>
> On Nov 13, 2009, at 6:43 AM, James Heartfield wrote:
>
> That's not what annoys me. What annoys me is when it seems that the left
>> gives up on trying to convince the suburbs, small towns and exurbs, as it
>> often does, suggesting that suburbanites are natural voting fodder for the
>> right. That is why we have a Tory administration in London now - because
>> Boris Johnson used the 'doughnut' strategy of campaigning in the suburbs
>> while Labour's Ken Livingstone tried to rally the inner city. That is
>> understandable, but ultimately self-defeating. All the evidence is that
>> de-densification is the underlying trend, which no amount of smart-growth
>> has succeeded in counter-acting. If the left gives up on the suburbs, then
>> it gives up on winning. (Sorry to sound like Kevin Philips, but on that, if
>> not on many other things, he had a point)
>>
>
> There are suburbs, and there are exurbs. Older, denser suburbs in the U.S.
> shouldn't be written of by a left, broadly defined. Not at all. But the
> rural areas and distant suburbs/exurbs/edge cities are mostly reactionary,
> and there's no point in trying to cultivate them.
>
> Doug
I taught Annette Lareau's Unequal Childhoods in an integrative social science/gen ed class titled, Individual and Society last summer. In it, she argues - too strongly, but pretty convincingly - that independent of race, late 20th and early 21st C professional class folks raise their kids in an over-scheduled world of "concerted cultivation" and overworked lower middle income, blue collar and urban poor folks raise their kids through kinship and neighborhood based world of "achieving natural growth" ("Go outside and play.")
If I was going to break down Doug's differentiation, I'd say that the "older, denser suburbs" are those built by, say, 1970, where middle and upper middle income and professional classes could still raise their kids - at least until 1982/84 or so - in a manner that primarily focused on achieving natural growth. Suburbs and ex-urbs built since 1980 are infinitely more likely to be gated communities, or the equivalent, not to have sidewalks or neighborhood schools, to have less public space, and to have "show" living rooms and garage doors on the face of the house and multimedia rooms (what we used to call the back- or TV-room), kitchens (of massive scale, if little use) and porches on the back (with bedrooms upstairs only having windows facing the back yard.
I'd have to agree with Doug, the older burb's - like Berkeley Heights, NJ, where I grew up (and East Lansing, MI, where I live - are totally worth pursuing, the newer one's... not hardly...