Suburban Planet - (Urban Futures) by Roger Keil (Paperback)

About the Book

"The urban century manifests itself at the peripheries. While the massive growth in urbanization is often referred to as an 'urban revolution', most of the twenty-first century's startling urban growth worldwide is happening in city peripheries.This book is about the process that creates the global urban periphery - suburbanization - and the ways of life - suburbanisms - we encounter there. Richly detailed and illustrated with examples from around the world, the book argues that suburbanization is a global process and part of the extended urbanization of the planet. This includes the gated communities of elites, the squatter settlements of the poor and many built forms and ways of life on the periphery in-between. While urbanist orthodoxy opposes low-density 'sprawl' for its disproportional environmental impact, the reality of life in the urban century is suburban: most of the earth's future 10 billion inhabitants will not live in conventional cities but in suburban constellations of one kind or another.Inspired by Henri Lefebvre's demand not to give up urban theory when the city in its classical form disappears, this book is a challenge to urban thought more generally as it invites the reader to reconsider the city from its periphery"--

Book Synopsis

The urban century manifests itself at the peripheries. While the massive wave of present urbanization is often referred to as an 'urban revolution', most of this startling urban growth worldwide is happening at the margins of cities.

This book is about the process that creates the global urban periphery - suburbanization - and the ways of life - suburbanisms - we encounter there. Richly detailed with examples from around the world, the book argues that suburbanization is a global process and part of the extended urbanization of the planet. This includes the gated communities of elites, the squatter settlements of the poor, and many built forms and ways of life in-between. The reality of life in the urban century is suburban: most of the earth's future 10 billion inhabitants will not live in conventional cities but in suburban constellations of one kind or another.

Inspired by Henri Lefebvre's demand not to give up urban theory when the city in its classical form disappears, this book is a challenge to urban thought more generally as it invites the reader to reconsider the city from the outside in.

Review Quotes

"Keil provides a crucial theoretical underpinning to show how a plurality of suburbanization processes are multifariously linked to urban expansion yet constitute their own force and way of existing. This is the first book I know to really engage this heterogeneity with all of its problems, weird splendor, and ambivalent potentiality."
AbdouMaliq Simone, Goldsmiths, University of London

"Suburban Planet is a major contribution to the theoretical and policy debates that are emerging in the increasingly urbanized twenty-first century. It is in the spatially 'exploding' urban places that the urban drama of the 21st century will be played out against a background of economic volatility, social tension and environmental risk."
Terry McGee, University of British Columbia

About the Author

Roger Keil is Professor and York Chair in Global Sub/Urban Studies and former Director of the CITY Institute at York University, Toronto