ABSTRACT
Notions that suburbs have little spatial pattern or are composed solely of single-family housing tend to overwhelm our ability to see particular suburbs in all their cultural, social, and physical complexity. Indeed, ideas of suburbia or of the suburbs refer to a particularly generic spatial and temporal domain that is difficult to connect to conventional notions of site. Individual suburbs are real physical and historical places, but images and ideas of suburbia tend to be without place or time, and thus without site. The term suburbia covers all suburbs, as if they have all the same qualities and can substitute for each other across urban areas and historical periods. There is no contrasting concept of urbia as a generic description of city centers.1 It is the suburbs that are “placeless,” with a “geography of nowhere.”2 Single-family subdivisions, shopping centers, office parks, and freeways float in a dimensionless landscape of “sprawl.” They are generic elements in a disorganized, chaotic, and unbounded landscape.3
