In Suburbia

[imomus]

This week's edition of my favourite radio programme, Laurie Taylor's Thinking Allowed, was a particularly interesting one. The repeat goes out on BBC Radio 4 this evening just after midnight, and you can stream it online here (unlike most Radio 4 Listen Again material, it won't disappear after a week).

Made in association with the Open University, the programme looks at Imagination and the Suburb. It follows a special on Imagination and the Countryside and will be followed by one on Imagination and the City.

[Error: unknown template video]

Laurie brings together a writer and two sociologists. Psychogeographer Iain Sinclair has published London Orbital, a book about his attempt to walk around the acoustic footprint of London's M25 ring road "to find out where it leads". (Above you can see him talking about his inner city book, London: City of Disappearances.) Also contributing are sociologists Paul Barker and Nick Hubble, author of "Beyond the Garden Gnome: Suburbs and Future Suburbs". Hubble -- a Ballardian -- is by far the most pro-suburban.

Some themes that emerge in the programme:

86% of British people live in the suburbs, but almost nobody admits it. The term has become pejorative. Rather than a euphemism treadmill-style replacement of the term, though, people pass in silence over generic descriptions of where they live, and so a linguistic vagueness and blandness stands in -- appropriately enough -- for a physical, geographic one.

The place designated "suburban" keeps shifting: Deptford was once considered suburban London, but now satellite cities like Brighton and Cambridge are effectively London suburbs, with residents commuting into the big city daily. (Tell a Brighton or a Cambridge resident that they live in a "London suburb" and they're likely to yell at you, though.)

[Error: unknown template video]

The general tone of the Thinking Allowed suburban special is "redemptive"; it's eager to offset (or pass off as "metropolian snobbism") the prevailing view that suburbia is toxic sprawl and ethnic cleansing. As a result, it's unduly lopsided in favour of suburbs, parading such absurdities as "suburbia is where everything now happens" and "suburbs are ecologically friendly; you need a lot of space for a wind farm" and "suburban gardens have the highest biodiversity in the United Kingdom" (these dubious gems all courtesy of Hubble).

The word "density" doesn't come up once in the discussion, which is pretty telling: density is a measurable index of suburban evil. The kind of high densities seen in city centres are much more environmentally friendly and sustainable than anything in suburbia.

It's alleged that the Green Belt idea was the invention of the dreaded "metropolitan snobs" and represents their disdain for the suburbs.

[Error: unknown template video]

The suburbs are also presented, in Ballardian terms, as "Edge City", a place for experiment and dissent beyond the city limits. British intolerance of difference (I sometimes think my homeland, far from the refuge for eccentrics it's sometimes portrayed as, is actually the place that least tolerates otherness) has often forced this separation. The poet Alexander Pope lived at Richmond because he was a Catholic, and at the time Catholics were forced, in Britain, to live outside the city limits. (Protestant sects, meanwhile, were fleeing to America in search of a religious freedom they didn't have in Britain.)

The historical link between the British inner city and intolerance ("Catholics out!") is trotted out in its latest, paradoxical, incarnation: ironically, suburban apologists like Hubble portray the inner city as the favourite place of metropolitan snobs, people (like Richard Sennett, my hero, who appears on next week's programme on Imagination and the City) who tout it as a place of "encounters with the other" -- as long as this "other" isn't a suburban one.

I looked into this paradox in a piece I wrote a couple of years ago, Geodemographics put me in my place, which looks at how people (like me) who champion the urban "choreography of encounters" are undermined by our intolerance of intolerance -- we don't want encounters with people who don't want encounters. In a country where 86% are living in some kind of suburbia, partly to avoid the "choreography of encounters with the Other", this becomes a problem. According to some demographers, urban liberals who value diversity in their inner city neighbourhoods ("the choreography of encounters") account for less than 2% of UK households.

There's no discussion in Imagination and the Suburbs of the different meaning of suburbs in the US or in France ("white flight" and "manifest destiny" contributing to the US case, portes -- gates in city walls -- and high density Latin lifestyles contributing to the French one), and certainly none of the Japanese context of highly dense urban microsuburbia based largely on public transport.

Tonight Hisae and I are throwing our Google Street View party, in which various Japanese friends will be invited to guide Jan Lindenberg, via Street View, to places he should check out on his upcoming visit to Japan. Let's see how many of them are in the suburbs.

Comments

[ofenheizung.livejournal.com]

Don't be too critical of the level of religious toleration in late 17th and early 18th century England. There were not many places in Europe to match it.
Don't forget that Catholic powers WERE conspiring to overthrow the government and that few of those American pilgrims believed in toleration in the slightest.
Dr. O.

[dabroots.livejournal.com]

I remember Sinclair's London Orbital from six years ago, when I was working for Granta's distributor here in the US. It seemed quite interesting, but it didn't sell very well. I might still read it.

I guess I live in what could be considered one of Pittsburgh's suburbs, although my mailing address reads "Pittsburgh."

A Google Street View party is a great idea. Hope it was/is good.

[(Anonymous)]

I think it has less to do with living among the Other than the space and value you can get in the suburbs versus the city. We will live this way until the oil is all dried up or becomes impossibly expensive. My only fear is that we will develop some kind of electric alternative to the car which will prolong the present shape of our lives, especially here in America.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Nick, you live in Berlin for the same reasons many of us live in suburbs.

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

Whimsy, I was quite distressed in my dream I had about you last night. You and Momus were fighting with each other in China! I wanted to cry. Cry all night. Possibly all day if the timing was right.

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

I grew up in North-west London - an area that was largely regarded as the epitome of London suburbia in the early 20th century, before its later urbanisation (Formerly the county of Middlesex, and formerly marketed as Metroland (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro-land))

I was born in Camden, and we lived in central London in a small flat until the birth of my younger brother. My parent decided to move to the suburbs. They never moved to get away from the foreigners or the "otherness", they moved for one simple reason, and it's this:



My parents didn't want my brother and I growing up in a tiny flat surrounded by roads. They wanted to have animals and bring up a family. The money it cost them to live centrally afforded them a proper garden, many parks and a quiet neighbourhood in the suburbs. Your priorities change when you have children.
I suspect it's the same for most families not just in Britain but America too. I think its perfectly understandable that people would do this.

As an young adult, it's very easy to hate the suburbs. It represents "growing up", starting a family, settling down -- middle England and its boring ways. You want to start socialising and going to interesting places. It's all very exiciting and new, but it's novelty more than anything.

As much as I prefer central London to the London suburbs at this stage in my life, it's purely because I've had my fill of suburbia. I don't hate the suburbs and I'm not ashamed of the fact I grew up there. I like to think that I can find beauty anywhere and appreciate everywhere for what it is. I don't ever want to be the type of person who needs "culture" crystallised and ostentatiously on display in some urban bubble where everything is for the urban elite, by the urban elite. In my experience, personalities like that are nearly always born of insecurity in one's own sense of self; they need the dressings and trimmings because without it theres not much else there. I saw a woman on tv recently who said "I like to dress in designer labels -- it makes me feel like the person I want to be" and that just sums up everything that's wrong with urban life.

One thing I'll always love about the suburbs and my childhood there is it gave me the ability appreciate the subtleties of everyday life.

[newironshapes (from livejournal.com)]

Momus, Edge city is Joel Garreau's term, I think. Or maybe that was "edgeless city".

skateboarding

[(Anonymous)]

bmx, and basement punk rock shows are all creatures of the suburbs. they represent the transformation of an otherwise bland environment into something ecstatic.

[robinsonner.livejournal.com]

It is said that Sinclair has a flat in Hastings, East Sussex.
After following John Clare's path to The Edge of the 'Orison He has suggested a future work on those very "suburbs" of London which you mention, including his adopted Hastings.

As for tolerance/intolerance I favour Zizek's reading that they are almost the same thing.

Which homeland are you referring to? Scotland or The United Kingdom?

How do peripheral housing estates fit into this debate now that they are mostly being regenerated and gentrified into prime real estate? Not the centre and not the suburb what are they now?

By the way, recent Edinburgh tramworks publicity states that those inconvenienced along the main lines will see their property prices rise?!

Let's have a listen.

[(Anonymous)]

I sometimes think my homeland, far from the refuge for eccentrics it's sometimes portrayed as, is actually the place that least tolerates otherness

I can't accept that 'others' are eccentrics for education and amusement - what about, for example, highly conservative others? Dutiful, traditional, change-fighting, family-orientated, patriarchal.

[desant012.livejournal.com]

All the reasons you live the city are what the suburbs are becoming, at least in America. Property in the suburban areas is now cheaper than in most urban areas, so immigrants and minority families are all buying houses and settling in the outliers, whereas the moneyed "boring establishment" is making the city its home. Of course those are the less attractive suburbs; the 'beautiful suburbs' of ye olde townes and villages and Victorians and Tudors are as wealthy as any trendy city neighborhood. But still, the process is becoming reversed.

So, the city becomes the reasons why you hate the suburbs, and the suburbs become the reasons why you like the city. What happens then?

[desant012.livejournal.com]

It's funny, I have a better chance of encountering "the other" in my old suburban NJ hometown than I do in gentrified Brooklyn. Mexicans, Hondurans, etc., have made my town (30 miles outside of NYC) their home, and the whole are has always been a Korean hotspot. Formerly it was for NYC expats, and before then, a bumpkin hellhole. In other directions there are Indian enclaves, etc.

In Brooklyn I have to walk miles before I see anyone large group not young and classified as a "creative".

[(Anonymous)]

in the spirit of the joemus presently struggling to be born, let's all listen to this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Za7yM6sbuS4