9 WELCOME TO THE SUBURBAN REVOLUTION But the physical suburbs are as resilient as the concept that denotes them. It is remarkable that just a few years after they were considered ground zero of the global financial crisis, suburbs have once again attained dreamworld status as their image is projected onto a future that vacillates between climate change denial and the virtuous realization that adaptation to the challenges of global warming has to begin in the most unsustainable place of all: the North American suburb. 3 e very concept of suburb or suburban has recently received renewed attention. Taxonomies and lexicons of suburbanization have been developed. “e suburb” has been in the center of these considerations. 4 In contrast to these important contributions, this book attempts a less defining and more inquisitive approach. e book advances a simple definition of suburbanization as the com- bination of an increase in non-central city population and economic activity, as well as urban spatial expansion. Suburbanism(s) refers to a suburban way of life. But we are less interested in laying out the conceptual boundaries of a thing called “suburb” and more keen on contextualizing the continuous suburbanization of our world in a general project of urban theory building. Inspired by Henri Lefebvre’s work on the “urban revolution” and a critical reading of subsequent conversations about “planetary urbanization,” the book turns our theoretical feelers out from the center and examines the “suburban revolution.” 5 Much of what goes for “urbanization” today is not what was seen as such in classical terms of urban extension. Rather, it is now generalized suburbanization. In this sense, the essays be- low contribute to creating an opening beyond the traditional dichotomies of urban studies. “Global suburbanization” is by no means intended to reify and mark differences between the category of “suburb” and the rest of the dimensions through which general urbaniza- tion moves ahead. 6 In this sense, the book might be considered part of what Merrifield calls a “reloaded urban studies [that] suggests a thorough reframing of the urban question, of dealing adequately with the ontological question, that of being in the world, of being in an urban world. Within this conceptualization we need to dispense with all the old chestnuts between North and South, between developed and ‘underdeveloped’ worlds, between ur- ban and rural, between urban and regional, between city and suburb, and so forth.” 7 ere is some relationship here, if not in intention, at least in the direction of the approach, with authors such as Dear and Dahmann who have proposed that “there is no longer such a thing as suburbanization, understood as a peripheral accretion in a center-dominated urban process.” 8 erefore, the book is as much a specific intervention into suburban debates as it is a contribution to a rejuvenated conversation on urban theory overall. 9 e essays in this book share the assumption that much if not most of what counts as urbanization today is actually peripheral. In reloading urban studies via the suburbs, it needs to be admitted, at the outset, that criti- cal urban theory has traditionally not held things suburban in high regard. e left’s disdain for suburbs has been particularly, and understandably palpable: David Harvey made his Roger Keil WELCOME TO THE SUBURBAN REVOLUTION In a world that is now more than half urban, New York City is the most urban place you can find. Manhattan. It evokes images of a forest of high-rise buildings, canyons of streets, mas- sive pedestrian presence in noisy streetscapes, and so forth. But even New York now is one of the most suburbanized metropolitan regions in the world. Fixing our view on Manhattan can lead to a certain myopia. While significant, the traditional core of the Western world’s most well-known city is only one among many centers there and clearly just one spike in the horizontalized landscape of New York’s urban region, which stretches into several states and across many municipal boundaries. It also, as we now know, is not the only model of global metropolitanity but increasingly joined, rivaled, and superseded in defining our urban worlds by the emerging global cities of the likes of Shanghai, Sao Paulo, Mumbai, Lagos, just to name a few. Driven by an oscillating dialectic of growth and decline, urbanization produces many com- peting forms of production of space. Suburbanization is one of them. A study of urbaniza- tion patterns in the United States has found that American society is becoming more met- ropolitan and that the new metropoles in that country are more diverse and more complex than their predecessors. 1 In fact, we might now speak about living in an era of post-suburbanization where the suburbs as the newly built subdivisions at the city’s edge are fading into memory and give way to complex, variably scaled, functionally differentiated, and socioeconomically mixed metropolitan structures that contain rather than constrain natures. 2