The suburban question

The papers presented in this collection all deal with suburbs, the most maligned aspects of metropolitan development. From the outset, the very term ‘sub-urban’ has connoted an inferior form of city in a way that other choices do not—‘exurban’, for instance, would have more explicitly captured the dynamics of development taking place outside traditional walled towns or beyond the original municipal boundary.

This special issue... has its origins in a collaboration between the editors, who gave joint papers at a conference on urban images in 2003. We subsequently worked on a paper for the Suburban World conference organized in 2008 by the faculty of the Virginia Tech, where we enjoyed the papers presented by the authors featured here (the paper by our colleague Feyzan Erkip came via a more circuitous route, albeit at the same time). We see them as contributing directly to ‘the suburban question’ (itself a title that we have appropriated from Manuel Castells’ innovative The Urban Question (1977)). Our aim has been to present work that illuminates that question—what is happening in the suburbs, in terms of the built form, the economy and social relations?