Suburban Constellations

Professor Roger Keil (York University, Toronto) introduces his new edited collection "Suburban constellations" (Jovis, 2013), followed by a panel discussion including Ute Lehrer (York), Nick Phelps (UCL) and Fulong Wu (UCL) and chaired by Matthew Gandy (UCL).

In a world of cities, suburbanization is the most visible and pervasive phenomenon. Global sprawl engulfs us but it does so in remarkably differentiated ways. While the single-family home subdivisions of North America remain the "classical case," there are now many other forms of suburbanism around the globe. The high rise housing estates around many European and Canadian cities, the belts and wedges of squatter settlements in the global south, the burgeoning megacity peripheries between Istanbul and Shanghai and the technopoles and edge cities in all corners of the world are all part of a pervasive trend towards global suburbanisms. Suburban Constellations provides a first account of this global development, analyzing the multiple manifestations of suburbanization and suburbanism.