Urbanity and Suburbanity: Rethinking the 'Burbs

ALTHOUGH I BELIEVE THAT MUCH OF THE ANALYSIS IN WILLIAM SHARPE'S and Leonard Wallock's vigorous polemic is seriously mistaken, I strongly agree with one fundamental point: the authors' profound concern for urbanity. They define urbanity as "diversity, cosmopolitanism, political culture, and public life," and they are right to be anxious about the present status and future survival of these crucial values. Unfortunately their anxieties have led them to adopt a literally reactionary analysis that seeks a return to the (supposedly) stirring days of yesteryear, when the clear binary opposition of city and suburb still held true. In the face of disturbing complexities, the authors cling to a vision of a simpler world where cities truly possess urbanity, suburbs do not, and upstanding cultural critics know exactly where they stand. The literary critic Diana Fuss has termed this insistence on preserving traditional dichotomies "policing the binaries." Sharpe and Wallock are particularly anxious to detect scholars who attempt to reconceptualize urban form and, thus (in their view), to subvert the special role of central cities. Not surprisingly, they prefer the critics of the 1950s-1970s who "attacked suburbia for its racial discrimination, patriarchal familism, political separatism, and geographical sprawl." By contrast, they indict more recent scholars (myself included) for "suburbanophilia." Yet the authors themselves acknowledge the truly revolutionary changes in urban and regional form that have transformed what they persist in calling "the suburbs" since 1945. Once bedroom communities-satellites