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When American Politics and Citizenship Became Suburban

When America Became Suburban (Beauregard, 2006) is a wonderfully argued account of the processes behind the suburbanization of the United States. Rather than simply describe suburbanization with an accounting of population shifts, land use changes, and so forth, Bob Beauregard has provided an analysis of the confluence of social forces that he argues account for suburbanization and for what he calls “parasitic urbanization.” In so doing, he traces the decline of industrial cities, the rise of suburbs and cities outside the traditional urban core in the northeastern and midwestern regions of the country, a domestic prosperity fueled by international trade, and the global dominance of the United States. Together, he argues, these forces had the effect of transforming American identity and connections to place that were previously manifested in American exceptionalism. Inevitably, it seems, readers think about books in terms of the issues with which they themselves struggle. For me, those issues include the privatization of politics, the rearrangement of political spaces in response to broader political and social trends, and the implications of each for citizenship. In this regard, the book is invaluable. One of the central concerns in the book—and the one on which I want to focus my comments—is the way the broad forces mentioned in the previous paragraph have led to an apparent erosion of urbanity in the United States. This erosion is characterised by the withdrawal of people but, more importantly, the withdrawal of commitment from industrial cities. The erosion and withdrawal, Beauregard argues, were accompanied by a shift in the values and practices that sustained a sense of urbanity that was social and political—that was, in other words, public. He argues that older cities had a variety of spaces for interaction between people who shared backgrounds and interests, but also between people who differed from each other. Older cities also had a spirit of “publicness” to them that committed people to the neighborhood, to the city, and to each other. Difference was tolerated and accommodated out of a sense of shared fate. And where there were problems, such as during the late 1800s and early 1900s, reform movements arose to address them. These movements blended state support and civic participation in a shared effort at reform. Beauregard does not use quite the same terms as I have, but he does celebrate the sense of urbanity and commitment to urban centers that came from a city characterized not just by diversity, but also by the involvement of members of educated, White, and middle and professional classes who were actively engaged in the affairs of the city as citizens and