ABSTRACT
John Friedmann’s notion of the prospect of cities, or the urban transition, speaks to the inevitability of the world turning urban (2002). The urban transition is the unstoppable movement from the rural and agricultural to the urban. In this short essay, I will discuss the space in between the rural and the urban, created by suburbanization, and its invisibility in Friedmann’s work.1 While Friedmann sees the urban field (Friedmann & Miller 1965) as the characteristic historical geography of the prospect of cities, he all but overlooks the characteristic form it takes: generalized post-suburbanization by which we refer to the generalized maturation of suburbanization and the spreading of suburban ways of life into the entire urban region: “a process that involves densification, complexification and diversification of the suburbanization process” (Charmes & Keil 2015, p.581). I will construct my argument through a selective look at Friedmann’s
work on cities and regions from the past 50 years, first among those his prescient essay with Miller, from 1965, on the “urban field”:
It is no longer possible to regard the city as purely an artifact, or a political entity, or a configuration of population densities. All of these are outmoded constructs that recall a time when one could trace a sharp dividing line between town and countryside, rural and urban man.
