International Perspectives on Suburbanization: A Post-Suburban World edited by Nicholas A. Phelps and Fulong Wu

Suburban Constellations edited by Roger Keil

Alex Schafran reviews two books edited by MCRI researchers in the International Journal for Urban and Regional Research. Read the review here.

"One way of thinking about the contemporary moment is that the goal is not to define or redefine suburbia, but instead to grapple with the ‘post-suburban’ moment, to understand how this place called suburbia has changed and what it has evolved into, even if we now acknowledge it was never quite what we thought it was. The idea of ‘post-suburbia’ is at the heart of Nick Phelps and Fulong Wu's edited volume International Perspectives on Suburbanization: A Post-Suburban World?, and to their credit they grapple with historical, spatial and political-economic definitions of the term. Is the post-suburban about a new age of suburbanism, a new physical/economic space or a new set of networked actors and institutions?"

"Roger Keil's Suburban Constellations sees Simone embracing Matthew Gandy over halal Chinese in a strip mall in Markham. It is a fabulously bold explosion of color from Keil who, along with Ute Lehrer and co-conspirators like Alan Mabin, has dutifully been attempting to provided structure, support and inspiration to global suburbanists the world over (in the interests of full disclosure, I too have benefited from their efforts, and will be part of one of the forthcoming collections). One of the first of many forthcoming products from the Global Suburbanisms project hosted at York (in post-suburban Toronto, naturally), Constellations is a structured bricolage of short essays, photos, brief snippets of larger empirical projects, suburban wanders and one very interesting report on a novel university–community ‘working group’ on suburban planning and community development."