Suburban Geographies: Introduction

This second issue of The Funambulist Magazine is dedicated to suburban geographies. Suburban politics are, of course, specific to each country and city, and this issue only examines some of them (the United States, Brazil, South Africa, France, and Palestine). However, they all share a geographical distance from city centers, corresponding to another distance, a societal one, whether forced on their inhabitants or chosen by them. Both of these distances are profoundly political, and their urban and architectural materializations require a thorough examination of the way they interact with the bodies they host.

American suburbia is a particularly good example to study in order to dispel the innocuous narrative that accompanied its development in the 1950s — exclusively focused on the access to property for the middle class — and to unfold the capitalist, military, and political logic that triggered and organized it at all scales. This starts with the individualization of transportation: between 1936 and 1950, General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California, Phillips Petroleum, Mack Trucks, and the Federal Engineering Corporation purchased the street cars and electric trains of 45 cities, and systematically destroyed them in order to create an exclusive dependency on the automobile industry that these corporations represented. Later, in 1956, the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, conceived by the Eisenhower administration, reinforced this dependency by constructing 41,000 miles of interstate highways. These transportation axes thus allowed the necessary fluidity to live outside of cities and still work in them. As the name of the Act indicates, there was an explicit militarized agenda for the creation of these highways. Within the context of the Cold War and the nuclear threat, this strategy consisted in the maximization of military movement, as well as the territorial diffusion of population and resources.

Let’s examine these two purposes: the first one consists in the capacity for any of these highways to become militarized infrastructures. It involves the simple transportation of motorized divisions from one point of a territory to another, but also the potential landing accommodation of military aircraft, as NATO exercises in West Germany showed in 1984 (see photograph on the left). The second purpose consists in the spreading of the American population and its resources to diminish the deadly and destructive effects of a nuclear attack. As researchers like Peter Galison (2001) and Joseph Masco (2006) have shown, the repeated narrative of the nuclear threat that characterized the forty-five years of the Cold War had a deep impact on not only the organization of the national territory, but also on individualized architectural responses through, for instance, the multiplication of private bomb shelters (see photograph above).

American suburbia is also characterized by a drastic reduction of social interaction. Public space’s function is reduced to automobile flux, and the few sites that gather bodies are semi-private, hyper-policed environments like the office or the shopping mall. This strategy is political capitalism (the association of capitalist economic logic with governmental agenda) at its highest level of efficiency: the office and the mall are the post-war sites of production of economic wealth, while their private territoriality allow a zealous policing of any non-normative (i.e. non-productive of wealth) behavior. In the time of political turmoil that reached its culmination in the late 1960s, public space had been reduced exclusively to the city-center, thus reducing as well the opportunity for bodies to organize themselves politically.

As Olivia Ahn demonstrates in her article (page 32), the American suburban house embodies an architecture calibrated for the female body to accomplish its daily unpaid labor, in the post-war context of the re-constructed heteronormative nuclear family. Each room is codified to correspond to normative and productive behavior. The kitchen, its furniture and objects in particular, is calibrated according to standard dimensions and gestures thought to optimize the female labor of cooking, going often as far as placing the counter-top at a height that integrates the high-heels supposedly worn by the housewife. Here again, it is reasonable to wonder: is it the heel that determines the height of the furniture, or the furniture’s height that ensures that women wear heels?

Kitchen furniture and high-heeled shoes are however not the smallest scale of design-intervention in suburban politics. In the book Testo Junkie : Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (The Feminist Press, 2013), Paul B. Preciado argues that the contraception pill emerges alongside the production of a spectacle of hyper-sexualized female bodies (cf. his study of the magazine Playboy), forming an object designed in association with the idea of controlling or orienting desire. According to Preciado, the Pill is as much a production of pharmaceutical capitalism as it is a reinforcement of the heteronormative imaginary. From the organization of national territory to the biology of the female body, we can thus see how all scales of design are mobilized in a global societal ideology.

American suburbia is however not the only instance we examine. The French banlieues are also an important example of a highly political organization of urban space. Although the word banlieue refers to suburbs in general, we will use it in this issue to specifically describe the suburban neighborhoods inhabited by populations in economic precariousness, a significant part of which are French citizens with ancestry in the former colonial empire (mostly North and West African countries), as well as more recent immigrants. The situation of every banlieue is characterized by social and racial segregation, and in his article (page 8), Hacène Belmessous describes the problem through the examples of Lyon and Paris. The latter, particularly symptomatic, is partially described through the two maps above.

The red (left map) and white (right map) marks represent 96 cités, high-density neighborhoods in low-density urban areas, where 820,000 members of the population described above live — 12% of the total population in the area shown on the maps. The map on the left shows how a majority of these cités are situated beyond a 15-minute walk radius to a subway or train station; a particularly crucial parameter with regard to access to jobs and the “right to the city.” The map on the right, on the other hand, illustrates both the territoriality of local governance — the fragmentation corresponds to the limits of each municipality — and the unequal distribution of social housing in what will soon become “Greater Paris.” Legislation passed in December of 2000 obliges each municipality of more than 3,500 inhabitants — there are a few other criteria — to comply with subsidizing 20% of its total housing stock. The municipalities represented in orange (between 10% and 20%) and in red (less than 10%) prefer to pay a fine, rather than mix their populations (the map presented on page 27 shows the average income by municipality) through the construction of social housing.

This territorial segregative logic is combined, at a smaller scale, with the antagonism deployed by the police against the banlieue youth. In his article, Belmessous describes how in recent years the police have been invited to the design table with urban planners, architects and social-housing developers when banlieue neighborhoods are up for renovation. The demolition of a specific building rather than another, the construction of a road in the middle of a pedestrian area, a comprehensive look at buildings’ halls; the police propose their architectural and urban expertise. Such intervention resonates with the 1970s architectural movement “Design Against Crime,” as defined by architects like Oscar Newman and Barry Poyner. Their ambition consisted in using architecture’s capacity to control visibility and filter bodies to police collective housing spaces, in concert with the establishment of local rules (a quota of children and youngsters to be allowed to live and play in these neighborhoods, for instance).

The police have a strong sense of space. Like the army, they deploy themselves in it, control it, appropriate it. There is therefore no doubt that their participation in the design of entire neighborhoods like the banlieues triggers effectively drastic changes in the organization of bodies in space. Yet, we should refrain from seeing such participation as a corruption of the noble discipline we assume architecture to be. On the contrary, I would argue, when the police and the architect become one entity, this is the very essence of architecture: its violent inherent characteristics find their full expression, and its ability to subsequently control the bodies it hosts is fully optimized. In the case of the banlieues, it also sanctifies the absolute separation of the police/architect from the inhabitants. The necessary antagonism that results from this separation is also what feeds it, since it creates and fuels the delinquency against which it claims to be organized — something admittedly difficult to describe beyond the mythical narratives characterizing the banlieues in the media. Only the dissolution of this rhetorical and political antagonism can claim to start constituting a
“solutions” — a problematic notion, admittedly — and actively destroy the segregationist agency of space in French cities. The police being the embodiment ‘on the ground’ of this antagonism, its complete reform needs to be engaged, including its withdrawal from any design table.

Elsewhere in the world, the logic is inverted, but architecture’s violence remains the same. As shown in the photographs by Gabo Morales, a certain amount of South American suburbs includes high-security gated communities where the highest social classes entrench themselves, outside of any public sociality with the rest of the city’s inhabitants. In a similar fashion to some of the militarized cities presented in this magazine’s first issue (September 2015), these neighborhoods are only accessible through checkpoints operated by private security contractors.

We should not be blinded by the literality of the walls shown in these photographs however; a multitude of suburban formations have no need for such explicit means of implementing segregative organizations. In American and European cities, an urban highway, or the lack of access to public transportation, might incarnate a just as drastic separation. Elsewhere, like in Ramallah, the withdrawal of new neighborhoods from the rest of the city, constructed to host the Palestinian middle class, constitutes a segregation with even more significant consequences, since it contributes to normalizing the Israeli occupation (see Tina Grandinetti’s article page 14). In all cases, examining suburban formations is imperative in understanding architecture’s propensity to separate bodies in space, as the scale on which they act is more dispersed, and thus more visible than in city centers. This is what the articles and documents that follow attempt to illustrate in all their geographical diversity.