Abstract
Poised at the beginning of a new century, American cultural critics will doubtless soon find occasion to look back on significant developments in U.S. society over the course of the past hundred years. Among the myriad changes that have fostered America’s evolution from a largely unsettled and expanding country to the tightly interconnected, late-capitalist nation of today, certainly one profound development can be seen on the face of the American landscape itself. While the beginning of the twentieth century saw increasing urbanization across the land, the second half of the century witnessed the massive development of the suburban landscape, a new type of terrain that dissolved the urban/rural place distinctions that had, until that point, largely characterized American topography.1 That the expansion of the suburban environment—particularly in the post-World War II era—stands as a significant cultural development is evidenced by the fact that, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, the United States is primarily a suburban nation, with far more Americans living in the suburbs than in either urban or rural areas.2
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Notes
As historian of the suburbs Kenneth Jackson notes in Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985)
According to analyses of U.S. census data, the suburbs, which as of the 1950 census were nearing parity with urban and nonmetropolitan areas in terms of population, by 1960 were clearly the most populous type of landscape in America, claiming over 33 percent of the total population. This percentage has steadily risen in subsequent decades. Analyses of recent census figures indicate that the trend toward suburbanization continues: G. Scott Thomas, in The United States of Suburbia: How the Suburbs Took Control of America and What They Plan to Do With It (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1998)
Roger Silverstone, ed., Visions of Suburbia (New York: Roudedge, 1997), ix.
J. Nicholas Entrikin, The Betweenness of Place: Towards Geography of Modernity (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 7.
Geographer E.V. Walter, in Placeways: A Theory of the Human Environment (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988)
D. W. Meinig, ed., The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 6.
Clifford Clark, “Ranch-House Suburbia: Ideals and Realities,” in Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of the Cold War, ed. Lary May, 171–191 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 171.
Kim Ian Michasiw, “Some Stations of the Suburban Gothic,” in American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative, ed. Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy, 237–257 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998), 253.
Ada Louise Huxtable, “An Alternative to’ slurbs,” in Suburbia in Transition, ed. Louis H. Masottie and Jeffrey K. Hadden, 185–191 (New York: New Viewpoints, 1974), 186
Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16 (Spring 1986): 24.
In many ways, Levittown, New York, and the subsequent Levittowns built in Pennsylvania and New Jersey provide a fascinating case study of the dynamics of the postwar suburban experience. For an excellent extended discussion of the Levittown experience, see William Gans, The Levittowners (New York: Pantheon, 1967).
Quoted in David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1993), 141.
Max Lerner, in America As a Civilization (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1987)
See chapter 11 of David Harvey, Justice, Nature, & the Geography of Difference (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996)
For studies that trace the profound social impact suburban situation comedies of the 1950s and 1960s had on culture in their day and beyond, see Nina Leibman, Living Room Lectures: The Fifties Family in Film and Television (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995)
Dana Heller, Family Plots: The De-Oedipalization of Popular Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995)
Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
Albert Hunter, “The Symbolic Ecology of Suburbia,” in Neighborhood and Community Environments, ed. Irwin Altman and Abraham Wandersman, 191–221 (New York: Plenium Press, 1987), 199.
Catherine Jurca, White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 4.
Barbara Ching and Gerald W Creed, eds. Knowing Your Place: Rural Identity and Cultural Hierarchy (New York: Routledge, 1997), 3.
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 170.
Martyn Lee, “Relocating Location: Cultural Geography, the Specificity of Place and the City Habitus,” in Cultural Methodologies, ed. Jim McGuigan, 126–141 (London: Sage, 1997), 132.
Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 82.
Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 44.
D. J. Waldie, Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1996), 118.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 4.
Philip Y. Nicholson, “The Elusive Soul of the Suburbs: An Inquiry into Contemporary Political Culture,” in Suburbia Re-examined, ed. Barbara M. Kelly, 207–213 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), 207.
Yi-Fu Tuan, Landscapes of Fear (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979).
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© 2004 Robert Beuka
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Beuka, R. (2004). Introduction Utopia, Dystopia, Heterotopia. In: SuburbiaNation. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-73210-4_1
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