Abstract
What’s next? That is the question Nicholas Phelps asks about the changing character of American suburbs in his book Sequel to Suburbia: Glimpses of America’s Post-suburban Future—a book that is sure to make a lasting contribution to sub(urban) and planning scholarship. The book has eight chapters. The first four are primarily conceptual. The latter four present empirical case studies and conclusions.
In the first four chapters of the book, the author’s intent is to present and then flesh out three inherent conflicts. The conflicts are as follows: first, the capitalist growth imperative versus the desire for environmental protection; second, the growth imperative versus the desire for collective consumption practices, such as the provision of infrastructures; and third, the nature and scale of governance and degree and type of intergovernmental arrangements. Depending on how these conflicts play out, Phelps foresees different kinds of suburban transformations in terms of form, governance, and other sociospatial dimensions.
Planning scholars and practitioners in particular will likely find that the three conflicts sound all too familiar. Everyday planning has now grappled with these issues in an attempt to reduce or eliminate the negative impacts associated with suburban sprawl, all the while providing collective infrastructures in a fragmented governance context. Phelps’s book provides a thought-provoking and reflective conceptualization of these trends, enhanced by the provision of detailed case studies.
The first two chapters set the stage by positioning post-suburbs as materialization of second modernity. Phelps draws on Ulrich Beck’s (1992) work that sees second modernity as a manifestation of the contradictions in modern capitalist societies. Interestingly, Phelps views post-suburbs as specific places (distinct from urban and suburban ones), continuing in the tradition of previous studies of sub(urbanization) that categorize cities into mutually exclusive sub-areas. The author usefully acknowledges the limitations to such an approach such as the somewhat whimsical nature of relying on distance from the center or period of development as defining characteristics of suburbia. However, more could have been said about how the post-suburban concept meshes with suburbanisms as ways of living, the latter arguably permitting insight into a broader variety of lived experiences than the creation of place-based, mutually exclusive categories (Walks 2013; Moos and Mendez 2015).
Chapters five through seven of the book present three case studies. All are uniquely illuminating and highlight different aspects of the challenges suburbs are facing, primarily focusing on the three conflicts mentioned earlier. The cases are as diverse as expected, given the varied locations. The first case is Kendall Downtown (outside of Miami), described as an attempt to create an urban core in a suburban setting following New Urbanist principles. Phelps makes an excellent case that New Urbanist solutions, largely developed in the Northeast, are unlikely going to work in the Sunbelt where conditions are so different, and where almost all existing suburban infrastructure was built during the era of the automobile.
The second is Tysons Corner (outside of Washington, DC), described as the archetypical edge city. From this case, the reader learns about the way mass transit can contribute to higher density private sector development processes in suburban settings, and the limitations that the “trappings” of existing automobile-based landscape place on redevelopment potential (p. 117).
The final case study is Schaumburg, Chicago, that the author argues was “born post-suburban” in that it developed from existing suburban characteristics but was also meant to be, at least in theory, a suburban center as intended in planning documents (p. 137). It contains “legacies of corporate capitalism” such as the suburban mall, which, as Phelps highlights, is currently undergoing a transition that either could contribute to the demise of this model, or the remaking of new kinds of malls that integrate commercial and residential components (p. 157).
Overall, Phelps does an excellent job outlining the forces contributing to what he sees as the “sequel” to suburbia, albeit varied, incremental, and complex in the way they will actually play out. As moviegoers will know, sequels are almost always worse than the original. And that seems to be the way Phelps portrays prospects for an alternate suburban future. The message for planners concerned about the negative societal impacts of current low-density development patterns is, “watch out, it can get worse.” Some of Phelps’s detailed case studies offer glimmers of hope, however, as they lay out plans toward densification and higher transit use. These should, at least in theory, set the stage for an alternate suburban development trajectory.
While Phelps certainly captures a wide array of pressing public policy concerns, I was a bit surprised that housing affordability did not feature more prominently, given the large role traditionally assigned to housing costs in suburbanization. Phelps mentions public finance distortions, but could have discussed this aspect further. While there is always room for more, contemporary fiscal conservatism is arguably an important force in the drive to reduce municipal expenditures. This situation may well play out in reducing the various direct and indirect subsidies and cross subsidies that currently favor low-density suburbanization (Blais, 2010), which would lead to a form of development that is less sprawling.
Although clearly not the author’s intent, I worry that the proliferation of the term “post-suburb,” and its use in the book, serves to homogenize the making and re-making of suburbia. As I have found in my work on Vancouver, densification in suburbs is in some instances connected to inner city gentrification that leads young adults to seek housing in transit-supportive suburbs. The processes that are producing this particular kind of post-suburb are different, although not disconnected, from those that are serving to continue to proliferate low-density estate housing developments in the exurbs or the construction of low-cost, single-family housing at the suburban fringe.
I am not convinced that all these should be viewed as post-suburban in nature. Yet, that is the conclusion I take from Phelps’s book. He also suggests that post-suburban trends, albeit nuanced, may even be globally generalizable, for instance to China. He suggests that the American post-suburban trends are occurring “in advance of those elsewhere” (p. 178). While plausible, I find these conclusions too speculative and sweeping especially since they were based only on three empirical examples from the United States. A related methodological shortcoming of this book is the lack of reflection on how the case studies were selected. This lack reduces the ability to generalize, although Phelps certainly does not shy away from doing just that. I am wondering why the author chose to subsume all the richness in context and geography he documents under the post-suburban label. His approach seems to mask the very sociospatial diversity that is so vividly documented in the book.
In his conclusion, Phelps also leaves little room for alternate suburban futures. His approach, as many planners and urbanists do, positions a successful post-suburban landscape as one that will be denser, more transit supportive, and walkable. The point is not stated explicitly, but the discussion certainly seems to imply that there is a particular, inevitable “evolution” of suburbs from low to high density. This line of reasoning makes me wonder whether many planning and (sub)urban scholars are being a bit too narrow in their view, and thus the question of what a successful suburban transformation could look like becomes somewhat self-fulfilling.
It is plausible to envision an alternate post-suburban future that remains low density and auto-oriented. This future is one where emissions problems are addressed through alternative technologies and congestion concerns through autonomous vehicles that may reduce the number of vehicles required on the road. In this alternate view, suburban residents live more localized lives, supported by telework and suburban agriculture. An automobile-based suburban future certainly would have a head start in terms of infrastructure investments. “Glimpses” of these futures also exist but we do not often see them in planning and sub(urban) research.
Admittedly, David Harvey’s (1978) theory of capital circulation, that Phelps draws on, would imply that a high-density suburban future looks most probable, however. Capital, it would seem, is still largely being invested into real estate. The suburbs are just the place for the next cycle of capital investment, as Phelps so vividly details. Smart growth and transit-oriented development strategies provide the planning mechanisms for justifying that these investments materialize in high-density form. But if global players, like Google or reinvigorated automakers, shift investment decisions by unveiling new automobile technologies, significant capital could suddenly be channeled into production activities, and thus promote the continuation of an automobile-based, low-density future. It remains to be seen whether it will be a change in alternative automobile technology or the proliferation of transit-oriented urban planning solutions (or a combination of the two) that will determine the future of the American suburb.
In summary, this book is an important contribution to planning scholarship, among other fields, in the way it so clearly illuminates the various processes that construct suburban landscapes. Perhaps most importantly, Phelps’s book reminds readers that the suburban trajectory of the past is not likely going to disappear just yet but that it is time to fundamentally change the way we think about, research, plan, and govern suburbia.