By Sarah Wesseler

With more people gravitating toward cities than ever before, new urban morphologies are proliferating throughout the developed and developing worlds. Roger Keil, a professor at Toronto’s York University, has spent his career thinking about the implications of this process. We spoke with him about Suburban Governance: A Global View, a newly released book he co-edited with University of Montreal professor Pierre Hamel.

Q: What do you hope readers will take away from the book?

A: We’re claiming that suburbanization is maybe the most important process now going on in the world of urbanization. We need to have our lens trained on suburbanization as a process and suburban living as a way of life.

We thought that it was necessary to look specifically at A) how suburban places are produced and B) how they are being lived in. And the novelty of this part of our research is that we attempted a global perspective. That really hasn’t been done. There have been idiosyncratic comparisons of this and that, and regional studies on suburbanization in former Soviet countries, in China. But we believe for the first time we have looked at this in a global context with a particular perspective on the idea of governance.

Our starting question for this first book in our series about global suburbanisms was, how can we imagine a universal framework that explains governance of suburbanization? We came up with this idea that there are always three factors: the state, capital accumulation, and private authoritarian government.

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