Carolina Caliaba's Library tagged estética →  View Popular

the suburbs are portrayed as a middle-class domestic utopia, and on the other as a world of unrelenting homogeneity and stifling conformity. Most of what we think we know about suburbia has been shaped by its portrayal in various media — film, music, literature, and television in particular — where it has been depicted alternately as an idyllic setting for family life in TV sitcoms, for instance, and a dysfunctional landscape of discontent in Hollywood movies: every subdivision has its Wisteria Lane or Revolutionary Road.

The mid-twentieth-century image of largely white, prosperous, middle-class, two-parent families as the predominant household of suburbia has been transformed. Contemporary statistics reveal a different picture: more ethnic minorities (27 percent), including many new immigrants, make their homes in suburbia; households without children now comprise a plurality of suburban occupants (29 percent); and, for the first time, there are about one million more people living in poverty in the suburbs than in the city.

The problem with so many end-of-suburbia theses is that they forget the most powerful thing about suburbia — its symbolism and the idealism associated with it. What might be surprising to critics of suburbia is not that most people choose to live there, but that they do so contentedly. Despite decades of trying to apply urban theory and assumptions onto suburban scenarios, it seems far more likely that suburbia itself will adapt and evolve on its own terms.

Aside from some early twentieth-century concepts, many architects have simply opted out of practical engagement with transforming suburbia, with the exception of those involved in New Urbanism, an attempt to ameliorate aspects of sprawl with more pedestrian-friendly, higher-density, mixed-use, and community-oriented designs, or the pragmatics of Joel Kotkin’s New Suburbanism or Ellen Dunham-Jones’ Retrofitting Strategies for Suburbia

The designs of New Urbanism are easily dismissed because the resultant forms are too traditional and nostalgic (“inauthentic”), but, as Ellen Dunham-Jones has argued, this recourse to traditional styles is often strategic, a way of masking the more difficult aspects of such proposals (such as living on smaller lots, with poorer people, and alongside businesses). Unfortunately for architecture, suburbia has become a place to avoid rather than one to engage. In turn, the general absence of design professionals — whether by choice or circumstance — from the development equation has resulted in the continued proliferation of unimaginative buildings and landscapes that typically have no relation to each other or their contexts.

Whether in art or architecture, the suburbs seem to lack cultural authorship and a “back story” — the suburban landscape simply unfolds ex nihilo — out of nowhere and out of nothing.

Suburban time is strangely suspended, literally an arrested development frozen in its initial phases of construction: no wonder most people conjure an image of suburbia as a series of new housing starts and barren landscapes. From William Garnett’s photos of Lakewood Park in California to Robert Adams’ pictures of suburban Denver, there is a long tradition of using photography to record these processes of transformation, and because they are focused on an early moment in the life cycle of suburbia, they do not typically provide any evidence of human settlement, aspiration, or inhabitation. Most suburbs are now old enough to have a history, and enough inhabitants over time to establish an identity. A perceived lack of identity and history, however, accounts for the proliferation of rebranded suburbia: the creation of new pedestrian streetscapes, “downtowns,” and town centers.

Another difficulty in developing a suburban aesthetics is the issue of popular taste. Most forms of criticism and artistic practice cannot perceive suburbia without the posture of ironic distance or cynical dismissal. Historian John Archer in his essay from the catalogue, “Suburban Aesthetics Is Not an Oxymoron,” undermines the conventional assumption that suburbia represents an empty, thin, and inauthentic form of consumption — a paucity of experience — a myth that is contradicted by the richness of suburbia’s symbolic universe, an experience lived by its occupants rather than viewed by its critics.

The oft-claimed alienation of the suburbs and the supposed close-knit communities of the city are both myths — convenient stories we tell about the other in the hope that the world next door will be kept worlds away.