Suburban Affiliations: Social Relations in the Greater Dublin Area

By Mary P. Corcoran, Jane Gray and Michel Peillon

Since the mid-1990s Ireland has experienced an extraordinary phase of economic and social development. Housing estates have mushroomed around towns and cities, most notably around the environs of Dublin. Seeking to understand the impact of these recent developments, Corcoron, Gray, and Peillon initiated the New Urban Living study, a detailed research project focused on four suburbs of Dublin. Suburban Affiliations represents the culmination of that research, offering an invaluable contribution to the study of suburbanization and to our understanding of the process of social change that has come to Ireland.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: May 27, 2010
• ISBN: 9780815650928

Book preview

Suburban

Affiliations

Irish Studies

James MacKillop, Series Editor

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ISBN: 978-0-8156-3214-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Corcoran, Mary P.

Suburban affiliations : social relations in the greater Dublin area / Mary P. Corcoran, Jane Gray, and Michel Peillon.

p. cm. — (Irish studies)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8156-3214-6 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Suburbs—Ireland—Dublin Region. 2. Dublin (Ireland)—Social conditions. 3. Associations, institutions, etc.—Ireland—Dublin. I. Gray, Jane, 1963–II. Peillon, Michel. III. Title.

HT352.I73D833 2010

Manufactured in the United States of America

MARY P. CORCORAN is a professor of sociology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, and a research associate of the National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis. Her research interests are mainly in the fields of urban sociology and migration.

JANE GRAY is a senior lecturer at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, and a research associate of the National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis. Her research and teaching interests center on families and households and on life-history analysis.

MICHEL PEILLON is a professor of sociology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, and a research associate at the National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis. Among other things, his work focuses on collective action in an urban setting.

Contents

List of Illustrations

List of Tables

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART ONE

Locating the Suburbs: The International and Irish Context

1. The Significance of Suburbs

2. Suburban Formation: The Case of Dublin

3. Suburbs and the Life Course

PART TWO

Attachment and Belonging in Suburbia

4. Suburban Pastoralism and Sense of Place

5. Linked Lives: Personal Communities in the Suburbs

6. Family-Friendly Communities?

7. Making Friends and Losing Spaces

A Child’s View of the Suburban World

PART THREE

The Public Life of Suburbs

8. Joining In: The Dynamic of Voluntary Associations

9. Fragments of Activism

10. Community and the Structure of Social Capital

Conclusion: Suburban Variation and Suburban Affiliation

APPENDIX

Telling Suburban Tales—Leixlip, Lucan-Esker, Mullingar, and Ratoath

References

Index

Illustrations

PHOTOGRAPHS

Boundaries (Lucan)

Coexistence (Ratoath)

Interpreting place (Leixlip)

Juggernauts rat run (Ratoath)

Local support (Lucan)

Main Street (Leixlip)

Provincial town (Mullingar)

Redevelopment (Ratoath)

Ring road (Mullingar)

Rurban scene (Ratoath)

Streetscape at Adamstown (Lucan)

Suburban pastoralism (Lucan)

Suburban flows (Lucan)

Suburban vista (Ratoath)

The Green (Leixlip)

The promise of sociability (Ratoath)

Village feel (Ratoath)

Traces of the past (Lucan)

FIGURES

1.Age, class, and family profile of respondents in the four suburban locations

2.One-person households, by distance from central Dublin, 1991 and 2002

3.Prefamily couples, by distance from central Dublin, 1991 and 2002

4.Respondents’ ages, by study location

5.Household type, by study location

6.Households, by children’s ages and study location

7.Time spent traveling to work, by study location and household status

8.Percentage of respondents attached or very attached to place, by study location and length of residence

9.Respondents’ mentioning of features they like about the place they live, by study location

10.Reliance on local ties, by study location

11.Reliance on local ties for frequent visiting, by study location

12.Reliance on local ties for practical help, by study location

13.Reliance on local ties for emotional help, by study location

14.Reliance on local ties for socializing, by study location

15.Composition of personal networks, by type of connection and study location

16.Percentage of ties that are kin, by type of support received and study location

17.Distribution of different types of personal networks in each study location

18.Respondents’ use of e-mail to keep in touch with family and friends, by personal network type

19.Number of households headed by married (or living-as-married) couples, by age of children and study location

20.Percentage of breadwinner households, by study location and children’s age

21.Mean number of ties mentioned, by type of tie

22.Percentage of dual-income households with preschoolers using different kinds of childcare in each study location

23.Social capital linkages in Leixlip

24.Social capital linkages in Lucan-Esker

25.Social capital linkages in Mullingar

26.Social capital linkages in Ratoath

MAP

1.Married couples with children as a proportion of all households in each electoral division, greater Dublin area, 2002

Tables

1.Use of facilities in each study area, by location of facility

2.Network characteristics, by study location

3.Mean number of ties and percentage of local ties in each study location, by type of support provided

4.Mean number of local kinship ties, percentage of all kinship ties living locally, and percentage of respondents with local and/or near family circles in each study location

5.Mean number of local ties, adjusted for independent factors

6.Access to key information technologies, by study location

7.Respondents who are attached or very attached to the place where they live, by family life stage

8.Local social ties of married or living-as-married respondents with young children, by family life stage

9.Attachment to place of married or living-as-married respondents with young children, by reliance on local ties for frequent visiting

10.Suburban affiliations typology

Acknowledgments

This book is based on data collected for the New Urban Living Study, which was funded by the Royal Irish Academy Third Sector Research Programme and the Katherine Howard Foundation. The investigators benefited from consecutive research breaks granted by the National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis (NIRSA) at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. NIRSA directors Gerry Boyle and Rob Kitchin supported us in our undertaking. NIRSA also provided technical support: Mary O’Brien, Peter Foley, and Justin Gleeson helped with data and mapping. A research fellowship at the Policy Institute, Trinity College Dublin, gave us additional scope for addressing related issues. Publication of this book was supported by the National University of Ireland.

The study covered four separate suburban locations around Dublin, and we acknowledge the help and cooperation we received from various individuals and groups in each area.

In Leixlip, Mary Foley, Father Michael Hurley, Michael Kenny, and Councilor Catherine Murphy were happy to share their deep knowledge of the locality. The principal and teachers of Scoil Mhuire and Scoil Bhride facilitated focus groups, as did the mother-and-toddler’s group and the Golden Years Club.

In Lucan, Paul Carolan, Gerry Flynn, Tess Kane, Kevin Farrell, and Fionnuala McCarthy of Lucan 2000 provided a vital introduction to the area. Father Philip Bradley publicized our study in the regular Lucan newsletter that he edits and greatly enhanced the cooperation we received from local residents. The principals of St. Anne’s National School and Archbishop Ryan National School were most supportive of our endeavor. Culture Quest, Lucan Homestart, and University of the Third Age were also greatly cooperative in facilitating the organization of discussion groups.

In Mullingar, Father Seán Henry, Róisín Kelly, Bob Morrison, and Marie O’Sullivan helped in various ways. Our thanks also go to the organizers and participants of our focus groups there: the teachers and sixth-class pupils at St. Colman’s National School, participants in a training course at Women’s Community Projects, and members of the 1428 Club.

In Ratoath, chairpersons of large residents’ associations provided a great deal of background information: Kieran Gallagher, Marcy McCormack, Anne Malone, and Emmet Wilson. A long conversation with Father Gerry Stuart allowed us to acquire an initial sense of the place. Editors of local newsletters advertised the study and considerably enhanced local residents’ cooperation. The principal of Ratoath National School, Active Age, and the mother-and-toddler’s group facilitated us in conducting focus groups.

The task of knocking on local residents’ doors and filling in questionnaires largely fell to a group of hardworking interviewers: Bernard Boyle, Brody Cameron, Breda Cunningham, Ann Dalton, Patricia Doyle, Paula Farrell, Doreen Garry, Marion Hanlon, Aine McDonough, Joseph Moffatt, Keith Parker, Muriel Redmond, and Eileen Whyte. For their efforts and diligence, our warmest thanks.

This kind of research ultimately depends on the good will of the residents who form the sample for the study. Most of them made us very welcome in their homes. Some of them also agreed to take part in follow-up interviews. Others joined us in discussion groups. Although all of these residents must, of necessity, remain anonymous, we convey our deep gratitude to them all.

Introduction

The objective of this book is to illuminate, by examining closely four different suburbs in and around the city of Dublin, a set of suburban processes that we believe provide insight into the ways in which suburbs more generally develop, consolidate across time, and become the object of affection or disaffection among those who live there. We present our analysis against the backdrop of the extensive U.S. and European literature on suburbs. As an empirically grounded, contemporary study of everyday suburban realities, our book offers a wealth of timely and innovative insights of relevance not only to social scientists, but also to architects, planners, policymakers, and the general public.

From the mid-1990s until 2007, Ireland experienced an extraordinary phase of economic and social development. Housing estates mushroomed around towns and cities and more particularly around Dublin. Public concern has been expressed about the weak regulation of such peripheral urbanization, the impact on residents’ quality of life, and the robustness of community feeling in these new neighborhoods. As colleagues at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, we initiated a research project, the New Urban Living Study, to investigate the impact of suburban development in Ireland. We selected four locations on the periphery of Dublin, each corresponding to a particular set of suburban circumstances (see the appendix for details of each suburb). This book revisits the mainly negative assessment that has been made of the suburban social fabric. The title of the book, Suburban Affiliations, underlies its main conclusions. Residents in suburban estates are not disaffiliated: they are in fact connected with the place where they live and with each other in many different ways. In the course of the book, we map the nature, quality, and focus of these affiliations.

Boundaries (Lucan).

We believe that the analysis of Dublin’s recent suburban experience provides a worthwhile case study in its own terms, but also in terms of contributing to the general social science scholarship on suburbs. The choice of suburbs around the city of Dublin is particularly apposite. Dublin is a major European city, and Ireland’s primary economic, social, and political relationships now take place within a European Union framework. Notwithstanding that fact, Ireland, for historical, economic, and cultural reasons, is very much open to American influence. We invite the reader to reflect on whether the Irish suburbs exhibit indigenous or European qualities or are simply an extension of a globalizing American suburban frontier. In telling the story of four suburban places in particular, we raise more general issues that have salience for all who are concerned about the kinds of neighborhoods and lifestyles we are creating in the twenty-first century.

Revisiting the community issue, the study seeks to assess the quality of contemporary suburban living. It offers a detailed analysis of the social fabric in four distinct suburbs and addresses the viability of such suburbs in social terms. It focuses on aspects of what has been called social capital in these suburban localities. The empirical study of suburbs has traditionally relied on particular case studies, from which general conclusions about the nature of suburbs are formulated. Very little comparative work has been conducted about suburbs, however, so the present study represents an important contribution to this small body of scholarship. Such a comparative emphasis highlights the fact that suburbs develop along different lines and offers rare insight into the factors that contribute to the formation and shaping of suburbs.

We think we know what happens in the suburbs, but we are missing many sides to the story, states Peter Lang (1997, 7). We still do not know a great deal about how people live in suburbs and how they relate to each other and to the outside world. Besides the conventional themes that have sometimes endlessly been elaborated upon, there is still much to be discovered. It has been some time since the sociological work on suburbs has produced a genuine understanding of what is actually happening in them and of how daily life is lived and experienced there. The present study brings to light social aspects of suburban living that have rarely been considered. Our analysis is all the more salient because it has been conducted against the backdrop of rapid social changes—the rise of the two-career family, the growth of long distance commuting, and the pervasive spread of new technology in everyday life.

The study of suburban living reported on here illuminates various processes at work in suburbs. This portrait identifies not only processes that are unfolding and shaping the suburbs, but also processes that are typically not registered or emphasized in other analyses. The intensification of parenting, the activation of kin, the presence and use of in-between public space, the reliance on an ideology of pastoralism, variations in the formation and composition of personal communities, the emergence of new types of local activism—all of these phenomena constitute ignored or neglected processes that unfold in the new suburbs.

For a suburb to satisfy its residents’ needs, we argue, it must produce communality—that is, minimum levels of affiliations among residents, affiliations that are neither entirely superficial nor deeply intimate in content. The four case study suburbs explored here are neither alienated deserts nor highly organized communities. Rather, they fall at different points on a continuum between these two extremes. What matters to people is not intimacy with known others in their locality, but loose connections or affiliations. In presenting this argument, we seek to move beyond the dualism inherent in much of the discourse about suburbs by demonstrating empirically the precise contours of the affiliative suburb, identifying those factors that act to embed people in their localities socially (creating the possibility of intensive affiliation) and those that threaten to erode or undermine connectedness and belonging (creating the conditions for disaffiliation). By adopting a comparative approach to the study of suburbs, we are able to demonstrate significant suburban variation in levels, types, and intensities of affiliation. Although each suburb may be constituted through the same basic ingredients, structural variations at the local level means that suburban neighborhoods may ultimately develop, evolve, and function along different trajectories.

THE BOOK’S STRUCTURE

We have organized the book in three parts. Part one situates Irish suburban processes and our four case studies in global and local contexts. Chapter 1 examines the significance of the suburbs through an extensive review of the large body of scholarly publications on suburbs and presents the book’s main objectives. Chapter 2 presents a critical analysis of the nature and type of suburban development that has evolved over recent decades in Ireland and outlines the main parameters of the New Urban Living Study, including our methodological approach. The appendix provides a detailed description of each of our study locations.

Chapter 3 explores some aspects of the changing demographic composition of the greater Dublin area and examines our case studies against this backdrop. It also examines some differences in orientation to place and sense of belonging among younger and older age groups. We find that because of the upsurge in family formation that occurred during the Celtic Tiger period, couples with young children continue to be the modal household type in new Irish suburbs. However, changing family trends have intersected with suburban ageing and the spatial extension of new suburbs, resulting in an increase in the proportions of single-person households—especially in older suburbs nearer to the metropolitan core—and of couple households without children on the outer suburban fringe. We found the demographic composition of our case studies to be generally consistent with this overall pattern. We also found that variations in household composition and the life-course timing of the move to the suburbs were linked to interesting differences in orientation to place. Urban geographers have suggested that the ways in which people at different life stages access resources and facilities across space may change as metropolitan centers evolve to become polycentric urban regions. We found mixed evidence for these hypotheses in our study, with some patterns of use conforming to the model of a metropolitan core, but others more consistent with the model of a polycentric urban region.

Chapter 3 also examines some aspects of senior residents’ experiences in the new suburbs. In general, we found that they were more likely to have lived in the area for a long time, to have developed a greater sense of emotional rootedness, and to have become more reliant on neighbors for everyday social support than other residents. However, focus-group interviews also suggest that some older residents felt that the quality of neighborliness had declined. They were also generally more likely than other residents to worry about social problems in the community.

Part two focuses on the processes that generate affiliation within and toward suburban places. Chapter 4 examines the sense of place that has developed in the four suburban locations under study. The literature on place tends to fall under two opposing viewpoints. One view sees place as being overtaken by the forces of globalization and technology and thus no longer meaningful in everyday life. Suburbs, in particular, are frequently depicted negatively as nonplaces within the literature. An alternative perspective suggests that local attachments continue to animate everyday life despite the wider changes in society. In general, our study has found that attachment to place is relatively high in suburbia and acts as a mechanism through which people develop a suburban affiliation. Of key significance is the role played by a pastoral ideology that draws people to particular suburban places and that is deployed as a way of legitimating the residential choices they have made. This pastoral ideology is invoked in a number of ways and plays a constitutive role in the suburbs, even when it is clear that the suburb’s pastoral dimension is under threat or has disappeared. Pastoralism is balanced by a degree of pragmatic decision making that is evident in residents’ conscious motivations regarding location, convenience, and, above all, choice. A minority of residents does not feel particularly attached to place and expresses some disaffection about living in the suburbs. Indeed, these residents’ everyday experience of suburbia is laced with a sense of disaffiliation from the locality and the community.

Through their association with the defining features of modernity, suburbs are often assumed to be characterized by a decline in extended kin relations and growing social atomization. In contrast to this depiction, some ethnographic studies have argued for the emergence of new extended families of choice in contemporary societies. According to a yet another set of arguments, new information technologies have led to a shift from place-based to person-based communities that are less rooted in localities than previously. Chapter 5 assesses the merit of these arguments through an exploration of the structure and composition of the networks of everyday social support—practical, emotional, and social—reported by our respondents. In conducting our study, we focused on the extent to which such networks were local and on the significance of kin in their composition. In general, we found that a majority of respondents were embedded in their local communities through everyday forms of social interaction.

We identified four network configurations: (1) dense (in terms of the frequency of interaction), local, kin oriented; (2) moderate, diffuse, kin oriented; (3) dense, local, neighbor oriented; and (4) weak, nonlocal. The distribution of these network types across suburbs varied according to a suburb’s maturity, demographic composition, the life-stage timing of respondents’ move there, and the nature of preexisting social ties. Compared to the national average, our suburban respondents displayed high levels of ownership and use of new information technologies. However, we found little evidence to support the idea that such technologies were displacing place-based patterns of social interaction. Few respondents engaged in shopping or banking online, and they appear to have used e-mail primarily to reinforce and extend kin-based forms of social support centered on the locality: those with dense, local, kin-oriented networks were most likely to use e-mail to stay in touch with friends and family.

Suburbs have historically been depicted as ideal places to raise young families. Their expansion was early on associated with the conjugal family ideology that came to prominence in Western societies after World War II. But some social (and sociological) commentators have queried the extent to which suburbs are really amenable places for couples with young children in that they are assumed to isolate the nuclear family from the support of extended kin, and the growth of dual-earner family work strategies is thought to diminish interaction with neighbors. Chapter 6 examines the extent to which new Irish suburbs may be considered family friendly by exploring differences in levels of attachment by suburban type and by family life stage.

Studies in the United States have shown that the extent to which suburban residents rate their communities to be family friendly or caring depends on the prevalence of families at a similar life stage and on the extent and quality of interaction with neighbors. There is limited evidence that the latter may be linked to the proportion of homemakers in the community. Our research is generally consistent with this evidence. In each of our case studies, we found that parents of young children increased their reliance on local social ties and reduced their reliance on kin for everyday forms of social support as their children reached primary-school age. Although we did not ask directly about our suburban areas’ family friendliness or otherwise, we did find that parents of primary-school children expressed a greater sense of belonging than did parents of preschool children. The highest levels of attachment were found in our most affluent suburb, where couples with primary-school children were demographically predominant and the proportion of homemakers was greatest across all family life-stages. It is plausible that the visibility of homemakers in that locality enhanced the perception of community for all residents, especially given its combination with a sense of new residents’ being pioneers in a fledgling suburb.

Chapter 7 expands on the role that children play in constituting the new suburban communities and, in particular, the extent to which they contribute to the levels of affiliation identified in the suburbs. The presence of children in suburbia leads to an intensification of parenting and helps to activate and maintain kin and neighborly relationships. Children create circuits of sociability within their neighborhoods and through their activities and needs generate meeting points for parents. There appear to be advantages to relatively high-density, proximate developments configured around quality green areas for children’s sociability networks. The literature suggests the desirability of unpoliced public space as an arena for childhood development. Children in suburbia note that there are less and less spaces available for them that they can successfully use as hanging out spots or meeting places. Children reproduce an antiurban ideology that acts to cement further their feelings of a life in common in the suburbs and their subscription to an essentially suburban sensibility. Despite the various problems that they perceive in their localities—principally a lack of amenities—the children in our study were relatively content with their quality of life, and most expressed a strong preference for suburban over urban living.

The third and final part of the book examines suburbs as spheres of public engagement and activity. The formation of voluntary associations represents an important aspect of the organization and social fabric of the locality. Chapter 8 examines social participation, mainly in the form of membership in local voluntary associations in the four suburban locations under study. We identified and investigated three separate dynamics in this context. One dynamic relates to the sorting of the local population into various categories: voluntary organizations attract members on the basis of services they provide to distinctive categories of local residents. The second dynamic, social embeddedness, refers to the fact that membership reflects the degree to which local residents are socially integrated: members of voluntary associations are far more likely to belong to local social networks. Finally, the third dynamic involves the definition and defense of local self-interests, which are particularly marked in relation to residents’ associations and diverse campaigning organizations. These three dynamics interact in the four suburbs under investigation, but they combine in different ways in each of them.

Approximately one-third of local residents claimed membership in a local voluntary association. Such a finding challenges the view of suburbs as either havens of isolation or hyperactivity. It certainly points to a meaningful engagement in local issues, hence emphasizing the civic vibrancy of such places despite the many obstacles that residents have to confront. If, as stated earlier, each location is characterized by a distinctive form of social participation and a particular way of combining the three dynamics observed, the question must be asked: What is the rationale for the various forms of social participation in the four locations? This question brings us back to the book’s comparative emphasis. Finally, the examination of social participation in Dublin’s suburbs reveals some intriguing characteristics. The dynamic of social participation appears dramatically different for local associations that provide a private good (a range of services to either individuals or families) than for those that promote a public good (which concerns the group as a whole). For instance, our analysis suggests that membership in a private-good association is more particularly anchored in friendship ties, whereas membership in a public-good association is more particularly rooted in neighborly ties.

Dublin’s suburbs—more particularly, its new suburbs—face many problems that derive to a large extent from the way they have been formed. Most respondents in our surveys clearly identified the main local problems, but only about one-third of them had attempted to do something about these problems. Chapter 9 examines how one can account for this level of active response. Local action has often been viewed as a response to external threats or to needs that have not been satisfied. Although some grievances may actually lead to action, the level of activism is not determined by the perception of local problems in the four suburbs studied: grievance is not transformed into action, at least not in any simple and direct way. In fact, collective action is not unified; it does not constitute the expression of a community. It often relates to competing views and interests within the locality. The emergence of collective action depends largely on a core group of individuals who pursue a set of preferences or interests and then mobilize a larger group of people around them. Their success in doing so is largely a function of the resources they can marshal in the given situation. Social networks form the main resource in this respect.

The level of activism varies considerably among the suburban locations under scrutiny, and we address the reasons for such variations. On the basis of a range of in-depth interviews, we identify several types of activists in suburbs. We observed some predictable forms of activism, but other types of activists are also found in the suburbs: the community entrepreneur, the reciprocal activist, the instrumental activist, the mediating activist, and the estate activist, for instance. Although our survey of the four suburban locations supports the idea of a strong connection between local activism and inclusion in personal social networks, a high number of kin or friends actually inhibits local activism.

Chapter 10 returns to the issue of the extent to which the new Dublin suburbs constitute communities, and it does so through the analysis of social capital. Attachment to place, inclusion in networks of personal support, and social participation represent key social resources and form the core social capital of these suburban neighborhoods. Determining the amount of social capital does not constitute the crucial task of the analysis. We in fact argue that the strength of suburban affiliations does not require a maximization of social capital, but rather demands a sufficient amount of mutual engagement among local residents, both informal and formal. The key issue relates to the composition of local social capital and to the way these resources are linked with others. Statistical analysis supports the view that the elements of social capital are associated with each other. The structure of social capital is thus best conceptualized as a spiral: an increase in one element leads to an increase in the others (and, as a corollary, a decrease in one leads to a decrease in the others). However, this structure does not apply consistently across our four suburban case studies. The dynamic of interconnectedness between the elements of social capital cannot be observed in all locations. Most display some deviations from the spiral model. However, these differences can be treated as exceptions because they are accounted for by features inherent in the local context.

Finally, in the conclusion we draw together the multiple strands pursued throughout the book. We conclude, first, that suburbs are not homogeneous: the quality of social life residents enjoy varies from one suburb to another. Second, the texture of suburban life varies according to a number of interrelated factors: the nature and timing of the development of the suburb itself and the kinds of people who move there; the life-course timing of the residential move; and the preexisting patterns of social life in the locality. Third, these contextual factors impact on the extent and kind of local attachment that residents feel and the local social networks they create and draw upon. These networks in turn mediate the structure of affiliation that develops in the suburbs.

The present study represents an important contribution to the relatively small body of comparative scholarship on suburbs. We identify the key factors that contribute to the formation and shaping of suburbs and highlight the role of different suburban actors—parents, children, activists—in that process. We demonstrate that suburbs are not homogeneous after all, but rather develop along different trajectories across time. Finally, we offer a benchmark insight into the suburb at the turn of the twenty-first century and a template for conducting further suburban studies across space and time.

PART ONE

Locating the Suburbs

The International and Irish Context

1

The Significance of Suburbs

STEREOTYPING SUBURBS

All roads lead, by now, through suburbia (Lang 1997, 5). In the United States, more than half the population resides in suburbs, and most developed societies are following a similar path. Even though the implications of this situation have still to be worked out, suburbs are much talked or written about. A large literature has developed on this theme, mainly since the 1950s. The early writers on suburbs approached them from many different angles. Some sociologists engaged in empirical studies of particular suburbs: John Seeley, Alexander Sim, and Elizabeth Loosley (1956) and certainly Bennett Berger (1960) and Herbert Gans (1967) fall into this category. Others commented on suburbs as a way of addressing modern society in general. David Riesman (1958) viewed the suburbs as best illustrating the sadness of the lonely crowd. Suburbs were seen as symptomatic of mass society. This was certainly the case for Lewis Mumford (1961), the prominent historian of the city. William Whyte (1956), although a journalist, nonetheless undertook a sustained empirical analysis of an Illinois suburb: he saw there the breeding ground of the organization man whose life and lifestyle crystallized all that is wrong with modern industrial society. Other journalists and indeed writers joined the fray, mostly to propagate the negative image of suburbs. Richard Yates’s classic work Revolutionary Road appeared in 1961 to critical acclaim. It chronicled the lives of a beautiful but desperate young couple whose dreams are crushed under the weight of suburban life. In Arlington Park (2006), Rachel Cusk has more recently tackled the same theme of simmering suburban despair, painting a dystopian image of middle-class suburbia in contemporary Britain.

The doomsayers, however, have not gone unchallenged. For example, Scott Donaldson (1969) wrote a sustained critique of the negative stereotyping of suburbs. A minority of commentators engaged in detailed analysis of particular suburbs and rejected the dominant suburban model, creating in the process a counterdiscourse. As we shall see, this discursive dualism continues to structure the debate on the nature of suburbs and suburban life and is evident in the most recent analyses.

Sociologists and geographers’ voices were prominent until the 1980s: although they sometimes upheld the dystopian view of suburbs (e.g., Baumgartner 1988), they were more likely to express skepticism or at the very least to display ambivalence (Palen 1995; Popenoe 1977; Thorns 1972).