Outside the Outside: The New Politics of Suburbs

by Matt Hern

What the changing suburbs tell us about the future of the city in the 21st century

One can no longer talk about the the urban center and the suburban periphery, and in Outside the Outside Matt Hern argues that we must rethink the entire identity of the city itself . Today the majority of the Western world lives in suburbs.

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.

While there is much talk of how gentrification displaces communities, there is little focus on where these communities are moved to. Outside the Outside maps these changes and also comes up with solutions on how to revive the social life of the city in the face of rabid financialization. In particular, Hern shows the rapid peripheralization of racial poverty.

With on-the-ground reportage in, amongst others, Portland, Vancouver, London, and Ferguson Missouri he shows us how we need to challenge our misconceptions and see the suburbs as vibrant places of resistance and regeneration, and to celebrate the movement, circulation and difference that make so many suburbs so alive.

Genres: Urban

192 pages, Hardcover

Published April 9, 2024

Reviews

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sympathetic book from leftwards on how much of recent urbanisation actually happens in suburbs, and in places that conventional urbanists are ill-equipped to understand because of their lack of resemblance to 19th century high urbanism//craft-beer 21st century urbanism. I think despite a couple of US cliches (obligatory bit on Pruitt-Igoe, etc) its thesis - what happens is more important than what it looks like - is generally correct and it is in places well argued. It's however boosted or marred according to your taste by that style which certain urbanists have, for which I blame Henri Lefebvre, where everything is divided into short off-the-cuff theory/chat chunks that always sound like they were dictated to a secretary, with citations added after she's typed up your soulful meditations. Section on London and the density and complexity of its furthest-flung suburbs made me proud to live here.

[David Hipp · Rating 1 out of 5]

Didn’t like it at all

[Alex Birnel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Outside the Outside is a book that opens up debates about the "suburb" as an analytical category of urban theory/urban studies. I don't think it ever successfully makes its own argument about what the suburb is, as much as the author seemed to want to problematize the cliches ascribed to suburbs in popular thinking and highlight the limitations of “the suburb” as a concept. It provides decent fodder to turn the field of urban theory's attention away from its canned positions that boundary and tightly define towards something more capacious and in greater flux.

The text is part confessional, with Hern reflecting on his youth, friendships, and accrued academic biases about city thinking, providing the biographical source material for the cliche list of ingredients that make a city a place in which the pursuit buen vivir can happen.

It's also part travel diary and conversation transcript about cities that Hern visits as he weighs out his questions and frustrations with urban theory on the page in exchanges with other academics.

Unfortunately, I think the book misses the mark of being fully formed, maybe because it's never intended to be, but as a reader, that desire to both resolve what's opened and go deeper with what's introduced, is there.

I'm taking away particular insights and not much else. That the city is a collection of processes that sometimes exceed the city, pointing towards the need for a planetary urban theory. That there is a double bind for the colonized in settler logic: the problem of both moving too much to settle land and maximize it's value, and moving too little, being in the way of settler projects. This nexus of mobility and fixity, along with it's knotted and contradictory tensions is illuminating but it's still an insight Hern likely borrows than advances himself. The reason this book about suburbs also dabbles in discussions of settler logics, or in the anarchist state evasions of the people of Zomia as another example of the seemingly not topical, is because the author is searching for ways to scrutinize the enclosures, hermetic seals, and boundaries that form the conceptual foundations of urban thinking.

He peppers valuable thoughts throughout a book that ultimately wanders a bit too aimlessly. He talks about the catch 22 of cities under capitalism, that their beautification is also what threatens them thanks to the gentrification that flows from increased valuations. He talks about the Lockean property-accumulation nexus that defines modernity and the citizen, but he never quite weaves all together so many loose threads beyond solid opening salvos and provocations that orientations and theorizations must change.

There is a plea to rescue the suburb from snobbish judgements, but these are mostly existential calls, calls to change how you relate, calls to deconstruct urbanist romanticism as middle class consumerist whiteness, calls to reconsider. Missing is an appreciation for experiments from below like the proliferation of regional solidarity economies, for power building from below like a celebration for the growing global tenants movement.

If the concepts of the suburb buckle at a limit because of the exhaustions of urban theory, great, and I can see how a lifetime of study gets you to biting familiarity with analytical boredoms and dead ends, sure, but give me a glimpse of the alternative at least, and better, document the social forces abolishing these boundaries and enacting the new.

Without doing so, Hern simply repeats to me that capitalism organizes space, and asserts that how we taxonomize that carving up may need a redo. I'm interested in the live undoings, reconstructions, and reorderings happening at the edges, or as Hern puts it "outside the outside" and I'm left still curious.

[Lucas Hennessey · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really like the ideas in this book. I don't want urbanism to boil down into "suburbs are bad," because there are people there that have lives that some urbanists think just don't matter. HOWEVER. There's not really a structure or compelling theme to this book (note the crazy shift from Morocco to sanitarium grandma), my eyes glaze over in many sections that read like academic papers written by ChatGPT, and bro has a style of writing that can only be described as incessant. HOWEVER, this book has me thinking, and I guess that's what matters in the end.

[Erik Wirfs-Brock · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kind of a wispy, half formed book, but I appreciated the attempt to analyze and celebrate those messy non dense suburbs where so many people spend their lives. Living on the west coast the reportage resonated, even if the time spent on the book on quoting other half baked urban theorists or the rote leftist rants did not.

[JohnDanish · Rating 1 out of 5]

Basically, a book that explains all the complexities and problems of urban metropolis as the fault of evil White people. An actual quote from the book: "Sam here, he might believe there is some good in white people, but every piece of evidence suggests otherwise."