ABSTRACT
Introduction In the wake of work by Charles Landry, Peter Hall, and Richard Florida, ‘creative’ and ‘creativity’ have become two of the most widely used words in the English language. While these two words have been inclusively applied by bureaucrats, urban planners, and scholars alike to an eclectic range of activities, objects, individuals, and places at different spatial scales, from the body to the neighbourhood to the city, they have rarely been applied to the suburb. Frequently maligned as ‘boring, uniform, isolated, domestic [places] … full of identical people doing identical things’ (Pile, 1999: 29), the caricatured sprawling suburb with its sixlane roads, deserted bus stops, industrial parks, strip malls, big box parking centres, prayer palaces, and garage-fronted McMansions would seem to be the very antithesis of creativity. yet, ironically, the central values of suburban life – space, privacy, independence, freedom, and personal control – are many of the same qualities that are as appreciated by socio-culturally diverse suburbanites as they are by cultural workers who form the core of Richard Florida’s creative class (Wyszomirski, 2000).
