Per Gunnar Roe. (2015). "The Construction of a Suburb: Ideology, Architecture and Everyday Culture in Skjettenbyen." Built Environment. Vol. 41, N0. 4, 538-549 http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/alex/benv/2015/00000041/00000004/art00008

Abstract: Countering both sprawling suburbia and suburban high-rise estates, planners and architects in the early 1970s developed other ways of making more human friendly, denser and participatory dwelling areas outside cities. Skjettenbyen outside Oslo is such an example. This paper presents an investigation of the ideological foundation for the construction of this large estate, how architecture was produced and represented as part of such an ideology, and how this relates to suburban culture and sense of place. Architects and planners tend to have great expectations of the social implications of their plans. Skjettenbyen is no exception: its planning, and the discursive context of the epoch, created a regime not only for the design and building of the area, but also for creating a social milieu and establishing a culture that the architects themselves would be a part of. Skjettenbyen is marked by the cultural political economy of the welfare state aiming at providing the working and lower middle-class places to live and belong. However, this investigation revealed a mundane pragmatism amongst its inhabitants, far from the counter culture represented by progressive architects. The meaning of Skjettenbyen and the everyday sense of place revealed in this study is the kind that develops over time when people build social capital. However, the planning layout, architectural form and practice-structure relations coming from the progressive discourse, as for example interior design and car parking, may still frame people's practices and place specific suburban culture in ways that make it different from suburbia elsewhere. As such this analysis contributes to the nuanced discussion of how planning influences people's suburban experiences.

Roger Keil and Sara Macdonald. (2016). "Rethinking urban political ecology from the outside in: greenbelts and boundaries in the postsuburban city" Local Environment.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13549839.2016.1145642

Abstract: This paper engages the existing literature on Urban Political Ecology (UPE) from the perspective of regulating urban expansion through greenbelts. The paper makes a contribution to a better understanding of suburbanisation and postsuburbanisation which have so far not been at the centre of the concerns of UPE. In an era of global suburbanisation greenbelts differ from similar boundary setting exercises in the past and are as varied as the suburbanisation processes and their governance themselves. While conscious of those varieties, we focus here on the Greater Golden Horseshoe (GGH) greenbelt in Ontario that was created by provincial legislation in 2005. With the 2005 legislation, the Ontario government declared 720,000 hectares off limits for conventional urban development. The Greenbelt Act created an expansive area under protection from the Niagara Peninsula in the south to the Bruce Peninsula in the north, the Niagara Escarpment in the west to a series of moraines in the east. We will argue that the GGH greenbelt has become a prime negotiation space for the overall re-regulation of urban political ecologies in Southern Ontario. Largely surrounding the booming Toronto region, the GGH greenbelt is expansion space and projection screen of a suburbanizing region in search of redefinition.

V. Gajendran. (2016). "Chennai’s Peri-urban: Accumulation of Capital and Environmental Exploitation" Environment and Urbanization Asia.
http://eua.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/02/26/0975425315619049.abstract

Abstract: Peri-urban areas such as those of Chennai, once characterized as rural, have transformed into places of luxurious living and globally invested special economic zones (SEZs). This industrial region includes Tamil Nadu’s State Industrial Promotion Corporation (SIPCOT) SEZs, which house global firms. Such investments have spurred publicly funded mega infrastructure projects such as expressways connecting to existing and new ports, all facilitated by land acquisition for ‘public purpose’. An important dynamic relates to the variety of players in the residential real estate market—ranging from low-income workers to mid-level executives. This peri-urban region’s connection to Chennai’s city centre happens not just via these globally oriented investments but also when natural resources, mainly water, are exploited for urban needs—supplied to Chennai city and also particular locations in its peri-urban region. Other locations in these peri-urban areas have transformed into dumping yards for Chennai’s wastes. Such environmental degradation shows how peri-urban areas are subjected to multiple processes and their dynamics cannot be captured through a single phenomenon. To theorize this situation, this work explores circuits of capital through ethnographic fieldwork. It argues that peri-urban areas of Asian metro cities like Chennai are sites of accumulation of capital whose exploitation for urban need extends to environmental degradation in complex ways. Such a joint conceptualization of environment and urbanization in urban peripheries is witnessed in other centres of the global North and South such as in Mexico City and Ho Chi Minh City, and within Indian cities as well. This points to a wider applicability of the concepts explored here.