Among the more fashionable of recently perceived (or contrived) apocalypses is "the end of suburbia," a notion popularized by a documentary of the same name, which argues coming oil scarcity will soon make modern suburbs uninhabitable.
If only it were true! For the sake of suburbanites alone, the end of suburbia would be a blessing. But that's not happening. To the extent we understand suburbia as a single place, wherever it occurs -- an uncomfortably definitive mould, a collection of syndromes masquerading as a lifestyle -- it is all too robust. We made our bed over the past half-century, shaping increasingly homogeneous, car-dependent, overconsuming, overworked, socially exclusive suburbs, and now we must lie in it.
"There used to be different ways you could end up being suburban," notes McMaster University historian Richard Harris, author of Creeping Conformity: How Canada Became Suburban. Indeed it was the working class, following smokestack jobs, that led the first great wave of suburbanization after the First World War. Since then, however, suburban life has become increasingly defined by a strict "package" of factors.
"It really is a package," Prof. Harris emphasizes, and it is not found only in suburbia. In suburbia, however, that's all there is: Middle-class families with long-term mortgage debt and high-consumption lifestyles, chained for life to at least two jobs per household in order to pay for both, enslaved to their cars in the absence of any other means of traversing increasingly long distances, helpless as steadily worsening congestion steals more and more of their overstructured lives.
"I just see that increasingly being the case," says the historian, whose work has documented the growing homogenization and "commodification" of the suburbs -- in effect the birth of suburbia. "I don't see that changing and I don't see how that can change for a very long time."
If anything, he says, the barriers and burdens that define suburbia are intensifying in the 21st century -- especially the income barrier.
"The prospect of low-income families being able to afford to move into the suburbs, and to commute and get around low-density suburban environments, is not likely," Prof. Harris says. "And the prospect that any government is going to start building low-income housing out in the suburbs is very remote."
And why would they? Such projects would only remove their occupants even further from the jobs they would need and tie them into a high-consumption lifestyle they could ill-afford.
Thus the economic apartheid of our modern cities gains strength. In Hamilton, as in Detroit, the centre has collapsed and is now occupied exclusively by the poor. In Toronto, the centre has boomed, pushing low-income families into older suburbs bordered on their outer edges by equally exclusive modern suburbia.
But life is not necessarily better for those lucky enough to earn admittance to the outer ring. In Prof. Harris's histories, suburbia begins with debt -- the introduction of long-term amortization for home mortgages -- and debt drives all family life in a single direction. One job becomes two, by necessity. Vehicles multiply by the same logic. Houses become bigger. Consumption becomes culture. Life choices diminish as the package takes shape. . . . Just don't lose that job.
It may well be that suburbia "ends" in a great postoil apocalypse. Or it may be brought to crisis by some other aspect of its manifold overconsumption -- of land, for instance. It may be, however, that the suburbia we all love to hate is simply no longer historical, something that will change and perhaps improve in time, but anthropological: a big mistake made permanent.
