Hot Off the Press: Suburbs

It’s been decades since the first groundbreaking scholarly works about suburbs were published. But a recent spate of books suggests more writers see the suburbs as a topic for serious study. In 1962, Sam Bass Warner’s Streetcar Suburbs described how planning and transportation strategies in Boston drew middle-class families out of the city and into surrounding areas. In 1985 Kenneth Jackson weighed in with Crabgrass Frontier, arguing that the growth of the suburbs was caused not just by transportation schemes, but also by the availability of cheap land and construction, an enduring rural ideal, and racial and ethnic prejudices.

In 2005, Robert Bruegmann’s popular and contrarian Sprawl: A Compact History questioned most commonly accepted views about the suburbs. The book also seems to have touched off an avalanche of new suburbs-related scholarship. In 2006 there was Kevin Kruse and Thomas Sugrue’s The New Suburban History, Becky Nicolaides and Andrew Wiese’s The Suburb Reader, and When America Became Suburban by Columbia professor Robert Beauregard. So far this year has brought The Suburbanization of New York by Jerilou and Kingsley Hammett, the founders and editors of Designer/Builder magazine in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Boomburbs: The Rise of America’s Accidental Cities by Robert Lang and Jennifer Lefurgy, two Virginia Tech researchers. You can bet there will be more to come.

The suburbs in these new books bear little resemblance to the suburbs of the early works. The ‘burbs are no longer the lily-white havens of conformity that they were in the ‘50s, complete with two-car garages and manicured lawns. To be sure, they are still full of gigantic shopping centers (as seen in photos in the back of The Suburb Reader). But they are also, increasingly, hubs of commerce, communication, and entrepreneurship, and home to more immigrant and minority families than the city neighborhoods they border. In other words, they are rich material for a book—or several.