Ditching the ‘Suburban Myth’

The North American suburb has very much become mythologized. Idealized as bastions of middle-class affordability or maligned as contributors to urban sprawl and climate change, nearly everyone seems to have a take on suburbia (not least every punk-rock band from California in the 1990s). Most picture the suburb as rows of uniform houses (the American myth calls for white-picket fences) full of middle-class nuclear families. While this idea of the suburbs has always been a fiction, it feels like an increasingly anachronistic one in light of the dynamic change in Canadian suburbs today. Consider York Region, which we visited last week. York Region is rapidly densifying, investing in mass transit, and is incredibly diverse, especially in cities like Markham, Vaughn and Richmond Hill.

Nevertheless, the suburban myth is hard to dispel and can be damaging. For example, in last week’s class, many policy students (the present author included) erroneously assumed the suburbs would have low levels of income inequality. By contrast, David Hulchanski’s (2010) work has shown how the suburbs have increasingly become income-segregated in much the same way as the city. In this case, the suburban myth obscured a social problem meriting action and consideration. Similarly, the suburban-urban divide has often been used as a divisive political wedge which has hurt ‘urban’ and ‘suburban’ people alike. For example, consider how political gridlock has paralyzed the construction of public transit in the GTA.

These issues mean we may want to begin to consider changing how we think about the suburbs. As Addie, Fiedler and Kiel (2015) note, dispelling the suburban myth may be impossible, but beginning to consider how both cities and suburbs exist as both “real and imagined places” might be a useful step toward thinking about the suburbs in way that is actually productive for policy discussions.