Outside the Outside
The New Politics of Suburbs
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
"Matt Hern's brilliant and captivating Outside the Outside presents an urgently needed, theoretically sophisticated street-level perspective on some of the most pertinent ongoing critical debates about life and politics in our decentered suburban world."
—Roger Keil, author of Suburban Planet
Modern "sub-urbs" as a place of vibrancy, conflict and resistance
Matt Hern argues that the changing relationship between the urban center and the suburban periphery forces us to rethink the entire identity of the city itself. Today, most of the Western world lives on the city outskirts. Yet these neighborhoods that once offered security and respite from the perceived dangers of the city center have been radically transformed in the last few decades to poor, working-class and racialized communities. Outside the Outside maps these changes and argues for a revival of the social life of the city as a whole.
Hern shows how language that relegates parts of the urban to the “outside” and designates other parts as the "center" echoes colonial forms of domination. This should come as no surprise in an era when communities are forced onto the periphery and beyond by gentrification.
With on-the-ground reportage in, among other places, Vancouver, Portland, London, Ferguson and Rabat, Hern demonstrates how we need to challenge our misconceptions and see the "sub-urbs" as vibrant places of resistance and regeneration and to celebrate the movement, circulation and difference to be found there.
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In this roaming polemic, community organizer Hern (Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life) urges a new understanding of where people live as a "variegated, complicating and fractured landscape"—a pluralistic amalgamation of cities, towns, rural areas, ethnic neighborhoods, and suburbs, all of them socially and economically diverse. Urban theorists, he claims, are fixated on center-periphery relations, such that the "dominant urban theory marginalizes anywhere outside imagined city boundaries as the sub to the urb." He advocates for theorists to abandon "tired tropes" and instead focus on the "creative forms of social organization that are emerging on urban peripheries" where most people are moving. These "sub-urbs"—"a set of modes of living and ways of being"—are everywhere, Hern contends, and not simply "outside" the city. They celebrate "movement, adjustment, non-fixities, and mobilities" and are the places where working-class households reside without the trappings of fashion-conscious consumerism, wealth accumulation, and global aspirations. ("Evangelical churches above auto body shops, pizza shops in garages and boutiques in industrial parks" serve as examples.) Later chapters recount Hern's explorations of cities and suburbs including Portland, Ore., and Ferguson, Mo. While his tantalizing intimations of an alternative to center-periphery thinking are never fully fleshed out, Hern's flowery frustration with the status quo will entertain like-minded readers ("that's just the sound of my dogmatic, pissed-off self"). It's a discontented meander through urban theory.
