What is suburbanim as a way of life and how has that concept changed over the years? The latest edition of Urban Studies includes an article by Alan Walks,  "Suburbanism as a Way of Life, Slight Return," that addresses these questions drawing on the work of Lefebrvre and others. Following is the article's abstract:

Much attention has been given to increasing dominance of the post-war suburbs,
and the concomitant rise of ‘suburbanism’ in ways of life in the ‘post-metropolis’.
However, the meaning of suburbanism is rarely specified and there have been insuf-
ficient attempts to theorise its relationship to the urban. Drawing on the dialectical
analyses of Henri Lefebvre, this article presents a theory of suburbanism as a subset
of urbanism, with which it is in constant productive tension. Six distinct dimensions
of the urbanism–suburbanism dialectic are identified, derived from extrapolating
Lefebvre’s urban theory into second- and third-order analyses. These aspects of sub-
urbanism are conceptualised not as static characteristics but as qualities that dyna-
mically flow through, rather than define, particular places. Suburbanism is thus
conceptualised separately from those places often termed suburbs, opening up the
potential for interaction between these dimensions and the lived realities of everyday
urban life and politics.