Designing and Living in a New Industrial Suburb: Experiences in the Cannock Chase Coalfield from the 1950s to the 1970s

Evans, Gareth; Larkham, Peter J.

doi:10.1068/b303

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…This comes close to endorsing a deterministic view of the suburbs as the 'natural' product of advanced phases of urbanisation, and therefore entitled to some higher moral legitimacy. Of course not all movements to the suburbs are out of choice, for example, the movement of miners to the suburbs following the restructuring of the coal industry from the 1950s onwards (Evans and Larkham 2004). Despite this, the realists are probably most open to acknowledging suburban space as a distinctive field of social practice than other dominant representations because they are less likely to marginalise or mythologise them.…”

Section: Suburban Identitiesmentioning

confidence: 96%

Suburban Urbanities

Legeby¹,

Pont²,

Marcus³

2015

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ForewordIn recent years there has been much debate within urban studies as to which came first in the evolution of human settlements, the countryside or the city. There was always a third context to this discussion, however, and that was the suburb. Life beyond the city walls was a distinctive feature of ancient urban civilisations from Persia to Minoan Crete, and today in the Anglophone world the suburban population is a majority. How surprising, then, that few scholars have attempted to understand the nature and agency of suburban living as a dominant characteristic of human settlements. This was symptomatic of a wider academic indifference and even hostility towards 'the suburban' which has only (ridiculously) recently been challenged by a new generation of scholars who take suburbs seriously.Suburban Urbanities is a hugely important contribution to understanding our suburban world. Drawing upon scholarship within the now rapidly expanding field of suburban studies, synthesising historical geography with space syntax theories and methods, and the sociology of everyday life, it sheds new light on the historic and spatial evolution of the city. It shows that suburbia is not a synchronic caricature of a life-less-lived, but a dynamic context of metropolitan agency and creativity. As an historic process, suburbanisation is not something that evolved beyond the city to suck the life out of it, but was intertwined with trajectories of growth, with the socioeconomic patterning and structuring of cities large and small. It is impossible to grasp the meaning of class relations, of gendered lifestyles, of ethnic segregation and integration, of urban economies and patterns of mobility and communications, without placing suburbia at the forefront of the analysis. The universality of the themes of Suburban Urbanities is obvious: the dynamics of growth are significant historically because suburbs are starting points in change over time, not the end of the line. Old suburbs were once new, and today's new suburbs, springing up rapidly across the world, will one day be old. As dynamic environments they continue to act as vectors of social, economic and political development, locally, nationally and globally.The book is timely in another important sphere, and that is the personal subjectivity of suburbanites. To those who live in them, suburban lives viii FOrEWOrD have meaning. Back in 2013, I went for a walk in Fort Totten, an AfricanAmerican suburb of Washington, DC. On a sweltering August lunchtime, as I took photographs of the comfortable suburban homes of middle-class black people in roads that were empty except for flowering trees and parked cars, a woman's voice called out to me with a gentle but audible 'good afternoon'. Across her neatly trimmed front lawn I began chatting with a woman in her sixties who was taking tea with a friend on her veranda. She had left downtown DC in 1976 and as she stated with some passion, 'I couldn't wait to get out'. Fort Totten had its problems, but it was an attractive and spacious plac...

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Section: Suburban Identitiesmentioning

confidence: 96%

Suburban Urbanities

Legeby¹,

Pont²,

Marcus³

2015

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…This comes close to endorsing a deterministic view of the suburbs as the ‘natural’ product of advanced phases of urbanisation and therefore entitled to some higher moral legitimacy. Of course not all movements to the suburbs are out of choice – for example, the movement of miners to the suburbs following the restructuring of the coal industry from the 1950s onwards (Evans and Larkham 2004) or the working‐class suburban life described by Hanley (2007). Despite this, the realists are probably most open to acknowledging suburban space as a distinctive field of social practice than other dominant representations because they are less likely to marginalise or mythologise them.…”

Section: Self‐referential Multiplicitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Do the suburbs exist? Discovering complexity and specificity in suburban built form

Vaughan¹,

Griffiths²,

Haklay

et al. 2009

Trans Inst British Geog

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In human geography cities are routinely acknowledged as complex and dynamic built environments. This description is rarely extended to the suburbs, which are generally regarded as epiphenomena of the urbs and therefore of little intrinsic theoretical interest in themselves. This article presents a detailed critique of this widely held assumption by showing how the idea of ‘the suburban’ as an essentially non‐problematic domain has been perpetuated from a range of contrasting disciplinary perspectives, including those that directly address suburban subject matter. The result has been that attempts to articulate the complex social possibilities of suburban space are easily caught between theories of urbanisation that are insensitive to suburban specificity and competing representations of the suburb that rarely move beyond the culturally specific to consider their generic significance. This article proposes that the development of a distinctively suburban theory would help to undermine one‐dimensional approaches to the built environment by focusing on the relationship between social organisation and the dynamics of emergent built form.

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Designing and Living in a New Industrial Suburb: Experiences in the Cannock Chase Coalfield from the 1950s to the 1970s

Cited by 2 publications

References 7 publications

Suburban Urbanities

Suburban Urbanities

Do the suburbs exist? Discovering complexity and specificity in suburban built form

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