DiscussSuburbs

Offer your comments, remarks and opinions. Discuss the posts on "SuBurbs."

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A number of the posts about suburbs are also posts about childhood, and children's love of wild or secret places. That would make an interesting subject for later -- children's places. The other main thing that jumped out at me was ambiguity, which is appropriate to suburbs' between-ness. I enjoyed reading all of these pieces, though I didn't really expect to -- I thought the subject too bland. Which goes to show the narrowness of my own mindset, or the deep cultural association between the words 'suburbs' and 'blandness,' or 'emptiness.' -- Nancy

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Good point. And I'm going to add "ChildrensPlace?" to our list. I was surprised too by the breadth of these latest entries. It seems there is also a theme of the loss of freedom, especially for children, that has occured as the suburbs have grown and anxiety increased. Is this partly due to the loss of longterm personal relationships that created a fabric of trust and security? Do anxiety and transience feed on each other? -- Beth

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Nancy, I was noticing the same thing, memories of childhood that kept resurfacing and an almsot mournful lament for the poor suburban children of today who don't have what we did, but instead live super-scheduled, over-protected lives. Michael Moore lays the blame for the culture of fear (specifically fear of the African American male) squarely at the feet of the media, but I wonder too whether transience doesn't also make our society more likely to buy into it? I have to say I was in a couple of places recently where I was laughed at for locking the doors of cars--where nobody locks their car or their house, and it made me curious about what different elements in a place make it "seem" more safe. Scale is certainly one. A sense that a majority of people in this place have been there a LONG time. Also, I'm pretty sure, racial homogeneity. I think these places are not inherently safer than others, but there is the perception that they are. -- Alison

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I just finished reading [Allan's post] where he asks "What if the tension over urban growth is not about traffic, or noise, or overburdened schools, but instead, at an archetypal level, is really about beauty?" I think he's onto something. The laments in the various posts over loss of rural childhood habitats, lack of freedom in suburban communities, loss of cicada song, hacking away at the understory of our yards, and even the lost feeling of safety all have aesthetics at their heart. The early childhood suburbs that I wrote about with some love and yearning are quite different from the suburbs of Irvine, California (largest planned community in the world) which I inhabited as a very unhappy teenager. That kind of suburb, where there truly is no beauty, no soul or opportunity for soul, are killers of imagination, stealers of the secret places children need, and without those, no child is safe. --Lisa

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