Why we’ve got the suburbs all wrong
Forget the metropolitan core — the real story of globalisation can be found out in the burbs
Janan Ganesh
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Janan Ganesh
January 12, 2018

“Have you ever lived in the suburbs?” wondered Ed Koch, in his truculent pomp as New York City mayor. “It’s sterile. It’s nothing.” The arts agree, to judge by their portraits of those who live in the corona of big cities. They are robotic (The Stepford Wives), dysfunctional (Ordinary People) and almost always homogenous. Even benign accounts of suburbia, such as John Betjeman’s hypnotic 1973 documentary Metro-Land, which the poet part-narrated in verse, mention “kept women” in their husbands’ “puritan arms”.

It is hard to say which is quainter: the suburbs, or this view of them. In 1982, when Koch spoke, perhaps they were still static, uniform places. But after that, migrants (and native-born minorities) began moving to the edges of North American cities until academics published work on the new “ethnoburbs”. In 2014, William H Frey of the Brookings Institution described this browning of suburbia in Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics Are Remaking America.

The trend, which demographers noticed a while ago, has still not changed the way we instinctively think and talk about suburbs. In a news report about globalisation, the stock image will be an urban junction — Times Square, say, or Oxford Circus. The trouble with this reflex is that city centres were diverse long before the most recent age of globalisation. What really changed in the past few decades was the outward creep of that diversity. In the western world, at least, globalisation has been more than anything a suburban story.

In 2016, the Consumer Data Research Centre, a collaboration of academics, produced a detailed map of Britain that colour-coded neighbourhoods according to their residents’ most common country of birth (excluding Britain itself). To zoom in on London is to find your eyes drawn to the suburbs: the Poles of Barnet, the Nigerians of Bexley, the Turks of Enfield, the Indians of Harrow and Stanmore, out there in Metro-Land, which was already changing when the film aired. Within the living memory of some Londoners, these place names were synonymous with homogeneity, in a way the centre of town never was.

The point is not that suburbs are innately better places because of their diversity. Leave that to personal preference. I just wonder how they have hung on to their reputation as ossified dormitories for human clones. “Suburban” is still a word with particular connotations. Given the trend of events on the ground, it should have new ones.

The metropolitan core is not the only crucible of globalisation, or even the main one. It is merely the obvious place to look. More vivid stories are playing out farther away from downtown: in Toronto’s Scarborough suburb, for example, or Parramatta in Sydney.

What brings migrants to these places? Perhaps they see suburbia as the gateway to assimilation. Or maybe economics drove them: the revival of inner cities from their mid-20th century slump has priced out the kind of newcomers who could once have counted on cheap accommodation near famous streets and Unesco heritage sites. Whatever the cause, the blurring of the line between a mixed centre and white suburbs should have shown up by now in culture and even in municipal politics. Yet as recently as 2016, Conservatives in London hoped to win the mayoralty with the old “doughnut” strategy of sweeping the suburbs to offset the cosmopolitan core. A strategy from another age.

If most people’s mental map of who lives where lags behind real-world change, I at least claim the advantage of having grown up with that change. Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, published in 1990, was a rare work of art that tracked the mutation of those nondescript outskirts even before the academics were on to it. When it was adapted for BBC television in 1993, I saw my own world, a London suburb not far from the story’s setting, reflected back to me for the first time. The same volatile demographics, the same atmospheric mix of tolerance and friction, as warehouses the size of aircraft hangars became Asian cash-and-carry wholesalers. They in turn became African churches after I left for London “proper”, where I can pretend that my high-earning French and American neighbours constitute the whole story of globalisation.

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