ancient cities

782 Suburbanization
this, suburbanization has been castigated by critics
who would have preferred a higher-density, citybased
history of urban development. The neo-
Marxist critique of suburbanization points to the
overdetermined nature of suburban supply by the
market and the fetishization of the material world
of suburbia by marketing and developer capital.
Any academic defense of working-class or ethnic
minority suburbanization will invite accusations of
neoliberalism or of a failure to critique the embourgeoisement
(the allegedly increasing middle-classness)
of suburbanized lower-income groups. Engels was
acutely aware of the nostalgia for a preindustrial
past that many urban working-class people felt by
the mid-nineteenth century. This did not translate
into any mass movement of counterurbanization or
a voluntary migration back to the countryside.
However, and particularly in Anglophone countries,
when poorer-income groups saw an opportunity
to move to lower-density housing areas,
either as a consequence of household affluence or
via public housing schemes, millions took the
opportunity to do so. It was less a return to the
land than a proletarian embrace of the suburban
aspiration. Hence did suburbanization literally
create a kind of halfway house between downtown
and open country. The working classes, by
extension of this argument, had as much a right to
aspire to and enjoy suburban living as did the
middle classes.
Many poorer suburbs remained poor and segregated,
largely immune to, or untouched by, middle-
class values and lifestyles. A powerful criticism of
suburbs attacks their often exclusive and homogenous
nature. During the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, suburban segregation by class was very
common, but in the years since 1945 segregation
along ethnic lines became increasingly apparent.
Many real estate agents and their clients attempted
to exclude aspirant Black households from White
suburbs, leading to civil rights legislation in the
United States during the 1960s, and a concomitant
apparatus of “race relations” in Britain. Both
attempted to provide equal access to housing.
Another criticism of suburbanization is that
it bled the city centers of their economic resources
and social capital. Deprived of downtown taxation,
downtown rates, and middle-class cultural
proclivities, residential areas in or close to
the heart of the city declined, becoming, in the
terminology of the Chicago School of Sociology,
zones in transition.
Suburban migration from the older, established
urban areas to new residential housing developments
was also deplored for the fracturing of the
social and spatial foundations of urban communities.
In their place, allegedly inferior forms of suburban
associative activity came into existence.
Many trenchant attacks on suburbia emerged during
the 1950s. In the United States for example,
William H. Whyte argued that suburbanization
was creating a nation of superficial “organization
men” whose domestic values were informed by the
competitive corporate culture of the United States.
Hence socializing and neighboring in suburbs was
all about status competition and a compulsion to
belong, or to “keep up with the Joneses.” In 1950s
Britain, suburban working-class council estates
were compared unfavorably with older, inner-city
areas. Sociologists working at the Institute of
Community Studies, based in the historic East End
of London, argued that suburbanization compromised
community with individualism, replaced a
vibrant street life for the relatively empty singleuse
streets of a residential estate, and substituted
proximity for the apparatus of upward social and
outward spatial mobility: the telephone and motor
car. In such circumstances, the long-established
and localized three-generational extended family
was weakened, and the elderly poor, in particular,
were rendered potentially lonely and vulnerable.
This was because most of those moving to the suburbs,
as in other countries during the 1950s and
1960s, were younger households. The baby boom
of the early postwar years was mostly accommodated
in suburbia.
Women were also viewed as victims of suburban
dispersal. During the 1930s, a condition of
“suburban neurosis” was first diagnosed by
medical practitioners among women in outlying
health centers in England. Women were left isolated
in expanding new environments where they
knew few people and felt cut off from the older,
familiar, busier urban world from where they
had come.
Analyses of the condition were largely postponed
during World War II, but the 1950s and
1960s witnessed a renewed discourse of suburban
neurosis. It was closely linked to the phenomenon
of the “new town blues” experienced