Introduction

Abstract

‘Post-suburbia’ is a term that encapsulates a variety of contemporary urban forms — ‘edge cities’ (Garreau, 1991), ‘edgeless cities’ (Lang, 2003), ‘exurbia’ (Soja, 2000), ‘technoburbs’ (Fishman, 1987) — perceived to be part of the expanding urban fabric of metropolitan regions. Either at their creation or through the subsequent accretion of commercial and economic activities to residential development, these spaces are distinctly post-suburban. While post-suburbia remains invested with much of the ideological elements associated with suburbia its economic function entails a set of political-economic tensions (Teaford, 1997). It is some of these political-economic tensions that we seek to explore in this book when considering the development of five post-suburban municipalities at the edge of European capital cities.

Over the centuries that followed, catastrophic incursions of the sea into the land of this kind happened time and again… Little by little the people of Dunwich accepted the inevitability of their hopeless struggle, turned their backs on the sea, and… built to the westward in a protracted flight that went on for generations; the slowly dying town thus followed — by reflex, one might say — one of the fundamental patterns of human behaviour. A strikingly large number of our settlements are oriented to the west and, where circumstances permit, relocate in a westward direction. The east stands for lost causes.

W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn