The Culture of the Suburbs

This post was inspired, in part, by watching this video. Arcade Fire apparently has gone all out on their new concept album in a way that Sgt. Pepper's, The Who Sell Out, or Village Green Preservation Society did not dream of.

Anyway, I think it's interesting to consider Win Butler and co.'s reaction to the built environment of most of post-World War II America--or as he apparently phrased it, "a letter from the suburbs" (NME Magazine, according to Wikipedia). Even if Butler claims a neutral opinion on the album, the video linked above certainly has a negative portrayal. Given time constraints, I'm going to try to make two points, which may not be novel, but they're currently on my mind.

1. Whether you like the suburbs or you hate them, they influence our culture. Especially after having been around for 50 years, they appear in our movies, our music, our TV shows. One of my favorite portrayals of suburban sprawl is in Back to the Future, because the movie shows the temporal progression of sprawl. More to the point, according to some of my planning classmates, the suburbs, by appearing in our movies shown across the world, have become symbolic of "the good life" for many people in other countries. The suburbs' effects on culture, though, are and will be evident even in the U.S. Maybe all I'm saying is that life influences culture, which certainly isn't a new idea. But it's interesting to ponder how this specific life--that of the suburbs--influences our current culture and will continue to do so.

2. It's easy to look today at the deficiencies of the suburbs and deride them and those people who created them. But they were created in order to avoid the problems of the cities--crime, pollution, noise--which still exist today to some extent. In other words, the suburbs are the product of people trying to live better lives and enable their children to live better lives than they themselves had. Sure, the effects were negative in many cases, but can you blame them for trying? In planning, perhaps people try to anticipate the problems of the future. But given how poorly we are able to solve the problems of the present, it is difficult to imagine that we could solve or avoid the problems of the future. So, where does that leave us? If we can't avoid problems, we can alleviate their effects. And if we try to remedy the negatives of the suburbs simply by returning to the cities, that can have unintended consequences, like the growing concentrations of poor people living in the suburbs. We need regional, encompassing solutions.