Discourse and dystopia, American style

Alex Schafran

City, 2013, vol. 17, issue 2, 130-148

Abstract: This paper examines the recent growth in the popular media of new discourses of decline focused on the American suburb. This new discursive twist, which appropriates language traditionally reserved for inner cities, is rooted in both the city/suburb dialectic, which has long dominated American urbanism, and the empirical realities of the foreclosure crisis and changing geographies of poverty in the American metropolis. Scholars should be concerned about the rise of this new discourse, as it reinforces a dialectic long since outdated, roots decline in a particular geography rather than examining the root causes of the crisis, and has potentially deleterious effects on communities already facing social and economic struggle in the wake of foreclosure. Linked as this discourse is to academic research on the suburbanization of poverty, it gives pause to those scholars who would speak in terms of 'suburban decline'.

Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13604813.2013.765125 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:cityxx:v:17:y:2013:i:2:p:130-148

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CCIT20

DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2013.765125

Access Statistics for this article

City is currently edited by Bob Catterall

More articles in City from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().