The Politics of Post‐Suburban Densification in Canada and France

Abstract

International audienceThis debate specifically focuses on densification as a particular dimension of (post-) suburbanization. In the introduction, we discuss densification, along with ‘compactness’ and ‘intensification’, conceptual terms that have become buzzwords within urban planning. Objectives associated with these tend to be presented in the literature within a normative framework, structured by a critique of the negative effects attributed to sprawl. The perspective here is different. It is not normative but critical, and articulated around the analysis of political and social issues, related to the transformation of wider metropolitan space. Three main themes are developed: (1) the politics of densification (the environmental arguments favouring densification are highly plastic, and are thus often used to defend projects or initiatives which are actually determined by other agendas); (2) why morphology matters (a similar number of houses or square metres can be established in many different ways, and those different ways have political and social meaning); (3) the diversity of suburban densification regimes (it is not only the landscapes of the suburbs that are diverse, but also the local bodies governing them—between the small residential municipalities of the Paris periurbs and the large inner suburbs of Toronto lies a broad spectrum)

Theorising suburban infrastructure: a framework for critical and comparative analysis

“…On one hand a number of new conceptual languages have emerged to grapple with the specificities of highly differentiated suburban spaces, including now classic accounts of 'edge cities' (Garreau 1991), 'ethnoburbs' (Li 2009), 'metroburbia' (Knox 2008), 'post-suburbia' (Teaford 1997) and the 'in-between city' (Sieverts 2003;Young et al 2011). On the other, typologies grounded in broad characteristics, such as peripherality, low-density and newness (Harris 2010), morphological differentiation between urban, ex-urban or rural metropolitan forms (Stanilov and Scheer 2004;Vaughan et al 2009) or population type; dominant politics; main actors; and morphological change (Charmes and Keil 2015), have struggled to fully encompass the dynamic, ephemeral and transitory characteristics of such peripheral urbanisation. The pluralised, contextual and interconnected nature of contemporary suburbs poses an epistemological question as to whether there is anything analytically distinct about 'suburban infrastructure', or the social, technical and political regimes that singularise the suburban moment in their production, governance or use.…”

7. The Other Low-Carbon Protagonists

“…There too, movements of poor are effectively pursuing democratic, gray ecologies. But the suburban terrain is distinctive and in many cases more challenging (Cohen 2014;Charmes and Keil 2015;Keil 2013).…”

Cosmopolitanism beyond the city: discourses and experiences of young migrants in post-suburban Netherlands

“…The dichotomy of urban/non-urban spaces is increasingly becoming less accurate when describing settlements due to the sub/urban being pervasive on a global scale, what Schmid (2011) call planetary urbanization, andKeil (2017) implies as planetary suburbanization. For this paper I explore a "post-suburban" space, a term signifying the contemporary era after the archetypical suburbia (Charmes & Keil, 2015;Phelps & Wood, 2011;Phelps et al, 2010). Post-suburbia calls for approaches beyond the common city/suburb dichotomies that often lack a deeper, qualitative understanding of the meanings of how the contemporary relationship between city and the (post) suburb has evolved and is evolving.…”