Ties that Bind? The Social Fabric of Daily Life in New Suburbs

The greater Dublin conurbation has now reached the 1.5 million mark. Over the last 15 years, most urban growth has taken place not at the core of the city, but on its periphery. The word ‘suburbs’ refers to those residential areas that are found around the periphery of urban centres. Suburban residents were previously thought to depend upon the urban core for work, shopping, and recreational and cultural pursuits. But this dependence on a centre is no longer seen as a crucial feature of suburbs. As Figure 11.1 clearly illustrates, Dublin has been characterised by peripheral urban development since the early 1990s. While the Dublin urban core grew only minimally between 1991 and 2002, the city expanded into the hinterland creating new suburban neighbourhoods. The further one travels from the city centre, the more marked this suburban growth.

A negative view of the suburbs infuses the sociological literature and the public imagination. The suburbs are frequently represented as places of homogeneity and uniformity, of stifling conformity, of social atomisation and isolation, of withdrawal from public life into the privacy of domestic life. Indeed, although people move to the suburbs in order to enhance the quality of family life, sociologists and other commentators have portrayed suburbs as negative environments for the family, due to the isolation of the nuclear family from the support that wider kinship networks provide, both in inner city and rural environments. This portrayal of suburban life is found in some of the specialised literature on the subject (for instance, Baumgartner, 1988; Fishman, 1987, and, less directly, Sennett, 1970), but this characterisation of suburbs prevails mainly in a range of journal articles and books that touch the topic without engaging with it.