Outside the Outside: The New Politics of Suburbs

In this roaming polemic, community organizer Hern (Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life) urges a new understanding of where people live as a “variegated, complicating and fractured landscape”—a pluralistic amalgamation of cities, towns, rural areas, ethnic neighborhoods, and suburbs, all of them socially and economically diverse. Urban theorists, he claims, are fixated on center-periphery relations, such that the “dominant urban theory marginalizes anywhere outside imagined city boundaries as the sub to the urb.” He advocates for theorists to abandon “tired tropes” and instead focus on the “creative forms of social organization that are emerging on urban peripheries” where most people are moving. These “sub-urbs”—“a set of modes of living and ways of being”—are everywhere, Hern contends, and not simply “outside” the city. They celebrate “movement, adjustment, non-fixities, and mobilities” and are the places where working-class households reside without the trappings of fashion-conscious consumerism, wealth accumulation, and global aspirations. (“Evangelical churches above auto body shops, pizza shops in garages and boutiques in industrial parks” serve as examples.) Later chapters recount Hern’s explorations of cities and suburbs including Portland, Ore., and Ferguson, Mo. While his tantalizing intimations of an alternative to center-periphery thinking are never fully fleshed out, Hern’s flowery frustration with the status quo will entertain like-minded readers (“that’s just the sound of my dogmatic, pissed-off self”). It’s a discontented meander through urban theory. (Mar.)