Suburbia, Settler Colonialism and the World Turned Inside Out

Abstract

While its primary aim is to explore possibilities for new research, this article contends that suburban and settler colonial imaginaries are related. It suggests that an awareness of the settler colonial “situation” and its dynamics can help an original approach to the interpretation of suburban forms (and vice versa). References to the suburban “frontier” have been frequent in both public discourse and scholarly debate, and suburban phenomena characterize in one way or another all settler societies. This connection, however, has not been the subject of sustained investigation. Thus, this article focuses on shared traditions of anti-urban perception and on a determination to pre-emptively secede from the metropole/metropolis in the presence of growing tensions and contradictions. Similarly, while settler colonial projects constitute separate political entities via an “outward” movement towards various “frontiers of settlement”, independent suburbs are also established via an “outward” movement and in an attempt to maintain local control over local affairs. In both instances displacement is a response/the only response to crisis.

Key words:

• Suburbia
• Settler colonialism
• World-turned-inside-out

Notes

1. An etymological note seems warranted: “metropolis” derives from the Greek word for mother-city. Thus, as it identifies a colony’s parent polity, “metropolis” is immediately linked to both reproduction and expansion. Later, the term came to identify the administrative units of the Catholic Church: a bishop overseeing other bishops within a province was the “metropolitan” and the “metropole” was the location of his seat (like Greek city states, new sees were established out of older ones). Eventually, “metropole” identified major sites of administrative activity. Thus, with the emergence of modern colonial forms, the “metropole” became the capital/centre of an empire, and the term returned to its original meaning.

2. The contemporary Israeli experience also confirms that “frontier” settlement and gated developments, the ultimate suburban form, can be coeval (see Rosen & Razin 2008, 2009).

3. Of course, I am not claiming that suburbia only characterizes settler societies; there are suburban experiences in metropolitan and in colonial societies too. Britain had suburbs – the Garden Cities – and many colonial cities did too. Britain, however, was linked to an extensive empire of settlement (Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia) and the colonial cities hosted communities of settlers (see King 1976). Suburbia and settler colonialism remain linked even beyond the limits of the settler world.

4. “Now ‘suburban’ does not even have a relationship to the city”, he concludes (Jackson 1985:272).

5. Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1898) proposed a vision of towns free of slums and endowed with the advantages of both town and country, culture and nature. It is significant that the Garden Cities movement also envisaged a model of social reform that was premised on a foundational sovereign displacement: these would be new settings located at a specified distance from existing urban centres. Not only this; these would be independent towns managed and financed by their residents. Commenting on this genealogy, Evan McKenzie links Garden Cities, the suburbs, and gated communities and Common Interest Developments (see McKenzie 1994).

6. On the “returns” of a particular settler colonial project, see Piterberg (2008).

7. Even attempts at “systematic colonization” that should have allowed for the preservation and reproduction of class differences were premised on the attempt to establish classed social bodies that were crucially deprived of the very rich and the very poor.

8. Other contexts experienced comparable developments in quite different ways. If in the USA the provision of public housing could be perceived as promoting the possibility of political subversion, its provision in the UK and France for example was viewed as a mechanism that would reduce the potential for working class insubordination. At the same time, in these contexts, unlike what happened in the USA, it was the working class that was displaced to the periphery.

9. James E. Vance, for example, notes that cities were “abandoned” by their earlier inhabitants, not invaded by their new ethnic ones (1972:186).

10. Outlining the “white flight”, Avila focuses on Lakewood (the prototypical 1950s suburban development): the Lakewood Plan accorded it independent municipality status within Los Angeles County. Lakewood would not need to support county government services, and this was presented as a measure that would guarantee local control, “a mantra among suburban Southern Californians” (Avila 2004a:14). Of course, similar deals were also routinely applied elsewhere.

11. On the “white flight” from densely populated, heterogeneous cities, see also Sibley (1995), Skogan (1995) and Avila (2004a, 2004b). In a different context, indeed with reference to colonial settlement in Pennsylvania, Ed White also presents a compelling analysis of the dynamics of flight (2005).