Reimagining the Suburbs Beyond Growth

Abstract

Suburbia refers to the low-density urban landscapes that typically surround the dense, high-rise urban centres in large cities. This opening chapter provides a brief history of how and why the suburbs emerged as they did, focussing on suburban development in the ‘new world’ cities of North America, Australia and New Zealand. Alexander and Gleeson show that the suburban form is shaped by the underlying political economy of economic growth, but they argue that this growth paradigm is unable to resolve the various social, financial and ecological crises affecting global capitalism today. A new paradigm of ‘degrowth’—or planned economic contraction—presents a coherent post-capitalist alternative for managing urban crises in the twenty-first century. This book explores what might become of the suburbs within a degrowth paradigm.