Cybergeo (Mar 2007)
Suburban fragmentation versus mobilities: is suburbanism opposed to urbanism?
Abstract
The suburban way of life is moving towards a rejection of tangible confrontation with otherness so that other people – should they be different – become politically invisible. This is at any rate what the critical literature surmises about the growing desire of suburbanites to live amongst their own and sometimes even behind the safe and reassuring walls of gated communities. However appealing this analysis might be, it seems nonetheless rather partial. Suburban populations are increasingly mobile and their everyday horizon is less and less reduced to the immediate perimeter of the neighborhood. Indeed, how can one interpret the social specialization of residential areas as a sign of “enclavism” when all the statistics available indicate that mobility has become a constitutive factor of people’s way of life and the neighborhood has all but lost its existential weight?Based on exploratory work, this paper aims to deconstruct the criticism articulated around the opposition of “suburbanism” and “urbanism” by emphasizing the effects of the various forms of mobility and showing that they complement the proliferation of homogeneous neighborhoods. In order to achieve this goal, the paper analyses the culture of people living at the periphery of two large French cities (Paris and Lyon). The arguments given are based both on the existing literature and on research the author carried out in France (Charmes, 2005).As a result of the analysis conducted, it becomes apparent that the increase in mobility and the social homogenization of neighborhoods can be linked in other ways than the one suggested by the critical literature. On the one hand, contemporary residential areas are not as neutral and sterile as they appear to be. Relationships between neighbors and interactions with people from the surroundings constitute at least an embryonic experience of otherness. Residential areas can therefore be conceived as “transition spaces” between the protected space of the home and the relatively unknown spaces of the large metropolis.On the other hand, the paper defends the hypothesis that mobilities tend to reinforce the need for stability and control of one’s immediate space. Mobilities have lead city dwellers out of the reassuring cocoon of the neighborhood in which almost everyone was swathed only a few decades ago. This growing uncertainty of life enhances the need to withdraw to a home “base”. However, this need is temporary and only concerns isolated moments of everyday life. The general tendency remains one of dispersal of spatial practices and individualization of experience.
Keywords
