Dear New Brown University Freshman,
Are you one of the roughly 150 million Americans from suburbs? If so, you should manage that information carefully. Don't reveal your origins to city-dwelling peers until your intelligence and sophistication have been firmly established, because a lot of people - especially people from fancy cities like New York or Paris - will immediately think less of you. If an introductory "where are you from" conversation veers into specifics, exaggerate your proximity to an urban center and change the subject. Most suburban kids figure this out rather quickly, but I hope to spare you some grief with an early heads-up.
Also, be careful around your professors. The suburbs catch a lot of flak from the urban studies folks. And the environmental studies folks. And the cultural studies folks. Actually, the American suburbs are a rather versatile academic whipping boy. They get blamed for global warming (car culture), racism (white flight) and more generally, American closed-mindedness, homogeneity and insularity. And these days, the suburbs are further sullied by their association with the real estate bubble. So, if you're from the 'burbs, and you remember your upbringing fondly, just keep it to yourself.
But don't worry - you're not alone.
Regards,
Matt Prewitt Moraga, Calif.
In all seriousness, many critiques of the suburbs are completely valid. Like cities, rural areas and anywhere else, the suburbs have serious flaws.
However, suburb-hating often turns ugly and vitriolic. Furthermore, anti-suburban ideas get in the wrong hands, and they dovetail with outright classism. Specifically, anti-suburban ideology is often a veil for upper-class hostility toward the middle and working classes. If you pay close attention, this is sometimes obvious.
Suburb-hating disguises itself as a populist narrative - it claims to be criticizing the rich. That's a straw man. Greenwich, Conn., is not representative of anything. Most people in the suburbs are card-carrying members of the American middle class.
We must remember that in recent decades, it has become all but impossible to raise a family in an American city on a middle-class income. Increasingly, cities are starkly segregated by wealth - they are the dwelling-places of the very rich and very poor. The few remaining urban middle-class neighborhoods are being gentrified by the day. Criticizing people for not living in cities is therefore inherently classist unless the criticism exclusively targets the suburban ultra-rich, which it never does.
The oft-repeated notion that suburbanites are rich families who have spurned the cities is dated and false. That narrative applies somewhat to wealthy suburbs close to economic boomtowns, like Silicon Valley's Atherton, Calif., or isolated rich communities like Jupiter Beach, Fla. But it is utterly inapplicable to the outer-ring suburbs and "exurbs" that are the butt of the ugliest cultural condescension.
When it comes down to it, a lot of suburban people are simply clustering around cities for the work opportunities and cannot afford to live any closer. Nobody likes commuting, and this is reflected by the fact that real estate prices decrease as you get farther from urban centers. Sure, many suburbanites could hypothetically sell their car, go back to renting and live in a small urban apartment. But it is faintly absurd to fault people for not making that decision, especially if they have a family.
Critics of the suburbs gleefully trumpet the virtues of public transportation and the evils of car culture. This is well and good. I, too, wish that suburban cul-de-sacs were underlaid with a subway network. But it isn't possible. Furthermore, outlying areas that are blessed with superior public transportation have matching real estate premiums, which reinforces the notion that anti-suburban reasoning dovetails with classism.
Much ink has been spilt satirizing, criticizing and lamenting suburban culture. Much of it comes from within - there is a lot of angsty suburban self-loathing. But when educated urbanites criticize suburban culture, it grates, because the issue is inextricable from household economics. The condescension is offhand and unconscious. The average urban studies concentrator from Manhattan does not perceive himself as an elitist, but when he turns up his nose at strip malls and tract housing, he is rubbing salt in a class difference.
If we could rebuild the world from scratch, we would build the suburbs differently. No question about it. But, in the 1950s and 1960s, this country built a whole lot of highways connecting cities to suburbs. These neighborhoods are still inhabited by fine people who commute to work, by automobile, because it is their only option. Not so long ago, gas was cheap, and no one realized the extent of the problem with petrol consumption. So let's work for a better world, and also accept that suburb-dwellers are not a corrosive cultural element.
Okay, I'll admit it. I really like driving.
Matt Prewitt '08 has a white picket fence and enjoys vandalism
