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Ségrégation et justice spatiale

 | 
Sylvie Fol
, 
Sonia Lehman-Frisch
, 
Marianne Morange

Espaces publics et exclusion spatiale

“Bad Spaces?”: Interrogating Suburbs, Myth and Spatial Justice

Gary W. McDonogh

Texte intégral

  • 1 Mathieu Kassovitz, La Haine, 1995.
  • 2 Lançon Georges and Bouchoud Nicolas, Ces banlieues qui nous font peur, Paris, L’Harmattan, “Questi (...)
  • 3 Touraine Alain, “Face à l’exclusion”, in Citoyenneté et Urbanité, Paris, Esprit, 1991, p. 165-173 (...)

1The riots that have repeatedly encircled Paris and ignited other suburban communities around France in the 21st century provide iconic visions of the banlieue as social problem. Powerful images of burning cars, angry youths and social injustice resonate with cinema1 and social studies that analyze “ces banlieues qui nous font peur2”. For many global spectators, the vivid demands of these youths in bleak places far from the promises of Paris, have epitomized issues of space and social justice through the stark polarity of city and suburb. Yet, as Alain Touraine noted decades ago, “Ce qu’on appelle d’un terme symbolique la banlieue, c’est justement cette zone de grande incertitude et de tensions où les gens ne savent pas s’ils vont tomber du côté des in ou du côté des out 3”.

  • 4 Wacquant Loïc, “Urban Outcastes”, in International Journal of Urban And Regional Research, n° 17/3 (...)
  • 5 Leinberger Christopher,“The Next Slum?”, in The Atlantic, mars 2008, http:// www.theatlantic.com/d (...)
  • 6 Nicolaides Becky, “How Hell Moved from the City to the Suburbs”, in The New Suburban History, Kevi (...)

2Rap artists, journalists and social analysts have drawn parallels between these banlieues and American inner cities4. By contrast, these iconic Parisian suburbs seem far from the middle class homes, lawns and private lives associated with American suburbia, which have spatialized the American dream for many. Both developments embody terrains of difference vis-à-vis the city, but the content of the difference appears irreconcilable. Commentators, nonetheless, have attacked American suburbs for social segregation, cultural complacency, ecological depredation and even issues of physical and mental health. In fall 2008, with the U. S. facing a national mortgage crisis, high gas prices and crises of confidence, an observer even spatialized regional problems in once-glorious suburbia: “the story of vacant suburban homes and declining suburban neighborhoods did not begin with the crisis, and will not end with it. A structural change is under way in the housing market-a major shift in the way many Americans want to live and work. It has shaped the current downturn, steering some of the worst problems away from the cities and toward the suburban fringes5”. As historian Becky Nicolaides observed, images of Hell have been transposed onto Arcadia6.

3In this essay, I reread American suburbs (and other global suburbs) to highlight a complex underlying theme: the transformation of varied suburban peoples and places into myths of the anti-city and the implications of the designation of suburbs as “bad places” for inclusive metropolitan spatial justice. From France and the U. S. to Latin America, Asia, and Africa, gated communities, habitat pavillonaire, shantytowns, grands ensembles and sprawling subdivisions of uniform houses have formed elements in discussions of the good city. Yet, in many cases, this use of suburbs in metropolitan arguments involves a reduction that conceals the complex historical, social and economic processes that constitute such areas, the agents who work to better them and the shared forces creating or constraining cities and suburbs. Suburbs as “bad places” have an intimate relation to urban social justice in so far as they are read as projections and opposites rather than places of growth that share problems of race, class, gender and civic rights. Whether suburbs are heavens or hells, mythologization undercuts voices who should be part of local and regional discussions and solutions of spatial justice.

  • 7 Orfield Myron, American Metropolitics, Washington, Brookings Institute, 2002.

4In defining myth, I draw primarily on its use in anthropology (while recognizing important convergences with Lefebvre’s conception). In anthropological terms, a myth is a narrative-like cluster, often set in past or distant (disembodied) times, that charters values, institutions, dialogue and conflict in the present. In contemporary multi-mediated societies, these narratives echo and transform across multiple media-journalism, mass media, academic studies and personal narratives. This diffusion introduces indeterminacies in story and interpretations and also conceals underlying elements. In no case, though, should myths be taken as mere falsehoods, even if they are false (as Orfield notes in his seminal American Metropolics7). Myths are framing rather than falsifiable; hence, their invisible power in policy and other issues.

  • 8 Barthes Roland, Mythologies, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1957.
  • 9 Ibid., p. 259-264.
  • 10 Spigel Lynn, Welcome to the Dreamhouse, Durham, NC, Duke, 2001; Amorin Marilia, Images et discours (...)

5For anthropological work in contemporary settings, literary critic Roland Barthes remains a key figure because of his recognition of the politics of myth in everyday life, crystallized in concrete places, objects and scenarios of modern France and his attention to functions through which myth reinforces power8. Barthes saw myths as the “Signes Zodiacaux de l’univers bourgeois: les Essences et les Balances9”. His readings of modern French space and society, in fact, guide us in a skeptical analysis of dichotomies of suburb and city that have framed spatial questions, excluded voices and thwarted meaningful responses. Such dichotomies invoke recurrent processes of myth, including the concealment of history, arguments through false alternatives, and reduction of data. Barthes’insights also inform a dialogue with recent scholars in media, urban/suburban history and related fields10.

  • 11 Barthes Roland, Mythologies, op. cit., p. 257.

6To link myth and demythologization to spatial justice, we also must remember Barthes’observation that “statistiquement, le mythe est à droite. Là, il est essentiel, bien nourri, puissant, expansif, bavard11..” This recognition, fundamental to imbalances of power and voice between cities and French banlieues or Latin American villas miserias, proves equally compelling in settings where suburbs are identified with power, as in the U. S. Demythologization, in turn, moves toward inclusive spatial and social justice: to challenge myths, we must explain how constructed differences have divided society and restricted inclusive dialogue and change. At the same time, we must grapple with the lived experiences that myths ignore. Only with critical reading and experiential investigation can we reimagine suburbs within a different paradigm, in which:

  • 12 Young Iris Marion, Democracy and Inclusion, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 229.

The scope of the polity. ought to coincide with the scope of the obligations of justice which people have in relation to one another because their lives are intertwined in social, economic, and communicative relations that tie their fate12.

7My examination of suburban myth is grounded in historical, ethnographic and cultural studies, everyday life in American metropoles, and comparative fieldwork in suburban Paris, Hong Kong, and Latin America. In this global project, I have examined structural and visual forms, processes of political economic development and the social, cultural and texts about places outside the city while raising children, shopping, eating out, being a neighbor and commuting. The quotidian cannot refute myth but often challenges it. Comparison, similarly, underscores how myths shape spatial justice in general and homogenize, silence and divide spaces and people. To illustrate problems in this essentialist separation in this essay, I focus on two key themes in U. S. materials: the racialization of space and justice and the (mis) reading of public spheres and alternative sites of metropolitan dialogue.

Divided Metropoles: Race, Place and Suburbs

  • 13 Gans Herbert, The Levittowners, London, Penguin, 1967.

8In the United States, postwar suburban development often has been explained by stark geographies of the “Other”, delineated via race and class. “White flight”, for example, identifies suburbs with racialized escape of the white middle class from the city. Many suburban stories emphasize such exclusiveness: Herbert Gans, for example, in his classic Levittowners chronicles how African-American families were excluded in this new development outside Philadelphia13. Gans, however, carefully showed how new suburbanites continued attitudes formed in the city rather than simply inventing or expressing new forms. And, over decades, Levittowns have become integrated in multiple dimensions as they have evolved in physical form and social meaning.

9Racialization, for many liberal urban observers, nonetheless transformed the utopian imagery of earlier elite suburban development, adding dark moral dimensions. Images of suburbanite’s abandonment of the impoverished racialized inner city, for example, spatialized fundamental questions about inclusive versus exclusive social visions and shared responsibilities versus private gains. Yet, this fundamental creation myth of suburbs, which journalists and even academics invoke today, overlooks historical processes, local complexities and cross-cutting metropolitan processes.

  • 14 Lower Merion Historical Society, The First 300: The Amazing and Rich History of Lower Merion, LMHS (...)

10Pennsylvania’s Main Line, for example, where I live and teach, is an elite railroad suburb that formed around great homes in the late 19th century14. Myths of race, class and space have been reinforced by the built fabric of great estates, journalists and social commentators and Hollywood films like George Cukor’s Philadelphia Story (1940). In the early 20th century, essayist Christopher Morley, scion of local suburban university professors, used the commuter rail journey from the city to these suburbs to crystallize his vision of Arcadia:

  • 15 Morley Christopher, “The Paoli Local”, in Christopher Morley’s Philadelphia, Ken Kalfus (ed.), New (...)

At Overbrook one gets one’s first glimpse of those highly civilized suburbs. It is a gloriously sunny May afternoon. Three girls are sitting under a hedge at the top of the embankment reading a magazine. Toward Merion we skirt a brightly sliding little brook under willow trees, with glimpses of daintily supervised wilderness. It is all so trimly artificial that one is surprised to see that the rubbery stalks of the dandelion have evaded the lawn-mowers just as they do in less carefully razored suburbs15.

  • 16 Ibid., p. 231.

11Vivid, personal images here create a transcendant space of controlled nature, gendered leisure, and “civilization.” Unspoken rights of race and that bind these images into “the loveliest spot on earth, now and forever16!”.

  • 17 Bosworth Marion, Housing Conditions in Main Line Towns, Committee on Investigation of Main Line Ho (...)

12Even as Morley wrote, however, African-American, Irish, Italians and other working class Americans had joined wealthy homeowners on the Main Line. They found stable employment in great homes, on the railroad, or in institutions such as colleges, hospitals, hotels and government. While Morley opposed the sylvan idyll of the Main Line to the smoke, vacant ground and rowdy children of the city, social researcher Marion Bosworth noted a spatial symbiosis across classes in a report on housing that claimed spatial justice for those confined in the slums of the Main Line: “if the country is good for the rich it is also good for the poor, and if the country is desired by the rich it may likewise be desired by the poor17.”. Here, spaces of the Main Line become dystopic:

  • 18 Ibid., p. 5.

Workers living in places where filth and squalor and disease are more prominent even than country air and sunshine, and laboring in the country by day where the very words filth and squalor seem anomalies, are another means of contact between the poorly housed and the well-to-do18.

13Race and class converged as element and challenges for Main Line rather than issues “outside” the suburbs. Indeed, Bosworth read housing problems in the wider context of metropolitan social justice:

  • 19 Ibid.

In the country the interrelation of rich and poor and their reciprocal effect upon each other is no less strong because it is not seen, as it were, through a magnifying glass, and is prone to be overlooked. The very thing which makes it possible for slums to exist in the country, the demand for workers, brings the connection between the two extremes of society very close19.

  • 20 Wiese Andrew, Places Of Their Own, Chicago, University Of Chicago Press, 2004, p. 4.

14The Main Line, in fact, participated in wider national movements of race, class and space often invisible in later suburban myth. Andrew Wiese’work on African-American suburbia shows that working-class Blacks created their suburban spaces by moving towards the city (from rural and urban settings) as much as escaping from it. During the American Great Migration (1910-20), 15 % of all Black migrants moved to suburbs rather than cities in the North. They built homes that incorporated work places, productive gardens and rental sites for kin and others. After World War II, suburban development took more upper class residential retreats from the city as their “model” in both sales and “white” self-identity: an iconography of homogeneity that in turn would become an ahistorical paradigm for both supporters and critics. But as Wiese insists, the disappearance of African-American voice and examples from narratives of suburbia never meant displacement of African-American communities. Today, twelve million African-Americans live in suburbs ranging from old working class cores to new elite subdivisions. Yet, even scholars of suburbia who have fought to integrate suburbs often accepted suburbia’s intrinsic whiteness20.

15As I have found in my own work, presence, historical and enduring, does not disprove myths of space or rights. In Savannah, Georgia, for example, in the early 1900s, Alsatian Catholic missionaries developed a near-suburban space on industrial lowlands west of the city for an African-American school and congregation. The Savannah Tribune of August 17, 1909 noted:

  • 21 McDonogh Gary, Black and Catholic in Savannah, Georgia, Knoxville, University Of Tennessee, 1993, (...)

Lots are being sold there every-day. A few beautiful homes have already been erected by colored men, who are being moved by the praiseworthy ambition of having their own sweet home. Soon a nice colony of colored citizens will be established on that beautiful healthy spot where peace and happiness will reign supreme21.

16Black suburbanization was part of preaching conversion and a religious commitment to racial justice, offering security, health and opportunity against the divisions of a segregated Southern city.

  • 22 Ibid.

17Despite decades of development, African-Americans complained decades later that the Catholic hierarchy did not recognize the spatial implications of their history. Closure of the black parish schools to produce integrated (previously white) units embittered many. Others argued that the diocese would not let them transfer an inner city, traditionally black parish to a new suburban lot they had acquired. Identified with urban missionary efforts to the poor, these parishioners felt they were denied the mobility through which white parishioners created new suburban churches. Ironically, some of these newer suburban parishes, in territories less imbued with urban racial categories, have experienced racial integration and incorporated new global migrants far better than fading white center city parishes. Still, myths of place and justice denied suburban movement as an option, much less a solution, for black questions about place and rights22.

  • 23 Mallowe, 1983, in Pottinger Trecia, Rethinking Race, Class and Space on Philadelphia’s Main Line” (...)

18This power of myth resonates among African-American, Irish, Italian, Jews and others in marked categories in Main Line settings today. In so far as “white” became an unmarked feature of suburban place, even anomalies came to reaffirm myth. By the 1950s, for example, the Woodman mansion, built by a 19th century Euro-American industrialist, became the center for a worldwide Afrocentric religious movement and the charismatic Father Divine, who showed his unique power by his place in of this white domain. A commentator in the 1980s added that “as one Main Line lady put it, One really ceases to be black or Jewish as soon as one is worth $10 million23”. Differences of race fade along tree-lined streets of privilege.

19Nonetheless, Black communities survive; churches, funeral homes, recreational and service associations and commercial institutions still are centers for specific ethnic and racial publics, sustained by generations of praxis rather than laws. Middle-class black families with long-rooted social ties and multiple local/national institutions form part of the variegated Main Line amidst new middle-class housing and a few remaining mansions. Yet, new people have moved into new developments and older housing, remapping spaces. On the one hand, multicultural professionals associated with local colleges and hospitals or metropolitan wealth have claimed places that affirm class while not challenging older images of once-white suburbia. On the other, neither the architectural fabric of older Black and working class areas nor neighbors themselves constitute fixed spaces. Outsiders identify these areas as affordable housing within an expensive suburban region of strong schools, low taxes and extensive services. Older Main Line African-Americans may resist gentrification of traditionally African-American (and working class ethnic) neighborhoods, but because of a widespread reading of suburbs as “White”, they often lose their place and participation within this local space.

20Meanwhile, other changes in race and place continue in the Main Line, as in other American suburbs, but may also be eclipsed by mythic racialization of suburbs. Chinese, Japanese and Korean families have formed Saturday schools that use Main Line facilities for cultural training and social gatherings that reflect their growing suburban presence. Koreans rent worship space from one of the oldest congregations in the area, whose traditional Euro-American membership has dwindled. A new Latino population has emerged in both work and housing around Philadelphia, raising new questions of social justice with regard to new laborers in the community-echoing Bosworth’s 1919 comments. All these groups have become important in the transformations of other American suburban areas-yet mythic contrasts of homogeneous white suburbs and diverse cities conceal ongoing transnational transformations.

  • 24 Rybczynski Witold, Last Harvest: From Cornfield to New Town, New York, Scribner’s, 2008.

21Moreover, the powerfully discrete myth of the Main Line is not bounded by opposition to the city alone. Recognition of suburban diversity and its implications for inclusive justice must take into account the evolving regional physical, social and cultural context as well. Norristown, for example, the capital of Montgomery County, is a small suburban post-industrial city facing issues of economic restructuring among many poor and minority residents. One Levittown development in the area has celebrated its fiftieth anniversary of change and diversification, inviting Gans himself as a keynote speaker. Nearby Upper Darby has accommodated multiple migrations yet has become a center for Korean investment and commerce. Meanwhile, outlying suburbs have been sites of rapid greenfield development that outstrip planning and services despite strategies to conserve land and privilege through conservancies and other strategies of zoning and reproduction24. These suburbs and their residents have strong feelings of difference and distinctiveness vis-a-vis their “neighbors.” Reducing them to a simple geography of white middle class communities obscures historical processed and complex motivations that have created metropolitan black, white and hybrid suburbanization.

22Such mythological divisions increase the difficulty of seeking metropolitan social justice across culturally-accepted divides. A review of changing issues of poverty in the U. S., for example, notes that:

  • 25 Frey William H, “Melting Pot Suburbs: A Study of Suburban Diversity”, in Redefining Urban and Subu (...)

Shifts caused the city-suburb poverty gap to narrow overall, but the rift remains wide, to the point that city residents remain more than twice as likely to be poor as their suburban counterparts. Likewise the share of the poor population residing in suburbs increased during the 1990s, though even so, half of all poor people in the United State’s largest metropolitan areas still live in central cities25.

23Older suburbs in the U. S. have become centers for immigration, racial mixture and concomitant “urban” questions of poverty or educational demands which vary, as noted, among the Main Line and other contiguous places but ultimately influence all of them as well as the cities they surround. While suburbs and cities differ, they do so within shared trajectories that suggest the need for shared solutions. In the past few years, in fact, grassroots demands have challenged mythic barriers as Greater Philadelphians have met and discussed common issues, creating a new space for “First Suburbs” cutting across jurisdictions of city and county, following people and issues instead of boundaries.

  • 26 Salcedo Rodrigo and Torres Alvaro, “Gated Communities in Santiago: Wall or Frontier?”, in Internat (...)

24The diffuse distribution of social issues and social solutions in these U. S. cases has global implications. Squatters and poverty taken as emblematic of the periphery of many Latin America cities constitute powerful symbols of fear and division within the metropolis. Yet, residents from these areas work across the city and its spaces even if they cannot find homes there. At the same time, we should also pay attention to the multiple meaning of “walls” in Latin American suburbs, where elite gated communities have now laid spatial claims to many shanty areas. Here, scholars have suggested that these areas may be symbiotic as well as antagonistic, as elites rely on a local labor pool and squatters experience improved local facilities and voice26. Resolving these issues demands Young’s wider dialogue rather than walls of exclusion and hostility that preclude spatial justice for cities and squatters peripheries.

25All these examples challenge simple, absolute division of bad suburbs and good cities through essentialization, contrast and alienation of history in Barthian terms. Constructed polarities divide publics and issues through false absolutes; thus, these processes shape how space and justice are conceived, much less achieved. They also may silence or conceal sites of dialogue and new visions themselves within this mythic landscape, as we may see in an examination of suburban public spheres and spaces.

Public, Private and Non-Spaces: Crucibles of Social Justice

26Reduction of suburbs to monolithic images raises issues of spatial justice within suburbs and within larger connected regions. Another set of images of American suburbs as “bad spaces” identifies them as inarticulate place markers in such debates as well. Mythic U. S. suburbs are distilled into mute mass media icons such as a single-family home, the car (station wagon, van, SUV), lawns and malls; all these images evoke pervasive themes of privacy, exclusion and alienation in opposition to the vital public spaces and public spheres of the city championed by Jorgen Habermas, Jane Jacobs or Lewis Mumford. Hence, in mass media, planning models and academic texts, the home and car become insular domains; the mall, a corporate pseudo-public space; and television, an insidious villain. Suburbs are places without dialogue or ideas.

27Metropolitan commentators and planners often have cited these features of suburbia as harbingers of spreading alienation, opposing a mythic city of public contact, exciting encounters and rich discussions to seemingly empty, alienated spaces where passive suburbanite live within cocoons of spatial exclusivity. Such images pervade plans for reform of soulless suburbs, from New Towns to New Urbanism. One might object that such visions idealized the city as well: not all cities are New York, Berlin or Paris. Nor are elite cafés and other fora prized by flaneurs and commentators equally accessible to all citizens. Small cities, working class neighborhoods and suburbs may lack canonically intense public spaces, but they also incorporate interesting alternatives. Through recognition of mythic reductions and suburban experiences, in fact, we can learn about wider forms of public space, public spheres and spatial justice in cities as well.

  • 27 Kolb David, Sprawling Places, Athens, University of Georgia Press, 2008.

28Often, the issue seems to be how we read spaces of planned or new development as well as people who use, connect and complicate even anodyne places27. As a suburban resident and scholar, I know banality and places of emptiness. I also experience multiple public and semi-public spaces where my neighbors interact as parts of everyday life. Defining suburbs as lands without expected urban public spaces in opposition to “cities”, though, denies the very possibility of agency in social action, of voices of dissent and change. Instead, I argue that these interactions are intrinsic to suburban life and underscore connections to urban fora as well as possibilities for local and metropolitan social change. Examples are surprisingly easy to find in life, if not in the literature on these suburbs, as I suggest through my own rhythms of schools, associations, libraries and churches as well as research in the U. S. and abroad.

  • 28 Orfield Myron, American Metropolitics, op. cit.

29Many American critics of suburbs, for example, have signaled public schools as critical sites of investment, population and privilege dividing cities and suburbs (despite the wide variation among suburbs in many regions28). Schools, however, also articulate multiple “communities” around activities, responsibilities and social networks. Networks grow through children and class activity: ongoing reproduction as a goal of suburban homes. Schools also evoke counterpublics epitomized by images of youth gathering in marginal space in American suburbs-parking lots, cemeteries, wild parties, and unpoliced school functions-that locate intergenerational debate in suburbs as well (and resonate with images of banlieues and shantytowns as well).

30Associations transcend schools through parents as well. The morning bus stop, for example, becomes a site for conversation, gossip and politics. This intensification of neighborly contacts across generations creates functional political and social networks in home and school associations. School issues motivate political forums as well: local elections have turned on school funding and taxation issues, while redistricting brings parents and students into public meetings.

31Yet public spheres originating in suburban public schools do not embrace the entire territory of even the Main Line, where elite private schools that screen candidates according to various criteria while charging for their selective educational services. Catholic and Jewish schools also reconstitute suburban ethnic identity and community. Together, these account for nearly one-third of all students, creating a complex tapestry of institutions and meanings. All these facilities, as monumental semi-public places, can foment other networks around Saturday immigrant schools, sporting events, and public performances. And all connected with other urban and suburban schools through partnerships, rivalries and circulation of teachers and students over time.

32Despite American sociological concerns with declining social capital in suburbia, a vast range of associations also unites and divides this suburban space, organized around places, ethnic groups, interests, social categories or gendered roles (women’s clubs). Some also bridge social divides to create social capital and address the inequalities intrinsic to local space. The century-old YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association), combines religious and civic mission on the Main Line. It moved five decades ago from a commercial location near to traditionally black and working class men to a site ensconced in more upscale, predominantly white residential zone one kilometer away. Nonetheless, it promotes diverse participation in camps, after school programs and athletics and shares programs with YMCAs across the metropolitan region.

33Other suburban institutions go beyond formal roles implicit in architectural monumentality to foster multiple publics. Main Line libraries, for example, are among the most monumental of public institutions near my home. They provide books, films and other material to any resident of the township. As social and intellectual centers, they participate in campaigns of shared reading that echo the “One Book, One City” campaign of Philadelphia. In addition, libraries offer meeting spaces, drop off points and after school activities, and host myriad activities for citizens of all ages, ranging from story readings to tutoring to temporary shelter for the homeless. In fact, the very complexity of these centers underscore how multilayered communities are as branches encased in sober Quaker buildings combine special African-American collections with large print books, children’s rooms and heavily used computers. Library environs provide important open spaces as well. Their lawns have hosted summer concerts, art exhibits and political actions; I have met neighbors in candlelight vigils against the war and random encounters on the steps of branches. Here, it is not their difference from urban public spaces but the roles these spaces share with similar urban institutions of conversation and protest that demand demythologization. And suggest that we also pay attention to the intersection of other open spaces-parks, playgrounds and even semiprivate swaths of lawns-as places of social interaction as well as boundaries.

  • 29 McDonogh Gary, “Suburban Place, Mythic Thinking and the Transformation of Global Cities”, in Urban (...)

34As I have noted in other work29, the problems in essentialist oppositions of public cities and private suburbs seem especially acute with regard to churches, synagogues and other religious spaces. Despite religious institutions’recognized roles as platforms for ethnic integration and urban protest in American history, suburban churches have been met with skepticism or glossed over in suburban studies. Even reports that highlight the centrality of churches in far-flung new exurban growth-providing social centers, daycare and schools and support in areas not served by the social contract of public governance-often use these examples to lament the absence of “real” public spaces and spheres. This resonates with an antagonism to churches as public spaces among postwar suburban planners and reformers in the United States-a theme that deserves comparative considerations in other exurban settings. Such new models and analyses, however, pay scant attention to processes that have created urban and suburban spaces.

35Across the U. S., religious meetings in homes were often the first sites of local and community life in nascent suburbs and points of identity in places swallowed by exurban growth. Congregations, buildings and cemeteries became nuclei for those who have created community life outside settled urban centers, as in the early spread of Philadelphia Quakerism that still anchors historic Main Line settlements. Over succeeding centuries, people, institutions and meanings of religion have moved from city to suburb, where citizens have actively recreated have added history and memory to the raw new landscapes of suburbs. In some cases, the existence of a fledgling religious nucleus has been a promise of continuity; in others, it has been one of the first spatial commitments or the first marker of difference.

36Suburban history and diversity are intertwined with the religious landscape and its social meanings and the Main Line township of Lower Merion has more than sixty religious institutions for its 58,000 residents. Even in the material presence of their sanctuaries, religious spaces, with their opportunities for teaching, preaching, discussion and identity constitute a network of styles, populations and issues rather than suburban homogeneity. Landmark Episcopalian churches claim landscaped places of privilege, while other denominations have adopted colonial or Gothic designs as statements of history, while several synagogues and churches boast intensely modern style. Still others have converted Main Line mansions into sanctuaries for Armenians, Catholic Colleges and the home of the Foundation for Islamic Education.

37Churches anchor time and power in suburban space. Although some approach mega-church status with more than 3,000 members, or dominate neighborhoods with their spires and chimes, others hang on with only a handful of loyal supporters. While many of these institutions occupy visible places along major suburban arteries, African-American churches, anchors of their communities, tend to be tucked away in side streets. Their congregations, nonetheless have been vocal and visible in many questions of race and social justice while other citizens have crossed color lines to create religious and social places of integration.

38Beyond sanctuaries and cemeteries, Main Line religious institutions also recreate faith communities through schools, including multiple regional seminaries, Catholic and Quaker colleges, and Catholic, Jewish, Episcopalian and Islamic day schools. These complement the daycare, youth training and adult activities that affirm generations and life courses within individual congregations.

39Religions sites are, of course, “private” spaces. In practice, however, they often act as semi-public spaces, hosting concerts and town planning meetings, day care, Alcoholics Anonymous, educational projects and diverse social groups. On election days, canvassers and voting machines bustle in and around church basements. Certainly such places may become nodes of exclusivity, discrimination, injustice and even hatred. Still, their partial permeability forces us to rethink the concepts of public space used in urban discourse, where religious and private origins of public spaces have been concealed under centuries of evolving use.

40Finally, the religious public sphere, like other associations, crosses urban-suburban divides. Catholic and Jewish social justice missions act on a metropolitan level. Partnered denominational institutions create social ties across jurisdictional lines. Religious affiliates have been active in First Suburbs meetings I have attended at a college in the Quaker tradition (Bryn Mawr), a suburban Catholic high school and a Catholic parish in Norristown. Moreover, people from suburbs may drive hours to participate in an inherited urban community, while others may change congregations in search of leadership, ambience and issues.

41These spaces may not resemble the great public squares or idealized cafés that has dominated discussion of the public sphere. Yet, we must not equate form with function-whether demanding grand plazas in suburbs or assuming that all such inherited spaces fulfill these idealized social roles in contemporary cities. Suburbs, reflecting their origins in expansion beyond cities, are about creating space, physically and socially, rather than the manifest hierarchies that often have characterized urbane constructed public spaces. Within this ongoing evolution of new places, the sheer ordinariness of suburban public spaces and public spheres renders them less visible but all the more important to identify as crucibles for discussion of spatial justice. Exclusions or undervaluation of churches, schools, libraries (and markets, streets, post offices and stores) by planners and academics obscures the variety and evolution of suburban space, society and culture and fundamental quests for meaning and justice that suburbanites share as global citizens.

  • 30 Bennhold Katrin, “French Muslims Find Haven in Catholic Schools”, in New York Times, September 29, (...)
  • 31 Charef Mehdi, Le Thé au harem d’Archi Ahmed, Paris, Mercure de France, 1985; Lepoutre David, Cour (...)
  • 32 See the local socialist housing blog on this point at hto:// ps-sarcelles.hautetort.com/archive/20 (...)

42In global suburban settings, many depictions of the poverty of public space echo the bland landscape imputed to American suburbia. Public and semi-public social spaces-schools, bars and restaurants, streets, markets, churches and other sites-nonetheless articulate these landscapes worldwide. In France, for example, religious institutions seem to have claimed problematic places in working class suburbs, whether in the rise and fall of worker-priests in older suburban factories or the religious institutions of new suburban Islam-and the lives of suburban synagogues-that have surfaced in discussion of social unrest. Indeed, a 2008 New York Times piece underscores the creative connection of religious spaces as Muslim students find spiritual sanctuary and dialogic homes within Catholic schools, constituting perhaps 10 % of all Catholic school students30. Other portraits of contemporary banlieue life emphasize the intense creation of spaces of interaction around bars, markets and schools, or, in the case of alienated youth, around almost any abandoned space within their environment31. These texts and studies underscore connections of urban and suburban lives and the significance of suburban counter-publics for lived geographies that disrupt mythic spaces and reframe spatial justice. Analysts have even underscored how creative use of “bad spaces” can foster community through shared experience in zones like Sarcelles and La Courneuve, identified with the bleakest alienation of French high-rise public housing32. Perhaps the messages of rap, novels and conversations in Petit Casinos, garages and market stalls can teach us about agents and actions who define spaces of potential justice even within bleak sub-urbscapes.

43In denying the public sphere of suburbia, planners and analysts shaped by urban myths and belief in difference overlook the malleability of space and the creativity of human populations. Not recognizing that many places can serve as points for the creation of diverse publics within a metropolitan region, they reaffirm visions of inevitable separation. In denigrating or disallowing these possibilities, they also delimit voices and concerns of the public space/public sphere that might allow agents to respond and go beyond their complaints.

44Instead, I argue that interrogations of suburban public space and public spheres help us reinterpret public spaces and spatial justice in cities as well. When police patrol urban parks worldwide to exclude skateboarders or protestors, libraries close on weekends due to shortage of funds and gentrification challenges the boundaries of behavior in parks and streetscapes, are malls, churches and other “suburban spaces” qualitatively different or points on a spectrum of creative and hybrid spaces with a range of present and potential meanings? Suburban issues offer challenges within wider metropolitan and national frames that balance institution and process, social justice and ideologies of space and place.

Conclusions: Spaces, Voices and Justice

45Suburban myths, in the U. S. and many other places, have become “second nature”, fodder for situation comedies and journalistic commentary. Visualizations of American suburbia replete with white middle-class single- family homes with stereotyped gender roles, spaces and characters facing offstage work or danger reproduce myths across media and society, as noted in a review of the American cable series Weeds:

  • 33 Siegeil Lee, “Suburban Blight”, inThe New Republic Online, August 11, 2005 http://www. nr.com/doc. (...)

When all else fails, when American life gets too complicated and wacky to get a good satirical hold on, writers repair to the suburbs. The unlovely secrets harbored by the ranch houses, and bi-levels, by the lawns and empty sidewalks of the towns lying just beyond the fervid cities have been to American novelists, screenwriters, and television writers what plutocrats were to Daumier. Behind every traveling sprinkler there is a penis longing to wander.
Artists and intellectuals have always hated the suburbs, probably because it’s the cities that produce works of art and intellect33.

46Guided by historical, ethnographic and political economic data, we can reread these images to understand more complex relations of myth, power, voice and spatial justice. Such an approach resonates with Myrto Konstakorakos’reading of French banlieue films as oppositional voices that challenge reductionist polarizations of space:

  • 34 Konstantorakos Myrto, “The film de banlieue: Renegotiating the Representation of Urban Space”, in (...)

despite their label, they are not strictly about banlieues, but about the distance between the centre and the margin and the stark division between two worlds that cannot understand each other, nor communicate to reduce their tensions. The banlieue films challenge the official representation of space by rethinking the relationship between centre and periphery34.

47These readings take us back to central questions of space, dialogue and justice that have been argued here through the fundamental claim that both suburbs and cities, as spaces of myth, demand nuanced analysis. Shared myths of suburbia, generalized within both metropolitan and national cultures, heighten contrasts and normalize symbolic spaces within a tense, changing and vitally interconnected metropolitan realm. Through these myths, many societies have crystallized strengths, problems and partial solutions for suburbs as for cities. Yet, while these certainties have delimited the transformation of urban/suburban America, they must be called into question there and elsewhere, challenging suburbs as anti-urban spaces. As I have argued, suburbs as places and processes certainly differ from cities (and from other suburbs), yet the qualities of such difference need not preclude connection and comparison of real value to analysts and citizens. Suburbs as metropolitan creations provide laboratories that reveal-as cities have done for millennia-what people value as humans in groups, creating built environments, balancing justice and opportunity, experiencing and changing place. Thus, the exploration of uncertainties outside the city clarifies both knowledge and values of action for the future of metropolitan spatial justice.

Notes

1 Mathieu Kassovitz, La Haine, 1995.

2 Lançon Georges and Bouchoud Nicolas, Ces banlieues qui nous font peur, Paris, L’Harmattan, “Questions Contemporaines”, 2000.

3 Touraine Alain, “Face à l’exclusion”, in Citoyenneté et Urbanité, Paris, Esprit, 1991, p. 165-173 et 167.

4 Wacquant Loïc, “Urban Outcastes”, in International Journal of Urban And Regional Research, n° 17/3, 1993, p. 366-383; Boyer Jean-Claude, Les Banlieues en France, Paris, Armand Colin, “Collection U” 2000; etc.

5 Leinberger Christopher,“The Next Slum?”, in The Atlantic, mars 2008, http:// www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/subprime.

6 Nicolaides Becky, “How Hell Moved from the City to the Suburbs”, in The New Suburban History, Kevin Kruse and T. J. Sugrue (eds.), Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2006, p. 80-99.

7 Orfield Myron, American Metropolitics, Washington, Brookings Institute, 2002.

8 Barthes Roland, Mythologies, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1957.

9 Ibid., p. 259-264.

10 Spigel Lynn, Welcome to the Dreamhouse, Durham, NC, Duke, 2001; Amorin Marilia, Images et discours sur la banlieue, Paris, Érès, 2002; Orfield Myron, American Metropolitics, op. cit. ; Katz Jack, “Metropolitan Crime Myths”, in New York & Los Angeles, Halle David (ed.), Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2003, p. 195-224; Dikeç Mustafa, Badlands of the Republic, Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 2007; Kevin Kruse and T. J. Sugrue, The New Suburban History, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2006; esp. Nicolaides Becky, “How Hell Moved from the City to the Suburbs”, op. cit.

11 Barthes Roland, Mythologies, op. cit., p. 257.

12 Young Iris Marion, Democracy and Inclusion, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 229.

13 Gans Herbert, The Levittowners, London, Penguin, 1967.

14 Lower Merion Historical Society, The First 300: The Amazing and Rich History of Lower Merion, LMHS, 2000.

15 Morley Christopher, “The Paoli Local”, in Christopher Morley’s Philadelphia, Ken Kalfus (ed.), New York, Fordham University, 1990, p. 12-14, p. 229-30.

16 Ibid., p. 231.

17 Bosworth Marion, Housing Conditions in Main Line Towns, Committee on Investigation of Main Line Housing Association, 1919, p. 4.

18 Ibid., p. 5.

19 Ibid.

20 Wiese Andrew, Places Of Their Own, Chicago, University Of Chicago Press, 2004, p. 4.

21 McDonogh Gary, Black and Catholic in Savannah, Georgia, Knoxville, University Of Tennessee, 1993, p. 156.

22 Ibid.

23 Mallowe, 1983, in Pottinger Trecia, Rethinking Race, Class and Space on Philadelphia’s Main Line” Black Suburbanites in Ardmore Pennsylvania, Unpublished Dissertation, American Studies, University of Minnesota, 2008, p. 31.

24 Rybczynski Witold, Last Harvest: From Cornfield to New Town, New York, Scribner’s, 2008.

25 Frey William H, “Melting Pot Suburbs: A Study of Suburban Diversity”, in Redefining Urban and Suburban America: Evidence from Census 2000, Katz Bruce J. and Lang Robert E. (eds.) vol. 1, Washington, DC, Brookings Institute, 2003, p. 17-136, p. 131; see Orfield Myron, American Metropolitics, op. cit.

26 Salcedo Rodrigo and Torres Alvaro, “Gated Communities in Santiago: Wall or Frontier?”, in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, n ° 28/1, March 2004, p. 27-44.

27 Kolb David, Sprawling Places, Athens, University of Georgia Press, 2008.

28 Orfield Myron, American Metropolitics, op. cit.

29 McDonogh Gary, “Suburban Place, Mythic Thinking and the Transformation of Global Cities”, in Urban Anthropology, vol. 35 (4), 2006, p. 471-501.

30 Bennhold Katrin, “French Muslims Find Haven in Catholic Schools”, in New York Times, September 29, 2008.

31 Charef Mehdi, Le Thé au harem d’Archi Ahmed, Paris, Mercure de France, 1985; Lepoutre David, Cour de banlieue, Paris, Odile Jacob, “Document”, 1997.

32 See the local socialist housing blog on this point at hto:// ps-sarcelles.hautetort.com/archive/2006/04/21/note-ed-lecture-sarcelles-une-utopie-reussie. html.

33 Siegeil Lee, “Suburban Blight”, inThe New Republic Online, August 11, 2005 http://www. nr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w050808& s= siegel081105.

34 Konstantorakos Myrto, “The film de banlieue: Renegotiating the Representation of Urban Space”, in Urban Space and Representation, Balshaw Maria and Kennedy Liam (eds.), London, Pluto Press 2000, p. 131-146, p. 135.

Auteur

Growth and Structure of Cities Department,
Bryn Mawr College

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