In my last post I touched on how globalization is producing a homogeneous architectural style worldwide, so now I want to take that idea and focus on the very embodiment of homogeneity: the Suburbs. I’ve rounded up a fair amount of photos from around the internet to illustrate my point: the suburbs are everywhere, and they are the same pretty much everywhere. Now you can have a pretty house with a white picket fence anywhere, even in China (photo evidence of that later).

With the growth of a middle class in developing nations, families move into houses that are nicer, bigger, more modern and so on. The result of this is that suburban neighborhoods pop up on the borders of cities due to a multitude of factors:

1. Building hundreds of houses from a similar template is relatively cheap and is quick to go from blueprint  to move-in: there is a large incentive for developers to build suburb-type neighborhoods.
2. Suburban neighborhoods are removed from the smog, crime and other undesirable qualities of the cities that they are near. They are thus very attractive to newly prosperous families in developing nations where those aforementioned qualities are rampant.
3. They provide instant urban structure for quickly developing regions.

As such, modern suburban neighborhoods are showing up everywhere throughout the world. What started as an iconic American phenomenon has spread to the entire globe. There are gigantic suburbs being built in every major city in China.

Japan:

India (Bangalore):

China (Shenyang):

United Arab Emirates (Dubai):

Florida (for reference):

Indian, Chinese and Arabian (al Jazeera) cities are growing to resemble American urban centers, which I find to be a little disturbing. The rise of the suburbs brings with it many implications, especially for non-American cultures.

First off, there is a loss of cultural history and identity with the loss of traditional neighborhoods. The most prevalent and dramatic example of this is the bulldozing of Chinese hutongs in favor of modern neighborhoods. Hutongs are the traditional form of Chinese community and are comprised of many siheyuan, which are homes built around a central courtyard. Hutongs house very close-knit communities who are identically Chinese. Magical Urbanism has a great post on the disappearing hutongs that really encompasses my feelings on the issue. Modern architecture and estranged communities are replacing hutongs; the loss of traditional Chinese culture is leading to a diminished sense of cultural identity for Chinese citizens.

Second, suburbs inherently lead to a geographic division of socioeconomic classes. Since the suburbs are essentially large developments of similarly priced homes, suburban neighborhoods house people of very similar economic status. Due to the great distance between new suburban developments and the cities they surround, the poor are being left in the slums far away from new developments, forgotten. A new generation of children is being raised far from poverty and other urban problems like racial division and crime. Although that in itself is not inherently immoral or in any way wrong, the likelihood that such problems will be present in suburban children’0s consciousness is small. How can such a society function? I found a great video on this very topic that discusses the implications of suburban development in Cairo:

There is a very powerful part of the video where one of the interviewees talks about how children in the Cairo suburbs say that they have never even been downtown. I just don’t understand how a city can have a sense of common identity if its middle class citizens have no contact with its downtown. How can you ever hope to make a dent in cyclical problems like poverty in crime when your classes are isolated by the structure of your city?

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