Suburban

From the first thinkers in urban theory, for example, Weber (1921), the Chicago School (Park et al 1925), their Marxist challengers in the 1970s (Castells 1977), the city has been conceptualized from the centre outward. There have been countertendencies, for example Lefebvre (2003), and the Los Angeles School (Scott and Soja 1996; Soja 1996; Sieverts 2003; for a recent overview see Judd and Simpson 2011), yet generally the peripheral, or suburban experience has been treated as derivative, or even deviant. Urbanization is still mostly imagined as a concentric expansion of centrality – of space, functions, economies, people. In turn, suburban studies (a large and growing field) has usually reproduced the centre-periphery split. Their disregard of the centre has been equally problematic (for recent overviews see Harris 2010; Forsyth 2012; Jauhiainen 2013).