Many centers: suburban habitus

David Kolb

City, 2011, vol. 15, issue 2, 155-166

Abstract: New patterns of suburban development in America after 1945 offered space for modes of life different from the social habits of those moving from crowded cities. Over time those habits changed, and then they kept on changing as new kinds of networks developed, so that now much of the built pattern of suburbia lags behind social activities and roles. What happens when so many connections in suburban life become electronic rather than spatial? This paper recalls two kinds of suburbs, discusses the mutual interaction of social roles and spatial patterns, then the polycentric habitus that has increasingly replaced hierarchical oppositions of center to periphery, in spatial planning, in organization structures and in modes of knowing. This is liberating but also surveyed by panoptic observers. These cannot be completely evaded, but openness in the interplay of architecture and social norms can lead to unexpected social formations and local creativity. Suburbia is evolving in ways that will better express and inculcate a polycentric habitus that it helped create.

Date: 2011
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DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2011.568701

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