The suburb was the major political, economic, spatial, and demographic project of the twentieth-century United States. Whereas in the nineteenth century, most Americans lived in places that could be defined using the traditional distinction between urban and rural, there now emerged a third kind of place that seemed to rest uneasily between the two, one that seemed to be both urban and rural—or perhaps neither. These kinds of places grew at startling speed in the postwar US—between 1950 and 1970, the suburban population doubled, while eighty-three percent of all population growth occurred in suburbs. And yet today, while a majority of Americans identify their place of residence as “suburban,” the government still has no formal definition for such places. What, then, is a “suburb,” a place seemingly defined in the negative, by being “less” than urban?
In this course, we will embark on an investigation of this vast, slippery, but hugely important phenomenon, which represents a dramatic reconfiguration of the way Americans live, work, play, and relate to one another. Together, we’ll ask: who or what prompted this great reorganization, when, and why? What’s the relationship between suburb and city? What did a move to the suburbs promise Americans of varying stripes, whether government officials, banks, builders, manufacturers, or consumers themselves? How were images of a suburban dream created and sold? What were the consequences of separating home, work, and leisure and knitting them together with the automobile, a device whose use became virtually compulsory? How did suburbanization contribute to the formation of a “consumer’s republic” where access to cheap goods came to replace substantive control over one’s time and one’s life? How did suburbanization respond to and shape transformations in class, race, gender, and the family? What was its relationship to property, ownership, and debt? Finally, what have been the ecological consequences of suburbs? Texts are likely to include works by Lizabeth Cohen, Kenneth Jackson, Owen Gutfreund, Dolores Hayden, Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen, Andrew Wiese, Thomas Sugrue, John Cheever, and others.
