into and out of cities, move away from cars---and to explore new ways of thinking urban space around that.
it's not a coincidence that in the mythology of the suburbs, the city was a wasteland so long as what was understood as living in that wasteland were colonies of poor folk. you can see in the "realization" that cities are more than a bit livable for lots of people that now there's a more differentiated public view of these spaces--track local television news programs---i remember philadelphia in the middle 80s being presented as the wild wild west on local tv news--it almost seemed that the idea was to keep people huddled in their tract house, wrapped up in a nuclear family, glued to the television monitor. it's all different now. funny how that works.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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