I’d like to recommend a new book that’s come out by Paul Barker: ‘The Freedoms of Suburbia‘. Many of the same themes that featured in Barker’s 1999 article Non-Plan Revisited: Or the Real Way Cities Grow feature here too: the inherent adaptability of suburban houses and the fact that suburbs are where most people want to live because they provide a balance between privacy and sociability. The “vociferousness” of suburbia enemies is also mentioned: many of them are architects and architecture commentators, who view suburbia with snobbery (despite of, or perhaps because of the fact they grew up in a suburb themselves). Indeed, the last two chapter’s argument for less planning echoes Barker’s 1999 article and it is interesting also to see that Barker sees a parallel between Jane Jacob’s desire to rescue the inner-city from “wrong-headed” improvements and his own desire to rescue suburbia from contemporary “condescension and hostility”. See also Barker’s interview along with Lynsey Hanley (author of  ‘Estates: An Intimate History’) on Laurie Taylor’s ‘Thinking Allowed’ programme on BBC Radio 4: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00n8m2s.

See also: http://uclsstc.wordpress.com/2007/06/03/the-need-for-adaptability-in-suburban-fabric-the-inevitability-of-change/.

An article entitled ‘Do the suburbs exist? Discovering complexity and specificity in suburban built form’ has been accepted for publication by Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.

Abstract
In human geography cities are routinely acknowledged as complex and dynamic built environments. This description is rarely extended to the suburbs, which are generally regarded as epiphenomena of the urbs and therefore of little intrinsic theoretical interest in themselves. This article presents a detailed critique of this widely held assumption by showing how the idea of ‘the suburban’ as an essentially non-problematic domain has been perpetuated from a range of contrasting disciplinary perspectives, including those which directly address suburban subject matter. The result has been that attempts to articulate the complex social possibilities of suburban space are easily caught between theories of urbanisation that are insensitive to suburban specificity and competing representations of the suburb that rarely move beyond the culturally specific to consider their generic significance. This article proposes that the development of a distinctively suburban theory would help to undermine one-dimensional approaches to the built environment, by focusing on the relationship between social organisation and the dynamics of emergent built form.

A pre-publication version of the article is available from the authors.

Visitors to this site may be interested in a piece written for New Geography on ‘Sustaining Localism in the English Suburban Context’. Click here for the piece in full.

The SSTC project team ran a workshop at The Building Centre in London on 23rd April 2009. The aim of the workshop was to give the project team an opportunity to present their research and to receive feedback from interested agencies, including representatives of local councils responsible for town centres studied by the project, Dr Nicholas Falk of URBED and Mr Tom Bolton of CABE.

The workshop was introduced by the leading historian of British and American suburbs, Dr Mark Clapson of Westminster University. An opening presentation by Dr Laura Vaughan, instigator of the SSTC project, was followed by the presentation of three detailed case studies focusing on Barnet, South Norwood and Surbiton.

The discussion, led by Dr Muki Haklay, explored four themes: the importance of research into suburban town centres, the relation of movement patterns and land use, the socio-economic diversity of the high street and the proposition that sustainability is essentially a question of identifying sources of adaptability in the historical built environment.

The SSTC project team would like to thank all those who participated in the workshop.

The 2005 report by Joel Kotkin: The New Suburbanism: a realist’s guide to the American future contains some interesting observations that are relevant to the UK context (a podcast on ‘what is the new suburbanism’ can be found here). I am particularly struck by the report’s understanding of suburbanisation as part of an historic process and the need to work with the grain of existing settlement.

One of the key ideas is “semiautonomous villages”, in many ways like New Urbanism’s tenets, but with some key differences: The author argues that there needs to be a recognition that New Urbanism’s “lambasting” and “dismissal” of suburbanites’ preference for a car-based environment overlooks the fact that “even as they evolve, ‘the suburb is not intended to be a city.”’ Instead, the future of suburbia is in providing all the amenities of villages (or towns) so that it is not dependent on the city – “The future of suburbia appears to lie in focusing on the development of ‘villages’ that provide cultural, economic, educational and religious sustenance. This will require the evolution of elements-social institutions, well-planned streets, open spaces, work spaces and housing -that function within the context of an existing or new community.”

A careful densification of suburban town centres (which is already occurring as the result of restrictions of building on open space) alongside the provision of a range of affordability in the town centre so that some units can be afforded by “retailers, particularly coffee shops, dry cleaners and small food stores”, to ensure that “middle income consumers” are not priced out of the area.

See also the New Geography site about the futures of places: http://www.newgeography.com/category/story-topics/suburbs.

I’ve just finished reading Dr Ben Goldacre’s ‘Bad Science’, which is this medical doctor’s book describing his ongoing fight against the misuse of research statistics in health, pharmacology & etc. (see here for his webpage). I was particularly interested to see his discussion of the problem with research done by “nutritionists”.

He points out that whilst there is a wealth of investment in interventionist studies into lifestyles, there is an urgent need for more research into matters such as the relationship between social inequalities and health inequalities and in particular, “‘enabling environments’ that naturally promote exercise, or urban planning that prioritises cyclists, pedestrians and public transport over the car” (page 133) .

I note the Outer London Commission has had its first meeting . The associated documents make for interesting reading in relation to our project. In particular:

Outer London: Realising its potential

Point 11: see the recognition that the outer suburbs are not just a dormitory, and contribute to London’s regional economic development.

Point 14: demonstrate the vision that employment must be physically accessible and that this is tied in with sustainability: ” What matters is that jobs are easy to get to…, are located to meet local aspirations and broader policy objectives eg reducing CO2 emissions”.

Point 22: the recognition of the importance of smaller town centres and that these need to be walkable: “Addressing the unique circumstances of London, the London Plan is more rigorous than national policy both in resisting inappropriate out-of centre development and in encouraging partners to work together … partners should work to ensure that it becomes more sustainable in terms of public transport access and, in appropriate locations, evolves into functionally balanced town centres.”

Point 23: also recognition of the importance of parking; this is something that has come up quite frequently in our detailed case studies.

Point 30: alongside a focus on 4-5 hubs, the intention is to identify smaller town centres that serve as exemplars of best practice.

Outer London: Economic data and statistics

This paper also makes interesting reading. It compiles statistics from a variety of sources that attempt to tease out the particularities of the outer London boroughs. Note the following in particular:

- The report highlights the uneven distribution of different economic sectors: “relatively large shares of Croydon’s and south eastern London’s employment [is in] in financial services. Amongst Outer London areas, creative jobs are most predominant in the western and south western zones and wholesale activities provide large shares of employment in the western wedge”.

- There is also interesting data on very small firms, using ONS inter departmental business database to locate VAT registered enterprises by employment size band – showing that the largest number of firms with <4 employees in the borough of Barnet and the smallest, in Barking and Dagenham (note, not normalised by population).

- Also notable are the statistics on commuting patterns, which show that outer London suburbs are recipients of significant numbers of in-flows. We knew this already, but what is interesting that this is presented as a surprising finding: “even Outer London boroughs depend significantly on non-resident workers – 39% of Croydon’s workers do not live in the borough, 50% in Kingston.”

According to the latest issue of Prospect, a rare advantage of the recession is that the closure of chains such as Woolworths opens up opportunities for alternative high street activities. Under the headline “Woolies—Britain’s least likely saviour”, the author notes:

Might the death of Woolworths save Britain’s high streets from the twin menaces of recession and uniformity? Art Space & Nature, an avant-garde Scottish art collective, think it just might, and have bold plans to brighten up Cumbernauld’s famously monstrous concrete town centre, by taking over at least one of Woolie’s 815 shuttered outlets. Neville Rae, an artist from the group, says a dozen students will exhibit in various abandoned shops, hoping to replace traditional high street bargains with “work responding to the social, political and aesthetic history of modernist new town planning”—a potentially more useful, if less comprehensible, public service than back-to-school specials and pic ‘n’mix.’

Note the interesting reference to Cumbernauld, celebrated at the New New Towns conference I have blogged about before. The article also mentions plans by the Institute of Community Cohesion’s head, Ted Cantle:

…to convert the empty Woolies into shiny new indoor markets, housing anyone from food retailers to farmers—who “presently have to contend with all weathers on windswept car parks” when selling their wares. Cantle wants the premises to be “available to local communities, rather than filled by the standard multinational brands.”

We have for a while been discussing by-product activity in suburban town centres: the notion that a town centre that contains a variety of activity – rather than mainly retail – is likely to generate a greater diversity of people, coming from a variety of distances and thus has the potential for greater sociability. I just came across this quote in support of this idea: “Mutuality and resonance, in their many forms, are the stuff of most human exchange. We chat pleasantly about the weather, share a joke we heard with our hairdresser, pass an hour over coffee gossiping with a friend.  These mostly unremarkable events soon fade into the dustbin of memory, yet without them life is apt to feel empty and cold.” (From The Space between Us: Exploring the Dimensions of Human Relationships. R. Josselson, 1996:  p. 152. – with thanks to Wendy Olsen).

I’ve been looking at the photos from one of our suburban field trips and remembered that we’d found a lot of local work in Rickmansworth in buildings that had been semi-industrial (stables, forge etc.).  It’s interesting to see the diversity of businesses on this small back street of the centre – Church Street. The businesses listed in the local directory include:

Accountants
Agricultural Machinery Dealers
Air Conditional Equipment
Anglican Church
Builders Merchant
Business Development Specialists
Cafes and Tea Rooms
Charity Shops
Computer Services
Computers and Computer Systems
Design and Development Engineers
Dry Cleaners
Engineering Consultants
Estate Agents
Food Manufacturers and Supplier
Furniture Manufacturers
Garage Services
Graphic Designers
Hairdresser
Italian Restaurant
Jewellers
Mortgage Advice
Newsagents
Opticians
Pharmaceutical Manufacturers
Printers
Pub
Publishers
Social Club
Solicitors
Surveyors and Valuers
Tableware
Textile Manufacturers
Waste Disposal Services

Image shows entrance to: The Stables, Forge Mews, 14-16 Church Street, Rickmansworth

Photograph: © Towards Successful Suburban Town Centres Project
Business directory source: 2008 Locallife Ltd.