The ‘S’ word has always been a bit of an insult, sneery shorthand for dreary conformism; their go-nowhere crescents wide open to mockery and satire, from The Stepford Wives to John Waters, WandaVision and the nightmares of David Lynch. If you really want to start living, reads the subtext, then leave the suburbs far behind. Except we’ve never really done that. Unaffordable city rents and the pandemic have made them newly aspirational for younger generations – all that extra space for home-working – and deserving of a fresh eye for their idiosyncrasies, of the sort shown by Melbourne-based photographer Kim Walvisch, who posts as @sublurb. While post-industrial urban-scapes are still being gentrified, neighbourhoods orbiting big cities are developing characters of their own.
The opening this sumnmer of the Ace hotel in Boerum Hill, a 19th-century suburb of Manhattan, would have been unthinkable a decade ago; but travellers of the near-future may book rooms in Montclair or New Rochelle outside New York, or in the Toronto satellite towns of Hamilton and Scarborough, where recently launched food tours reflect the diversity of its migrant communities. And while many associate suburbia with cultural death, a contemporary-art hub is rising outside Paris in nondescript Romainville, while in much-maligned Luton, the Hat District – studios and spaces in former factories – is drawing in artists priced out of London.
Ellen Dunham-Jones, co-author of the Retrofitting Suburbia series, charts the American parking lots being re-greened and the dead shopping malls (memorably rising ‘like mountains beyond mountains’ in the lyrics of Arcade Fire’s ‘Sprawl II’) repurposed as cultural centres and ethnic mercados. Meanwhile Eero Saarinen’s 1962 Bell Labs structure, now a thriving ‘metroburb’ in small-town New Jersey, has a sequel to follow soon outside Chicago. Dullsville? That’s the next one along.
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