Post-suburban regionalism: From local politics of exclusion to regional politics of economic development

Abstract

The suburbs seem to occupy a contradictory position in the wider politics of space in the United States (US). One dominant view in the literature is that suburbs are local spaces of exclusion (Danielson, 1976). Suburban voters - often categorized mainly but not exclusively as white and middle or upper income - elect leaders who, in their turn, use local land use authority to keep out locally unwanted land uses and incomers, thereby enhancing the local tax base and protecting local services and property values. This local exclusionary politics produces an intense fragmentation of metropolitan political space which, in turn, contributes to a variety of metropolitan governance challenges. For the most part, solutions to these challenges have involved developing closer inter-jurisdictional relationships between neighbourhoods, suburbs and central cities (Downs, 1981). Nevertheless, despite years of attempts to ‘open up the suburbs’ to non-whites and lower income households (Downs, 1973), local jurisdictional fragmentation remains a deeply entrenched feature of the metropolitan political landscape in the US (Teaford, 1979).