Abstract
The dream of a house in the country, at the seashore, or near a ski hill, is one shared by many in North American society. But the environmental and social impacts of the realization of this dream by an increasing number of people has created crises and conflict for many communities. The concept of exurbia has traditionally been used to describe settlement patterns simultaneously dispersed from the city yet also connected to urban networks. This paper reviews scholarship across disciplines including geography, ecology, sociology, and political ecology. Exurbia is here proposed to be strengthened as a powerful conceptual approach to capture and discuss the complex processes producing this phenomenon. Previous scholarship has produced excellent but largely disconnected work on the periurban zone around cities, exurban settlement processes, tensions between exurbanites and other rural residents, environmental impacts and habitat fragmentation. Future work on exurbia holds a great deal of promise to think about cultural values supporting the processes that produce these landscapes, working across scales from local to global using interdisciplinary and multi-method study.
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Notes
Based on my own research using available online databases covering Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. Canadian newspaper reporters, especially, by the end of 2006 were increasingly using “exurbs” to identify rural residential settlement at the extreme edge of the existing urban regions of Vancouver and Toronto.
I am indebted to Kirsten Valentine Cadieux for her close collaboration in collecting sources and debating the possibilities of exurbia. This review was first presented at the 2006 Association of American Geographers Meeting in Denver and it was delivered as a companion to Cadieux’s presentation reviewing the ideology of nature [in this issue]. Many thanks to the reviewers who provided additional references and great suggestions.
Geographers use landscape to study cultural processes converging in time and space to produce the material environment. Using the concept of landscape in this way to study everyday environments is relatively recent (Bender 1993; Cosgrove 1985; Crang 1998; Duncan and Duncan 2004; Groth and Bressi 1997; Relph 1981; Schein 1997; Wilson and Groth 2003). While the term ‘landscape’ may conjure up paintings or tourist vistas, in cultural geography it is the context for everyday life and “needs to be understood as enmeshed within the processes which shape how the world is organised, experienced and understood” (Seymour 2000, p. 214).
Landscapes are not benign however scenic they may appear (to both exurbanites and researchers); they are political (Walker and Fortmann 2003), and constantly being revised and reshaped, both materially and discursively (Williams 1973; Marx 1964; Duncan and Duncan 2004). The exurban landscape is full of conflict: between various “normative visions” (Walker and Fortmann 2003, p. 487, fn 11), especially between those of newcomers seeking amenities in the landscape and old-timers in agricultural and resource production (Lage 2005).
Bibliographies on urban dispersion were useful in reviewing the literature. See “A Smart Growth Bibliography” prepared by the Smart Growth Network, “Exurban and Rural-Urban Interface Bibliography” prepared by the Exurban Change Project at Ohio State University; a bibliography on amenity-led residential development was prepared in 2002 for the Journal of Planning Literature (Marcouiller et al. 2002); and a bibliography on “suburban” literature by Varangu (1998). The latter includes a section on the “exurban fringe” which points out that literature to that date on exurbia (as opposed to suburbia) focused on impacts of scattered rural homes on agricultural land and the natural environment.
David Brooks, in On Paradise Drive (2004), a journalistic account of exurbanites in the US, sees their lives seemingly unconnected to the city. These brand-new settlements look like the suburbs, in that they are developer-built with faux mainstreet shopping centres, but they are distant from the urban field of the city. Brooks asks interesting questions about exurbanites’ motivations. His answers are irreverent and somewhat reminiscent of Spectorsky, but where Brooks’ exurbanites are driven by consumer ideology (cheaper land allows bigger houses that can hold more stuff), Spectorsky’s exurbanites were no less conspicuous consumers but their need to live in the countryside was drawn by the idealized rural life. Both Brooks’ and Spectorsky’s books were New York Times best-sellers (1955, 2004). Brooks’ exurbanites are, in Mitchell’s definition, “displaced-urbanites” and perhaps are an exception to the exurbia driven by nature ideology that I am interested in. It remains to be seen and clarified by further study.
Exurbia as very low density amenity-seeking residential development has been part of the settlement of cities throughout history. Re-reading urban development theory and suburban histories with an eye to parsing the amenity-driven, nature-seeking exurban forms, processes and behaviours from the suburban might draw interesting questions for future research.
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Taylor, L. No boundaries: exurbia and the study of contemporary urban dispersion. GeoJournal 76, 323–339 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-009-9300-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-009-9300-y