What's in a Name?: Talking about Urban Peripheries 9781442620643

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WHAT’S IN A NAME? Talking about Urban Peripheries Edited by Richard Harris and Charlotte Vorms

Borgata, favela, périurbain, and suburb are but a few of the different terms used throughout the world that refer specifically to communities that develop on the periphery of urban centres. In What’s in a Name? editors Richard Harris and Charlotte Vorms have gathered together an international group of experts to examine such terms as an essential part of a framework for the study of the urban periphery. Rather than view these distinct “suburban” communities through the lens of the western notion of urban sprawl – and the homogeneous terminology favoured by many researchers – the contributors consider the variety of everyday terms used by local residents to refer to the urban fringe, along with the specific connotations and broader implications associated with these terms. The first book in English to pay serious and sustained attention to the naming of the urban periphery worldwide, the volume explores the local terminology used in places across several continents, and in cities such as Beijing, Bucharest, Montreal, Mumbai, Rio di Janeiro, Rome, and Sofia. By studying the ways in which different actors, such as land developers, governments, academics, planners, the media, and, above all, residents themselves – speak about the urban periphery What’s in a Name? bridges the divide between the global North and the global South and sheds light on a wide range of issues related to urban growth and international policy development. (Global Suburbanisms) richard harris is a professor in the School of Geography and Earth Sciences at McMaster University. charlotte vorms is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Paris 1–Panthéon Sorbonne.

GLOBAL SUBURBANISMS Series Editor: Roger Keil, York University Urbanization is at the core of the global economy today. Yet, crucially, suburbanization now dominates 21st-century urban development. This book series is the first to systematically take stock of worldwide developments in suburbanization and suburbanisms today. Drawing on methodological and analytical approaches from political economy, urban political ecology, and social and cultural geography, the series seeks to situate the complex processes of suburbanization as they pose challenges to policymakers, planners, and academics alike. For a list of the books published in this series see page 359.

What’s in a Name? Talking about Urban Peripheries

EDITED BY RICHARD HARRIS AND CHARLOTTE VORMS

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2017 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in the U.S.A. ISBN 978-1-4426-4960-6 (cloth)   ISBN 978-1-4426-2696-6 (paper) Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetablebased inks. (Global Suburbanisms) Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication What’s in a name? : talking about urban peripheries / edited by Richard Harris and Charlotte Vorms. (Global suburbanisms) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4960-6 (cloth). – ISBN 978-1-4426-2696-6 (paper) 1. Suburbs – Developing countries.  2. Suburbs – Developed countries.  I. Harris, Richard, 1952–, editor.  II. Vorms, Charlotte, editor.  III. Title.  IV. Title: What’s in a name?  V. Series: Global suburbanisms. HT351.W53 2017   307.74   C2017-902050-1 This work has received financial support from the LabEx DynamiTe (ANR-11-LABX-0046), as part of the “Investissements d’Avenir” program. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

Funded by the Financé par le Government gouvernement du Canada of Canada

Contents

List of Figures and Tables  vii Preface  ix 1 Introduction  3 Richard Harris and Charlotte Vorms 2 The Naming Process  36 Christian Topalov 3 “Suburb Is Not a Rude Word in Australia”: A Lexical History  68 Graeme Davison 4 Doubts about “Suburbs” in Canada  89 Amy Shanks, Victoria Coates, and Richard Harris 5 Defining Peripheral Places in Quebec: A Review of Key Planning Reports and the Media, 1960–2012  112 Claire Poitra s 6 Bombay’s Urban Edge: Villages, Suburbs, Slums, and the Expanding City  132 Nikhil Rao 7 Kampungs, Buitenwijken, and Kota Mandiri: Naming the Urban Fringe on Java, Indonesia  152 Freek Colombijn and Abidin Kusno

vi Contents

8 From Favela to Communidade and Beyond: The Taming of Rio de Janeiro  173 Rafael Soares Gonçalves and Francesca Pilo’ 9 Naming Rome’s Edge: Cultural and Political Representations of the Borgata  192 Francesco Bartolini 10 Naming Madrid’s Working-Class Periphery, 1860–1970: The Construction of Urban Illegitimacy  209 Charlotte Vorms 11 To Name or Not to Name: Contradictions in Naming Processes of One Bucharest District  232 Ioana Florea 12 Some Reflections on Comparing (Post-)Suburbs in the United States and France  255 Renaud Le Goi x 13 Périurbain, from Woes to Words: Political and Social Uses of a New Administrative Category  282 Anne Lambert 14 The New Neighbourhoods: The Discursive (and Other) Transformation of South Sofia’s Modest Beginnings  299 Sonia Hirt 15 Lost in Translation: Names, Meanings, and Development Strategies of Beijing’s Periphery  316 Xuefei Ren 16 Concluding Suggestions  334 Richard Harris Contributors  347 Index  353

Figures and Tables

Figures 4.1 The geography of income in Hamilton, 2010  94 4.2 Perceptions of suburbs among residents of single detached homes 103 4.3 Perceptions of suburbs among residents of townhouses  104 5.1 Main components of the Montreal metropolitan area  123 10.1 Occurrence of the words suburbio and chabola in the ABC newspaper, 1891–1985  213 11.1 Map of Bucharest, according to architect Mihail Dumitriu, January 2016  237 12.1 Typical post-suburbia in southern California  256 12.2 Residential subdivisions in Bussy-Saint-Georges  259 12.3 Suburbanization dynamics in France, 1962–2006  262 12.4 Annual growth rate by county urbanization, large metro areas, 2000–10 265 16.1 Terms for the urban periphery in British English, 1930–2009  340 16.2 Terms for the urban periphery in American English, 1930–2009 341 Tables 4.1 How residents of Hamilton define the suburbs  98 12.1 Competing definitions: Examples of the geographies, concepts, and criteria used to characterize the dynamics of suburbs and exurbs in the United States  266

viii  Figures and Tables

12.2 Categories of subdivisions approved in California between 2000 and 2010  268 12.3 Housing typology by type of permit and surface area of new housing built in Ile-de-France between 1999 and 2007  270 15.1 Key terms describing urban centres and peripheries  319

Preface

The British and the French do many things differently, and one of the ways in which they differ is in how they think about language. The British actually do not think about language very much at all; mostly, they are happy just to use it, correct it, or perhaps marvel at a neologism. But the French, and especially French academics, ruminate, speculate, theorize, and, in sum, are much more self-conscious about the way they speak. As the editors of this collection, we do not represent these stereotypes but we have been shaped by them. The English influence was certainly powerful on Richard, who – mea culpa – was for many years happily naive in his use of language, assuming that a suburb was, after all, a suburb. But as a graduate student, he had read and admired the work of Raymond Williams, who, through Keywords and The Country and the City, has probably had more influence on the conversation about urban words in English than any other writer over the past half century. Eventually, those seeds planted by reading and thinking about Williams began to bear fruit, when, as part of an international project on global suburbanisms, he was encouraged to read and reflect very widely, attempting to make comparisons between places that differed most obviously in the forms taken by suburban development but also, it turned out, in the ways in which local residents understood those places. At a certain point it became apparent that a suburb by any other name was not necessarily a suburb. The analogous French influence is also true with respect to Charlotte. Educated in France, she studied in the 1990s when the constructivist paradigm was dominating social sciences. During her years as a PhD student, she noticed how language was used to impose policy. Drawn

x Preface

into Christian Topalov’s research project on the usages of urban words in seven languages, she wanted to further investigate issues at stake in the naming process, as well as its practical effects. Starting from different places, and following different paths, we have ended at a (remarkably?) similar destination, recognizing that words matter and wishing above all to root them in particular contexts. We discovered this commonality in the process of helping to organize sessions on the subject “What’s in a Name? How We Label Peripheral Places,” at the International Conference of Urban History, which was held in Prague in September 2012. These sessions generated enough interest that we decided to bring together a number of the papers that were presented there, along with several that we subsequently solicited. Together these papers constitute the first collection on the topic of suburban names in English. Along the way, we have accumulated a number of debts that we gladly acknowledge. Richard would like to thank Roger Keil for inviting him into the Global Suburbanisms project, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for funding it. Charlotte thanks Laurent Coudroy de Lille for introducing her to the infinite interest of exploring words’ usages, and the Labex Dynamite (Laboratoire d’Excellence Dynamiques Territoriales et Spatiales, Cluster of Excellence Territorial and Spatial Dynamics) in Paris for helping fund this book. We are both grateful to Sean Purdy and Sonia Hirt for helping to coordinate the conference session in Prague, to three anonymous readers for taking the time to add valuable comments and suggestions, and to Doug Hildebrand for his continuing support and assistance in shepherding the manuscript through the review and publication process.

WHAT’S IN A NAME? Talking about Urban Peripheries

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1 Introduction Richar d Har ris an d Ch arl ot t e V o r m s

Around the world, people use different words to speak about the urban periphery. They are diff erent not only in the obvious way, because of the variety of languages, but also in having widely contrasting connotations and meanings. And some people have no word at all for this space, as if in their societies the urban periphery does not matter, or is not understood as such. What does this variety mean, and why should we care? Those are the questions on which the present book aims to shed some light, using local examples drawn from cities in every major world region except Africa. Like other categories, including statistical ones (Desrosières and Thévenot, 2002), words qualify, divide, and classify reality. They are representations that reflect social understandings of the world, and so it is fruitful to study them as such. We believe that to study the words used to refer to urban peripheries is one means to a better understanding of the significance of urbanization, and indeed of its very nature. In turn, this understanding should allow us to design better, more locally sensitive, programs to address urban problems. The Space We Are Interested In: The Urban Periphery What is so interesting or important about the urban periphery? Globally, the pace and scope of urbanization has never been greater, and the zone in which we are interested is where most of the action lies. It includes the sorts of recently developed districts that in American or British English would routinely be referred to as suburbs, as well as areas further out that are developing as urban areas grow, often in a haphazard, disconnected, unplanned fashion. These new developing areas, which

4  Richard Harris and Charlotte Vorms

may include pods of new development and scatterings of individual dwellings as well as existing farms and town and village settlements, have been variously labelled “exurbia,” “penurbia,” périurbain, and “the rural-urban fringe” by European and North American scholars. In this academic description of inhabited spaces, the binary distinction between city and countryside, and – within urban areas – between cities and suburbs, has increasingly been replaced by a threefold division of city/countryside/something-in-between, and city/suburb/this-thirdspace. There is no agreed-upon generic label in English for this in-­ between/third space; but, for the clarity of our exposition, we will call it “sprawl.”1 A basic question this book asks is: To what extent do these binary or ternary divisions of cities correspond to the everyday understanding of local residents in different spatio-temporal contexts? What are the distinctive features of the urban periphery, including the continuously developed territory that in North America is referred to as the suburbs and the discontinuous development now known as exurban sprawl? The physical character of these zones varies. Some­ times the suburban portion consists of single-family homes, sometimes townhouses, and occasionally high-rise apartments. At one extreme, as in southeast Asia, the exurban territory already contains dense agricultural settlement; occasionally, as around Cairo, it is desert. But all of these places typically share some important characteristics. In their location, and often in terms of their residential densities, they lie between city and country. They are new and, in the case of sprawl, rapidly changing. For that reason, they are areas of possibility, as people settle down to make a new life and, with it, a new place. Their legal status and manner of production also varies. On this subject there is a massive but uneven literature (Harris, Lehrer, and Bloch, 2013). In a general way, the processes of urban development and change are clear. To simplify, in western Europe, North America, and Japan, urban expansion is now significantly driven by the movement of people out of the city; elsewhere, it is shaped above all by rural migrants who are seeking urban opportunities (Saunders, 2010). In creating new spaces, land developers play a key role, coordinating builders, perhaps installing infrastructure, and marketing new subdivisions.2 In the South,3 much of this activity occurs irregularly, through squatting, or quasi-legally in “unauthorized,” “irregular,” or “pirate” settlements that fail to meet one or more set of government regulations (Harris, 2014). Indeed, some areas come to be defined by their absence of infrastructure: in Rio, asfalto designates areas without paved roads, while in

Introduction 5

Luanda the musseques are contrasted with the “town of cement” (seke means “sand” in Kimbundo, the local language) (Rodrigues, 2009). In principal, municipalities control types of development and where it may occur. In practice, they can be influenced by landowners and developers, and they may be manipulated and corrupted. This is especially true where their fiscal and managerial capacities are limited and where the problem of housing is such that the municipalities are unable to avoid it. Last, but certainly not least, the social character of these urban peripheries can vary widely. In Britain, North America, and Australia, the stereotypical suburb is middle class, although the reality in those places has always been more complex. In other parts of the world, the urban periphery can be a world of extremes, extending from isolated settlements characterized by abject poverty, through comfortable middleclass zones, to luxurious settlements where upper-class groups choose to live far from all others. The rise of gated communities at the urban fringe, especially in countries such as Brazil, India, and Russia where large numbers of people have acquired new-found wealth, is perhaps the most striking case in point (Herzog, 2015). The only features that urban peripheries have in common are that they are newly built and near the edge of a city. Academics, and especially geographers, planners, and urban designers, assume that these two criteria are important. But is this assumption shared by local residents, or significant enough to justify the use of a generic word for such areas? This is a basic question, rarely asked, that our book wants to address. Describing the Urban Periphery The literature on urban peripheries, as indeed in urban studies more generally, has commonly been very naive in its use of language and treatment of names (Beauregard, 1993). Here, one of us can speak from experience, and ruefully, having published a global survey that more or less assumed the usefulness of the term “suburb” (Harris, 2010: 25). In some part, this naivety is another aspect of the global dominance of English, not only in the academy but, more importantly, in various international political arenas (McCrum, 2010). However, this fact is due not only to naivety but also to the necessity of a lingua franca for international organizations. It remains true, though, that western academics have commonly thought nothing about deploying their own language,

6  Richard Harris and Charlotte Vorms

and conceptual frameworks, in order to describe and interpret cities in other societies, and they have increasingly come to use “suburb” to refer to the urban periphery all over the world. Yet it is clear that locals have often not followed suit (Harris, 2010: 23–25). In other words, almost everywhere urban theory is Anglo-centric (Robinson, 2002; Roy, 2009). Apart from squeezing diverse local experiences into alien categories, such as “slum” (cf. Kundu, 1999: 39), the dominance of such theory has also led to parochiality, such that its exponents have taken for granted the circumstances, values, and categories to which they are native. Names have attracted attention only when clearly new – notably, the blatant and unimaginative branding of new subdivisions, such as Bangalore’s “Dollar Colony” (Nair, 2006) – or when a name is challenged, for example the popular resistance to “slum” that gathered momentum in Britain and North America in the 1960s. Even in a recent collection of papers on Asian and Pacific cities, where local writers were encouraged not to rely on western perspectives, the editors speak of “suburban development” (Shirley and Neill, 2013: xviii). This linguistic imperialism, however convenient, is all the more curious since academics are keen to invent new words and then debate their merits. The examples of postindustrial cities as a whole and of urban sprawl in particular are cautionary: there has been an extensive and inconclusive debate in recent years about how to describe them. This form of growth has stimulated the coining of many new words – metropolis, exopolis, megalopolis, metropolitan region, penurbia, metroburbia, postsuburbia, and so forth (Taylor and Lang, 2004). But few, if any, of these terms have entered the common language, and even in academic circles most have short lives.4 But the discussions about these words do indicate a widespread sense that names and concepts matter. Are There Generic Words for Urban Periphery? What words, if any, are used in different parts of the world to refer to these urban outskirts? Words vary from one language to the other, but their usage also varies from one place to another, even among those who speak the same language. North American and British English-speakers refer to “suburbs”; French-speakers, including those in Phnom Penh, New Orleans, and Montreal, use banlieue and, confusingly, les banlieues (Cattedra, 2010; Faure, 2010a, 2010b; Jackson, 1985: 13). Germans use Stadtrand, Russians prigorod, and many Arab speakers, Turks, and Chinese dâhiya, gecekondu, and jiaoqu, respectively (Erman, 2001; Freytag,

Introduction 7

2010; Harb and Depaule, 2010; Moine, 2010).5 It is more difficult to identify a generic word in Italian or Spanish: Italians speak of periferia or sobborgo, but usage varies across different periods and different cities: borgata has been very much used in Rome (Broccolini, 2010; Brucculeri, 2010; Poggi, 2010; Vallat and Boiteaux, 2010); Spanish extrarradio or afueras don’t have the generic importance of “suburb” or banlieue. At the other extreme, most Indian and Iranian cities have no agreed-upon term at all (Hourcade and Kian-Thiébaut, 2001; Patel, personal communication). Does that mean that the category of “suburb” is irrelevant in these societies? At the very least, it means that other criteria of subdivision are more important than the centre/periphery one (Topalov, 2002) Another important point is that in places where a generic term exists – in North America, Great Britain, and France for example – these words are not equivalent: “suburbs” and banlieues have very different meanings. While “suburb” in North America evokes neighbourhoods of middle-class single-family homes, banlieue conjures images of highrise social housing inhabited by poor, immigrant households, which raise questions of social inequality and exclusion. While “suburb” is generally positive in its popular connotations, banlieue is negative. This can be explained by the varied urban social histories of Great Britain, France, and the United States. While, broadly speaking, in England and the United States upper-class people chose to live just outside the city in places where an idealized nature was recreated (Fishman, 1987; Hayden, 2004), the French bourgeoisie have generally preferred to stay in the city centers. From the nineteenth century onward, peripheral growth around French cities was thus principally due to working-class settlements: the first banlieusards (Faure, 1991) were working-class families, and the French suburban dream was a lower-class one. The banlieue they built became the symbol of poorly designed and weakly regulated urban development during the interwar years. The word to refer to this French urban periphery changed, but not the negative connotation: faubourg was used for most of the nineteenth century, banlieue in the twentieth (Faure, 1991, 2010a, 2010b; Fourcaut, 2000; Merriman, 1999; Raad, 2012). While banlieue was replacing faubourg, and taking over its negative social and morphological connotations in the 1980s, the word faubourg, and the neighbourhoods it referred to, changed its meaning and acquired the charm of the past (Faure 2010b; Gilbert, 2011; Dikeç, 2007; Rivière and Tissot, 2012, Topalov, 2015). The specificity of public housing built between 1945 and the 1970s in suburban locations in England and France deepened further the contrast between banlieue

8  Richard Harris and Charlotte Vorms

and “suburb.” In England these developments became known as “council estates”; in France, scholars and planners referred to them as grands ensembles (Dufaux and Fourcaut 2004), but they were simply banlieues, cités, or HLM in everyday speech. Except in Scotland, most British council estates were of single-family homes or townhouses, many of which, following the Thatcher revolution of the 1980s, were sold for owner-occupation. Grands ensembles were high-rises and mainly rental projects (as they remain), which are now strongly associated with immigrés, who replaced the French population in this type of housing from the mid-1970s onward. Meanwhile, the representation of residents of the French urban periphery living in single-family dwellings (pavillons), as selfish, narrow pavillonnaires, an image built after the Second World War, was reactivated for their successors, residents of the périurbain zone, who have been seen as electors of extreme right-wing politicians (Raymond et al., 1966; Magri, 2008; Cartier et al., 2012; Girard, 2012). As Anne Lambert indicates in chapter 13, périurbain is not a term that is welcomed, or even used, by its residents. Périurbain communes are self-governing in a manner comparable with American suburbs (although resulting from another history) and very different from equivalent settlements in England, where land use regulation remains more centralized (Billard and Brennetot, 2009; Charmes and Keil, 2013). Périurbain France, then, has no precise equivalent in England – nor, of course, in the United States – either in terms of the territory it denotes or of its historical, social, and political associations (Davies, 2008; Waine, personal communication). It is interesting to note that the connotations associated with “suburb,” banlieue, and périurbain partly travel with the languages across borders, but also change. An example of this can be seen in Montreal. That city is a fine experimental setting because it contains many native French- and English-speakers, most of whom are at least partly bilingual. Francophone academics sometimes use les banlieues, not as they would in France but as Canadian English-speakers refer to “the suburbs” (e.g., Charbonneau and Germain, 2002). And, in both cases, the largely negative stereotypes of the suburban way of life are broadly similar: a lack of cultural and recreational activities, privatized forms of entertainment that are focused on television, and so forth (Horvath, 2006). But, as Claire Poitras shows in chapter 5, among Montreal francophones banlieue (or banlieues) has other, frequently used synonyms, including suburbain, as exemplified in a recent study of politics in périurbain Montreal (Breux and Bherer, 2009). For anglophones, however,

Introduction 9

“suburb/suburban” is dominant. Does this matter? In some measure, surely it must. Francophone Quebeckers are familiar with events in France, and in many ways compare their society with that of France, not of English Canada. Recent debates and street demonstrations about the price of university tuition are a case in point. Quebeckers are familiar with the meanings that a term such as les banlieues has in France, and it would be interesting to know whether some part of that meaning carries over into the way they think about their hometown. Unusually bilingual, Montreal illustrates the complex manner in which the meanings of languages can intermingle, though in this case the flow seems to be one way, from English to French, a larger, and significant point. Of course, a single word in the same language can have different meanings and connotations according to time and place. A prime example, well documented and probably known to many readers, concerns the way locals speak of suburbs in white settler colonies (Harris and Larkham, 1999: 8–15). In the United States, to be a suburb a place must have a separate political identity (Binford, 1985; Clapson, 2003; Jackson, 1985; Teaford, 2008). Not so in Canada, where places can still be referred to as suburbs for many years after they have been amalgamated into the central city (Harris, 2004). This is true whether the place in question is affluent, as is the case with Ancaster, Ontario (since 2001 part of the City of Hamilton), or income challenged, as is Scarborough – sometimes dismissed as Scarberia – which for over a decade has been part of the City of Toronto. But to Canadians and Americans alike, Australia presents a puzzle. There, as Davison discusses in the first geographically focused chapter of our collection, even lower-income inner neighbourhoods such as Fitzroy – once described as a slum but now gentrifying – are routinely labelled as suburbs (Birch, 1994).6 If Aussies are catholic in their use of the term, Americans are puritanically strict. In many places, there seems to be no generic word at all for the urban periphery, but many specific ones. Each denotes a slightly different type, zone, or combination of territory; invariably, all differ in their social, cultural, and political connotations. Each fits into its language and its local society in a particular way – and sometimes the culture is very local – thereby carrying unique, historically determined meanings, and enabling specific types of thoughts, conversations, and actions. Exact translations from one setting to another, then, are simply impossible. Colloquially, locals sometimes refer to the periphery of Teheran as humeh-ye tehrân, but the areas it denotes are widely stigmatized and many residents refuse the name (Hourcade and Kian-Thiébaut, 2001).

10  Richard Harris and Charlotte Vorms

In Cairo, daHiya is sometimes used but, like “suburb” in Australia or “neighbourhood” in England and North America, this can refer to inner-city districts (Schmid, personal communication). Different types of fringe areas have different names (e.g., new city, gated community), but there is no generic term equivalent to “suburb” or banlieue. India is an even more challenging case, as it is so varied. In Mumbai there is a tradition among literate English speakers of referring to “the suburbs,” but that is not true in other cities (Harris, 2017). Bimal Patel (2011, personal communication) has observed that “we do not seem to have a settled usage. Some people say it in long form: ‘development in the outskirts’,” but this is unusual. Sanjeev Vidyarthi (2011, personal communication) has commented that “‘suburb’ is almost completely missing both from the official discourse (master plans etc.) and everyday parlance” (cf. Gupta, 2011). Perhaps, as Annapurna Shaw (2011, personal communication) suggests, “living in the fringes doesn’t have any particular connotations except,” she adds ruefully, “for the greater travel time.” For that reason, some Indian scholars speak about the urban periphery without having a generic term for the zone. Vidyarthi (2010), for example, takes this approach, even while discussing what an AngloAmerican audience would think of as a quintessentially suburban topic: the use of Clarence Perry’s idea of the “neighborhood unit” to design a new postwar neighbourhood. Or scholars make no reference to the urban periphery at all, a recent statistical handbook being a case in point (Sivaramkrishnan, Kundu, and Singh, 2007). It seems that, in India, for most people in most cities living at the urban periphery has no particular social meaning. The Language of the Experts versus Everyday Speech Judgments about meaning are complicated by the fact that the vocabulary of urban experts differs from everyday speech. Several of the case studies included in this volume testify to this, and none more so than Xuefei Ren’s survey of Beijing, which shows that experts and planners commonly use English words, while locals, not surprisingly, do not. These divergences themselves are meaningful, although many academics overlook this fact. In the English-speaking world, périurbain and “sprawl” are good examples of this disjuncture between expert and lay discourse. In China, arguably, the term jiaoqu (urban outskirts) is commonly used by experts to refer to peripheral areas, but others prefer

Introduction 11

nong cun (rural or village) or perhaps jinjiao nong cun (close-in villages) (Smith, personal communication; Wu, personal communication ). In Germany, people will use Stadtrand but not the technical terms preferred by planners and academics, such as Suburbanisierung, Umlandge­ meinde, or Zwischenstadt (Parnreiter, personal communication). Anglo­ phone planners may speak of conurbations, edge cities, and exurbia, and francophone experts refer to périurbain zones, but these terms are not in everyday use, whether in Lusaka, Montreal, or Paris (Myers, personal communication; Polèse, personal communication). Indeed, it seems that even banlieue and “suburb” might be used less often, and more vaguely, than we might suppose. When asked directly, most francophone high school students in Laval, Montreal’s largest suburb, were at a loss to say what a banlieue is (Boudreau, personal communication). As Amy Shanks, Victoria Coates, and Richard Harris report in chapter 4, a survey of the residents of three neighbourhoods on the periphery of Hamilton, Ontario, found similar uncertainty among local residents about how “the suburbs” might be defined. This uncertainty may indicate that residents of the suburbs see their environment as so natural that it does not require a generic term; it is those who live in older neighbourhoods who find such a term useful. It is also probably a sign that, even where such a generic term exists, people generally do not find such a category necessary. Among Vietnamese speakers, ven do (roughly, périurbain) is used by experts, and ngoai o (outskirts) appears in dictionaries, but these words are not used by locals, for whom ngoai thanh (roughly, extra-muros, or “suburban”), in distinction to noi thanh (intra-muros, or “urban”), is more meaningful (Labbé and Drummond, personal communications; Segard, personal communication). When they are thinking about where to live, most people are likely to focus on a combination of specific issues – convenience to work, affordability, neighbours, quality of the local schools – rather on generic labels (cf. Michelson, 1977; Potter, 2013). At most they speak in terms of specific, named neighbourhoods, such as the fringe district in Bucharest examined by Ioana Florea in chapter 11. Very occasionally, when a specific area becomes notorious, it may lend its name to a generic type. As Christian Topalov discusses in chapter 2, and as Rafael Soares Gonçalves and Francesca Pilo’ show in detail in chapter 8, a fine example is favela. There is evidence that real estate agents are aware that generic names are often unnecessary: typically, neither their listings nor their con­ versations include references to terms to denote centre or periphery

12  Richard Harris and Charlotte Vorms

(Coates, 2013). It is only the planner or the academic who needs a systematic vocabulary with which to speak about the overall character, and different parts, of the urban area. The issue is complicated where experts and residents do not speak the same languages. In Vietnam, French colonial administrators sometimes referred to a zone suburbaine, with connotations of a parallel “indigenous city,” but this would have made no sense to locals (Labbé, personal communication). Even today, in Zambia, English-speaking officials may refer to “peri-urban” areas, but the local Swahili-speakers talk of kiunga (literally, the thing attached) or of shamba (dwellings further out). “Periurban,” incidentally, appears to be a rarity: a term first used in the Global South by French experts, which then travelled into Britain and then North America (Adell, 1999: 4), but is not used on the street. India, again, is gloriously diverse (Harris, 2017). Urban professionals use a variety of terms, all English. “Suburb” has a long tradition, but its fragility is implied by Das (1994: 21), who speaks self-consciously of “‘sub’-urban growth” (cf. Bhagat, 2005; Brush, 1968). Others refer to the “rural-urban fringes” or “margins” (Roy, 2003: 10), “peri-urban areas” (Brook and Dávila, 2000; Dupont, 2005; Shaw, 2005), “outskirts” (Shaw, 2005), and “extended metropolitan areas” (Chakraborty, 1991), none of which have local resonance, even among English speakers. Terms that appear to be gaining ground are “satellite” or “new towns” (Glover, 2012; Wang et al., 2010) and “gated colonies” (Waldrop, 2004), while the term urban “extensions” (Venkatarayappa, 1957: 46–54; Vidyarthi, 2010: 85), once quite common, may be fading. The only terms that are freely used by all English speakers in India are “nagar” (now meaning neighbourhood), because it is incorporated into many place names, and “colony,” which refers to any unit of development, new or existing.7 And so Narayani Gupta (2011) playfully speaks about modernday “imperial Delhi and its colonies.” Whether this term has much resonance among the majority of Indians who are not English speakers, however, or whether it has equivalents in the various indigenous languages, is unclear to us. Of course, it is possible to find a similar variety in terminology in many western countries (cf. Taylor and Lang, 2004). But what makes India different is that none of the terms that specifically denote the urban periphery are well established or dominant, while all terms are foreign to the majority of the population. It may be significant that this practice contrasts with the use of local names for stigmatized dwellings or slum areas: kutcha, chawl, jhuggi, johnpdi, and especially basti (Kundu,

Introduction 13

1999: 38; Kundu and Basu, 1999: 27, 30). At different times, the linguistic gap between colonizer and colonized was a routine feature of societies such as India, Zambia, and Vietnam – and, for that matter, Morocco, Brazil, and Mexico. It is still a feature in the postcolonial era. Many planners and academics are trained in western nations and learn the terminology of western urbanists, mostly English speaking. They receive advice from international agencies that speak the lingua franca of English. Directly and indirectly, they feel pressure to communicate using widely used English terms, whether in published research or through advisory reports. A recent World Bank (2013) report on urbanization in India, for example, includes seventy usages of “suburb” and nine of “peri-urban” (including four references to the report’s title, which includes the latter term), but none of “colony.” Using such language, local experts may communicate more effectively with their international professional colleagues than with the other residents of the places where they live and about which they speak. But if their language does not match local realities, will their message get through to local residents? They might need, in effect, to translate their reports into the common tongue, something that experts everywhere might think about doing, but especially in situations where a whole language is foreign. And, of course, planners and other experts could seek local input, so that both the language and the content of their reports express realities on the ground. Specific Words for Peripheral Neighbourhoods Whether or not there is a generic word for the urban periphery, many specific words are always also used. They generally qualify the spaces socially and/or morphologically, the two often being connected. As the example of banlieue has shown, such connection often implies a positive or negative judgment. A concept may be simplified – the idealized suburb, the stigmatized slum – or it may be nuanced, but specific words are rarely neutral. Most, it seems, are negative: banlieues, favela, extrarradio, bidonville, villa miseria, borgata, musseques, gecekondu, prigorod, daHiya; “shacktown,” “shantytown”; “squatter”; “irregular” or “informal settlement”; and so on. Some, like the Indian “colony,” are neutral or mildly positive, depending on the context. Others are ambivalent, depending on the speaker and audience: “suburb,” once wholly positive, has long fallen into that category. Only a few are consistently positive, like the Spanish ensanche (Coudroy de Lille, 2010). Logically, the most common

14  Richard Harris and Charlotte Vorms

of these positive terms occur in English – “new town” and “community,” for examples – although it is not clear whether and how the residents of gated areas refer to such places. Presumably, this trend reflects the fact that, in the major English-speaking countries, much of the urban periphery has been occupied by the middle or upper-middle classes. Elsewhere, the reverse has usually been true. Of course, the places denoted by those positive English terms have had their critics. In particular, some may question whether “the suburbs” still has a favourable ring. Certainly, as is well known, such areas have long borne the brunt of criticism from intellectuals (Clapson, 2003; Harris and Larkham, 1999; Nicolaides and Wiese, 2006). Initially, the charge was of physical uniformity or ugliness combined with social and cultural mediocrity. More recently, they have been damned for encouraging an unhealthy and environmentally unsustainable way of life. It seems that these criticisms have been gaining ground, most obviously in academic and planning circles (Schafran, 2013). This is even true in Australia, arguably the most “suburban” nation in the world (Anderson, 2006). But, outside these circles, suburbs have always had articulate defenders, and it would appear that critics are still in the minority. These defenders continue to point to the fact that land at the urban periphery costs less and is more affordable to maintain, and that most families prefer the greater space and privacy in and around the home that typically goes with living there. Recent criticisms of “the suburbs” have increasingly been deflected onto “sprawl.” In some minds, the two are synonymous, or at least joined at the hip, as in “suburban sprawl.” But researchers have pointed out that they are in principle separable (Galster et al., 2001). It would be reassuring for many residents of the urban periphery if they could believe the same thing. There is some evidence that exurbanites view suburban subdivisions – and not their own territories – as the embodiment of sprawl (Crump, 2003; Sandberg, Wekerle and Gilbert, 2013). They appear to think of themselves as conservers of rural landscapes. More plausibly, the residents of fully developed suburbs might view exurbanites as the culprits. It is an interesting, but still open, question as to how much conscious thought the residents of the urban periphery choose to give to these issues and whether, if they do, they subconsciously deflect criticism of “sprawl” onto others. Observing the words they use to describe the place they live in might be a way of investigating this question. For planners and politicians who wish to persuade people that urban intensification is desirable, the answers to

Introduction 15

such questions could have great practical significance. However, whether through subtle psychological manoeuvres, or a straightforward desire to live their lives as best they can, most people in English-speaking countries still seem to think that “the suburbs” sounds good. In varying degrees and using different names, similar debates have been developing elsewhere.8 In sum: there are specific as well as generic names for the places that English speakers normally call suburbs; residents and experts sometimes differ in the labels they use; and the connotations of all these words helps define their meaning, thereby hinting at the ways in which such words can matter. If we are to move beyond these simple observations, and begin to appreciate the significance that names can have, we need to understand them historically, tracing the ways they emerge, evolve, and sometimes die out. On this issue, we have found the work of two scholars, one English and one French, to be especially useful, not least because they focus on popular usage. In The Country and the City and Keywords, Raymond Williams (1975, 1976) uses names as entry points for an exploration of the evolution of English culture and of the shifting meanings associated with city living. In a similar vein, but with a very different scope, Christian Topalov led a ten-year research program that explored the historical evolution of the words used in eight languages to describe the city, including the urban periphery. The result was a series of publications, including one devoted to les nouveaux territoires urbains, culminating in a volume entitled L’aventure des mots de la ville (Depaule, 1998, 2006; Rivière d’Arc, 1997, 2001; Topalov et al., 2010). Both Williams and Topalov start from the assumption that words derive their meaning from two immediate contexts (Williams, 1976: 14; cf. Austin, 1962: 100). One is the language, including the array of related and contrasting vocabulary, so that a word’s meaning stems from its “relative position” (Topalov, 2009: 11). A well-known example is late nineteenth-century London, where “suburb” derived much of its meaning in opposition to “slum,” and vice versa (Dyos and Reeder, 1973). Lesser known examples are discussed in the contributions to this book by several authors, including Francesco Bartolini (borgata vs. quartieri) and, perhaps even more strikingly, Freek Colombijn and Abidin Kusno, who suggest that most of the names used to describe the periphery of Javanese cities are framed in opposition to the indigenous kampung. The other immediate context, of course, is the social and material

16  Richard Harris and Charlotte Vorms

setting. Changed conditions alter the meaning of words or give rise to new ones. But the naming itself matters. Topalov (2009: 9) quotes Marc Bloch: “the emergence of a name is always an important fact in history, even though the thing it describes already existed, because this emergence signals that decisive step which is awareness.” So it was with “suburb”: an emergent bourgeois reality of the late eighteenth century acquired a name only in the early nineteenth (Archer, 2005: 91; Jackson, 1985: 13). As Robert Fishman (1987: 62) has commented, “as always, language lagged behind reality.” But once the term “suburb” became popular, it became a force to be reckoned with, in the minds of house buyers, builders, and developers, and then of municipal officials, reporters, and commentators. Sharing a general assumption about the importance of context, the projects of Williams and of Topalov and his colleagues differed greatly in scope. Based on his extensive knowledge of language, especially of literature, Raymond Williams provided an inspiring example of the ways in which the genealogy of words can be used as a window on the evolution of culture. Of particular relevance to the present volume, he traced the changing meaning of “city” and “country.” Unfortunately, and surprisingly, he says little about suburbs. More importantly, he confined himself to England, and so, unlike Topalov and his colleagues, never broached issues of translation and comparison. The focus of the latter project is narrower, on urban words, but geographically and linguistically far more ambitious. Topalov, like Williams, concentrates on popular usage, but sometimes taking into consideration experts’ words when they enter popular language. An example is HLM (habitation à loyer modéré) – that is, French social housing, which in everyday speech refers to high-rise, lower-class housing) (Topalov et al., 2010: 2; Williams, 1976: 12). But neither of these scholars is mainly concerned with comparing the ways in which experts and local residents speak, nor do they consider the venues in which each exerts influence over the other. In that sense, they provide only an incomplete model of how to investigate the process by which particular words emerge and evolve – and that is especially true for a word like “suburb.” In the modern era, much of the public debate about suburbs takes place in the media and is framed by planners and academics. If language and the urban context provide the immediate contexts within which such words evolve, then, for a word like “suburb,” the social context also includes the media and social experts who help frame meaning.

Introduction 17

The Naming Process The concept of framing is useful because it points to the importance of an active process. As Schon and Rein (1994) have pointed out, the way we contextualize and speak about a subject shapes how we think and act in relation to it, whether as individuals or through public policy. They illustrate their argument with the example of “slums” and the associated policy of clearance and urban renewal. For decades, slums were framed as a pathological package of unhealthy physical conditions and social dysfunction (Dyos and Reeder, 1973; Yelling, 1986). Even those who discovered, and chose to emphasize, the resilience, resourcefulness, and rich community life of local residents, still talked about “the slum” (Gans, 1968). Soon, however, as the process of reframing continued, the term itself was largely discarded. With reference to the Global South, attempts were made to moderate the effect of the term by distinguishing slums of hope from those of despair (Stokes, 1962), and its use has continued (Davis, 2006), including by UN-Habitat. Some indigenous organizations, notably the National Slum Dwellers Federa­ tion in India as well as Slum Dwellers International, proudly wear the label to mobilize support. But the term is controversial, not least because it is widely used as a metonym for poverty in the Global South (Ara­ bindoo, 2011; Gilbert, 2007; Rao, 2006). The struggle over reframing “the slum” continues. In varying degrees, reframing has affected the meaning of many of the other names given to the urban periphery. Sometimes, this has happened when local residents resisted social stigma – for example in Rio’s favelas (Valladares, 2010). More typically, reframing happens when physical and social conditions change, as has happened with the Spanish extrarradio and the Russian prigorod (Moine, 2010; Vorms, 2010) or when a word is reactived to refer to another reality, as has happened with cité in France (Durand, 2010). To understand the meaning of words, we need to determine who has used them, and how and why they have done so. What word do respective groups of speakers (land developers, scholars, residents, etc.) use, according to the speaking context? Is there a generic word for the periphery? Does the distinction of the centre from its periphery seem relevant enough to local residents for a generic word to exist in everyday speech? How is it that certain words become widespread while others do not? How does a word first used by one group become part of the vocabulary of others? Do people disagree about names and the naming

18  Richard Harris and Charlotte Vorms

process? If so, why? Why does a group chose one word instead of another? These are the sorts of questions we need to consider. We believe it is possible, fruitful, and indeed important to develop a broad frame of reference within which local names may be understood and compared. Such a frame should consider how the naming of the urban periphery has arisen and changed, and how this matters. What might such a framework look like? Each of the case studies that follow illustrates some aspect of it, while collectively they underline the global diversity of meanings that we give to what is often described blandly as “the suburbanization process.” The overall purpose of the book is not to present comparative research in the traditional sense. Instead, we aim to encourage people to be more aware of the names they use and to question the frames of reference that gives those names meaning, together with their underlying assumptions (McFarlane, 2010). We are conscious that our framework is provisional. Although the geographical coverage of the case studies is broad, it is inevitably incomplete. And, because not much has been written about this topic, we suggest some strategies and tactics for future research in a brief concluding chapter. There are many types of people who play a role in the process of naming and framing, and they are likely to use different vocabularies. We suggest that these seven groups are usually the most important: land developers; residents of the urban periphery; outsiders (that is, those who don’t live in the periphery); governments; scholars (social scientists); planners; and the media. Of course, their vocabularies are not mutually exclusive, and overlaps can be important. But in principle, members of each of the seven categories have a particular and distinct interest in the naming and framing process. In most periods and places, private-sector agents, variously qualified and employing a range of strategies, shape the development of the urban periphery. We will call this group land developers. They have a commercial interest in the representation of the place they are creating, and they rarely show much imagination about this representation. They commonly use predictable terms (in English, “gardens,” “park,” “estate”) to suggest an area’s aspirational character, but they also coin new terms, which often have a short life but sometimes become common, as happened with “country-club” or “country” in Argentina in the 1980s (Paiva and Collado, 2010). The developers must say something about the features of the housing: the types of dwellings (single family, high-rise, etc.), the architecture, the facilities, and so forth. For

Introduction 19

marketing purposes, however, it is often helpful to identify with a brand, or to forge a new one. This may be a specific type of development (“gated community/colony,” “new town,” urbanización), and it must have unambiguously positive connotations, at least for the target audience. For the middle class, “suburb” or “garden suburb,” served that purpose at one time, and occasionally found its way into an area name, as at Hampstead, London. But the term “suburb” now sends mixed messages and is not distinctive enough, so we would guess that it is not much used in promotional material. Residents also have a stake in the names associated with their neighbourhood. They will generally wish for a name with positive or at least neutral associations, and might fight for it, too. In Pagedale, an African-­ American inner suburb of St Louis, Missouri, residents have wrangled over whether their community is to be known locally as a “ghetto” or a “suburb” (Rios, 2015). In English, “neighbourhood” and/or “community” are widely favoured terms, implying identity and mutual support, but without any particular reference to the urban periphery. Obviously, local residents are likely to avoid, resist, or actively reject a pejorative label. This is especially true where it legitimizes state action against the area. “Slum” is the best-known example of such a term, and, in his chapter on Bombay, Nikhil Rao shows how local residents opposed this label with a Marathi term that had positive, traditional connotations. The words used by non-residents are also interesting, since they can reflect how social divisions frame, and gain resonance in, the geography of the city. This is how stereotypes are built and how they feed stigma. This latent dynamic may be activated if the stigmatized areas come to be associated with crime or other forms of social deviance. The examples are numerous and familiar: English “estates”; American “projects” and “ghettos”; Parisian cités; Roma encampments in much of Europe; South African “townships”; Indian “slums”; Rio’s favelas; Luanda’s musseques. Non-residents are likely to be reluctant to use the same generic term for such areas as they use for their own. That may help to explain why, in both popular and academic circles, for many decades people avoided using “suburb” to refer to lower-class or immigrant areas at the urban fringe, even when they were low in density, new, and peripheral. To some degree, this aversion is still apparent. For example, the notion that “townships” might be thought of as “suburban” would shock most South Africans, perhaps including township residents themselves.

20  Richard Harris and Charlotte Vorms

Local and national governments, including planners, have a different perspective. Where local government is fragmented, politicians and bureaucrats may have a strong investment in speaking about “city” and “suburbs,” in this case defending the interests of one against the other. If they are responsible for managing a whole metropolitan area, they need generic terms that refer to the different parts. It is likely that they will borrow or develop a term for the newly urbanized area, because such areas pose particular challenges and opportunities for government. The challenges include the provision of infrastructure and management of traffic. The opportunity lies in the possibilities for obtaining new revenues, whether from taxing property and land transfers or, more rarely, imposing a betterment tax. More generally, if a policy is aimed at a territory, that area has to be defined and labelled. Govern­ ments therefore need to develop criteria to distinguish different categories and then adopt words for each. In 1981, after riots in Lyon during the summer, the French government established a policy aimed at lower-­ class peripheral neighbourhoods, which it labelled développement social des quartiers. Its agents frequently used quartiers sensibles or quartiers difficiles in their reports; this new usage of “quartier” as an administrative category, and target of a public policy, has been extremely successful; les quartiers was thus generalized, with a negative connotation, to refer to peripheral lower-class neighbourhoods that the state judged problematic (Tissot, 2007). As already discussed, the term “slum” is another good example of this type of labelling. Developers communicate their visions and language through advertising, while planners write reports that have limited circulation. The key agents linking these groups with each other and with urban residents as a whole are the local media, of which local newspapers have been the most important until recently – and perhaps still are. It is in the newspaper that developers advertise; it is there, or on television news, that residents see and hear about events – crime, riots, land use conflicts, peaceful demonstrations – in other districts. It is there that they may read about what plans the municipality has in store – for them, or more generally for the metropolitan area. And it is the main channel and public arena in which names and labels circulate. Clearly, the media both reflect and shape the language and prejudices of the majority of their audience. If the public perception is negative, so too will be the media’s representation, and vice versa – les banlieues being a case in point (Billard and Brennetot, 2009; Gilbert, 2011; Rivière and Tissot, 2012). Several of the contributors to this collection discuss this interplay of public perception and media coverage: Ioana Florea

Introduction 21

(with reference to the Ferentari district of Bucharest), Rafael Soares Gonçalves and Francesca Pilo’ (favelas of Rio de Janeiro), Francesco Bartolini (Rome’s borgata), Sonia Hirt (Sofia’s predgradie), Anne Lambert (the French use of périurbain), and Charlotte Vorms (Madrid’s chabolas). Of course, if circumstances and popular understandings change, so too will the way newspapers cover such areas, as Erman (2001) has shown for Istanbul’s gecekondus since the 1950s. In such situations, it is often difficult to determine whether media coverage led or followed popular changes in usage and meaning. In most cases, the media probably reinforce rather than change stereotypes. It is easy to understand why such reinforcement would be the norm. Newspapers need to be able to communicate in the language of their readers, and in ways that will not alienate them. That is why their language is a useful indicator of what names are used locally, and also of majority prejudices within their readership. And of course they are likely to tone down discussion of stigmatized names if large numbers of readers might take offence. Where frames and names are contested, a newspaper will report on each side. In that sense, it must watch its language, unless there are several local newspapers, with each catering to a particular constituency or point of view. But media do more than simply reflect the frame, or frames, of reference of their readers and viewers. They have their own biases, some personal and some structural. Reporters, editors, and owners are not a social cross-section, and they will be more familiar with, and sympathetic to, certain groups and areas than others. Disproportionately, they probably live in centrally located neighbourhoods, if only because those are likely to be closer to their office. This geography colours the amount of space they devote to the urban periphery and the way they speak of it in their coverage (Kaniss, 1991: 5; cf. Buchanan, 2009). As several local reporters have confessed, this is true even in a city such as Toronto, which is served by several newspapers with a significant number of journalists covering urban affairs (Dale, 1999: 4–5; Keenan, 2013). Newspaper reporters and editors are also unlikely to represent an ethnic cross-section, which may have contributed to the way the media, for example, have covered Parisian banlieues and American inner cities (Berthaut, 2013; Burgess, 1985; Hargreaves, 1996). The exceptions, of course, are papers that speak for specific ethnic or residential communities (Lindgren, 2011; Martin, 2000). Apart from biases that are largely unconscious, owners, editors, and especially columnists may wish to push a particular point of view. Commonly, these biases align in a general way with those of the local

22  Richard Harris and Charlotte Vorms

municipality, so that negative (or positive) discourses circulate between government and the media (Ghertner, 2012). Occasionally, these discourses may challenge readers, going against their dominant frame of reference. There are many, well-documented instances of crusading journalists, such as Jacob Riis, who have sympathetically exposed, and reframed, life in stigmatized areas. In recent years, it appears that, echoing the growing chorus of academic criticism directed at the suburbs, a significant number of columnists have joined in. For example, Christopher Hume, the Toronto Star’s urban affairs columnist, has been writing highly critical commentary about the suburbs for two decades, even though that is where most of the Star’s readership lives (Harris, 2015). Clearly, these are visible instances where, at least to some degree, media make the news, reframe the debate, and alter the meaning of names. There are also less visible but more consistent structural biases that colour the way the media circulate names. Until they began to create their own websites, developers relied heavily on newspapers to market their subdivisions, and their advertising was a major source of newspaper revenue. That is still true, albeit to a lesser extent, and so newspapers tend to cast all newly developing areas in a positive light. That bias is reinforced by the inclination of all local newspapers to boost their hometown. Papers that address themselves to literate, middle-class readers may try to present themselves as “responsible,” articulating the overall needs of the metropolitan area. This point of view is likely to mesh well with the views of municipal planners, whose views and language the paper may then pass on. These observations about local media identify plausible tendencies rather than invariant rules. Indeed, given the lack of research on the subject, they might better be expressed as hypotheses. It is difficult to establish consistent bias in the media’s coverage of the urban periphery and, except in dramatic instances, almost impossible to identify its effects, and few people have tried to do so. This is a fruitful topic for research, one that also lends itself to more casual enquiry, an issue to which we return in the conclusion. Finally, social scientists are very fertile inventors of words and of new usages for existing words. They often discuss their word choices: we have already alluded to the debate on the labelling of spaces produced by urban sprawl. Some of the words they use extend to other vocabularies – common language or political vocabulary, for example. The recent reactivation of the word ghetto in France and Romania is an

Introduction 23

interesting case. Introduced by academics in reference to American ghettos, and much debated by social scientists, the term was adopted in France by politicians and the media to back the rénovation urbaine policy (demolition of public housing in quartiers difficiles) in the 1990s (Gilbert, 2011). Academics tend to be very normative with the words they use, believing that there are correct and incorrect usages of words and producing many technical dictionaries. Both the successes and the failures of their inventions and new usages of words are interesting, as are the lives of these words as they travel beyond academia. The Circulation of Words Complicating the story of how new words arise and evolve is the fact that they circulate, nationally and indeed globally. At any scale, but especially the international, the fate of a word depends a good deal on that of the language of which it is a part. Here, regional politics as well as geopolitics are key. Historically, and with varying degrees of success, colonialism imposed one or another (and sometimes several) Eu­ ropean languages on large parts of the world. That is why Australians, Americans, Canadians, and some Indians speak of “suburbs”; why most Montrealers live in banlieues while others settle in “suburbs”; why Mexicans have barrios; and why a few Indonesians once referred to buitenwijken. The extent to which European languages were able to penetrate and dominate has, of course, varied from region to region. Commonly, their reach has reflected degrees of settlement and influence. At the extreme, foreign words become indigenous. Most of the examples just mentioned exemplify this evolution. But that is never the whole story. Indians have welcomed “colony,” to denote a neighbourhood or specific development, but for the most part have rejected “suburb,” apparently because they have not felt the need for a generic term (Harris, 2017). As Nikhil Rao explains in chapter 6, however, Bombay/ Mumbai is a partial exception to this generalization. It seems, then, that other things also matter, including lexical niches and regional cultures. Soft power also matters, as well as the military. In the colonial era, the two were paired. Today, soft power is exerted more through the channels of trade, finance, and, most generally, globalization. English is now the dominant global language of politics, science, and the professions, not to mention real estate and urban planning (McCrum, 2010). That is why, as Renaud Le Goix and Xuefei Ren show in chapters 12 and 15, respectively, French and Chinese planners alike speak of “suburbs,”

24  Richard Harris and Charlotte Vorms

and why, as Sonia Hirt shows in chapter 14, Sofia’s developers market “parks” and “villages” with “views.” Practically, planners want to be able to communicate with international agencies and with their colleagues elsewhere. Perhaps they also want to show that they are au fait with modern ideas and idioms. Wanting to sell real estate, developers understand very well that cachet counts, and that English carries prestige. It is a familiar story, one that underlines the fact that words travel and that they carry power, along with ideas about success and civilization, as can be seen, for example, in postwar Sofia. But words do not always follow the power gradient. In the colonial era, Europeans often adopted or adapted local words because they had unique meanings that were useful for the purposes of administration or for simple communication. From Indian languages, the English borrowed some words that they used only locally: bustee, referring to a particular type of poor-quality indigenous settlement, was a case in point. Others, like “bungalow,” they imported and then spread to other colonies, where the words’ meaning evolved (King, 1984). The same process happens today. In 2005, rather than trying to make a possibly misleading translation, non-francophone journalists reporting on the riots in France were often careful to use the term banlieues. Similarly, non-Portuguese-speaking journalists covering the 2014 World Cup in Rio de Janeiro routinely referred to favelas (Davies, 2008). So, of course, did everyone in Rio. In Sofia, land developers occasionally use English words, but most do not. The same undoubtedly can be said of the great majority of the city’s local residents, or of those in Mumbai or, even more obviously, Beijing. When we consider the words used on the street, then, instead of those deployed in scholarly journals and professional reports, we find that the imperialism of English is very far from complete. Local words and meanings typically rule. In a variety of historical and geographical settings, the present collection bears witness to that fact, and suggests why it matters. The Present Collection The papers we have brought together here are mostly empirical in their focus, but the first one addresses the general issue of naming. As we noted earlier, the most ambitious international attempt to survey the words used to speak about cities was that conducted under the direction of Christian Topalov. Although some of the background materials

Introduction 25

that were prepared for this project are accessible in English on the Web, most related material, including the more conceptual statements and the finished work, are as yet available only in French (Topalov et al., 2010). For that reason, following this introduction, we are pleased to be able to include a wide-ranging conceptual chapter in which Topalov articulates and illustrates some of the general insights that he brought to, and derived from, that project. He discusses several precepts that have informed our own thinking as we put this book together: the importance of paying attention to everyday usage, to the mutability of names, to the naming process, and to what he refers to as sponsors – that is, the agents who articulate and popularize particular words because it serves their purpose. He also discusses the ways in which words must fit into existing lexical systems, whether filling a niche or defining a contrast. The remainder of this collection consists of case studies, typically of usage in a particular city, but in three cases (Australia, France, and Java) of a more general pattern of speech. Our thinking in creating this particular mix was that, although sometimes it is both possible and useful to generalize, word usages are often local. This is obviously true in the naming of specific neighbourhoods, for example, Bucharest’s Ferentari (Florea), or when, as with favela (Soares Gonçalves and Pilo’), the name of a specific place acquires a generic character. But it is also true of more widely used terms, including banlieue and “suburb.” Another consideration is that case studies provide solid ground for discussion. Most papers pay at least some attention to popular usage, and in some cases (Florea; Shanks, Coates, and Harris) this is the clear focus of attention. Some compare popular with expert language, and a few tip towards the latter. This is to some degree inevitable, especially in studies that deal substantially with a quite distant past (Bartolini; Colombijn and Kusno; Davison; Soares Gonçalves and Pilo’; Vorms). The challenge of documenting everyday lives and points of view is one that social historians and social scientists have faced for decades. Much of what they have said on the issue has relevance to the documentation of language, but on this issue there are some specific challenges and possibilities. In the conclusion, Harris considers some of these challenges and possibilities, with reference to the case studies collected here. We considered several ways of organizing these chapters. A separation of historical from contemporary studies, while arbitrary, would represent a continuum and help to highlight different methodological

26  Richard Harris and Charlotte Vorms

challenges. A reasonable distinction could be made, too, between studies that focused on a particular word, as opposed to those that try to take stock of all the various ways in which the urban fringe is described. And chapters could plausibly be ranged on a continuum that ranges from those that emphasize vernacular usage to those that focus on expert discourse. Ultimately, we decided to group the chapters in ways that invite different sorts of comparisons. The first cluster of five case studies addresses the question of the existence of a generic word for urban periphery. It considers the words used in two English-language settings (Australia; Hamilton, Canada), in a Canadian bilingual city (Montreal), in Indonesia (Java), and in a multilingual city (Mumbai). In the second cluster we have brought together contributions that examine words, in four languages, that refer to extensive low-income areas that are variably associated with the urban fringe. Each study (Rio de Janeiro, Rome, Madrid, Bucharest) stands on its own but together they invite comparison of the subtly different processes and dimensions of stigmatization. The final cluster consists of four contributions that describe new urban developments independently of their social profile in very diverse countries (France, Bulgaria, China). The historical experiences and current situations of the cities studied (Lyon, French cities in general, Sofia, Beijing) are very different, but comparison of these chapters provides evidence that the developers and the residents of new neighbourhoods want their areas to be socially distinct. Yet another way of organizing the chapters would have been in terms of the mix of sources and methods on which the authors relied. All of our contributors have preferred to interpret texts rather than to analyse quantitative data, but they differ in their use of reports, academic works, newspapers, interviews, and field observations. Commenting on this variety, in the conclusion Harris offers some suggestions for those who are interested in the issues raised in this book and who wish to pursue their own enquiries, rigorous or otherwise. For the present, as you explore the following chapters, we invite you to suspend the categories, binary or otherwise, that you normally use to describe the urban fringe. Enjoy the variety of terms and distinctions that local residents make, or fail to make, in other places. And then return to the words that you use, often unthinkingly, and consider how they reflect and shape your world view. Our purpose is not simply to show how other peoples think about the urban fringe but to make us all a little more self-conscious about the categories and labels we use.

Introduction 27 NOTES 1 Sprawl of all sorts includes non-residential development, but we focus on the residential aspects of this zone. 2 For convenience we use “subdivision,” a North American term, to denote a defined tract of land at the urban periphery that an entrepreneur has designated for development. It may be planned or unplanned; formal, ­informal (“irregular”), or illegal (squatted). Other English terms (e.g., “layout,” “extension”) are used elsewhere in the literature. 3 “North” and “South” have partially replaced “developed” and “developing” world. Increasingly, scholars are acknowledging the limitations of such binary distinctions, but they still use them (Solarz, 2014). Because it is not directly our subject here, we employ this simplification in the introduction. 4 According to Google’s NGram Viewer, “Megalopolis” peaked in the late 1960s, while “Edge Cities” and “postsuburbia” have been in decline since the early 2000s. For discussion of Ngram, see the last chapter. 5 There are various transliterations of non-Latinate languages. We claim only to be consistent. 6 Confusingly, depending on the context and manner of usage, in Australia “suburb” sometimes means “outer suburb.” See, for example, the way Fiona Allon writes in Renovation Nation (2008). 7 Vidal and Gupta (1999: 19), indicate that “colony” is also used in Hindi. 8 It seems that “sprawl” has been adopted in many European languages (Ingersoll, 2006: 3). REFERENCES Adell, G. 1999. Theories and Models of the Peri-urban Interface: A Changing Conceptual Landscape. London: Development Planning Unit. Allon, F. 2008. Renovation Nation: Our Obsession with Home. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Anderson, K. 2006. Post-suburban Sydney: The City in Transformation. Sydney: Centre for Cultural Research. Arabindoo, P. 2011. “Rhetoric of the ‘Slum’: Rethinking Urban Poverty.” City 15 (6): 636–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2011.609002. Archer, J. 2005. Architecture and Suburbia: From English Villa to American Dream House, 1690–2000. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Austin, J.L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

28  Richard Harris and Charlotte Vorms Beauregard, R.A. 1993. Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S. Cities. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Berthaut, J. 2013. La banlieue du “20 heures”: Ethnographie de la production d’un lieu commun journalistic. Marseille: Agone. Bhagat, R.B. 2005. “Rural-Urban Classification and Municipal Governance in India.” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 26 (1): 61–73. http://dx.doi. org/10.1111/j.0129-7619.2005.00204.x. Billard, G., and A. Brennetot. 2009. “Le périurbain a-t-il mauvaise presse?” Articulo-Journal of Urban Research 5 (online). https://articulo.revues.org/ 1372 Binford, H.C. 1985. The First Suburbs: Residential Communities on the Boston Periphery, 1815–1860. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Birch, T. 1994. “‘The Battle for Spatial Control in Fitzroy.” In Beasts of Suburbia: Representing Cultures in Australian Suburbs, edited by S. Ferber, C. Healy, and C. McAuliffe, 18–34. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Breux, S., and L. Bherer. 2009. “Modes de la vie et politiques municipales: Regards sur le mileieu périurbain montréalais.” Articulo-Journal of Urban Research 5 (online). https://articulo.revues.org/1389 Broccolini, A. 2010. “Borgo.” In Topalov et al., 2010, 149–54. Brook, R.M., and J. Dávila, eds. 2000. The Peri-Urban Interface: A Tale of Two Cities. School of Agricultural and Forest Sciences, University of Wales and Development Planning Unit. University College London. Brucculeri, A. 2010. “Suburbio.” In Topalov et al., 2010, 1192–97. Brush, J.E. 1968. “Spatial Patterns of Population in Indian Cities.” Geographical Review 58 (3): 362–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/212563. Buchanan, C. 2009. “Sense of Place in the Daily Newspaper.” Aether: Journal of Media Geography 4 (March): 62–84. Burgess, J.A. 1985. “News from Nowhere: The Press, the Riots and the Myth of the Inner City.” In Geography, the Media and Popular Culture , edited by J.A. Burgess and John R. Gold, 192–228. New York: St. Martin’s. Cartier, M., I. Coutant, O. Masclet, and Y. Siblot. 2012. “Les petits pavillonnaires: Perdus pour la gauche?” Métropolitiques, 21 March 2012. http:// www.metropolitiques.eu/Les-petits-pavillonnaires-perdus.html Cattedra, R. 2010. “Bidonville.” In Topalov et al., 2010, 125–31. Chakraborty, S.C. 1991. “Extended Metropolitan Areas: A Key to Under­ standing Uyrvan Processes in India.” In The Extended Metropolis. Settlement Transition in Asia, edited by N. Ginsberg, B. Koppel, and T.G. McGee, 299–325. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Charbonneau, J., and A. Germain. 2002. “Les banlieues et l’immigration.” Recherches Sociographiques 43 (2): 311–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.7202/000540ar.

Introduction 29 Charmes, E., and R. Keil. 2013. “Post-suburban Morphologies in Canada and France: Beyond the Anti-sprawl Debate.” Unpublished paper, York University, Toronto, May 2013. Clapson, M. 2003. Suburban Century: Social Change and Urban Growth in England and the USA. Oxford: Berg. Coates, V. 2013. “How Real Estate Agents Frame and Market Suburbia in Hamilton, Ontario.” BA thesis, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON. Coudroy de Lille, L. 2010. “Ensanche.” In Topalov et al., 2010, 453–59. Crump, J. 2003. “Finding a Place in the Country: Exurban and Suburban Development in Sonoma County, California.” Environment and Behavior 35 (2): 187–202. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0013916502250207. Dale, S. 1999. Lost in the Suburbs: A Political Travelogue. Toronto: Stoddart. Das, B. 1994. Socio-economic Study of Slums in Surat City. Surat: Centre for Social Studies. Davies, E. 2008. “Crossing les Barricades: The Use of French in Some English Newspaper Articles.” Language and Communication 28 (3): 225–41. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2007.09.002. Davis, M. 2006. Planet of Slums. London: Verso. Depaule, J.-C., ed. 1998. Naming Cities and Urban Areas. Cahier/Working Paper/Cuaderno No. 3. Les Mots de la Ville. Paris: UNESCO. Depaule, J.-C., ed. 2006. Les mots de la stigmatisation urbaine. Paris: UNESCO. Desrosières, A., and L. Thévenot. 2002. Les catégories socioprofessionnelles. 5th ed. Paris: La Découverte/Repères.7 Dikeç, M. 2007. Badlands of the Republic: Space, Politics and French Urban Policy. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Dufaux, F., and A. Fourcaut, eds. 2004. Le monde des grands ensembles. Paris: Créaphis. Dupont, V. 2005. “Residential Practices, Creation and Use of Urban Space: Unauthorised Colonies in Delhi.” In Urbanization and Governance in India, edited by E. Hust and M. Mann, 311–41. Delhi: Manohar, CSH, and South Asia Institute. Durand, S. 2010. “Cité.” In Topalov et al., 2010, 297–301. Dyos, H.J., and D.A. Reeder. 1973. “Slums and Suburbs.” In The Victorian City, ed. H.J. Dyos and M. Wolff, 359–86. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Erman, T. 2001. “The Politics of Squatter (Gecekondu) Studies in Turkey: The Changing Representations of Rural Migrants in the Academic Discourse.” Urban Studies (Edinburgh, Scotland) 38 (7): 983–1002. Faure, A. 1991. Les premiers banlieusards. Aux origines des banlieues de Paris (1860–1940). Paris: Editions Créaphis. Faure, A. 2010a. “Banlieue.” In Topalov et al., 2010, 72–77.

30  Richard Harris and Charlotte Vorms Faure, A. 2010b. “Faubourg.” In Topalov et al., 2010, 465–69. Fishman, R. 1987. Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia. New York: Basic Books. Fourcaut, A. 2000. La banlieue en morceaux. La crise des lotissements défectueux en France dans l’entre deux guerres. Paris: Créaphis. Freytag, A. 2010. “Stadtrand.” In Topalov et al., 2010, 1153–57. Galster, G., R. Hanson, M. Ratcliffe, H. Wolman, S. Coleman, and J. Freihage. 2001. “Wrestling Sprawl to the Ground: Defining and Measuring an Elusive Concept.” Housing Policy Debate 12 (4): 681–717. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/ 10511482.2001.9521426. Gans, H. 1968. Essays on Urban Problems and Solutions. New York: Basic Books. Ghertner, A.A. 2012. “Nuisance Talk and the Propriety of Property: Middleclass Discourses of Slum-free Delhi.” Antipode 44 (4): 1161–87. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2011.00956.x. Gilbert, A. 2007. “The Return of the Slum: Does Language Matter?” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 31 (4): 697–713. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2007.00754.x. Gilbert, P. 2011. “‘Ghetto,’ ‘Banishment,’ ‘Neighborhood Effects’: A Critique of the ‘Ghetto’ Image of French Housing Projects.” Métropolitiques March 23. Translated by Eric Rosencrantz. http://www.metropolitiques.eu/IMG/ pdf/MET-Gilbert-en.pdf Girard, V. 2012. “Les votes à droite en périurbain: ‘Frustrations sociales’ des ménages modestes ou recompositions des classes populaires?” Métropolitiques, 30 April 2012. http://www.metropolitiques.eu/Les-votesa-droite-en-periurbain.html Glover, W. 2012. “The Troubled Passage from ‘Village Communities’ to Planned New Town Developments in Mid-twentieth Century South Asia.” Urban History 39 (1): 108–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0963926811000800. Gupta, N. 2011. “Imperial Delhi and Its Colonies.” Paper presented at the Conference on Shadow Cities, London, July. Harb, M., and J.-C. Depaule. 2010. “Dâhiya.” In Topalov et al., 2010, 412–16. Hargreaves, A.G. 1996. “A Deviant Construction: The French Media and the ‘Banlieues’.” New Community 22 (4): 607–18. Harris, R. 2004. Creeping Conformity: How Canada Became Suburban, 1900–1960. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Harris, R. 2010. “Meaningful Types in a World of Suburbs.” In Suburbanization in Global Society: Research in Urban Sociology, vol. 10, edited by M. Clapson and R. Hutchison, 15–47. Bingley, UK: Emerald. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/ S1047-0042(2010)0000010004.

Introduction 31 Harris, R. 2014. “Urban Land Markets: A Southern Exposure.” In The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South, edited by Susan Parnell and Sophie Oldfield, 109–21. London: Routledge. Harris, R. 2015. “Using Toronto to Explore Three Suburban Stereotypes.” Environment and Planning A 47 (1): 30–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/a46298. Harris, R. 2017, in press. “Transnational Urban Meanings: The Passage of ‘Suburb’ to India, and Its Rough Reception.” In Transnational Urbanism, edited by A. Sandoval-Strausz and N. Kwak. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Harris, R., and P.J. Larkham, eds. 1999. Changing Suburbs: Foundation, Form and Function. London: E&FN Spon. Harris, R., U. Lehrer, and R. Bloch. 2013. “The Suburban Land Question.” Revised version of discussion paper presented at the Global Suburbanisms project workshop on Suburban Land, Montpellier, France, 21–23 October 2012. Hayden, D. 2004. Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820–2000. New York: Vintage Books. Herzog, L. 2015. Global Suburbs: Urban Sprawl from the Rio Grande to Rio de Janeiro. New York: Routledge. Horvath, C. 2006. “Ecrire la banlieue: Réalité et representations de l’espace périurbain en Europe et au Canada.” Journal of Canadian Studies / Études Canadiennes 60: 21–31. Hourcade, B., and A. Kian-Thiébaut. 2001. “Nommer les banlieues de Téhéran.” In Nommer les nouveaux territoires urbains, edited by H. Rivière d’Arc, 189–210. Paris: UNESCO. http://dx.doi.org/10.4000/books .editionsmsh.1442. Ingersoll, R. 2006. Sprawltown: Looking for the City on Its Edges. New York: Princeton Architectural. Jackson, K.T. 1985. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press. Kaniss, P. 1991. Making Local News. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Keenan, E. 2013. Some Great Idea: Good Neighborhoods, City Politics and the Invention of Toronto. Toronto: Coach House Press. King, A. 1984. The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Kundu, A. 1999. “Stigmatization of Urban Processes in India: An Analysis of Terminology with Special Reference to Slums Situations.” In Les Mots de la Ville Working Paper No. 4: Inde du Nord / Northern India, 33–40. Aix-en-Provence: Maison Mediterrannéenne des Sciences de l’Homme.

32  Richard Harris and Charlotte Vorms Kundu, A., and S. Basu. 1999. “Words and Concepts in Urban Development and Planning in India.” In Les Mots de la Ville Working Paper No. 4: Inde du Nord / Northern India, 23–32. Aix-en-Provence: Maison Mediterrannéenne des Sciences de l’Homme. Lindgren, A. 2011. “Interpreting the City: Portrayals of Place in a Toronto-area Ethnic Newspaper.” Aether: The Journal of Media Geography 8, A: 68–88. http://digital.library.ryerson.ca/islandora/object/RULA:319. Magri, S. 2008. “Le pavillon stigmatisé: Grands ensembles et maisons individuelles dans la sociologie des années 1950 à 1970.” L’annee sociologique 58 (1): 171–202. http://dx.doi.org/10.3917/anso.081.0171. Martin, D.G. 2000. “Constructing Place: Cultural Hegemonies and Media Images of an Inner-city Neighborhood.” Urban Geography 21 (5): 380–405. http://dx.doi.org/10.2747/0272-3638.21.5.380. McCrum, R. 2010. Globish: How English Became the World’s Language. Toronto: Anchor. McFarlane, C. 2010. “The Comparative City: Knowledge, Learning, Urbanism.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34 (4): 725–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2010.00917.x. Merriman, J. 1999. “Urban Space and the Power of Language: The Stigmatisation of the Faubourg in 19th-century France.” Social Science Information 38 (2): 329–51. Michelson, W. 1977. Environmental Choice, Human Behavior and Residential Satisfaction. New York: Oxford University Press. Moine, N. 2010. “Prigorod.” In Topalov et al., 2010, 989–93. Nair, J. 2006. The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore’s Twentieth Century. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Nicolaides, B., and A. Wiese, eds. 2006. The Suburb Reader. New York: Routledge. Paiva, V., and F. Collado. 2010. “Country.” In Topalov et al., 2010, 391–95. Poggi, F. 2010. “Periferia.” In Topalov et al., 2010, 909–15. Potter, S. 2013. “Family Ideals: The Diverse Meanings of Residential Space in Chicago during the Post–World War II Baby Boom.” Journal of Urban History 39 (1): 59–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0096144212463545. Raad, L. 2012. “Pratiques et representations des couches moyennes en banlieue rouge: Stratégies résidentielles et ancrage territorial.” Espaces et sociétés (Paris, France) 1(148–49): 91–110. http://dx.doi.org/10.3917/ esp.148.0091. Rao, V. 2006. “Slum as Theory: The South/Asian City and Globalization.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30 (1): 225–32. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2006.00658.x.

Introduction 33 Raymond, H., N. Haumont, M.-G. Raymond, A. Haumont. 1966. L’Habitat pavillonnaire. Paris: Institut de sociologie urbaine. Rios, J. 2015. “Everyday Racialization: Contesting Space and Identity in Suburban St. Louis.” In Making Suburbia: New Histories of Everyday America, edited by J. Archer, P. Sandul, and K. Solomonson, 185–207. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Rivière, J., and S. Tissot. 2012. “The Media Construction of the Suburbs in France: Looking Back on the 2007 Presidential Campaign.” Métropolitiques 23 May. Translated by Oliver Waine. http://www.metropolitiques.eu/ IMG/pdf/MET-Riviere-Tissot-en.pdf Rivière d’Arc, H. 1997. “Workshop I. Naming New Urban Areas.” In Naming Cities and Urban Areas: Working Paper No. 3. Les mots de la ville, edited by J.-C. Depaule. Paris: UNESCO Rivière d’Arc, H. ed. 2001. Nommer les nouveaux territoires urbains. Paris: UNESCO. http://dx.doi.org/10.4000/books.editionsmsh.1401. Robinson, J. 2002. “Global and World Cities.:A View from Off the Map.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 26 (3): 531–54. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.00397. Rodrigues, C. 2009. “Angolan Cities: Urban (Re)segregation.” In African Cities: Competing Claims over Urban Spaces, edited by F. Locatelli and P. Nugent, 37–54. Leiden: Brill. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/ej.9789004162648.i-308.17. Roy, A. 2003. City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Roy, A. 2009. “The 21st-century Metropolis: New Geographies of Theory.” Regional Studies 43 (6): 819–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/ 00343400701809665. Sandberg, L.A., G. Wekerle, and L. Gilbert. 2013. The Oak Ridges Moraine Battles: Development, Sprawl and Nature Conservation in the Toronto Region. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Saunders, D. 2010. Arrival City: The Final Migration and Our Next World. Toronto: Knopf. Schafran, A. 2013. “Discourse and Dystopia, American Style: The Rise of ‘Slumburbia’ in a Time of Crisis.” City 17 (2): 130–48. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1080/13604813.2013.765125. Schon, D., and M. Rein. 1994. Frame Reflection: Toward the Resolution of Intractable Policy Controversies. New York: Basic. Shaw, A. 2005. “Peri-urban Interface of Indian Cities: Growth, Governance and Local Initiatives.” Economic and Political Weekly 40 (2): 129–36. Shirley, I., and C. Neill. 2013. Asian and Pacific Cities: Development Patterns. New York: Routledge.

34  Richard Harris and Charlotte Vorms Sivaramkrishnan, K.C., A. Kundu, and B.N. Singh. 2007. Oxford Handbook of Urbanisation in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Solarz, M.W. 2014. Language of Global Development: A Misleading Geography. London: Earthscan. Stokes, C. 1962. “A Theory of Slums.” Land Economics 38 (3): 187–97. http:// dx.doi.org/10.2307/3144581. Taylor, P., and R. Lang. 2004. “The Shock of the New: 100 Concepts Describing Recent Urban Change.” Environment And Planning A 36 (6): 951–8. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1068/a375. Teaford, J. 2008. The American Suburb: The Basics. New York: Routledge. Tissot, S. 2007. L’État et les quartiers: Genèse d’une catégorie de l’action publique. Paris: Seuil, Collection Liber. Topalov, C., ed. 2002. Les divisions de la ville. Paris: Editions UNESCO-Editions de la MSH. http://dx.doi.org/10.4000/books.editionsmsh.1233. Topalov, C. 2009. “City Words: An Experiment and a Thesaurus.” Paper presented at Columbia University, Maison Française, 5 November. Topalov, C. 2015. “Thirty Years of Urban Sociology: A French Viewpoint.” Metropolitics, 30 October. Translated by Oliver Waine. http://www .metropolitiques.eu/Thirty-Years-of-Urban-Sociology.html Topalov, C., L. Coudroy de Lille, J.-C. Depaule, and B. Marin, eds. 2010. L’aventure des mots de la ville. Paris: Laffont. Valladares, L.— 2010. ‘Favela.” In Topalov et al., 2010, 469–475. Vallat, C., and M. Boiteaux. 2010. “Borgata.” In Topalov et al., 2010, 144–49. Venkatarayappa, K.N. 1957. Bangalore: A Socio-Ecological Study. Bombay: University of Bombay. Vidal, D., and N. Gupta. 1999. “Urban Vocabulary in Northern India.” In Les mots de la ville. Working paper No. 4: Inde du Nord / Northern India, 7–22. Aix-en-Provence: Maison Mediterrannéenne des Sciences de l’Homme. Vidyarthi, S. 2010. “Reimagining the American Neighborhood Unit for India.” In Crossing Borders: International Exchange and Planning Practices, edited by P. Healey and R. Upton, 73–93. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge. Vorms, C. 2010. “Extrarradio.” In Topalov et al., 2010, 459–64. Waldrop, A. 2004. “Gating and Class Relations: The Case of a New Delhi ‘Colony’.” City and Society 16 (2): 93–116. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ city.2004.16.2.93. Wang, L., R. Kundu, and X. Chen. 2010. “Building for What and Whom? New Town Development as Planned Suburbanization in China and India.” In Suburbanization in Global Society: Research in Urban Sociology, vol. 10, edited by M. Clapson and R. Hutchison, 319–345. Bingley, UK: Emerald. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/S1047-0042(2010)0000010016.

Introduction 35 Williams, R. 1975. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press. Williams, R. 1976. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana. World Bank. 2013. Urbanisation beyond Municipal Boundaries: Nurturing Metropolitan Economies and Connecting Peri-urban Areas in India. Washington, DC: World Bank. Yelling, J.A. 1986. Slums and Slum Clearance in Victorian London. London: Allen and Unwin.

2  The Naming Process Christian To pal ov

Words have a history, as evidenced by their shifting meanings. Writing that history is no easy task, as nothing is more fleeting than ways of saying things, which leave few traces. When it comes to the urban vocabulary, we can nevertheless reconstruct some of the major changes in the ways languages designate places, things, and people. It is possible to investigate these shifts using multiple sources – texts of many kinds, maps, past and present place names. Such research shows that speakers, situated in time and space, are in fact the source of the lexical innovations that result in urban words. Some of those innovations failed to take hold and have been forgotten, while others were successful and have modified the semantic systems that have structured the description of urban worlds, often for very long periods of time. A language can therefore be viewed as a theatre of ongoing struggles over meanings, punctuated by partial agreements that produce – for a while – a common language. This story is made of bureaucratic or popular innovations, new words competing with old usage, the imposition of classification systems and challenges to them, stigmatizing speech acts and their possible subversion. In this chapter my aim is to describe certain aspects of the process by which urban names are assigned to things and give them consistency, with particular reference to the naming of the urban periphery. I mostly dwell on the findings by other scholars that have been collected in the framework of an international research project that led to a multi-­ lingual dictionary of city words (Topalov et al., 2010). The aim of that endeavour was to empirically document the variations of meanings of a series of words that common speakers have used to describe urban aspects through space, time, and society: categories of urban

The Naming Process  37

settlements, districts in cities, types of dwellings, types of urban thoroughfares and open spaces. The stories or “adventures” of about 40 words in each of the eight languages studied were written by some 160 authors. It is their work that made it possible to tentatively underscore some general results.1 Our historical point of view on language is markedly different from the search for etymology: instead of positing that the meaning of a word is inscribed in its phonetic features and transmitted along with them through the centuries, we are concerned with the role of the actors of history in transforming systems of signification. This viewpoint also rules out trying to determine the concepts to which words give form: we are by no means postulating the permanence of the signified, of which the signifier would be merely the appearance; on the contrary, we are observing the instability of the signified itself, which changes with the system of signifiers. What we are studying is neither the origin of words nor the history of concepts; it is the variability of usages and, through it, the history of semantic systems. From this angle, scientific lexicons are of limited importance. Yet sociologists and, above all, geographers, have shown remarkable creativity in inventing new words to describe the unceasing changes in urban worlds more accurately than can the average person. All these specialists would do well to consider that they are not producers of concepts in the enchanted world of science, but in fact speakers like any other. The painter is in the picture, for today the human sciences participate in the concert that results in a common language. It is this shared, everyday language that interests me in this chapter. Two aspects of the naming process will be constantly interacting in this study: they are both what could be called “lexical events.” The first is the lexical innovation involving moments, places, and protagonists, which we will endeavour to reconstruct as fully as possible. The outcome can only be very approximate because, as E.P. Thompson humorously noted with regard to the neologism “unemployment” in the English language, “cuckoos usually arrive in these islands some weeks before they are announced in the Times” (Thompson, 1968: 776n. 2). One can, however, pinpoint (always provisionally) sources in which a new word or usage was encountered for the first time and survey sources showing its dissemination, or the continuing use of older ways, or alternative innovations. One can document speakers’ hesitations. One can also try to reconstruct what those who introduced the new words actually tried to do with them and observe their social characteristics

38  Christian Topalov

and specific linguistic register. The second noteworthy aspect of the naming process is the semantic system to which the words we study belong. It is often easier to identify classification systems than to grasp the dynamics of how they change. One can easily recognize oppositions, gradations, or hierarchies among terms, but further observation is necessary to detect how a lexical innovation succeeded in forcing a semantic system to reconfigure itself. In some instances, the case studies outlined in this chapter highlight innovation, and in others the systemic aspect of meanings, but our demonstration will not be complete until both aspects of the naming process have been documented. One main interpretive thread runs through the present text: the local character of the meanings of city words. We do not primarily live in a “suburb” or a banlieue: we live in Highgate, Forest Hills, or Saint-Cloud, in Brixton, the Bronx or the 9–3.2 For the people who live there, a city is first and foremost made up of places and therefore place names – not common nouns, generic terms, or classificatory categories. Thus, it is important to examine both the meaning of the generic terms that form the common language and the situations that have led to their emergence and possible consolidation. I propose to show the advantages of this type of questioning in three of many possible ways. First, I will observe how toponyms become generic – that is, how proper names attached to a specific place in a particular city become common nouns, to a degree that speakers forget the local character of the original designation. Next, I will bring out the local character of the lexical systems by which “good” neighbourhoods are contrasted with “bad” ones and a few of the processes of language creation that can be observed in situations of social and spatial stigmatization. Finally, I will show that toponymy preserves the traces of nowforgotten successive classificatory systems and how one can at least partly make sense of the ensuing lexical disorder that appears on maps by reconstructing the history of place names and how the actions of local speakers affected them. When It All Began with a Place Name One of the notable forms of lexical innovation in the area of city words is the conversion of a place name into a generic term: a name that has no meaning outside a specific locality where it designates a specific place ends up designating all spaces of the same type in the language in question, or even beyond it. At that moment, the local character of the

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designation is erased. I will look at three words that exemplify this phenomenon: they all refer to stigmatized places and populations and have circulated widely within one or even several linguistic areas. I will discuss them in the chronological order of their appearance below. The first case is the Italian word ghetto. There has been a good deal of controversy over its origin, which, as often happens in etymological disputes, has become part of the history of the word itself and of its cultural significance. Nevertheless, today there is a very broad consensus regarding the first attestation of the term (Boiteux, 2010). Following a decree issued by the Republic of Venice dated 29 March 1516, the city’s Jewish population was forced to settle on a piece of land called Ghetto nuovo (new foundry). In the Venetian dialect of the time, the word geto signified “melting,” and the place name, recorded as early as the thirteenth century, appeared for example in a 1455 notarial deed certifying the purchase by the da Brolo family of the terren del Geto from Larco Ruzzini (Cortelazzo and Zolli, 1980, 2). Soon the word was circulating in other cities of the peninsula with its new meaning: in Genoa in 1536, getta designated the wharf where Jews expelled from Spain were held in quarantine (Stow, 1992) and, by the end of the seventeenth century, ghetto was used in Rome to designate the serraglio degli ebrei (enclosure of the Jews), instituted by the pope in 1555. Serraglio, vico (alley), and claustro (cloister) were used in Rome in competition with ghetto, which first appeared in the Roman Jewish community, whose men of letters adopted a new etymology: geth (divorce) in Hebrew (Wigoder, 1993: 320–22). Some historians preferred the Roman rabbinical interpretation to the Venetian origin. The geth etymology is no doubt inaccurate, but that is not what matters: speakers decide the meaning they intend to give words and in so doing may modify their origin. The point is that the word had acquired meaning for those it stigmatized, allowing it to spread easily to other Italian cities that had created a similar institution. In Venice, the new neighbourhood reserved for Jews, set up in 1541 on a former industrial site, was called Ghetto vecchio (old foundry), but when the Ghetto nuovissimo was created in 1633, the place no longer had a foundry as its origin: the toponym had changed its meaning and become generic.3 The word ghetto was to undergo other changes in usage later on and we will come back to them in a moment. It began entering other languages with the limited acceptance that it was given in the 1863 Littré Dictionnaire de la langue française: “Name, in certain Italian cities, of the quarter in which Jews were obliged to reside,” and in the 1890 edition

40  Christian Topalov

of Webster’s: “The Jews’ quarter in an Italian town or city.” In the 1920s and 1930s, English and French dictionaries extended its meaning beyond the specifically Italian one: “1. The quarter of a town or city to which Jews were restricted for residence, esp. in Italy; a Jewry. Obs. or hist. 2. A quarter of a city where Jews in greatest numbers live” (Webster’s New International Dictionary, 1920).4 This generalization gave a second life to the word, which had become obsolete with the disappearance of the institution in Italy itself in 1870 – except when it was used as a pejorative term for a poor, squalid neighbourhood: “Old Zona [zone] of a city, with tortuous vie [streets], filthy vicoli [alleys] in a state of abandon” (Battaglia, 1970, vol. 6). Although there is little documentation on the process whereby the word came to be adopted outside Italy, one might postulate that ghetto reappeared at the end of the nineteenth century with the arrival in western Europe and the United States of a large wave of Jewish immigration from Russia and Poland. Use of the word at the time has been documented in English and French in cities, where it took on a new value as a toponym – “the Ghetto,” le Ghetto – to designate the Lower East Side in New York, Spitalfields in London, or a section of the Marais in Paris. The second example of a toponym turned a common noun is the word favela, which belongs to Brazilian Portuguese but has entered many other languages to designate Brazil’s poorer urban districts. Here again, the origin is clearly a place name (Abreu, 1994; Valladares, 2006: 15–26). When the soldiers that quashed the 1897 popular Canudos uprising in the state of Bahia came back to Rio de Janeiro, the capital, they settled in the hills of Morro da Providência to wait for their long-­overdue pay. They built makeshift dwellings on the hill, located right in the centre of the city, which soon became the core of an impoverished neighbourhood. The soldiers called the place Morro da Favella, the name of a plant that grows in the Nordeste, which was also given to a hill in Bahia where the federal army had won a decisive victory.5 The neighbourhood became the leading target of hygienist criticism, and Morro da Favella soon came to be called la Favella, a toponym that described it as the prototype of other similar areas resulting from the transformations of the centre of Rio and the expulsion of the labouring population. In the 1920s, the name lost its uppercase F and became a generic term commonly used in the Carioca press to designate the growing number of areas filled with makeshift dwellings that were mushrooming on the hillsides. Their inhabitants, initially known as favellanos (1931) and later as favellados (1942), were associated with criminality and social hazard, while

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their exotic lifestyle and enthusiasm for the samba were being turned into folklore.6 The word favella entered the administrative lexicon in 1937 with the building code of the city of Rio (Código de Obras, 1964: 107) and soon appeared in a dictionary of the Portuguese language (published in 1939), but as a term specific to the city of Rio (Freire, 1939–44). The first census of the favelas of Rio was conducted by the city authorities in 1948, and the general census of Brazil in 1950 gave the term a definition that was valid throughout the country (Guimarães, 1953). The word favela – already in use in São Paulo and Brasilia, where it had shed its particular features as a Carioca place name – had become a generic term that subsumed a wide variety of local words used to designate poor neighbourhoods made up of makeshift dwellings in Brazil, such as baixada (Belém), vila favela (Belo Horizonte), mocambo (Recife), and invasão (virtually everywhere). According to a 2001 article in a São Paulo newspaper, “by the end of the twentieth century, Brazil had 3,905 favelas, scattered over the entire country” (Folha de São Paulo, 7 January 2001). Our third example of a toponym that became generic is the French word bidonville, a case that closely resembles that of favela. In the 1920s, when the first neighbourhoods of makeshift dwellings began appearing in Casablanca, one of them, a former encampment called Gadoue­ ville (literally, Dirt-town), was known locally as Bidonville (literally, Tin-Town) (Cohen and Eleb, 1998: 221). Written evidence of this place name can be found in a business magazine published in 1930 and on a postcard printed in 1932: for many people, the neighbourhood had become a symbol. The novelist Pierre Mac Orlan talked about it in 1934: “Bidonville, … capital of ‘abject poverty,’ made of oil drums and corrugated iron” ([1934] 1989: 65). A few years later, the German journalist Friedrich Sieburg noted: “Today, Bidonville stretches out like a monstrous town, where squares and streets are slowly being mapped out” (1938: 205). In the 1930s, the name lost its uppercase B and was used to designate all neighbourhoods of this type in Casablanca. It is mentioned in 1934 in an article written by a journalist for l’Illustration, with the word still in quotation marks and italics: “a real danger for the European city ... lies in these ‘bidonvilles’” (Vaillat, 1934: 91). It was definitely a French word, for local speakers of the Moroccan Arabic dialect used karyan (adapted from the French word carrière), derb (neighbourhood), or dwar (village, referring to the rural origin of the inhabitants) (Cattedra, 2010). In the next phase, bidonville came into widespread use as a French word for similar neighbourhoods in other Moroccan cities and all across

42  Christian Topalov

French North Africa, with the press serving as a vehicle for its circulation. It was also adopted by the colonial administration and by scholars: in 1958 the Orientalist Jacques Berque described the North African city as divided into three parts: the médina (traditional native town), the villeneuve (modern European town), and the bidonville. In Tunisia, however, bidonville was used concurrently with the local word gourbiville (gurbi, a word in Arabic dialect for a traditional, one-room home with no windows). In the 1950s, the word crossed the Mediterranean to France, where it was used to designate informal settlements of makeshift housing built in cities by North African, Portuguese, and Spanish immigrants as well as French families. In this period, the word bidonville replaced the various local terms such as zone, colonies de bicoques, or village nègre employed to designate shantytowns in the Paris area (Crémieux, 1929: 14, quoted by Fourcaut, Bellanger, and Flonneau, 2007: 200). The semantic closeness of bidonville to zone appears in a 1950 Série noire thriller. The hero is being pursued in a locality lost in the Guyanese forest: “It was like hunters moving in for the kill in Bidonville.” It consisted mostly of “houses made of boards, walls of oil drums flattened with hammers,” but there was also “a building a little less zonier than the others” and “two or three perfectly normal constructions that seemed out of place in this espace zonier” (Dominique, 1956: 57, 55, 20). The terms bidonvillais and bidonvillois appeared at the same time. In 1966, the French Ministry of the Interior drew up a “map of the bidonvilles,” with a view to eradicating them, and the social protest movement of May 1968 invented the slogan Bidonville, ville-bidon (literally, fake-town). By the end of this period of generalization, bidonville was used in the French social sciences and the reformist literature to designate slums of makeshift housing all over the world: for example, in 1980 La planète des bidonvilles was published (Granotier, 1980). The processes we have just described come under the heading of a figure of speech known as antonomasia, in which the name of an individual is used to name the class of objects to which it belongs.7 In this case, the individual is a place, designated by a proper noun beginning with a capital letter, which is maintained as long as speakers are aware of the link to the original place name. When that link disappears, the antonomasia is lexicalized and turned into a common noun or generic term. But what we are describing here is more than a mere matter of words: it is the emergence, among an increasing number of speakers, of a new category of objects. The main condition for transforming a toponym into a generic term is, of course, the need to state that different

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places are similar in at least one respect. Places that were once described by various terms – depending on the locality, the speakers, or the linguistic register –find themselves unified under a common term that is used as a general category. The description of the urban world must then be reorganized. The Locality of Classifications Much ink has been spilled by sociologists and geographers in an effort to decide what the true definition of a quartier, a barrio, or a neighbourhood is – that is, to specify the corresponding concepts and determine how to draw their boundaries and measure their characteristics. After decades of discussion, scholars have yet to reach a consensus on these questions. One can avoid this endless controversy by observing how city dwellers use these words and how the sections into which cities are divided are actually named (Topalov, 2002). Such observation reveals just how local the meanings of words referring to city districts actually are and how futile any attempt is to give them general definitions that would be valid from the outset for an entire linguistic area. A survey conducted in Guadalajara, Mexico, in the late 1990s noted the following statement: “Aquí ya no es mas colonia, es barrio” (This place is no longer a colonia, it’s a barrio). The speaker was an elderly woman who missed the former respectability of her neighbourhood, which had been lost due to insecurity and the impoverishment of some of the residents (Rivière d’Arc and Ibarra Ibarra, 2001: 239). In 1995, the municipality of Rio launched the Favela-Bairro project with aid from the Inter-American Development Bank. The project aimed to endow the favelas with an infrastructure and urban services to promote initiatives managed by the inhabitants, thus integrating spaces that were disparaged and dangerous to the rest of the city (Brazil 2003). A version of the project in English described it as a “slum-toneighborhood ­project” (Upgrading Urban Communities, 2001). The classificatory inversion is striking: in the observation made in Guadalajara, barrio is related to colonia in the same way favela is related to bairro in the observation in Rio. The language is not the same, nor are the speakers: in the first case, we have the spontaneous language of a resident; in the second, the official language of an administration. The semantic contrast should nevertheless draw our attention. The use of colonia became widespread in Mexico at the end of the nineteenth century to designate new residential districts built by large-scale

44  Christian Topalov

developers for the middle classes, with an overall street plan and some restrictions on the housing that could be constructed within them. This type of development implied modernity, as opposed to the disorderly working-class districts that were expanding on the outskirts of the cities (Rivière d’Arc, 2010a). During the colonial period, the word barrio was generally reserved for districts inhabited by indigenous people, which were administered by separate authorities and located outside the grid of the Spanish city (Lira, 2002). Thus, the terms barrios de indios (Indian districts), barrios indigenas (native districts), and arrabales (suburbs) became associated with disorder, poverty, and the common people (Aréchiga Córdoba, 2010). Yet the positive connotations of colonia and the pejorative ones of barrio were in no way set in stone. In the 1930s and 1940s, the revolutionary regime promoted the rise of colonias obreras or proletarias, which associated the working class with order and modernity. Some neighbourhoods that grew out of spontaneous urbanization in the 1990s were called colonias irregulares, a paradoxical term testifying to the residents’ desire to be considered colonos, or ordinary citizens. As for the word barrio, it can be used as a neutral term to designate a city division or positively to highlight the vitality and singularity of a particular neighbourhood in the literature on reform, tourism, and the social sciences. As a result, while the classificatory opposition invoked by the old woman from Guadalajara was available and perfectly intelligible locally to convey her meaning, it has not been very stable in the Spanish spoken in Mexico. In contrast, the negative connotations of favela and the positive connotations of bairro are both quite widespread in Brazilian Portuguese. There are variations, however, that stem from the efforts of certain actors to rehabilitate symbolically and materially the spaces and human groups associated with the word favela. With regard to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, during the first decade of this century, there was a definite tendency among activists in non-governmental organizations, electoral candidates, members of the press, and certain inhabitants of these neighbourhoods to describe them as comunidades (communities) (see the chapter by Soares Gonçalves and Pilo’ in this volume). That term is borrowed from the religious language of the grassroots communities promoted by Catholic liberation theology activists and Protestant evangelicals as well as from the Anglo-American vocabulary used in international organizations. The chosen term was no doubt intended to give the favelas and the favelados a dignity that hygienist condemnation and police repression had denied them for decades. It is difficult to tell

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whether this symbolic rehabilitation has changed the uses of the word favela: in the end, does Favela-Bairro mean that the favelas are bairros and worthy of the name or that they must lose their former name in order to become the latter? The situations I have just described are reminders not only of the classificatory value of words that designate neighbourhoods, but also of what one might call, by analogy with one of the main theses of Saussurian linguistics, the arbitrariness of the sign. We have seen, in the case of favela and bidonville, how pejorative generic terms are formed to designate, from the point of view of outside observers, neighbourhoods of spontaneous urbanization and makeshift housing – social exonyms, as it were, similar within a single linguistic area to the traditional exonyms formed when moving from one language to another.8 This phenomenon is quite common. In societies in which the economic inequalities between populations are accompanied by spatial divisions, language always supplies pejorative terms to designate spaces of poverty and supposed social risk, in contrast to terms for spaces that represent an acceptable urban order. What is constant, therefore, is the classificatory opposition between a positive word and a negative word. What varies from one locality to the next, including within one and the same linguistic space, is the words that express this contrast. By investigating the history of how this opposition arose locally, we can understand the circumstances surrounding the formation of the word pair in use. Inhabitants immediately grasp the positive or negative overtones attached to the names of places or areas in the city. At various times since the nineteenth century, such oppositions have structured the representations of urban space: the East End and West End in London, the Lower East Side (or West Side) and Upper East Side in New York, or, on another scale, Belleville and Faubourg Saint-Germain in Paris. Generic words have developed to express more abstractly the same type of opposition: in London, “slum” and “suburb” (Dyos and Reeder, 1973).9 These polar opposites of places and the names that designate them have a structuring effect, which is not to say the lexicon is stable or even consensual. In the nineteenth or twentieth century, a dominant (and always pejorative) generic word emerged in most Western languages for the poor districts of a city and sometimes the housing that composed it. In some cases, as we have seen, it resulted from the transformation of a toponym into a generic term. In other instances, it developed from a change

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in the usage of a word in a familiar register. This was probably what happened in English in the case of “slum” and its derivatives “slumland” or “slumdom”: first documented in the form of “backslum” in around 1825, “slum” was initially a slang word for “room.” Similarly, the Russian word truščoba – meaning a remote, impenetrable corner – was introduced with this new meaning in 1864 in a novel by Vinogradov on the slums of Saint Petersburg (Azarova, 2010). In Brazilian Portu­ guese, cortiço, a word for both “hive” and “courtyard,” changed its meaning at the end of the nineteenth century (Pesavento, 2006). Often, a single term among those currently in use was chosen by hygienists and reformers to designate the substandard housing they sought to eliminate: in French, taudis ended up supplanting other terms such as bouge or masure in the early twentieth century; in English, “slum” became prevalent around 1880, at the expense of frequently used colourful expressions such as “rookery” (crow’s nest) or “little hell”; in Spanish, tugurio was the abstract term that specialists preferred to the more descriptive word chabola (hut, cabin) (Rodríguez Chumillas, 2010). In all such cases, it appears that reform circles played a decisive role in suggesting the lexical solution that finally won out in the press, politics, and common language. Their influence is hardly surprising: stating that there was a “housing problem” implied adopting new language to designate the target of actions to be undertaken. The reformers had to promote a lexical solution to a difficult problem: a name comprehensible to everyone should be given to condemnable housing conditions, one that would describe an abstract notion encompassing the particular forms they took in one locality or another. And yet, very often the words derived from common usage implied a specific morphology – such as Mietskaserne or “tenement” for working-class, multi-family rental buildings in Berlin or New York, respectively; basso for basement housing in Naples; vecindad, cortiço, patío, conventillo, or courée for single-storey row houses or rooms built around a central courtyard in Mexico City, Rio, Porto, Buenos Aires, or in the working-class towns of northern France, respectively. Reform work thus involved producing a generic term through a double process of abstraction, which generalized not only from one particular place to a particular type of poor housing, but also from that particular type to all possible morphological types of poor housing. This has been described as “condensationtypification” (Depaule 2006: 5). International reform conferences played an important role in this shift to the concept, sometimes by agreeing on

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a glossary of translations, sometimes by adopting a solution belonging to the dominant language at the time. As a general rule, the generic term that was ultimately chosen had a highly pejorative connotation. Starting from this situation, several developments can be observed, both among the reform administrators and among the populations concerned. The reformist urban policies that arose in the twentieth century relied on legislation, procedures, and specialized bureaucracies. They engendered a number of terms to designate poor neighbourhoods and deteriorated or makeshift housing. These terms had to meet two conditions: they had to be accepted by the legal lexicon and increasingly, as time went by, they were not to imply flagrant stigmatization of the populations concerned. In Britain, legislators generally preferred “defective houses” (1867) or “unhealthy areas” (1875) to “slum,” and “improvement schemes” to “slum clearance.” In the 1930s terms such as “blighted areas,” “deteriorated areas,” or “substandard housing” appeared in the United States (Reeder and Topalov, 2010). In France, early twentieth-­ century legislation governing “action against the taudis” used the terms îlots insalubres, logements défectueux, or habitat insalubre. Social control policies that have been developed since the mid-1970s invented the terms quartier de développement social or quartier sensible (Tissot, 2007), and early twenty-first-century policies in favour of housing for the destitute promoted the term habitat indigne. These new expressions were essentially euphemisms for pejorative terms. The resulting vocabularies, developed within reformist groups and public bureaucracies, seldom entered common usage, let alone the language of the populations concerned. We might note, however, one paradoxical exception in French at the end of the twentieth century: the ironic trajectory of the word quartiers. That word (always in the plural in this usage) was introduced with euphemizing epithets by well-­ intentioned reformers, but the adjectives were soon dropped by the press, politicians, and ordinary speakers. The term les quartiers (without any qualifier) has since become one of the most common ways of designating stigmatized areas on the outskirts of a city, and it now often replaces banlieue in this role. Hence new uses: “youth from les quartiers,” “les quartiers went up in flames last night,” or “les quartiers [i.e., young people from les quartiers] invaded the city centre.” Few studies have been carried out to document in detail the linguistic responses of the inhabitants to the pejorative terms used to describe

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their neighbourhoods and themselves.10 No doubt one could distinguish several types that have given rise to more or less established terms: in every case, the resulting endonyms are only locally comprehensible because they came into being as specific responses on the part of stigmatized actors to words imposed on them from outside. One way of responding consisted of rejecting the pejorative exonym and replacing it with an ameliorative endonym. Thus, in the Nordeste of Brazil in the 1970s and 1980s, organized groups that illegally occupied land to construct dwellings used the word invasão not only for their action but also for the resulting neighbourhood. For example, in Salvador de Bahia, the inhabitants of Invasão das Malvinas (Invasion of the Falklands) (1985), which the authorities renamed Barrio da Paz (Neighbourhood of Peace) a decade later, still proudly refer to it by its original name. One of the consequences of this situation is that the term invasão, which has a very pejorative connotation in the cities of southern Brazil, has acquired the characteristics of an ameliorative term in the Nordeste, as opposed to mocambo or favela (Rivière d’Arc, 2010b). The same phenomenon was observed in the early years of this century in Buenos Aires, where several movements engaged in illegal occupation of urban land called the quarter they had created an asentamiento. In this instance, by adopting the most orderly street plan possible and giving the place a name – Spanish for human settlement – borrowed from the vocabulary of NGOs and intergovernmental organizations, particularly the World Bank, the inhabitants proclaimed their difference from the surrounding poor neighbourhoods designated in Argentina by the pejorative villa miseria or villa (Merklen, 2005: ch. 5). Mockery was another response. When encampments of the unemployed and displaced farmers began multiplying in major American cities during the Great Depression, they were designated by the generic term “hooverville” – from the name of the Republican president at the time, Herbert Hoover – which was often used as a place name, for example in Seattle and Sacramento (Erb, 1935; Roy, 1935), or in the form of Hoover Valley for Central Park in New York City. There is some controversy over the origin of the term: was it a local initiative of the inhabitants or the invention of a Democratic politician? The head of a group of occupants in Seattle reported in July 1932: One evening, several of us sat around an open campfire and one of the shanty dwellers remarked that “We must have a name for this place, we cannot call it ‘any old thing.’” Another man remarked “This is the era of

The Naming Process  49 Hoover prosperity; let’s call this place ‘Hooverville.’” So the name, “Hooverville,” given through sarcasm to President Hoover, has clung to the place ever since. (Jackson, 1938: 286)

Whatever the case may be, the name quickly caught on and was popularized by word of mouth, the press, and the cinema, allowing the populations involved to play on sarcasm to avoid the usual pejorative terms “shacks” and “shantytown.” A similar process based on mockery was observed in the Soviet Union in the 1980s (Amestoy, 2010), when the term xruščoba came into use to designate the blocks of poor-quality flats built en masse under Khrushchev in the late 1950s and early 1960s. At first, the buildings were called pjatiètažka, a familiar, neutral term for a five-storey building, which simply indicated a new shape compared with the constructions of the Stalin era. A pejorative term soon appeared – xruščevka – composed of the name of the Soviet leader associated with the housing program (Xruščev) and the diminutive ka, emphasizing the flats’ cramped nature. A play on words – xruščoba – came next, this time combining the name of Krushchev with truščoba, a word used to designate slums before the October Revolution. This new term certainly originated among the inhabitants, although it began appearing in the official press in 1989, when the government started selling state-owned housing units to their occupants. Mockery was mixed with self-mockery: people made fun of their own accommodations without having to respond to a stigmatizing exonym, as the stigma was silently but clearly signified by the nascent property market itself. A third type of response to a pejorative exonym was its adoption by those it stigmatized, transforming the stigma into a banner, as happened with the French word banlieue in the late nineteenth century. Seldom used before the end of the century, the word designated a ring of rural townships beyond the faubourgs of Paris, sometimes described as “the surrounding campagnes [countryside]” (in 1830) and sometimes as “an anti-rural banlieue” because of its unsightly factories and ugly little cottages (in 1843). The word was perceived as pejorative by some, so much so that in 1889 the elected officials and prominent citizens from a district west of Paris wrote in a local newspaper, “Let us be bold banlieusards [banlieue dwellers], since banlieusards is what they call us!” and others, in a bulletin entitled La Banlieue, “Banlieusards, come join us!” (quoted by Faure, 2010: 74). They were, in fact, embracing a stigmatizing exonym as an emblem of pride. Nevertheless, in the twentieth

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century, with the considerable extension of the suburbs and their swelling population, the word banlieusards generally kept its negative connotation – “The train was packed with banlieusards, exhausted from their work day” (Gros 1970: 11). It then disappeared altogether with the emergence of the “problème des banlieues,” which no longer referred to exhausted employees but to the unemployed “youth of the quartiers.” To a certain extent, the adventures of the word “ghetto” in American English show a similar pattern. In its toponymic form, “the Ghetto” designated the New York and Chicago neighbourhoods where Jewish immigrants fleeing from pogroms in Poland and Russia settled from the 1880s on. It was also used in the early twentieth century as a generic term for a densely populated, poor neighbourhood, like the ones described by the journalist and novelist Jack London as “a working-class ghetto” or “labor ghetto” in San Francisco ([1909] 1986: 258, 262), or any neighbourhood in which immigrants of the same origin concentrated, like those described by the sociologist Robert E. Park in evoking “the Chinatowns, the Little Sicilies, and the other so-called ‘ghettos’” (1926: 9). In the case of immigrant Jewish neighbourhoods, there is little doubt that the term was an exonym with a distinctly pejorative connotation. A shift took place after the Second World War, when the word came to refer exclusively to districts with a concentration of AfricanAmerican inhabitants. One resident, an old man, noted: “They call it a ghetto now, my old neighbourhood in Newark … It acquired that name only after the predominantly Jewish population moved out shortly after World War II” (quoted in Vergara, 1995: 4). We would be hardpressed to find a better illustration of the contextual meaning of city words. From then on, in English “ghetto” designated the urban districts populated by the black minority in the United States. As often happens, the term subsequently made its way back to the Old World to designate neighbourhoods inhabited by post-colonial minorities in British and French cities. The phenomenon of a stigma being turned into an emblem was most apparent in the United States: the youth of these stigmatized neighbourhoods expressed their revolt by protesting against the ghetto, while at the same time identifying with “ghetto culture”, which was a source of pride (Schuman, 2010). Time on a Map Nothing seems more confusing than the myriad ways of naming places on the street map of a large city. In Paris, streets that look alike in every

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respect are called – in one instance avenue de la République, in another boulevard Sébastopol, and in yet another rue de Turbigo. A small deadend street lined with blocks of flats might be called cité Bergère, another square de Maubeuge, and elsewhere villa Michel-Ange. In London, very similar-looking gardens surrounded by very similar-looking terraces may go by the name Kensington Square, or Queen’s Gate Gardens, or even Greenville Place. A traditional square-shaped area of terraced houses in Bloomsbury might be called Russell Square, along with the irregularly shaped Nicholl Square in the City or Paternoster Square, cluttered with constructions. Large upscale blocks of flats may be identified as Cornwall Mansions or Durward House or Alexandra Court. In São Paulo, housing estates intended for the privileged classes are called Vila Buarque in one case and Jardim América in another. Arbitrary naming seems to be the rule in the semantics of street maps. To clear up the confusion, it is helpful to reconstruct the history of street or place names by situating each one in the period when it appeared, usually in the form of a generic term (e.g., “square”) combined with a singularizing element (e.g., Bloomsbury). It then becomes obvious not only that the generic terms belong to local classificatory systems but that these systems change over time. Yet toponyms – with their generic element – remain fixed for very long periods of time, in the course of which the original meaning of the term – its classificatory value – is usually forgotten. Hence the apparent arbitrariness of the naming process. To an attentive observer, however, there is some order in this disorder: cities were built by adding on successive regions or rings, and the frequency of the terms usually varies in keeping with the geography of urban expansion. These regularities are, of course, disrupted by the physical transformations of the old parts of the city, as well as by the new names assigned to places over time. Nevertheless, place names are visible signs of time on a map, for they express a succession of lexical events that become contemporaneous for us through their enduring results. Let us illustrate this point by examining how the word “square” has been assigned in London since it came into toponymic use in the seventeenth century (Forty, 2010b). The first urban object to receive this name was Southampton Square in 1661 – today Bloomsbury Square. Terraced houses forming a square around an open, central space had appeared before in the West End to accommodate the migration of the well-to-do classes outside the City. But other names had been given to such a configuration, such as Covent Garden (1620s), Leicester Fields (1630s), and

52  Christian Topalov

Lincoln’s Inn Fields (1640s). The innovation of 1661 did not come into widespread use immediately; prior to 1690, the most commonly used terms for this type of open space were “piazza” and “fields.” By the end of the seventeenth century, however, “square” had become prevalent, and from then on the name was given to all similarly shaped developments. “Square” had become fashionable, in the sense that speculative builders realized that wealthy families wanted to have an address carrying this name. In the City, many spaces formerly called “yard” or “court” were renamed “square” during the reconstruction following the Great Fire of London in 1666. This was the case, for example, of the pentagonal space known as Charterhouse Yard in 1682, which became Charterhouse Square in 1747. As a result, quite dissimilar objects came to be called “square.” The success of the word continued unabated until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the multiplication of squares ended up robbing the term of its virtue as a social distinction. Thus, the speculative builders that developed Kensington starting in the 1850s created estates bearing a close resemblance to the squares in the Georgian West End but generally called them “gardens” rather than “squares.” When the distinctive significance of “gardens” faded in turn in the late nineteenth century, it gave way to a new word – usually “court” or “place.” In this manner, identical objects came to receive different names. Questioning the intrinsic meaning of the terms or their etymology will not explain these variations; instead, we have to reconstruct the semantic field relevant to the property market players – builders and buyers – at the time the name was chosen. The trajectory of the name “square” is one example of a semantic cycle that has given rise to numerous observable examples in other languages. The cycle came into being when developers started building properties to sell on the market rather than on commission from clients, a shift that took place very early on in London. To position the properties in the upscale market segment, speculators sometimes invented a new product, but that was not always enough: they also needed to find a symbolic way of conveying its distinctive character. Launching a new word could play an important or even decisive role in this instance. To be sure, the innovation might fail and the word would quickly disappear, but when it succeeded, it was taken up and repeated by an everincreasing number of developers. At that point, the word ceased to be new and could end up being given to products intended for less privileged market segments, as the middle classes were usually very fond of symbols associated with the upper classes. The word would then lose

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its value and the cycle would begin anew, with builders attempting once again to reach the upscale market by choosing a new name for their products to recreate the symbolic differentiation they needed. When philanthropic reformers and, later, public authorities began building model housing for workers, they too adopted a lexical strategy of symbolic distinction: they gave the newly reformed and reforming blocks of flats different names from those used for ordinary private construction for the working classes. Whenever the reformed housing in turn became an object of stigmatization, as frequently happened, the new names were depreciated. There is an observable pattern in all these cases, which could be described as a cycle of “distinction-dissemination-devaluation” (DDD). The cycle might last a few years or decades or as long as a century, for the words used in property markets seldom change. But when they do, this recurrent and widespread process is usually at work. Let us stay in London for a moment. We know that the upper classes in the city were reluctant to live in blocks of flats until the mid-­nineteenth century. While the first structure of the kind dates from 1853, “mansions” – the name that was to designate this type of property development for several decades – did not appear until 1866 with the building of Belgrave Mansions (Forty, 2010a). “Mansions” (always used in the plural), borrowed from aristocratic vocabulary, was intended to signal an unmistakable difference from working-class blocks of flats, called “buildings,” “house” or, in the generic mode, “tenement blocks” or “block dwellings.” Class segmentation of the property market through words continues to this day, but according to a changing vocabulary. “Mansions” was devalued by coming into general use: towards the end of the century, it tended to be replaced by “court” or “place” – one sign of this change was the petition sent by the inhabitants of Corn­ wall  Mansions to the municipality in 1901, asking to have their address changed to Cornwall Place. Furthermore, when the London County Council began building housing for workers, it sought to differentiate these developments from decried “tenement blocks” by calling them “estates” – such as Boundary Street Estate (1890) – another term of aristocratic origin. Social polarization continued in other forms, opposing first “mansion flats” and later “apartments” for the middle classes to “council flats” or “council estate,” and then “high-rise” or “tower block” for working-class residents. The emergence of all these terms at a particular moment can be dated quite precisely, but through the toponyms, they are present simultaneously in the city of today.

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Similar cycles can be observed in Paris as well.11 In the wake of the Napoleonic wars, developers began to urbanize small plots of land simply by opening a short private road, often a dead end, and then building investment properties around it. Most of these developments were at first called cités, and that word was also used to refer to the street. A number of them were opened in the boulevard section of Paris, fashionable at the time of Balzac, including Cité Bergère (1825), Cité d’Antin (1829–30) and Cité de Trévise (1840). This was an entirely new usage of a word that had become obsolete, except to designate “the oldest part of the ville [town]” (Littré, 1863, vol. 1; cf. Diderot and le Rond d’Alembert, 1753, vol. 3). In all likelihood, this lexical innovation was intended to give the housing estates the glamour of the past and perhaps even the grandiose connotation the word enjoyed when one spoke of the cité as a higher form of society: the cité antique, or even the cité de Dieu. In 1849, there were twelve cités in Paris, almost all of them in the vicinity of the boulevards, including two that were a new name given to a former impasse (Lazare and Lazare, 1849). However, the distinctive quality of a cité was soon compromised by an unflattering association: reformers seized upon the word to promote cités ouvrières (Fourier, 1849; Villermé, 1850); the Société des cités ouvrières de Paris was founded in 1849 and construction of the Cité Napoléon began the same year. It was followed by Cité Doré (c. 1859), Cité Jeanne d’Arc (1869–72), and many others, some of which were soon denounced by hygienists as Paris’s worst slums. New lexical innovations had therefore become necessary. Some were created early on in the surroundings of Paris, where private land subdivisions appeared, often in wooded, picturesque sites intended to be built for wealthy clients: the vast Parc de Maisons (1834), far from Paris and served by the first railroad, or, much closer to Paris’s city limits, the Nouveau Village d’Orléans (1834) in Le Petit Montrouge, the Hameau Boileau (1838) – also called Parc or Square Boileau – and the Villa de Montmorency (1853) in Auteuil (Gresset, 1996: 22–24). The plans often featured a square, in this context a French word designating a garden in the centre of the estate, including at the Cité de Trévise mentioned above. There were other parcs in the suburbs, but hardly any nouveaux villages and only a limited number of hameaux in Paris – a total of eight, nearly all located in the neighbourhoods of Auteuil and la Muette. Villa was by far the term of choice to designate a small, private housing estate giving onto a short, often private street and distinguish such developments from cités ouvrières. Villas were increasingly built from

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1880 up to the First World War in peripheral districts, especially Auteuil and Porte Dauphine on the bourgeois side of the city and near Amérique or Père Lachaise on the working-class side. Villas could be built with bourgeois petits hôtels or chalets (Villa de Montmorency, Villa de Beau­ séjour), blocks of flats (Villa Michel-Ange, 1883; Villa Jeanne-d’Arc, c. 1905), or even small working-class cottages (Villa du Progrès, 1889; Villa Alexandre-Ribot, 1923). The word lost its rural connotations at the beginning of the twentieth century and became urban. Furthermore, some of the villas that appeared in this period had been in existence for a long time and had undergone a change of name only after having been an impasse (dead-end street) or sometimes a passage (alley). Fewer and fewer new villas were built in Paris in the 1930s, and the name was taken over by the suburbs: in the outlying town of Athis-Mons, thirtyfive housing estates, all of them called villas, appeared between 1893 and 1935. The first (Villa Bel Respiro) was rather posh and the last (Villa Athis-Panorama) working class (Petit, 1993: 10, 15, 48). In just over four decades, the word had lost its distinctive value due to its success, particularly in working-class Parisian neighbourhoods and remote suburbs. It did not come back into use until the 1990s, when the charm of the “discreet Paris” of villas was rediscovered (Lamarre, 2010). In the 1920s and 1930s, the word square was adopted in Paris to replace villa. It no longer referred, as in the nineteenth century, to a small public garden, but to a complex of blocks of flats along a private street, often brightened up by small gardens. The innovation dates from the 1890s (Square La Bruyère, 1894; Square de La Tour-Maubourg, 1897), but the word did not come into widespread use until just before the First World War. It was never limited to bourgeois neighbourhoods, but was in fact frequently employed in developing the site of the former city fortifications for a middle-class clientele in the Auteuil district (Square de la Bresse, 1932) and the working-class Amérique neighbourhood (Square d’Aquitaine, 1934). I have used examples from Paris and London to illustrate the DDD cycle, but the study of city words provides many other examples. There was no reason for this phenomenon to occur when the social hierarchy was stable and dwellings were commissioned. It started shaping urban vocabularies only when building became speculative – that is, undertaken for a market in which the buyers were unknown – in a society in which money allowed people to buy social status. The DDD cycle is thus a historically circumscribed phenomenon. It is set in motion by speculative builders: to promote a new product targeted to the high-end

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market, they launch a terminological distinction; other developers take up the same word (the dissemination or popularization phase); and when it finally comes to be used for more modest or even very low-end segments of the market, devaluation takes place and the term is abandoned by the high-end developers, who have to launch new terms to distinguish their products. The cycle is quite long: in London, the ascendant period for the word “square” lasted roughly from 1690 to 1850 and for “mansions” from 1870 to 1900; in Paris cité was ascendant from 1820 to 1850 and villa from 1850 to 1900. The length of the cycle depends largely on how the word is disseminated. As long as it is used to designate socially superior dwellings, it is sure to last, but it loses its appeal when the word begins to be used for buildings of inferior status. Most often, this happens when speculative developers try to add glamour to constructions built for a modest clientele; but it can also occur when social reformers use a distinguished or noble word to give workingclass dwellings a dignity long denied to them: cité ouvrière (Paris, c. 1850), council estate (London, c. 1890), villa operária (southern Brazil, c. 1890), colonia obrera (Mexico, c. 1930). Finally, devaluation takes place when the inhabitants of small dwellings give them names borrowed from the upper classes, usually tongue-in-cheek: this was the case of the tiny Villas Sam’suffit (“It’s enough for me”), working-class cottages built in the Paris suburbs in the 1920s. It should be emphasized that this downgrading is a strictly lexical phenomenon: it affects only the naming of places and is virtually independent of any morphological transformation of the housing products. Some aspects of the DDD cycle result in separating the signifier from the signified. During the dissemination period, it may happen that the word serves to assign a new name to places that already existed and are materially different from new constructions. It may also be used to name places with a changed morphology, generally due to densification. In contrast, during the period of devaluation, new names are invented for places that continue to be built on the previous model, and the whole cycle starts afresh. The DDD cycle generally results in stable toponyms, composed of a generic term affected by the cycle and an identifying element specific to the place. The generic term is thus inscribed in a proper noun that remains attached to the place for a very long time, even though the speakers have long since lost any memory of the circumstances of its first naming. One could thus say that this kind of toponym is a projection of time in space, the localized trace of an earlier lexical cycle. City words

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are like the stars that fill the night sky: they all appear to us at the same time, but in fact they are not contemporary with each other – some died out long ago, even though we still see them shine. The Process of Naming and the Variability of City Words Variability is thus characteristic of city words and their meanings. One could find cases to counter this assertion in which stability won out, but they are few and far between. The most generic term designating human habitation is one of those cases: “house,” casa, maison, Haus, dom – terms that for centuries have remained unchanged in their respective languages. One of the meanings of these words has shown exceptional stability: “a place where people dwell,” sometimes associated – in the case of the aristocracy – with “the name of the family that lives there.” Everything else in this semantic field is likely to change, however: over time, different types of single-family homes and flats in multi-family structures have been named in a wide variety of ways. Similarly, the generic terms for the most common types of urban thoroughfare have also remained rather constant: via, calle, rue, “street,” Straße, and ulica have all been in use for a very long time.12 But many variations developed as new types of roads were opened up in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: corso and viale in Italian, avenue and boulevard in French and English, Alee in German, or prospekt in Russian. Not to speak of the new thoroughfares of the automobile age in the twentieth century. On the other hand, there has been no stability in the words used to designate “urban” agglomerations among the different categories of human settlement. One of the reasons for this instability is that under the old regimes in Europe, what we now consider villes of different sizes did not fall into a single category designated by one and the same term, because they were ranked according to the privileges granted to them by the sovereign. In most cases, a generic term was adopted once this political heterotypy was erased through revolution or gradual disappearance, but some countries have preserved lexicons that continue to express differences in the dignity of places: the United Kingdom still distinguishes between “city” and “town” on ancient grounds, as does Portugal between cidade and vila. In contrast, the necessities of the colonial system in the Americas led to an early and rapid extension of the use of ciudad, cidade, and “city” – and the related rights granted to European settlers. Consequently, villa and “town” lost most of their

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distinctly urban character very early on in the New World, an evolution that the same words did not undergo in the home countries – even though “small town” is found in North America, as a consequence of another quite common use of “town” as opposite of “country.” These observations suggest that we will not find the meaning of words in their etymology, even though this approach has enjoyed great importance historically and is still widespread today. From the time of the first classic dictionaries of the vernacular – in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries – looking for the origins of words was a task for compilers. This was especially true in the Latin world, where scholars were eager to enhance national languages by establishing their Roman roots: for French, the dictionary by Gilles Ménage (1650) and the one by the Jesuits of Trévoux (Dictionnaire universel françois et latin, 1704); for Portuguese, the dictionary by Raphael Bluteau (1712–21), also a Jesuit, who specified or invented the Latin meaning of each word; and for English, the etymological dictionary by Nathan Bailey (1721). In the nineteenth century, etymological interest shifted to the pre-Latin vernacular in an effort to find the deepest foundations of the nation in the origins of the language. This was the task the Grimm Brothers (1854– 60) assigned to themselves; it was taken up as well as by Emile Littré (1863–69) and later Walter Skeat (1882) and (to a lesser extent) J.A.H. Murray (1888–1928). Such endeavours declined in the twentieth century, at least in France: the most recent French etymological dictionary was published in 1932 (Bloch and Wartburg), and the fascination with origins gave way to work on the history of the language (Rey, 1992–98). German scholars, however, continued to be actively engaged in etymology (Duden Etymologie, 1963). The etymological quest is illusory when it is prompted by the belief that the meanings of words are essentially fixed at their origin and last over the course of time, that they are somehow inscribed in their phonetic materiality or their “root,” as one often calls it. This belief is still firmly held in many areas: beyond routine uses of etymology by scholars in the social sciences, we all know that meditating on the origin of words can have an enormous impact on certain religious, philosophical, or psychoanalytic discourse. And yet words have no memory; they do not carry their history in their phonemes. One can argue that cities have no past either, except the one made present by people today. In cities, the actors of the present – of any of the successive presents – designate certain objects as arising from the past, which for that very reason should be preserved or

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destroyed, valued for their authenticity or updated (Lepetit and Olmo, 1995). Similarly, words have meaning only in speech that belongs always and only to a particular present. If in some cases they acquire a past, it is because they have been caught up in interpretive arguments put forward by those who have set themselves up as guardians of the past and of tradition or, on the contrary, by those who denigrate them. Etymology is only one particular type of action by the present on the past: more than merely engaging in a gratuitous search for the origin of words, it helps give words a meaning or connotation that is relevant for the present.13 Thus, by putting too much emphasis on etymological concerns, which divert attention away from observing actual usage, we run the risk of failing to ask the right questions. The German word Park may come from Latin, or the medieval Latin word parcus may come from Old German: there is probably no way to know for sure, but it does not matter. What does matter is that when Park reappeared in German in the fifteenth century, it was borrowed from French, which invites us to wonder who borrowed the term and why they did so (Rohde, 2010). No doubt the words capital and capitale in Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian come from the Latin caput (head), but these words did not arrive directly from Rome. They came into use late, having first appeared in adjectival form (ville capitale), and, above all, their meaning was in no way determined by their origin: they did not designate immediately – and in some languages, ever distinctly – the main city in a particular state, in the sense of the seat of the sovereign and his or her administration, for this meaning implied at the very least that the residence of the monarch and the royal or imperial administration was established in a single city. With regard to the time periods and places in which this process occurred, etymology is at best silent, and at worst, misleading. If Latin did in fact play a role in the adventures of city words in Europe, it was hardly the Latin spoken by Romans; it was the Latin of the scholars of European Christendom, whose language was used to draft charters and establish rights. Yet the medieval uses of the Latin lexicon were far removed from its classical uses and, above all, were in no way uniform. To understand the “Latin” origin of a word in our modern languages, we have to determine when and where it came back into use in the Middle Ages. Here is a robust etymology, for example: “suburb” has its origin in suburbium and consequently is said to signify the territory topographically or legally included under (sub) the city (urbs). This is definitely one of the lexical configurations recorded in

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Europe. But there are many others, some of which were to generate other lexical adventures:14 the opposition between urbs and suburbium was indeed much less common than civitas/burgus (Paris, London, Cologne, Aix) or castrum-castellum/burgus (Beauvais, Tournai, Valen­ ciennes, Caen); one can also find burgus/novus burgus or portus (Gand, Bruges), vetus urbs/nova urbs (Strasbourg), and still other forms. In vernacular language, civitas/burgus became City and Borough (Southwark) in London and città and borghi (or borgate) in Rome. A further complexity: the original part of the city was seldom the first to be governed by municipal law: in Aix, civitas designated the episcopal city and burgus the city of merchants; in Bruges, burgus designated the city of the Count of Flanders and portus or poort the commercial city; in Caen, castellum was the comtal city and major burgus (later bourg) the commercial city governed by tenure en bourgage (“burgage tenure” in England), whereas the fauxbourgs designated the two bourgs formed by the count for the benefit of ecclesiastical seigneuries. Unless we go back to the sources – the actual usage of the urban charters – we cannot make head or tail of it. Thus, studying the naming process does not mean tracing the etymology of a word or the evolution of a concept: it means observing variations in usage. Of the many observations contained in L’aventure des mots de la ville (Topalov et al., 2010), it might be useful to remember the fact that a variation in the use of city words occurs only when three conditions are met. First, there must be a classificatory niche that needs to be filled. This does not necessarily correspond to the appearance of a new urban object – a structure, a road, or an institution that did not previously exist and that has to be given a name. Indeed, old names may be given to new objects and new names to objects that have not changed. Urban reality does not directly impose any lexical innovation; what it triggers is a tension in the classificatory system that is strong enough to disrupt it. This tension creates a niche that has to be filled, and, when a solution is adopted, the whole semantic system affected by the sudden appearance of the new word or new use must be reconfigured. The second condition for semantic innovation is that the speakers must have a suitable lexical resource at their disposal. This requirement is easily met: a language constitutes an inexhaustible reservoir of words whose usage can be modified, forgotten words can be reactivated, and there are possibilities for neologisms, especially when they can be drawn from a pool of toponyms. The foreign languages of

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neighbouring nations, those with which the speakers of the national language maintain sufficient commerce, also offer words to borrow – above all when they belong to the language of a country renowned for its opulence, culture, or power. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Russian borrowed from German (prospekt, magistral’), Ameri­ can English from British English (“mall”), as well as French (parc and square), Spanish (parque), and Brazilian Portuguese (a new meaning of villa); in the twentieth century, they all borrowed from English, whether British (country for Argentine Spanish) or American (a new meaning of plaza in Spanish-speaking America). Often several words are proposed to fit the same classificatory niche (“piazza” and “square” in London around 1660, villa and hameau in Paris around 1850), but one usually triumphs over the others. The innovation always consists in giving a national or borrowed word a semantic twist, but in order to be successful, at least one of the old meanings of the word must be connected to the new one.15 This minimum of semantic continuity, no doubt present in every redefined usage of a word, provides the almost imperceptible thread that may maintain the illusion of the relevance of etymology. The third condition is just as essential, though often overlooked: a lexical innovation must bring with it some advantage to someone who belongs to the social world concerned. There must be enough actors who need to promote a new word to fill the available classificatory niche, and these actors must be able to do whatever is necessary to propose the innovation to speakers who in turn will ultimately decide its fate by adopting, ignoring, or transforming it. These actors may be quite diverse, but without them, no lexical event can take place: they may be property developers eager to give a product another name to enhance its market value; reformers seeking a new word for an old problem to secure its place on the political agenda; legislators or administrators who must define the precise limits of a category of objects or actions; or inhabitants who produce classificatory categories for spaces (for example to disparage the spaces of others or promote their own). In all these cases, the lexical action undertaken must be sufficiently relevant for the innovation to catch on and take hold over the long term. It then becomes available to dictionary compilers, who record it and thereby bestow the legitimacy the word needs to officially enter the language. A dictionary entry provides a series of definitions, which are sometimes enriched with examples. When a new acceptation is added to the list, the trace of the original lexical event usually

62  Christian Topalov

disappears, so that the national language, always similar yet different each time, can continue imperturbably on its way.

Translated from French by Susan Taponier NOTES 1 The introductory texts to Topalov et al. (2010) give more details on the methodology of the project and the varied sources authors have used. 2 The cases mentioned here are districts now considered to be archetypes of the wealthy or poor suburbs of London, New York, and Paris. The term “9-3” refers to the number of the administrative department of Seine– Saint-Denis, the poorest area in the Paris region. The number itself has become a place name, which its residents generally pronounce neuf-trois (nine-three). 3 Maps of Venice from 1697, 1729, and 1739 indicate a later reorganization of the local designations, which erased their toponymic origins to comply with the order in which the ghetti were created: the Ghetto nuovo (1516) was thereafter named Ghetto vecchio; the Ghetto vecchio (1541) and Ghetto nuovissimo (1633) taken together became Ghetto nuovo (Calabi, Camerino, and Concina, 1996). 4 Also “name, in certain Italian cities, of the quarter in which Jews were once obliged to reside. By extension, the name is still used for quarters in which the Jewish population is dominant” (Quillet, 1934). 5 With the reform of Portuguese spelling in 1942, double consonants were eliminated and favella became favela. Here I have followed the spelling used in each period. 6 The years mentioned are those of the first documented use of the word. 7 Examples of this form of antonomasia (archetypal names): a “frigidaire” (from the trademark Frigidaire), “Wall Street” (for big finance), dare to be a “Daniel.” 8 Exonym can be defined in two ways: “a name given to a place by foreigners: Londres is an exonym of London” (Collins English Dictionary, 2003) and “a name by which one people or social group refers to another and by which the group so named does not refer to itself” (American Heritage Dictionary, 2011). Endonym means a name given from inside by the group itself. 9 Despite the scornful attitude of some intellectuals towards “suburbia” beginning in the nineteenth century (Reeder and Warner, 2010), a

The Naming Process  63 phenomenon also observable in the United States in the twentieth century (Jacobs, 1961). 10 This issue has been the focus of a study directed by Jean-Charles Depaule. I have relied to a large extent on his conclusions here (Depaule, 2006: 1–8). 11 What follows is mainly based on the list of Paris streets published online by the City of Paris (Recherche des rues de Paris); we also used Lazare and Lazare, 1849, and secondary sources. 12 These words sometimes have competitors, however: in urban contexts, via and strada are interchangeable, like Straße, Gasse, and Weg or, in Britain, street and road. 13 An excellent example of this phenomenon has been studied by José Lira (1999) in connection with a debate among Brazilian etymologists in the 1920s and 1930s over the African roots of the word mocambo. Another is the erroneous etymology of the word banlieue that the French press continues to spread, according to which banlieue was once the place of the ban or of bannissement (banishment) – whereas it was in fact the distance of one lieue (league) or several at the city limits subject to the municipal ban (jurisdiction); in other words, where municipal law applied: consequently it was a space included in the city and not “excluded” (Faure, 2010). But since the banlieues today are described as quartiers d’exil or d’exclusion, a false etymology of the term has been mobilized to confirm this point of view. 14 I developed this point in Topalov, 2002: 396–401, based mainly on Pirenne, 1939. 15 I have borrowed this observation from Jean-Charles Depaule, who formulated it in the seminar “Les Mots de la Ville” at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in 2007. REFERENCES Abreu, M. de A. 1994. “Reconstruire une histoire oubliée: Origine et expansion initiale des favelas de Rio de Janeiro.” Genèses 16 (1): 45–68. http://dx.doi .org/10.3406/genes.1994.1246. American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. 2011. 5th ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Amestoy, I. 2010. “Xruščoba.” In Topalov et al., 2010, 1341–45. Aréchiga Córdoba, E. 2010. “Colonia.” In Topalov et al., 2010, 97–100. Azarova, K. 2010. “Truščoba.” In Topalov et al., 2010, 1235–38. Bailey, N. 1721. An Universal Etymological English Dictionary ... London: Printed for E. Bell.

64  Christian Topalov Battaglia, S. 1970. Grande dizionario della lingua italiana. Vol. 6. Turin: UTET. Berque, J. 1958. “Médinas, villeneuves et bidonvilles,” Les cahiers de Tunisie 6 (21–22): 5–42. Bloch, O., and W. von Wartburg. 1932. Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue française. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Bluteau, R. 1712–21. Vocabulário portuguez e latino ... 8 vols. Coimbra: Collegio das Artes da Companhia de Jesus [vols. 1–4]. Lisbon: Officina de Pascoal da Sylva [vol. 5–8]. Boiteux, M. 2010. “Ghetto.” In Topalov et al., 2010, 540–44. Brazil. Secretaria Municipal de Habitação. 2003. Favela-Bairro. http://www0 .rio.rj.gov.br/habitacao/favela_bairro.htm. Calabi, D., U. Camerino, and E. Concina. 1996. La città degli ebrei. Il ghetto di Venezia: Architettura e urbanistica. Venice: Marsilio. Cattedra, R. 2010. “Bidonville.” In Topalov et al., 2010, 125–31. Código de Obras e Legislação Complementar. Decreto 6.000 de 1-7-1937. 1964. 4th ed. Rio de Janeiro: A. Coelho Branco. Cohen, J.-L., and M. Eleb. 1998. Casablanca: Mythes et figures d’une aventure urbaine. Paris: Hazan. Collins Dictionary of the English Language. 2003. London: Collins. Cortelazzo, M., and Zolli, P. 1980. Dizionario etimologico della lingua italiana. Vol. 2.. Bologna: Zanichelli. Crémieux, A. 1929. Le grand soir. Paris: Nouvelle Société d’Édition. Depaule, J.-C., ed. 2006. Les mots de la stigmatisation urbaine. Paris: Editions UNESCO–Editions de la MSH (Les Mots de la ville). Dictionnaire universel françois et latin ... 1704. Trévoux: Estienne Ganeau. Diderot, D., and J. le Rond d’Alembert. Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences des arts et métiers … 1751–1780. 35 vols. Neufchastel: Samuel Faulche et Compagnie, Librairies & Imprimeurs; Paris: Briasson. Dominique, A.L. 1956. Le gorille et l’Amazone. Série noire. Paris: Gallimard. Duden Etymologie: Herkunftswörterbuch der deutschen Sprache. 1963. Mannheim, Vienna, Zurich: Duden Verlag. Dyos, H.J., and D.A. Reeder. 1973. “Slums and Suburbs.” In The Victorian City: Images and Realities. Vol. 2. Shapes on the Ground: A Change of Accent, edited by H.J. Dyos and M. Wolff, 359–86. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Erb, L.D. 1935. “Seattle’s Hooverville.” Seattle Pacific College, 1935, Seattle Public Library 361.97977 Er19S. http://web.archive.org/web/200606210 41215/http://clerk.ci.seattle.wa.us/~public/doclibrary/hoover_erb.htm Faure, A. 2010. “Banlieue.” In Topalov et al., 2010, 72–77. Forty, A. 2010a. “Mansion.” In Topalov et al., 2010, 711–15. Forty, A. 2010b. “Square.” In Topalov et al., 2010, 1138–42.

The Naming Process  65 Fourcaut, A., E. Bellanger, and M. Flonneau. 2007. Paris-Banlieues: Conflits et solidarités. Historiographie, anthologie, chronologie, 1788–2006. Paris: Créaphis. Fourier, C. 1849. Cités ouvrières: Des modifications à introduire dans l’architecture des villes. Paris: Librairie phalanstérienne. Freire, L. 1939–44. Grande e Novissimo Dicionário da Lingua Portuguesa. 5 vols. Rio de Janeiro: Livraria José Olympio Editora. Granotier, B. 1980. La planète des bidonvilles: Perspectives de l’explosion urbaine dans le tiers monde. Paris: Seuil. Gresset, P. 1996. “Les banlieues doivent-elles disparaître? Pittoresque et lotissements-parcs.” Les Cahiers de la Recherche Architecturale 38–39: 15–26. Grimm, J., et al. 1854–1960. Deutsches Wörterbuch. 16 vols. Leipzig: S. Hirzel. Gros, B. 1970. Quatre heures de transport par jour. Paris: Denoël. Guimarães, A.P. 1953. “As favelas do Distrito Federal.” Revista Brasileira de Estatistica 14/55: 250–73. Jackson, J. 1938. “‘The Story of Seattle’s Hooverville,’ Published by Annette de Vol Trumbull, University of Washington, 1938.” Social Trends in Seattle, University of Washington Press 1944:286–93. Jacobs, J. 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House. Lamarre, C. 2010. “Villa.” In Topalov et al., 2010, 1304–9. Lazare, F. and L. Lazare. 1849. Dictionnaire administratif et historique des rues de Paris et de ses monuments, avec un supplément 1844–49. Paris: chez Félix Lazare. Lepetit, B., and C. Olmo. 1995. “E se Erodoto tornasse in Atene? Un possibile programma di Storia urbana per la città moderna.” In La città e le sue storie, 3–50. Turin: Einaudi. Lira, A. 2002. “Les divisions de Mexico aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles: De la ville des deux Républiques à la ville républicaine.” In Topalov, 2002, 101–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.4000/books.editionsmsh.1242. Lira, J.T. 1999. “Hidden Meanings: The Mocambo in Recife.” Social Sciences Information / Information sur les sciences sociales 38 (2): 297–327. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1177/053901899038002006. Littré, E. 1863–69. Dictionnaire de la langue française. 4 vols. Paris: Hachette London, J. [1909] 1986. Martin Eden. New York: Bantam Classic. Mac Orlan, P. [1934] 1989. “Bousbir.” In Rues secrètes, 46–65. Paris: Arcéa. [Ménage, G.] 1650. Les origines de la langue françoise. Paris: Auguste Courbe. Merklen, D. 2005. Pobres Ciudadanos: Las clases populares en la era democrática (Argentina, 1983–2003). Buenos Aires: Ed. Gorla. Pesavento, S.J. 2006. “Cortiços, porões, caebres: Où habitent les pauvres? (sud du Brésil, fin du XIXe siècle).” In Depaule, 2006, 97–122.

66  Christian Topalov Park, R.E. 1926. “The Urban Community as a Spacial [sic] Pattern and a Moral Order.” In The Urban Community, edited by E.W. Burgess, 3–18. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Petit, F. 1993. Du cabanon au pavillon ou le développement des lotissements sur le plateau d’Athis-Mons, 1896/1950. N.p: Centre culturel d’Athis-Mons. Pirenne, H. 1939. Les villes et les institutions urbaines. 2 vols. Paris and Brussels: Alcan. Quillet, A. 1934. Dictionnaire encyclopédique. 6 vols. Paris: Librairie Aristide Quillet. Recherche des rues de Paris. n.d. http://www.v2asp.paris.fr/commun/ v2asp/v2/nomenclature_voies/. Reeder, D.A., and C. Topalov. 2010. “Slum.” In Topalov et al., 2010, 1116–24. Reeder, D.A., and S.B. Warner, Jr. 2010. “Suburb.” In Topalov et al., 2010, 1177–87. Rey, A. 1992–98. Dictionnaire historique de la langue française. 3 vols. Paris: Le Robert. Rivière d’Arc, H. 2010a. “Colonia.” In Topalov et al., 2010, 336–38. Rivière d’Arc, H. 2010b. “Invasão.” In Topalov et al., 2010, 617–21. Rivière d’Arc, H., and X. Ibarra Ibarra. 2001. “De Guadalajara à Recife et Salvador: Du vocabulaire de l’action à celui de la légitimité urbaine.” In Nommer les nouveaux territoires urbains, edited by H. Rivière d’Arc, 235–49. Paris: Editions UNESCO–Editions de la MSH. http://dx.doi.org/10.4000/ books.editionsmsh.1448. Rodríguez Chumillas, I. 2010. “Chabola.” In Topalov et al., 2010, 272–76. Rohde, M. 2010. “Park.” In Topalov et al., 2010, 848–52. Roy, Donald Francis. 1935. “Hooverville: A Study of a Community of Home­ less Men in Seattle.” Master’s thesis, University of Washington, 1935. Seattle Public Library R309.1797 R812H. http://web.archive.org/web/ 20060621041112/http://clerk.ci.seattle.wa.us/~public/doclibrary/roy.htm. Schuman, T. 2010. “Ghetto.” In Topalov et al., 2010, 529–34. Sieburg, F. 1938. “Le rôle économique de Casablanca vu par un écrivain allemand.” Bulletin économique du Maroc, 5 (21): 205–7. Skeat, W.W. 1882. An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language ... Oxford: Clarendon Press. Stow, K. 1992. “Sisto V, the Jews, and Their Ghet.” In Essential Papers on Jewish Culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy, edited by D.B. Ruderman, 386–400. New York: New York University Press. Thompson, E.P. 1968. The Making of the English Working Class. Rev. ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

The Naming Process  67 Tissot, S. 2007. L’état et les quartiers. Genèse d’une catégorie de l’action publique. Paris: Seuil. Topalov, C., ed. 2002. Les divisions de la ville. Paris: Editions UNESCO–Editions de la MSH (“Les Mots de la ville”). http://dx.doi.org/10.4000/books .editionsmsh.1233. Topalov, C., L. Coudroy de Lille, J.-C. Depaule, and B. Marin, eds. 2010. L’aventure des mots de la ville. Paris: R. Laffont. Upgrading Urban Communities: A Resource for Practitioners. 2001. Case Examples – Favela-Bairro Project. http://web.mit.edu/urbanupgrading/ upgrading/case-examples/ce-BL-fav.html Vaillat, L. 1934. Le périple marocain. Paris: Flammarion. Valladares, L. 2006. La favela, d’un siècle à l’autre. Paris: Editions de la MSH. Vergara, C.J. 1995. The New American Ghetto. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Villermé, L.-R. 1850. Sur les cités ouvrières. Paris: J.-B. Baillière. Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language. 1920. Springfield, MA.: G. and C. Merriam. Wigoder, G., ed. 1993. Dictionnaire encyclopédique du judaïsme. Paris: Cerf.

3  “Suburb Is Not a Rude Word in Australia”: A Lexical History Gra eme Dav ison

“Suburb is not a rude word in Australia,” the English actress and television personality Jeanne Heal noted in 1959. “People want to live in suburbs,” she added with mild incredulity (1959: 49). She was among the many international visitors who recognized the suburb as the standard expression of “the Australian way of life” (White, 1981: 164–66). To many Europeans, attuned to urban or metropolitan values, Australians’ enthusiasm for suburban living seemed perverse, a symptom of their cultural immaturity. So complete had been the triumph of the suburbs, complained another English observer, Jeanne Mackenzie, that there was “no escape from it. There is almost no urb” (1961: 127). By the 1950s, the suburb had become so ubiquitous that Australians used the word as a name for any part of the city, however dense or sparse, close or far, old or new. “In Australia, a suburb is a named and bounded locality of a city, with an urban nature, regardless of its location within that city,” notes Wikipedia. “This differs from British and North American usage, in which the term ‘suburb’ is usually not applied to urban areas that are close to a major city centre” (“Melbourne Suburbs,” 2012). If an Australian asks, “What suburb do you live in?” you may answer “Fitzroy” or “Paddington,” even though these relatively dense inner-city neighbourhoods would not be called “suburbs” anywhere elsewhere. This distinctive usage is partly a product of inertia. Places that were once on the edge (Fitzroy was originally called “Newtown” and Pad­ dington, its historian notes, was once “a paddock full of houses”) continued to call themselves suburbs even after they had been absorbed into the metropolis, just as Manhattan’s Greenwich calls itself a “village” and London’s Camden, a “town” (Kelly, 1978). Australian cities



“Suburb Is Not a Rude Word in Australia”  69

are also built at much lower densities than European and American ones, and so may actually appear to be “suburban” through and through (Davison, 1995a: 61). In most Australian capital cities (Brisbane is the exception), the suburb has also often been a municipality in its own right, with its own town hall, football team, and lively sense of its own importance, not simply a political appendage of the city. How Australians talk about their suburbs, however, is also a product of a distinctive lexical history, in which words imported from elsewhere took on new meanings or inflections (Arthur 2003). The recent digitalization of Australian archival newspapers enables historians to track changes in usage over time, detecting patterns invisible to previous researchers. Most of the capital city newspapers of record, from the 1820s to the 1970s, as well as many regional newspapers, are now searchable by word through the National Library of Australia’s website, Trove (Trove, 2014). In this chapter, I have made extensive use of this resource to trace the appearance, meanings, associations, popularity, and decay of such words as “suburb” and “sprawl,” and collocations such as “Cinderella suburb” and “urban growth boundary”. As historians become more alert to the potential of digital sources, lexical history will surely develop greater analytical precision: this chapter is a preliminary exercise in what is likely to become a standard research methodology. The First Suburban Nation Australia, the social commentator Donald Horne claimed, was “the first suburban nation” (1964: 20–24; cf. Davison, 1995a). It was settled by Europeans at the beginning of the nineteenth century, just when the modern suburb was being born in England, and from the moment of its arrival the word bore the marks of its English birth. Australia was itself a suburb of Britain, a cultural as well as political satellite of the imperial metropolis. From the first, its city dwellers patterned themselves on English cities, by adopting English, and especially London, fashions, customs, and nomenclature for everything from food and dress to architecture and town planning. The words they chose to describe the periphery of their emerging cities were also products of this essentially dependent relationship. In its original pre-industrial European meaning, the suburb (suburb) was an area beyond – or under – the city walls. The English word has similar etymology to the French faubourg and the German Vorst­ adt (Topalov et al., 2010: 464, 1178, 1320). The prefix “sub” implied a

70  Graeme Davison

difference in status as well as location: according to the older Oxford English Dictionary, it was “a place of inferior, debased and especially licentious habits of life” (Fishman 1987: 6). As late as the 1830s and 1840s, the outskirts of many British towns were given over to those noxious, dangerous, disorderly, or unsightly activities the inhabitants had banished from the town itself. The suburbs were a dumping ground for military barracks, jails, cemeteries, gallows, hospitals, lunatic asylums, slaughterhouses, and cattle yards (Fishman, 1987: 6–7, Jackson, 1985: 15–19). In the literal sense, Australian cities could not have “suburbs” because they had no walls. Almost everywhere else across the British Empire, when colonists established a beachhead on alien shores, they erected walls against attack by sea or land. New York’s Wall Street, which marks the location of the palisade erected by the colonial Dutch, is one reminder of the practice. The walled French colonial cities of Quebec and Montreal defended themselves from the British, while the British built fortifications near the newly founded Loyalist towns of York (Toronto) and Hamilton as bulwarks against the new American republic (Stelter, 1980: 148). Fortresses and walls were also features of colonial towns in both Africa and India. Even New Zealand, founded in the same era as Australia, had its military towns and stockades. Some of Auckland’s southern suburbs originated in the 1840s as villages occupied by ex-soldiers who were granted land in return for an undertaking to defend the settlement from attack by Maori (Hamer, 1995: 18, 35–36). By contrast, early colonial Sydney, according to historian Grace Karskens, was a “soft colony,” where British settlers and the indigenous people, the Aborigines, mingled and cohabited within an urban space with no walls and no firm boundaries (2009: 351–355). The first governor of the colony, Arthur Phillip, aimed to “conciliate the affections” of the indigenous people – who were not as numerous, sedentary, or warlike as the Maori or Native Americans – a policy that entailed an open frontier between town and hinterland. How far, we may wonder, did this experience of openness contribute to the consciousness of a city without limits? Only in the 1830s, as the competition for scarce resources intensified, as disease ravaged the aboriginal population, and as settlers complained about their importunate presence in the town, did the boundary between the town and its periphery begin to harden (Karskens, 2009: 431–37).



“Suburb Is Not a Rude Word in Australia”  71

The first Australian towns were distinctive in yet another way: their function as receptacles for the boatloads of convicts transported by the British government. For the first fifty years of their lives, Sydney and Hobart were urban jails – “open jails,” to be sure – in which most convicts lived as assigned servants in their own households or in the houses of free settlers. While only a minority of recalcitrant re-offenders were actually incarcerated in places like Sydney’s Hyde Park Barracks or Hobart’s Penitentiary, in the late 1820s two-thirds of Sydney’s adult males, and at least as many of Hobart’s, were either convicts or exconvicts (Davison, 2006: 749, Solomon, 1967: 57–65). Reforming British governors such as Ralph Darling in New South Wales and George Arthur in Van Diemen’s Land, both evangelicals, wanted to expunge the moral taint of convictism from the towns. Their first impulse was to reform them, by straightening their crooked streets, exposing their dark corners to the light, and policing them more vigorously. The second was to purge them, by removing, in the time-­honoured way, whatever was dirty, vicious, unsightly, noisome, or disorderly to the suburbs (Davison, 2006: 754–58). The word “suburb” first appears in contemporary sources as the name for a kind of lawless borderland frequented by vagabonds and high-spirited young men who drove or rode furiously across the landscape, firing muskets and terrifying the locals.1 Reformers urged that slaughteryards, tanneries, and “other works having a tendency to affect the atmosphere of [the] town” should be removed to the suburbs.2 Military barracks should also be transplanted “from the heart of Sydney to where they belong– in the suburbs” (editorial in Australian, 3 May 1826). In Hobart, Governor Arthur was determined to remove the principal convict institutions to the circumference of the town. James Backhouse Walker, who grew up in Hobart during the 1840s, recalled the spectacle of chain gangs shuffling from the penitentiary to the waterfront. “Nor did the visitor escape the convict atmosphere, when he went to the suburbs,” he added, itemizing the ring of prisons, orphanages, hulks, and probation stations that lined almost every road out of the settlement (Walker, 1968: 101–2). The Improved Suburb By the late 1820s, the traditional idea of the suburb as a dumping ground was challenged by the Romantic ideal of the suburb as a sanctuary from

72  Graeme Davison

the ills of the town. In 1828, Governor Darling made grants of land to several of the leading free settlers (the “Exclusives” as they were called) at Woolloomooloo, a picturesque hill overlooking the harbour, where, he anticipated, they would build their villas “to the ornament and improvement of the suburbs of Sydney” (Broadbent, 1987: 15). “Improve­ ment” is a word, dull to our ears, once capable, as the historian Asa Briggs reminds us, of “stimulating daring flights of imagination” (1959: 2–3, 46, 277–78). The outskirts of the towns were often called “Waste Land,” a term signifying uncultivated or unoccupied land in need of “improvement.” Arthur, for example, offered “liberal inducements for converting the unprofitable waste which adjoined this Town [Hobart] into cultivated fields and gardens” (Arthur 1828). By 1832, the Sydney Gazette noticed “the spirit of improvement” evident across the outskirts of Sydney Town. Woolloomooloo Hill, formerly “a picturesque though sterile tract of land,” had been improved into “a second Kensington.” “The most out-of-the-way, rugged, good-for-nothing strips have started up into valuable properties, and arrogantly claimed to be worth their hundreds of pounds; while those seated in great thoroughfares or on the banks of any part of the harbour have rivalled, in the prices they have commanded, the precious inches of Fleet-street or Cheapside” (Gazette [Sydney], 17 April 1832). The idea of “improvement” was a tacit threat to the open frontier of the “soft colony.” By characterizing the urban periphery as “waste land,” a kind of terra nullius or no man’s land, it erased from white consciousness the indigenous people who had actually lived there for tens of thousands of years. In the early 1820s, when the suburban land rush got under way, Sydney and Melbourne were still ringed by Aboriginal camps (Karskens, 2009: 424, Edmonds, 2010; Boyce, 2011: 181–93). As recent historians have shown, the sites most coveted by suburban settlers, on wooded hills, or overlooking rivers and beaches, were often precisely those most prized by Aborigines. The settlement of the first suburbs proceeded simultaneously, and sometimes in harness, with the dispossession of Aborigines. In 1830, when the surveyor-general of Van Diemen’s Land, George Frankland, was busily engaged in rounding up the sadly depleted remnant of Tasmanian Aborigines, his subordinates were surveying the boundary between Hobart Town and its suburbs.3 Colonial officials aimed, at least in theory, to curb the rampant speculation in urban land. Under regulations promulgated by the colonial secretary, Lord Goderich, in 1831 (the Ripon Regulations), Crown land on the edge of the colonial cities was divided into three categories:



“Suburb Is Not a Rude Word in Australia”  73

town allotments, suburban allotments, and country allotments (Bur­ roughs, 1967: 35–59). This scheme, or variations on it, was adopted in several Australian colonies as well as in parts of New Zealand and Canada. The word “suburban,” in this context, simply defined a class of land intermediate in size and location between “town” and “country” allotments (Lewis, 1999: 23–27; Seddon and Ravine, 1986: 97).4 Town allotments, usually of up to five acres, were located within the formal bounds of the town. “Suburbans,” as they became known, were allotments of between ten and twenty-five acres intended for market gardening and small-scale agriculture. In order to deter speculators, regulations required purchasers to clear the land and erect a residence of an appropriate value. The most rigorous attempt to deal with the problem of speculation on the urban periphery was in South Australia, where systematic colonizers inspired by the doctrines of Edward Gibbon Wakefield laid out the town of Adelaide with a wide belt of parkland separating the compact “town” from the surrounding “country” (Dutton, 1960: 213–22, Freestone, 2010: 90–93, Bunker, 1998). Inside this perimeter, surveyor Colonel William Light drew a rectangular plat of streets and squares. Beyond, a network of roads and “villages” connected what was conceived as a closely settled agricultural hinterland. By placing a buffer zone between the town and its rural surrounds, Light’s plan registered the sharp division in Wakefield’s mind between town and country, and attempted to arrest the speculation that occurred when rural land was too rapidly converted into town allotments. The plan made no explicit mention of suburbs; yet that is what it eventually produced. Some country allotments were subdivided and sold by private developers; others were purchased by syndicates and cooperatives of workingmen. Instead of expanding continuously from the centre towards the periphery, however, the suburbs expanded polycentrically as “villages” grew towards each other along arterial roads, much as had occurred in some early American towns, like Boston (Marshall, 1960–61: 65–67; Binford, 1985). By the 1840s, however, the word “suburb” had acquired a deeper, more sentimental meaning. The Romantic suburb, popularized by Brit­ ish landscape writers such as John Claudius Loudon, embodied the aesthetic, moral, sanitary, and social aspirations of the urban middle class (Fishman, 1987: 18–38, Davison, 2013b). “A suburban residence with a small portion of land attached, will contain all that is necessary to happiness,” Loudon promised in his The Suburban Gardener and Villa Companion in 1838 ( [1838] 1982: 8). His Encyclopedia of Cottage Architecture

74  Graeme Davison

was no sooner published in London than the Hobart Town Courier hailed it as “very applicable to the improvements going on around Hobart-town and other townships in the interior” (Courier [Hobart Town], 25 January 1833). Advertisements in colonial newspapers during the 1830s and 1840s deploy the keywords of Loudon’s lexicon, grounding the word “suburb” in a rich array of aesthetic (“pretty,” “picturesque,” “delightful,” “beautiful”), sanitary (“healthy,” “salubrious”), functional (“convenient”), and social (“eligible,” “desirable,” “fashionable,” “genteel”) associations. They also allude, more obliquely, to the speculative attractions of suburban land ownership, in words like “flourishing”, “rapidly rising” or – always the adjective of choice –“improving.” Naming Suburbs Well before the approach of the auctioneer, surveyors had inscribed the landscape with new names. “By the act of place-naming,” writes Paul Carter, “space is transformed into a place, that is a place with a history” (1988: xxiv). The names chosen by the colonists came with histories of their own, and by applying them to a landscape they first perceived as alien, they sought to domesticate it, and make it more familiar. A recent study of the “namescape” of Melbourne found that 78.4 per cent of the city’s 483 suburban place names were of English origin, and only 17.7 per cent of Aboriginal origin (Bolling, 2011: 6–7; cf. Davison 2013a). Many new suburbs, especially in the first decades, bore the names of colonial governors, explorers, politicians, or war heroes. Hence Sydney’s Balmain, Bankstown, Bass Hill, Castlereagh, Darling­ ton, Hobartville, Hunter’s Hill, Pitt Town, and Wentworthville; Mel­ bourne’s Fitzroy, Hotham, Collingwood, Brunswick, and Coburg; and Adelaide’s Hindmarsh, Gawler, Torrens, Sturt, and Darlington. Sometimes the colonists’ motive was nostalgic: celebrating their hometown or the name of a nearby aristocratic seat. More commonly the inspiration was topographical: so, for example, the shoreline of Sydney’s upper harbour is lined with places named after towns along the Thames: Greenwich, Woolwich, Chiswick, Putney, Henley, and Mortlake. London and the southeast counties, the region that supplied the largest contingent of immigrants to Australia in the later nineteenth century, also provided the largest proportion of Australian urban placenames (Jupp, 1988: 385, 392–96). Although many of the immigrants came from inner London, inner London placenames seldom appeared on the map of



“Suburb Is Not a Rude Word in Australia”  75

Australia’s cities: Hobart’s Wapping, Adelaide’s Hackney and Mile End, and Sydney’s Woolwich are rare exceptions. More commonly, they chose the names associated with fashionable West End neighbourhoods such as Kensington, Paddington, Brompton, and Westbourne Grove; of London suburbs (Richmond, Camberwell, Kew, Bexley, Lewisham, Epping, Croydon, Sydenham), or of villages and towns in the nearer countryside (Ascot, Guildford, Goodwood, Canterbury, Chatham, Eltham, Box Hill). In the imagination of many colonists, Australia was the farthest suburb of London, and dreams denied in the metropolis were realized in Kensingtons and Camberwells carved from the Australian bush. Naming suburbs occurred in waves as roads and ferries, and later rail and tramways, extended the bounds of settlement. “I confess to having been considerably puzzled latterly by the multiplicity of new suburban names which met my view in newspaper advertisements and wall posters,” an observer of Adelaide’s embryonic suburbs noted in 1879, just as the Glenelg railway reached the city’s southern fringes.5 He deplored the application of absurdly high-sounding names, like “Hyde Park,” to rows of vacant allotments on unmade tracks. Some Englishsounding names were simply chosen, or invented, for their romantic associations. Ivanhoe, Waverley, and Templestowe, for example, came from the pages of Walter Scott’s novels, while other new suburbs, such as Auburn, Arcadia, Hawthorn, Thornbury, Briar Hill, Surrey Hills, Broadmeadows, Forest Glen, and Lilyfield evoked ideal, but imaginary, English places. The common use of English suffixes – park, hill, dale, vale, glen, heights, grove, haven, wood, burn, field, garden – illustrates the same powerful anglicizing imperative. By making windswept paddocks into “fields” and “meadows,” dry creek beds into “burns” and “vales,” and stands of scattered eucalypts into “groves” and “woods,” the colonial imagination was rendering the raw urban frontier more conventionally picturesque. The rapid extension of railways and cable tramways in the 1880s stimulated a boom in suburban land development (Davison, 2004: 166– 211). The author lives in a Melbourne suburb, Mont Albert, named for the Prince Consort, which was subdivided in the 1880s but not intensively settled for another forty years. In the early 1890s, the boom burst, leaving in its wake a ragged frontier of insanitary, unmade streets. Disil­ lusioned contemporaries inverted the standard rhetoric of suburban promotion, writing of “unhealthy,” “insanitary,” “diphtheria-­breeding,” “neglected,” and “undesirable” suburbs. In the early twentieth century,

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when evangelists for the English Garden City movement arrived in Australia, they had only to venture to the cities’ outskirts to observe textbook examples of their bête noire, “sprawl.” The Qualities of Sprawl and the Ills of Suburbia Few words in the history of urban planning have been as potent as “sprawl.” The term – literally “an awkward or clumsy spreading of the limbs” – denoted the unsightly, unplanned linear development on the edge of a city or town. Sometimes the word seems to have been used spontaneously, as in 1860 when a Ballarat newspaper observed: “This sprawling city of ours is covering so vast a space, that if it ever fill[s] with a dense population up to its present outline, the aggregate would be something extraordinary for a gold colony.”6 But its adoption as a self-conscious planning slogan appears to date from 1883, when the socialist and aesthete William Morris addressed an audience in Oxford on “art under plutocracy.” Art, Morris insisted, was something that should shape the material lives of the many, including their homes and towns, as well as the palaces of the few. “Need I speak to you of the wretched suburbs that sprawl around our fairest and most ancient cities?” he asked, by way of example (1910, 171, my emphasis). Among Morris’s disciples (he may even have been present at the Oxford lecture) was a fellow socialist, the pioneer town planner Raymond Unwin. By 1909, when Unwin published his influential book Town Planning in Practice and the House of Commons debated the first British Town Planning Bill, the phenomenon –what Unwin called “that irregular fringe of halfdeveloped suburb and half-spoiled country which forms such a hideous and depressing girdle around modern growing towns” – was well-recognized, even if the word had not yet become standardized (Unwin, 1909: 154; Miller, 1992: 106–7). When W.H. Fitchett, a visitor from Melbourne, described the landscape of Adelaide in 1910, he felt obliged to explain the expression: “The city resembled a sprawling body with limbs in imperfect relation to each other,” he observed.7 The noun “sprawl,” along with a standard repertoire of adjectives (“depressing,” “haphazard,” “dreary,” “ugly,” “shapeless,” “straggling,” “prosaic,” “unlovely,” “mushrooming”), was gradually entering the vocabulary of Australian planners and architects. In 1915 Garden City evangelist Charles Reade urged Australians to achieve “something finer and more virile than the sprawling octopus of Sydney.”8 When the architect Kingsley Henderson observed in 1921 that “the suburbs had



“Suburb Is Not a Rude Word in Australia”  77

simply ‘sprawled’ outwards,” his use of quotation marks signalled the term’s arrival as a self-conscious usage.9 “Sprawl” was an anthropomorphic concept – it conjured up the image of a lazy, untidy, bad-mannered invader of other people’s space; a couch potato monopolizing the national living room. Making the place human invested it with human faults in need of discipline. The word gained currency at about the same time as the word “suburbia,” a word suggesting similar humanoid qualities. “Suburbia lifts itself on the hills or snuggles in the hollows, plants itself in close communion of fellowship, or suspiciously scatters itself over a wide expanse of sand,” a Perth writer noted in 1914.10 Observers of the Australian suburb echoed contemporary English critics, such as H.G. Wells and C.F.G. Masterman, for whom “suburbia,” the insular world of Mr Pooter and Mr Polly, had become a metonym for the cramped vision of its lower-middle-class inhabitants. “It is a life of Security; a life of Sedentary occupation; a life of Respectabil­ ity,” Masterman noted of the south London suburbs, a territory of “little red houses in little silent streets” (1909: 70). The word “little,” signifying spiritual as well as physical diminution, also betrayed the condescension of the critic. By the time the English critic got to Australia, he peered down from an even mightier height. “Each little bungalow was set in its own hand-breadth of ground, surrounded by a little wooden palisade fence,” Richard Somers, hero of D.H. Lawrence’s novel Kangaroo, observed of Sydney’s surrounds. “And there went the long street, like a child’s drawing, the little square bungalows dot-dot-dot, close together and apart, like modern democracy, each once fenced round with a square rail fence” (Lawrence, 1950: 15, 17, my emphasis). Long before Pete Seeger sang of “little boxes made of ticky-tacky,” the intellectuals, of both Left and Right, had written the suburb in a minor key. The “suburb” had been invented as an antidote to the “slum”: it was as open, healthy, respectable, and law abiding as the slum was dense, unhealthy, vicious, and dangerous. The Edwardian critics did not question the physical determinism that undergirt both concepts, but they applied a different scale of values. The trouble with suburbia, in their eyes, was that it was too open, too sanitized, too respectable, and too safe. A place constructed around the logic of avoidance had succeeded only in purging the city of everything that inspired and challenged the human spirit (Davison, 2013b). In 1928 the Australian historian Keith Hancock returned from Oxford to confront, as though for the first time, the Australian suburb. “Behind the garden fences, and within the little bungalows of a working class

78  Graeme Davison

suburb, there are cleanliness, fresh air, some of the comforts and all of the decencies of life,” he admitted. “But for the Socialist” (he was writing for the British socialist journal the New Statesman), “it will not be enough.” The Australian suburb, he decided, offered “comfort without taste.” It had democratized “the standards of a plutocracy.” Even its residents, he believed, were vaguely conscious of the “dullness and monotony of Antipodean suburbia.” Hancock thought he knew the remedy. The trouble with Australian cities, he decided, was “the abuse of space,” a habit they had inherited from their English counterparts. “It is time to declare a revolt against England . . . We shall find better teachers in Stockholm, or Hamburg or Vienna” (W.H.K. 1928, 1930). Australia’s cities would become more civilized as they became better planned, more compact – in short, more European (cf. Davison 2001). Cinderella Suburbs When it was first applied to urban development, the word “sprawl” signified a poorly coordinated and untidy process of peripheral development. To the suburbanites themselves, the fault lay not with the suburb but with authorities who had failed to provide inherently beautiful places with the services needed to realize their beauty. They were, in the contemporary phrase, “Cinderella suburbs,” an Australian expression, born of the long period of stalled growth between the depressions of the 1890s and 1930s (McLean, 2013: 125–43). It evoked images of inexpensive, owner-occupied cottages strung along muddy “heartbreak streets,” of backyard “dunnies” (earth closets), and “skeleton” transport services. Like the heroine of the folktale, however, even a neglected suburb might hope for “some Cinderella-like recognition.”11 Every small improvement inspired hope of better things. “Richmond, regarded as something like a Cinderella among the suburbs, claims the honour of being the first to open a public playground in the most densely populated part of the suburb,” its local newspaper proudly announced (Fitzroy City Press, 23 November 1906). Fears of “suburban sprawl” fluctuated in response to cycles of enthusiasm for urban planning. In 1948 Sir Patrick Abercrombie toured Australia, preaching the lessons of his 1944 London Plan. “Decentralisa­ tion,” “satellite cities,” “greenbelts,” and “model suburbs” quickly became part of Australian public discourse (Davison, 1995b). “Sprawl” came to be regarded primarily as an economic disease rather than an aesthetic one. “With its ever-increasing sprawl Melbourne has grown



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too big for its economy,” the Melbourne Argus warned in 1952. “To save our city and ourselves from bankruptcy we must call a halt to the sprawl before it can run us into bigger bills.”12 The attack on sprawl was coupled with reports of failing urban services, tallies of unmade roads, sewers, and tramways, and appeals for an urban growth boundary. “There are no definite boundaries where an observer can say: ‘Here the city ends and the country begins’,” Victoria’s Town and Country Plan­ ning Board noted.13 The “Green Belt” in Sydney’s 1948 Cumberland Plan and the “rural zone” in Melbourne’s 1954 Metropolitan Planning Scheme were the first legislated boundaries around Australian cities since Colonel Light drew his famous belt of parkland around Adelaide in 1837 (Howe, 2000). By the 1950s, “suburbia” had become a metonym for a new range of complaints. As well as architectural dullness and “oppressive conventions,” it produced “effeminacy,” “loneliness” and political apathy” (Gilbert, 1988). “Nine out of ten of the little women in suburbia are content to leave political decisions to the mastermind of the house,” a women’s columnist lamented.14 Women were also the chief victims of a mysterious disease imported from the United States, called “suburban neurosis” (Murphy, 1992: 200–4). Defenders of suburbia had to defy an undertow of intellectual condescension. Australia’s most popular women’s magazine, the Australian Women’s Weekly, deplored the “scorn” of students and other “sham sophisticates” towards suburbia.15 “Of course it’s largely suburbia, but why should one be afraid of that name?” asked historian Charles Bean, in defence of his home, Canberra. “Twentythree years as Australia’s war historian taught me how much that is magnificent can come from our decent suburbs with their little homes and gardens.”16 Even suburbia’s defenders, it seemed, could not shake off the diminutives, “little” and “decent,” that seemed to haunt its name. In 1970 a younger historian offered a more robust defence. “Instead of despising the suburbs we should work to improve them,” declared Hugh Stretton in his influential “political tract,” Ideas for Australian Cities (1970). The charge that the suburbs produced intellectual conformity struck him as absurd, especially considering how many of the critics actually lived in the suburbs themselves. “Conformist imitation is itself a strongish feature of suburban intellectuals’ familiar manifestos about suburban life,” he chided. With some American critics, Stretton questioned the crude environmentalism that tended to equate the suburbs with whatever the beholder found unwelcome in modern life. “These,” he insisted, “are part of the human condition,

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not just in the suburbs” (Stretton, 1970: 10–11; cf. Gans, 1967: xv–xvii, Donaldson, 1969). Ideas for Australian Cities became the textbook for Labor Prime Minis­ ter Gough Whitlam’s attack on the inequalities between Melbourne and Sydney’s picturesque hill and harbour-side suburbs and their less scenic neighbours, and it inspired efforts to redeem the dreary tracts of weatherboard or fibro-cement cottages on their flat western perimeters. “West,” the direction of the setting sun, had become an adjective suggesting declining prospects as well. “The Deprived West” was a battle cry of advocates seeking to redress access to Melbourne’s education, health, and other urban services (Lack, 1991: 377–79). “Westies” and “Parras” (for Parramatta), as the residents of Sydney’s far western suburbs were known, became stereotypes of the “unintelligent, unmotivated, and unrefined youth” the deprivation had produced (“Westies,” n.d.). Stretton wrote at a moment when the suburbs were still ascendant. Some intellectuals, Stretton among them, had moved back to the terrace (row) houses of the “inner suburbs,” but they were unlikely, he believed, to reverse the trend that had taken successive generations of young Australians to the suburban frontier (Stretton, 1970: 21). Forty years later, however, the map of urban inequality had been almost inverted and the balance of academic and popular opinion has shifted. Postwar Italian and Greek migrants and young university-educated professionals, the “trendies” as they were often called, became the propagators of a new self-consciously urban “lifestyle” focused on the cafés, bookshops, cinemas, and universities of the inner city (Davison 2009; Howe, Nichols, and Davison, 2014). By that time, the richest households and most rapidly appreciating real estate of Sydney and Melbourne were concentrated within ten kilometres of their central business districts, while the car-dependent outer suburbs, the traditional frontier of opportunity, were increasingly viewed by social scientists as zones of poverty and “social exclusion” (Baum, 2008). The suburbanites did not always see themselves that way. In 2003 Labor Opposition leader Mark Latham, a child of Sydney’s western suburbs, challenged the leftists’ vision of a city divided between affluent east and “deprived west.” The new suburbs were the homeland of the small businesspeople, contractors, and franchisees of a burgeoning service economy. There, Latham observed, “social mobility has become more tangible and accessible. The politics of envy has been replaced by the politics of aspiration” (2003: 110–11). Since the 1970s, political



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commentators had regarded the “mortgage belt” of outer suburbs as the place where Australian elections were won or lost. In the 1990s, the “battlers” or “aspirationals,” as their voters became known, had often transferred their loyalties to John Howard’s conservatives. Observers of the Australian suburbs sometimes echoed American fears of an exclusionary politics symbolized by white flight, gated communities, and fiscal selfishness. “US-style fear is a new additive in the tank fuelling the engine of Australia suburban growth,” Brendan Gleeson warned in 2003. In fact, Australia was largely innocent of the racial, fiscal, and political structures that inspired the American disease (Gleeson, 2003–4, 70). The most potent hazards to the survival of the suburbs were economic and environmental rather than political. With its super-sized, heavily mortgaged houses (“McMansions”) set on pocket-handkerchief allotments, its double and triple-garages, and backyard swimming pools, the urban periphery was portrayed as hostage to depleting supplies of energy, water, and cheap money. Social scientists at Queensland’s Griffith University created an index with the sinister-sounding acronym VAMPIRE (vulnerability assessment for mortgage, petroleum and inflation risks and expenditure) that showed the car-dependent outer suburbs as the places most exposed to the risk of a rise in mortgage costs and petrol prices (Dodson and Sipe, 2008). The sense of hazard was compounded by a ten-year drought that accentuated public concern about the likely effects of human-induced climate change on the “sustainability” of their low-density, thirsty suburbs, and by a wave of bushfires and floods that literally threatened to destroy them (Troy, 2008). By 2000, most Australian cities had embraced policies of “urban consolidation” designed to concentrate residential development within the old public transport city. Inspired by environmental dread, its supporters levelled fresh charges against their old adversary, “sprawl”: traffic jams and water shortages, poisonous air and childhood asthma, even obesity, neuroses, and depression (Gleeson 2008, 2655). Few words in the urban lexicon had proved so adaptable. “Whenever the word ‘sprawl’ is mentioned today, it triggers an entire litany of alleged woes ... They form a kind of mantra,” the American architectural critic Robert Bruegmann observes (2005: 137–38). In the course of a century, “sprawl” had changed from an aesthetic, to an economic, and then to an ecological disorder (Galster et al., 2001). Once it was applied to the city’s ragged edge; by the twenty-first century it tended to be applied to the form of the entire conurbation. The old antidote to sprawl was

82  Graeme Davison

planning; the new one was consolidation. Almost the only constant feature of it was the tone of disapproval. One of the few Australian intellectuals to brave the chorus of disapproval was Australian’s most distinguished poet, Les Murray. A selfdescribed “redneck” and scourge of the urban elites, Murray celebrates, in a poem of the same title, “the quality of sprawl” as a national virtue: “an image of my country. And would that it were more so.” “Sprawl leans on things. It is loose-limbed in its mind. Reprimanded and dismissed / it listens with a grin and one boot up on the rail / of possibility” (1999: 1–2). Murray cherished the ragged, improvised, unfinished, casual qualities that most offended planners. A cri de coeur, rather than a policy statement, his poem nevertheless gave voice to a persistent vein of popular sentiment – pragmatic, populist, sometimes anti-intellectual – that insisted on the right of the ordinary Australians to do their own thing, free of official interference. They defied the orthodox wisdom that Australian cities could preserve their boasted “liveability” only by becoming more compact. (In fact, many of the qualities that made them “liveable” according to international surveys actually derived from their relatively low densities). Most Australian capitals legislated “urban growth boundaries” designed, like chastity belts, to preserve their environmental virtue. Unlike “green belts” created to preserve the countryside, growth boundaries were designed primarily to promote density and stimulate urbanism. A vigorous minority questioned this planning logic. Was suburban morphology the real cause and cure of the cities’ environmental ills? Could cities that had travelled so far down the suburban path really turn back? (Troy 1996). For 150 years, Australians had looked to the suburbs as a frontier of opportunity. Now they were being asked to change their perspective. “We have to look inwards, not outwards,” an advocate of urban consolidation warned in 2006.17 The strongest supporters of consolidation were the university-educated, Green-voting professionals of the inner suburbs. If they looked towards the suburbs at all, it was to dismiss them as “ghettos” remote from their own “vibrant” city core. To challenge the intellectuals’ perspective, one had to question their own centrality. Defenders of the suburbs, like Brendan Gleeson (2006), insist that they, not the city, are the true “heartlands” of Australia, its emotional as well as demographic centre. His mission was to “reclaim” them from “the politics of despair.”



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In seeking to change the language of urban debate, Gleeson stood in a long tradition, for the Australian city was made of words as much as bricks and mortar. In naming urban places, the speakers were exercising power and contesting the power of others. At first sight, the lexicon of Australian urban discourse looks and sounds just like the British or American one. “Suburb,” “green belt,” “sprawl,” “urban-rural fringe,” “consolidation”: the words arrived in Australia, with hardly a pause after their appearance in the metropolis. From John Claudius Loudon to Raymond Unwin, and from Lewis Mumford to Richard Florida, the urban oracles had no sooner spoken than their words issued, as though from a ventriloquist’s dummy, from the mouth of some antipodean disciple. Yet although the words were the same, their meanings were often different, if only because the cities to which they were applied were different. And sometimes words of high currency elsewhere – “edge city” and “gated community,” for example – arrived, only to slip from usage when they failed to find Australian counterparts. Circumstances shape usage, and words change their meaning subtly, or even dramatically, in response to changing urban realities. Whoever writes the urban dictionary takes a long step towards shaping the future of the cities themselves. NOTES 1 See “To the Editor,” Sydney Gazette (Sydney), 19 January 1826; “Advance Australia,” Gazette (Sydney), 19 October 1830; “The Parramatta Festivals,” Australian (Sydney), 7 October 1829. 2 “Original Correspondence,” Herald (Sydney), 29 November 1832; “Nuisances,” Herald (Sydney), 3 August 1835. 3 “Supreme Court: Moore v. O’Connor,” Courier (Hobart Town), 22 March 1839. 4 “Government Notice,” Gazette (Perth), 11 January 1834; “Port Phillip Land Sales,” Colonist (Sydney), 13 February 1839. 5 “The Embryo Suburbs of Adelaide,” South Australian Register(Adelaide), 2 May 1879. 6 “News and Notes,” Star (Ballarat), 2 April 1860 (my emphasis) 7 “The City of Adelaide: How It Strikes a Visitor,” Advertiser (Adelaide), 4 June 1910. 8 “Town Planning Criticism of Australian Cities,” Morning Herald (Sydney), 18 December 1915.

84  Graeme Davison 9 “Home Planning,” Argus (Melbourne), 21 July 1921. 10 “In Suburbia,” Western Mail (Perth), 11 December 1914. 11 “South Perth: The Cinderella Suburb,” West Australian, (Perth), 6 January 1915. 12 “Melbourne Has Grown Too Big for Its Economy,” Argus (Melbourne), 2 October 1952. 13 “City Outskirts Spoiled,” Argus (Melbourne), 2 November 1950. 14 Beth Thwaites, “I’m Telling You!” Argus (Melbourne), 22 November 1952. 15 Kay Melaun, “Sham Sophisticates,” Australian Women’s Weekly, 4 November 1953. 16 “The Soul of Canberra,” Morning Herald (Sydney), 16 February 1954. 17 Jason Dowling, “The Outer Limits,” Age, 16 March 2010. REFERENCES Arthur, G. 1828. Despatch to Sir George Murray, 8 November. Tasmanian Archives, GO 33/4/766; Government Order no. 26, 30 April 1828, GO 33/4/771. Arthur, J. 2003. The Default Country: A Lexical Cartography of Twentieth Century Australia. Sydney: UNSW Press. Baum, S. 2008. Suburban Scars: Australian Cities and Socio-economic Deprivation. Urban Research Program, Research paper no. 15. Brisbane: Griffith University. Binford, H. 1985. The First Suburbs: Residential Communities on the Boston Periphery, 1815–1860. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Bolling, A. 2011. “A Namescape of Melbourne.” Placenames Australia 1 (December): 6–7. Boyce, J. 2011. 1835: The Founding of Melbourne and the Conquest of Australia. Melbourne: Black Inc. Briggs, A. 1959. The Age of Improvement. London: Longmans, Green and Co. Broadbent, J. 1987. “The Push East: Woolloomooloo Hill, the First Suburb.” In Sydney: City of Suburbs, edited by M. Kelly, 12–29. Kensington: UNSW Press. Bruegmann, R. 2005. Sprawl: A Compact History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226076973.001.0001. Bunker, R. 1998. “Process and Product in the Foundation and Laying out of Adelaide.” Planning Perspectives 13 (3): 243–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/ 026654398364437. Burroughs, P. 1967. Britain and Australia, 1831–1855: A Study in Imperial Relations and Crown Lands Administration. Oxford: Clarendon Press.



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Carter, P. 1988. The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History. New York: Knopf. Davison, G. 1995a. “Australia: The First Suburban Nation?” Journal of Urban History 22 (1): 40–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/009614429502200103. Davison, G. 1995b. “Past Visions of the Future City.” In Changing Cities: Reflections on Britain and Australia, edited by J. Walter, H. Hinsley, and P. Spearritt, 54–55. London: Menzies Centre for Australian Studies. Davison, G. 2001. “The European City in Australia.” Journal of Urban History 27 (6): 779–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/009614420102700606. Davison, G. 2004. The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne. Rev, ed. Carlton: Melbourne University Press. Davison, G. 2006. “From Urban Gaol to Bourgeois Suburb: The Transformation of Neighbourhood in Early Colonial Sydney.” Journal of Urban History 32 (5): 741–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0096144206287097. Davison, G. 2009. “Carlton and the Campus: The University and the Gentrification of Inner Melbourne, 1958–75.” Urban Policy and Research 27 (3): 253–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08111140903118365. Davison, G. 2013a. “City of Signs.” In Cluster: Exploring the Stories and Patterns behind Melbourne’s Street Names, edited by S. Banham, 1–19. Melbourne: Melbourne City Gallery. Davison, G. 2013b. “The Suburban Idea and Its Enemies.” Journal of Urban History 39 (5): 829–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0096144213479307. Dodson, J., and N. Sipe. 2008. Unsettling Suburbia: The New Landscape of Oil and Mortgage Vulnerability in Australian Cities. Urban Research Program, Research paper no. 12. Brisbane: Griffith University. Donaldson, S. 1969. The Suburban Myth. New York: Columbia University Press. Dutton, G. 1960. Founder of a City: The Story of Colonel Light. Adelaide: Rigby. Edmonds, P. 2010. “The Intimate, Urbanising Frontier: Native Camps and Settler Colonialism’s Violent Array of Spaces around Early Melbourne.” In Making Settlers Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place and Identity, edited by T. Banivanua Mar and P. Edmonds, 129–54. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/9780230277946_9. Fishman, R. 1987. Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia. New York: Basic Books. Freestone, R. 2010. Urban Nation: Australia’s Planning Heritage. Melbourne: CSIRO Publishing. Galster, G., R. Hanson, M.R. Ratcliffe, H. Wolman, S. Colman, and J. Freihage. J. 2001. “Wrestling Sprawl to the Ground: Defining and Measuring an

86  Graeme Davison Elusive Concept.” Housing Policy Debate 12 (4): 681–717. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1080/10511482.2001.9521426. Gans, H. 1967. The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community. London: Allen Lane. Gilbert, A. 1988. “The Roots of Australian Anti-Suburbanism.” In Australian Cultural History, edited by S.L. Goldberg and F.B. Smith, 33–49. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Gleeson, B. 2003–4. “What’s Driving Suburban Australia? Fear in the Tank, Hope on the Horizon.” Griffith Review 2: 43–57. Gleeson, B. 2006. Australian Heartlands: Making Space for Hope in the Suburbs. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Gleeson, B. 2008. “Waking from the Dream: An Australian Perspective on Urban Resilience.” Urban Studies (Edinburgh, Scotland) 45 (13): 2653–2668. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0042098008098198. Hamer, D. 1995. “The Making of Urban New Zealand.” Journal of Urban History 22 (1): 6–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/009614429502200102. Hancock, W.K. 1930. Australia. London: Ernest Benn. Heal, J. 1959. A Thousand and One Australians. London: Michael Joseph. Horne, D. 1964. The Lucky Country: Australia in the Sixties. Ringwood: Penguin. Howe, R. 2000. “A New Paradigm: Planning and Reconstruction in the 1940s.” In The Australian Metropolis: A Planning History, edited by S. Hamnett and R. Freestone, 80–97. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/ 9780203362518_chapter_5. Howe, R., D. Nichols, and G. Davison. 2014. Trendyville: The Battle for Australia’s Inner Cities. Clayton, Australia: Monash University Publishing. Jackson, K. 1985. The Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press. Jupp, J. 1988. “Migration from London and the South-East.” In The Australian People, edited by J. Jupp, 392–96. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Karskens, G. 2009. The Colony: A History of Early Sydney. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Kelly, M. 1978. Paddock Full of Houses: Paddington, 1840–1890. Sydney: Doak Press. Lack, J. 1991. A History of Footscray. Melbourne: Hargreen. Latham, M. 2003. From the Suburbs: Building a Nation from Our Neighbourhoods. Sydney: Pluto Press. Lawrence, D.H. [1923] 1950. Kangaroo. London: Penguin. Lewis, M. 1999. Suburban Backlash: The Battle for the World’s Most Liveable City. Melbourne: Bloomings.



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Loudon, J. [1838] 1982. The Suburban Gardener and Villa Companion. Reprinted, New York: Arno. Mackenzie, J. 1961. Australian Paradox. Melbourne: F.W. Cheshire. Marshall, A. 1960–61. “The Growth of Subdivision in the Adelaide Urban Area.” Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia (SA) 62: 65–68. Masterman, C.F.G. 1909. The Condition of England. London: Methuen. McLean, I. 2013. Why Australia Prospered: The Shifting Sources of Economic Growth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. “Melbourne Suburbs.” 2012. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ List_of_Melbourne_suburbs, accessed 27 June 2012. Miller, M. 1992. Raymond Unwin: Garden Cities and Town Planning. Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press. Morris, W. 1910. “Art under Plutocracy.” Reprinted in Collected Works, vol. 23. London: Longmans Green and Co. Murphy, J. 1992. Imagining the Fifties: Private, Sentimental and Political Culture in Menzies’ Australia. Kensington: UNSW Press. Murray, L. 1999. The Quality of Sprawl: Thoughts about Australia. Sydney: Duffy and Snelgrove. Seddon, G., and D. Ravine. 1986. A City and Its Setting: Images of Perth, Western Australia, Freemantle, Australia: Fremantle Arts Centre Press. Solomon, R.J. 1967. Urbanisation: The Evolution of an Australian Capital. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Stelter, G. 1980. “Urban Planning and Development in Upper Canada.” In Urbanization in the Americas; The Background in Comparative Perspective, edited by W. Woodrow Borah, J. Hardoy, and G. Stelter, 143–55. Ottawa: National Museum of Man. http://dx.doi.org/10.7202/1020703ar. Stretton, H. 1970. Ideas for Australian Cities. Adelaide: Self-published. Topalov, C., L. Coudroy de Lille, J.-C. Depaule, and B. Marin, eds. 2010. L’aventure des mots de la ville. Paris: R. Laffont Trove. National Library of Australia. 2014. http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper Troy, P. 1996. The Perils of Urban Consolidation: A Discussion of Australian Housing and Urban Development Policies. Sydney: Federation Press. Troy, P., ed. 2008. Troubled Waters: Confronting the Water Crisis in Australia’s Cities. Canberra: ANU Press. Unwin, R. 1909. Town Planning in Practice: An Introduction to the Art of Designing Cities and Suburbs. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Walker, J.B. 1968. “Reminiscences of James Backhouse Walker” [c. 1899]. In All That We Inherit: being family memorials of the Walkers and Mathers of Hobart … Hobart, Tasmania: J. Walch and Sons.

88  Graeme Davison Westie (Person). n.d. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westie_ (person) White, R. 1981. Inventing Australia: Images and Identity, 1788–1980. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. W.K.H. [Hancock, W.K.] 1928. ‘The Australian City.” New Statesman, 21 January. Reprinted in Courier (Brisbane), 7 April 1928.

4  Doubts about “Suburbs” in Canada A m y Sh an k s, Vict oria Coat e s , a nd R ic h ar d H arris

Academics and planners are no longer happy with the word “suburb.” Lately, a growing number have expressed doubts as to whether this term really captures what is happening in metropolitan areas. It used to mean a dormitory residential area at or near the fringe of a single-­ centred city. But metros are now multicentred and apparently formless, with homes, stores, offices, factories, highways, and other urban paraphernalia scattered almost at random. The classic suburb hardly exists any more. In response, urban experts have generated a series of neologisms to grapple with these facts – what Lefebvre (1991: 38–39) calls “representations of space.” “Exurbia” was one of the first, followed by “metropolis,” “technoburb,” “Edge City,” and so on (Spectorski, 1955; Gottman, 1961; Fishman, 1987; Garreau, 1992). But none of these has stuck, and so experts still talk freely, if uneasily, about suburbs. But what about the non-experts, the people who live in those metropolitan areas but who do not comment on, write about, or plan them? In Lefebvre’s terms, what are their “representational spaces”? This question is important. Over the past half century or more, when academics have written about suburbs it has usually been to condemn them, whether for their cultural aridity or their environmental and health impacts (Nicolaides, 2006). Journalists have happily picked up, simplified, and amplified these criticisms in the mass media (Harris, 2015). Planners have followed suit, buying into the rhetoric of New Urbanism, walkability, and intensification. A good indicator of this influence has been the large numbers of items on these topics posted in recent years on the well-used Planetizen website. The hope and expectation of such writers has been that urban residents would pay heed and change their ways. They have acknowledged the challenges of

90  Amy Shanks, Victoria Coates, and Richard Harris

persuasion, underlined by NIMBY resistance to redevelopment. But are suburbanites even receiving this critical message? To do so, they would have to have a fairly clear idea of what a suburb is and agree that they themselves live in one: only then can the message hit home. Do they? Very few researchers have addressed this question and their conclusions are contradictory. This case study of Hamilton, Ontario, does not resolve the matter, but it does underline the importance of considering it. A mid-sized Canadian city of half a million, which received its city charter in the mid-nineteenth century, Hamilton is a plausible urban laboratory. Seventy kilometres west of Toronto, it is still primarily single-centred. Physically, it exhibits clear contrasts between century-old neighbourhoods and postwar subdivisions; socially, these are broadly associated with poverty and affluence, respectively. Here, if anywhere, we would expect that residents would express few doubts about what the suburbs are and where they begin. In-depth interviews with local residents and real estate agents show that the story is not that simple, however, with associated implications for people’s appreciation of the criticisms that have been levelled at suburban living. How North Americans Think about “the Suburbs” In recent decades, an enormous amount has been written about the suburbs. Trends, patterns, causes, and cultural representations have been described, interpreted, weighed, and judged, ad infinitum (e.g., Nico­ laides and Wiese, 2006). Expert opinion, which, a century ago, was generally favourable to the suburbs, has moved strongly against them since the 1950s (Nicolaides, 2006). It was in that decade, for example, that the director of planning for the regional Planning Board of Hamilton declared that “hell is a suburb” (Pearson, 1957). Supposedly, popular opinion has followed the same trajectory, implying that suburbanites are now ashamed of their status: at best, they experience a “love that dare not speak its name” (Goldsworthy, 2004). In truth, this claim is more supposition than fact. Remarkably few researchers have asked residents what they found attractive and unattractive about the suburbs, and why they moved there. And, typically, they have simply assumed that “suburb” is a meaningful, if not self-evident, term. To our knowledge there are only two exceptions – two researchers who have explored what the term means to the man or woman on the cul-de-sac. Awkwardly, their conclusions are contradictory.

Doubts about “Suburbs” in Canada  91

In the late 1980s, Roberta Feldman surveyed 1,648 men and women who worked in downtown Denver, Colorado. She found that the great majority recognized clear differences between “city” and “suburban” neighbourhoods. Moreover, most did not hesitate to identify themselves as a “city person” or as a suburbanite (33 per cent each). Others saw themselves as “small-town” or “country/mountain” people (9 per cent each); only 16 per cent said that they could not place themselves in such terms (Feldman, 1990: 201; Feldman, 1994). These distinctions, and notably those between city, suburb, and small town, are ones that researchers commonly make, and their salience to Americans has been confirmed by the work of Sidney Brower (2011: 128). But, at the same time, David Hummon reached very different conclusions after speaking at length with seventy-seven residents of two suburbs of San Francisco. One, Bayside, he describes as working class; the other, Hillcrest, as upper middle class. To be sure, he found that, especially in Hillcrest, quite a number of residents were clear about the specifically suburban character of their neighbourhood, but for a significant minority “suburb” was “not part of their vocabulary of place.” Indeed, he notes that, for several residents, “suburbia has virtually no meaning at all” (Hummon, 1990: 110). Intriguingly, Hummon also reported a telling result from a larger-scale study of Northern California communities, directed by the prominent Berkeley sociologist Claude Fischer. This study found that “only one in three of … suburban residents even designated as a suburb the community in which they lived” (110; emphasis in the original). Hummon concluded, rather awkwardly, that the “suburban ideology is not so pervasive in suburbs as to define the meaning of suburbia for many suburban residents” (115). It is difficult to reconcile these two sets of findings. Perhaps those who worked in downtown Denver were untypical: most would either have been unusual in having chosen to live in the city or in being suburban commuters. Either way, their experience encouraged them to make explicit comparisons between types of places. In contrast, even in the 1980s many suburbanites lived and worked in the suburbs and could simply take their environment for granted. Because this suburban experience has become steadily more common, perhaps Hummon’s findings have become increasingly relevant. But this is speculative, and it may be that other influences account for the difference between the findings of these studies. After all, ways of speaking vary from place to place, and it is a commonplace that what people tell researchers depends on various circumstances, and in particular what, and how, they

92  Amy Shanks, Victoria Coates, and Richard Harris

are asked. At any rate, there is enough evidence to suggest that researchers, journalists, and planners should stop taking it for granted that everyone knows what a suburb is, and knows whether or not they live in one. In addressing these issues, it is doubtful that textual evidence alone is adequate. One resident told Hummon “I don’t really know the definition of a suburb” (1990: 110), and we might reasonably ask whether this is surprising. Academics and planners need precise definitions, but residents do not. Most have no reason to think about the issue. At most, they may know a suburb when they see or live in it. One way of uncovering understandings that are unarticulated or even unconscious is to ask them to draw maps. For several decades, researchers have used “mental maps” in order to uncover people’s images of the city. An early and widely cited study compiled and contrasted the mental images of Los Angeles that were held by residents in several city and suburban neighbourhoods (Los Angeles Department of City Planning, 1971). But no studies, including those of Feldman and Hummon, have used this technique to explore people’s understanding of what counts as a “suburb.” The Status of Suburbs in Hamilton It was with these considerations in mind that in 2012 we undertook a study of Hamilton, Ontario. The immediate reason for choosing this city was convenience: at the time, all of us were based at McMaster University, located in the city’s west end.1 More significantly, within the Canadian context, Hamilton is a place where “suburb” should still have resonance. Suburbs do not mean the same in Canada as in the United States (Harris, 2004: 18–22). The term has great weight south of the border, where local municipalities have constitutional rights, where annexations have been rare for over a century, and where political boundaries often underline social and physical differences. In contrast, Canadian municipalities can be made, unmade, or combined by provincial governments, over staunch local opposition – indeed, this has happened. In Canada, then, “suburb” does not carry exactly the same freight of meaning. On that basis, we might expect people in any Canadian metro to conform more to the pattern observed by Hummon – uncertain about what a suburb is – than that described by Feldman.

Doubts about “Suburbs” in Canada  93

But that is least likely to be true of Hamilton. By Canadian standards, this is a place where city-suburban contrasts are very prominent. Still sometimes referred to as “Steel City,” since the 1970s Hamilton has been affected by deindustrialization as much as any major Canadian centre (Dear, Drake, and Reeds, 1987). One consequence has been the decline of most of the older neighbourhoods and a growing contrast between inner-city poverty and suburban affluence (Filion, 1987; Mayo, 2011; Stanger-Ross and Stanger-Ross, 2012; Walks, 2013) (figure 4.1).2 This patterning is well-recognized locally, and has been documented in “Code Red,” a series of investigative articles published over a period of several years in the local daily newspaper, the Hamilton Spectator (DeLuca, Buist, and Johnston, 2012).3 Hamilton’s social geography, then, is more akin to that of neighbouring Rustbelt cities in the United States, such as Buffalo and Cleveland, than to nearby Toronto or other mid-sized Canadian cities such as Ottawa or Calgary: it is only now being touched by gentrification. The city’s social geography is reinforced by its topography. Bordered to the north by Lake Ontario, the metro area is split by the 300-foot Niagara Escarpment, known locally as “the Mountain” (see figure 4.1). Generally running east-west, this is a significant barrier to communication, crossed by only a handful of major access roads, which helps to shape people’s patterns of activity and mental images of the city (Watson, 1979). The city’s downtown, together with neighbourhoods that were mostly developed before the Second World War, lie to the north, “below the Mountain.” Postwar suburbs lie “on the Mountain,” to the south into rural Glanbrook, as well as to the east into Stoney Creek and to the west, into Dundas, Flamborough, and Ancaster. A recent analysis that identified suburbs across Canada solely in terms of modes of transportation drew a sharp and consistent line in Hamilton between areas above and below the Mountain.4 To be sure, there are differences among the suburbs, the upwind west side (and especially Ancaster) being more affluent. And in recent years some of the early postwar areas on the Mountain have experienced decline (Pavlic, 2014). For the most part, however, in both physical and social terms it is easy to distinguish between older and newer neighbourhoods. The situation is complicated by the political status of Hamilton’s urban fringe territory. Unusually for a North American city, the boundaries of the City have kept pace with urban growth. A succession of annexations occurred during the twentieth century, leading to the amalgamation of

Figure 4.1. The geography of income in Hamilton, 2010. Source: Canada Revenue Agency Taxfiler data. Map courtesy of Richard Maaranen, Neighbourhood Change Research Partnership.

Doubts about “Suburbs” in Canada  95

the City of Hamilton with five suburban jurisdictions, effective 1 Janu­ ary 2001 (Weaver, 1982: 102, 144, 174; Spicer, 2012). The current City of Hamilton effectively embraces the entire built-up area as well as some still-rural territory, notably to the west in Flamborough and the south in Glanbrook. The amalgamation was opposed by the suburban municipalities and remains controversial, with ward politicians from the onceseparate suburbs still often voting as a bloc (Spicer, 2012). Although the whole of Hamilton is now a political unit, many urban fringe residents and their representatives resent the fact and remember a time when they were distinct. For this reason, too, we might expect residents to have little difficulty in distinguishing between city and suburb. The Hamilton Study To find out whether urban fringe residents thought of themselves as suburban, and how they defined suburbs in general, we carried out semi-structured interviews in neighbourhoods that by conventional Canadian standards are unambiguously suburban. All of these neighbourhoods were developed primarily in the 1980s, boast loop-and-­ lollypop layouts, and are primarily residential. As they are low in density, residents are car-dependent, as a recent study has shown (Gordon and Janzen, 2013). In only one respect are these areas slightly unusual. Modern Canadian suburbs contain a mix of dwelling types that commonly include townhouses, low-rise, and occasional high-rise apartments, as well as single-family dwellings. Only the latter conform perfectly to the suburban stereotype. To explore whether the occupants of different types of dwellings have different understandings of the suburbs, we selected three areas where townhouses and single-family dwellings were tightly juxtaposed. In each of these areas, an almost exactly equal number of interviews were carried out with residents of detached and attached dwellings. The relative location of these neighbourhoods is important. Because memories of the recent amalgamation are still strong, we considered it important to include at least one neighbourhood from either side of the old City boundary. Similarly, because the westside suburbs are generally more affluent than the eastside ones, it seemed important to consider both. In the end, we chose a city neighbourhood on the Mountain (Barnstown), an eastern subdivision in what had been Stoney Creek (Albion), and another in the westside, which, while nameless, we refer to by the name of the place in which it is located, “Dundas.” Barnstown

96  Amy Shanks, Victoria Coates, and Richard Harris

was a fairly long walk (ten blocks) from Limeridge, a major mall; Albion was located slightly further from a shopping plaza; “Dundas” lay at least as far from a traditional shopping street. Apart from containing a similar mix of dwelling types, all three were solidly middle class. They lay in census tracts where, in 2006, median household incomes were $72,000–84,000, comparable to the city-wide median of $55,312. We recruited participants by going door to door between May and July 2012. In total, 874 households were contacted, 354 in single-­ detached homes and 520 in townhomes. This yielded 30 and 31 interviews, respectively, for a total of 61 – a response rate of 7 per cent. Most lived in Barnstown or Albion. Demographically, the participants were not exactly representative of the adult population of the city, but they did include a broad cross-section. Eleven (18 per cent) were immigrants, compared with 25 per cent citywide; 40 (66 per cent) were female, compared with 52 per cent across the city. Half of the total, 30, were retired, worked from home, or were either unemployed or not in the labour force. This may have reflected the time of day when most respondents were recruited, in the late-weekday afternoons. However, many of those not in the labour force were contacted on weekday evenings, or on weekends. Noting the generally low response rate, it may be that this group felt that they had more time available, and were more willing to respond. For analysis, each participant was assigned an identification number, using the first letter of each neighbourhood, an “S”’ or “T” for the two types of dwellings, and a number. Thus, the third interviewee from a townhouse in Dundas was coded DT3. These ID numbers are used below. The interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed manually, as were rough notes taken during the interviews. The data were then coded using a process of latent content analysis, which seeks for underlying meaning, and responses categorized. Similar attributes, for example references to parks, greenery, or open space, were grouped. Complex responses were possible, and common. For example, defining a suburb, participant BS8 responded: “houses with lots of shopping centres where people don’t work ... They go somewhere else to work.” This answer was placed in two categories: “purely residential” and “presence of shopping centres.” The number of responses in each category was tallied and ranked. We asked people a variety of questions, about suburbs in general as well as about those in Hamilton (see Shanks (2013) for details). Here we report how they responded to four questions: how they would define a

Doubts about “Suburbs” in Canada  97

suburb; how they would label the type of place in which they themselves lived; whether they had heard of any negative comments being directed at suburbs; and, if so, what those criticisms were. In addition, we asked them to mark a map of Hamilton so as to show which areas they considered to be suburban. Following this procedure, we were able to obtain a verbal record of the ways in which a wide cross-section of Hamiltonians think about “suburbs” in general, together with both a verbal and a visual impression of what they understand to be the suburbs of Hamilton itself. In their general outline, the results were at first glance predictable; as ever, the devil is in the details. How Hamiltonians Define “Suburbs” When asked to describe how they would define a suburb, interviewees offered a variety of criteria. Even when researchers do not actually define suburbs socially, as middle-class places with a high proportion of homeowners, they see these characteristics as an enduring part of the stereotype. Not so in Hamilton. Of the sixty-one people interviewed only three – barely 5 per cent – claimed that suburbs are affluent. This is noteworthy, given that in Hamilton there is a marked and wellknown concentration of poverty in and around the downtown. Instead, in all three of the neighbourhoods we surveyed, the criteria that people cited were overwhelmingly physical (table 4.1). The physical aspects are conventional, and the most frequently mentioned require little commentary. The most common (22 mentions, n = 61) is distance from the urban core. Interviewees used phrases such as “far away from the city” (AS5), “a little while away from (the city)” (BS12), and “a certain distance away from downtown” (DS3). Following closely behind (17 mentions), is a purely residential character: “just houses” (BS3), and therefore “bedroom communities” (DT5), where “people don’t work ... They go somewhere else to work” (BS8). The significant fact is not that these two criteria were mentioned most frequently, but that each was overlooked by a large majority of residents. Less commonly mentioned were five related beliefs: that suburbs are low in density, with green space and a peaceful atmosphere, but with limited access to amenities, which led to car dependency. We classified these separately, but in many ways they form a package. A young man in Dundas observed that suburban homes have “larger properties than in the city” and more “wasted space” (DS5). In Albion, a middle-aged

Table 4.1. How residents of Hamilton define the suburbs Total (n = 61)

     What is a suburb? Albion

Barnstown

Dundas

Townhome (n = 11)

Single- Total family (n = 24) (n = 13)

Townhome (n = 13)

Single- Total family (n = 25) (n = 12)

Townhome (n = 7)

Singlefamily (n = 5)

Total (n = 12)

Away from the urban core

3

5

8

3

6

9

1

4

5

Not densely populated

0

2

2

2

2

4

1

3

4

10

Bedroom community/purely residential

3

3

6

3

3

6

5

0

5

17

Family-oriented

1

4

5

3

1

4

2

0

2

11

Lots of open space/ green space

1

2

3

2

1

3

0

0

0

6

Calm/peaceful/quiet

2

1

3

2

2

4

0

0

0

7

Presence of shopping centres

1

1

2

0

1

1

0

0

0

3

Little automobile traffic

0

1

1

1

1

2

0

0

0

3

Limited accessibility to amenities

1

0

1

1

1

2

3

0

3

6

Car-oriented

2

1

3

3

0

3

0

0

0

6

Affluent

1

0

1

1

1

2

0

0

0

3

Physically homogeneous

0

1

1

2

0

2

0

0

0

3

Other

3

4

7

2

3

5

2

2

4

16

22

Doubts about “Suburbs” in Canada  99

woman agreed, tying this attribute to dwelling type: “detached single homes, rather than apartment buildings” (AS13). A number of those in townhouses had a slightly more catholic view. One commented that “the suburbs mainly have single family dwellings for the most part, but I guess there’d be townhouses in there, too” (DT4). Another went further, suggesting that suburbs include “single family homes, maybe like this [his own dwelling], semi, maybe some condos, less apartment buildings” (AT10). Not surprisingly, then, the residents of detached homes had the most stereotyped image of dwelling type. A connected issue was open space. In Barnstown, a middle-aged man suggested that a suburb is a place “where you would have more ... open space” (BS10), and five others emphasized the same things. It followed that suburbs would be calm and peaceful, “not ... crowded” (AS2), “away from [the] hustle and bustle of the city” (BT8), or, again, where there are not as many “people bustling around” (BS3). Hamilton’s core does not quite compare with Manhattan, or even with downtown Toronto, but some local residents perceive that, nevertheless, the suburbs are markedly different. If, when mentioned, peacefulness and green space were generally viewed positively, two corollaries were viewed more critically. Five interviewees agreed in essence with the comment of an elderly woman in Barnstown, that suburbs “are further away from” amenities (BS2). The same number noted how dependent everyone is on cars. A young man stated the obvious: “most people own a car ’cause it’s the only way to get around” (AS5). With lower incomes, townhouse residents were especially likely to identify access as an issue. Some complained about the lack of transit, one young woman in Barnstown noting that “the buses suck” (BT2). In Albion a woman suggested that it is a “ten minute drive to any type of super centre or grocery shopping” (AT2), while a young man in Barnstown suggested that his neighbourhood was a suburb because “there’s no milk in walking distance” (BT12). Townhouse residents were especially likely to raise these concerns, given that only two owned cars. They were presumably more sensitive to the cost of owning their own vehicle and the disadvantage of dependence on cars. It is this latter cluster of physical criteria that connect with the leading social aspect that interviewees mentioned, namely its suitability for families (11 mentions). One woman simply asserted that suburbs are “where families live” (AS13); this was echoed by another, who described them as “where people raise their children” (BT8). In a couple of instances, people explicitly connected families with particular amenities.

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One woman drew attention to the fact that in the suburbs “there are schools everywhere” (AS12), while another suggested that they have “more playgrounds” (AS6). At least in our sample, then, there was a predictable gender bias in terms of the extent to which their childfriendliness was seen as a defining characteristic of suburbs. Except for their lack of emphasis on income, viewed in the aggregate our interviewees may seem to have offered a predictable, consistent, and conventional mix of responses. In that respect, they are more akin to the people interviewed by Feldman than those contacted by Hummon. The way that they largely overlook the issue of personal safety is typically Canadian, as opposed to American (Ouimet, 1999). But as we look closer, the picture becomes messier. Most researchers would say that suburbs are distinctive in several ways, but our Hamiltonians typically singled out just one or two criteria: the average was 1.8. Even if a couple of the closely related criteria were aggregated, none of these aspects were mentioned by a majority of interviewees. A few offered only vague suggestions: “nice” (AS2) and “private feel” (AS4) are positive, but imprecise, while “[there] isn’t any sidewalks” (BT2) is precise enough, but limited in scope. Some offered curious or ambiguous suggestions: “homes built out of nothing” (AS4). Quite a number made observations that could fit the notion of the suburb as a hybrid of city and country: “everything that’s not rural or urban” (BS7), or “smaller community” (DS2). Among these, however, the emphasis seemed to be on the rural element in the mix: “a bit more rural” (AS7), “more country” (BT11), “a more rural area” (AT4), and “farm-ish property” (DS4). The last few responses are reinforced and illuminated by their answers to related questions that we asked in the larger survey. When asked what lifestyle characterizes suburbia, a woman (AS2) insisted that some suburbanites “are like literally the farmers” (AS2). Similarly, another woman described “traditional farmer type people” who “have their crops and things” as living in the suburbs (AT2). A young man, asked about housing styles in the suburbs, described his grandmother’s seventy-eight-year-old farmhouse (BS12). A minority of Hamiltonians, then, see the suburbs as being decidedly more rural than urban. One woman (BT5) flatly declared that she did not know how to define a suburb, and left it at that. Her reluctance is telling. The evidence presented in table 4.1 suggests greater certainty than most people felt. Several struggled to articulate a definition. Many second guessed themselves. An older man suggested somewhat doubtfully that a suburb is “a small community, right?” (AS11). One woman’s answer shows a

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level of indecision that was unusual but symptomatic: “[A suburb] is everything that’s not rural and I don’t know, urban, I just don’t know whether I have … urban I’m thinking as being the centre, as being downtown Hamilton, I don’t know whether that’s right” (BS7). When pressed, most people can come up with one or two things that they believe to characterize suburbs but, lacking conviction, many would respond uncertainly and unpredictably when faced with references to the subject. We had expected that residents would fail to offer a multidimensional definition of suburbs. What is more surprising, and arguably more significant, is that their understandings were often radically simplified, in some cases at variance with what urban experts assume, and commonly lacked conviction. Their uncertainty is underlined by the ways in which they characterized their own neighbourhoods of residence, both verbally and visually, on a map. How Hamiltonians See Hamilton’s Suburbs In some ways, any attempt to determine how people define suburbs is an academic exercise: in their everyday lives, the great majority of people never need to offer, or to possess, such a definition. For practical purposes, perhaps all that matters is that “they know one when they see one.” To probe this possibility, instead of just asking people to go through the rather abstract exercise of defining “the suburbs” in general, we also challenged them to sketch on a base map of Hamilton the areas that they considered to be suburban. It must be said that many people found it just as difficult to make this sort of sketch as they did to provide a definition. In a pre-test, we experimented with a minimalist map that included very few features, but this sketch proved too disorienting to respondents to yield useful information. In the end, we showed them a map that included major physical features and roads, as well as the names of the pre-amalgamation suburbs. Regrettably, in effect, this encouraged them to identify particular places as “suburban,” nudging them to define the suburbs in a particular way. Even so, many participants had a hard time completing their sketch. They expressed confusion about the location of certain parts of the urban area. In conversation, we resisted the temptation to provide more than very basic, supplementary information, and as a result many maps contain inaccuracies about where specific places are located. But that was the point: as much as possible, what we wanted

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were people’s mental maps, however incomplete or inaccurate those might be. To summarize and display this evidence, each map was geo-­ referenced and digitized using GIS software. Where participants had shaded or outlined specific areas, boundaries were traced, but several participants simply circled the names of pre-amalgamation suburbs on the map. In such instances, we assumed that they meant to refer to the whole suburb. Information for the maps was then aggregated. To do this, following a common and intuitively meaningful procedure, we tallied the number of times that each area was identified as a suburb, and then mapped the grouped tallies using choropleth shading. The results varied remarkably little by neighbourhood, and not very much by dwelling type (figures 4.2, 4.3). Accordingly, we will emphasize the broad aggregate pattern. One person, the woman mentioned earlier who betrayed confusion about rural and urban elements, marked most of the downtown core as suburban (BS7). But otherwise, the pattern was both plausible and predictable. There was a broad ring-shaped pattern, implying that residents understood distance from downtown to be a key criterion. The parts of the city that were most frequently identified as suburbs were the former municipalities. All or part of Dundas, Ancaster, and Stoney Creek were most commonly singled out; Flamborough and Glanbrook less so. Both of the latter include extensive areas that are still rural, a fact that many people commented on as they completed their maps. One young woman, for example, observed that these areas were “mostly farms” (AS5). However, many also knew of recent development in these areas – an older man commented that “everything is creeping out [there]” (BS5) – and such development was the reason why quite a number of people labelled parts of these communities as suburbs. However, the other reason is that a few viewed rurality as a suburban quality. With reference to the pre-amalgamation suburbs that are extensively developed, respondents perceived degrees of what might be called suburban-ness. In particular, there was broad agreement that, at least in the Hamilton area, Ancaster should be considered as the quintessential suburb. In completing their sketches, many commented on this suburb’s perceived wealth. One woman equated its “big giant mansions” with suburbia (BS1). Others talked about the type of people who live there, and their attitudes. Another woman observed that Ancaster residents “think they’re a little bit better off than most people” and that this “snootiness” is a specifically suburban characteristic (BS7). Affluence

Figure 4.2. Perceptions of suburbs among residents of single detached homes

Figure 4.3. Perceptions of suburbs among residents of townhouses

Doubts about “Suburbs” in Canada  105

was not the dominant consideration as people drafted their maps, but it figured more prominently than when they were wrestling with abstract definitions. It seems that, in Canada, affluence is a latent criterion, mobilized when people are asked to consider specific places. Another latent criterion is a remembered political boundary. It is not surprising that very few people considered any of the neighbourhoods below the Mountain to be “suburban.” The exception – and a limited one – is Westdale, an interwar suburb boasting curvilinear streets that is adjacent to Dundas in the old City’s far west end (Weaver, 1979). More noteworthy is the fact that only a minority viewed as suburban those parts of the old City that lay on the Mountain. These included not only neighbourhoods on the central Mountain such as Barnstown, developed in the 1980s, but areas to the south that have been completed since 2000. For many people, the old city limits still mark the boundary between city and suburb, even though this line is invisible on the ground. It would be wrong to make too much of this, and certainly to generalize from it. As noted above, our base map encouraged people to think about pre-amalgamation suburbs, while many local residents would already have been doing so because that amalgamation is fairly recent and, especially in the minds of some of those who were dragged unwillingly into the city, still a political issue. But clearly, here again we can see a difference between what people said about suburbs in theory and what they showed in practice. If the legacy of amalgamation still mattered, we would expect the pattern of response in Barnstown to differ from those in Albion and Dundas. To check whether there were variations, we constructed maps for each neighbourhood. It turns out that Barnstown residents were somewhat more likely to identify areas on the Mountain – including, of course, their own neighbourhood – as being “suburban.” But the difference was very minor.5 The amalgamation issue may still be shaping the thinking of Hamilton residents, but, if so, its effect is felt within as well as beyond the old city limits. Do Hamiltonians Even Talk about “the Suburbs”? But even mental maps associated with amalgamation may be missing the point. It is moot whether many people actually talk about “the suburbs,” as opposed to the specific places in which they live, work, shop, or visit family and friends: in Hamilton these places include Stoney Creek, Limeridge Mall, Westdale, downtown, and Dundas. In a related

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study, one of the authors undertook a small survey of local real estate advertisements and of real estate agents who are active in the three study areas (Coates, 2013). It emerged that, when drafting a real estate listing, agents rarely use the word “suburb.” Although the question has never been addressed directly, this seems to be true of agents in other cities (Perkins, Thorns, and Newton, 2008). It has also been true of land developers, perhaps because they aim to use advertising to create the sense of a unique place (Eyles, 1987). In London, England, during the interwar period, for example, “the word ‘suburb’ rarely figured in advertising content”; “suburbia per se was the formless background against which the [housing] scheme of true distinction would stand out” (Gold and Gold, 1990: 175). In Hamilton, the absence of the term “suburb” carries over when agents show prospects through a home. The agents Coates spoke to said that they assume that what matters – and so what they talk about – are the qualities of the property: type, price, size, features, schools, access to highways and amenities, and so on. Naturally, they adjust their pitch to suit the client. Those moving from a rural area or small town will be told about the convenience of living in a bigger place, including the wider job options, shopping opportunities, and amenities. Lot sizes and prices are downplayed. In contrast, those moving westwards from Toronto – a growing number in recent years – will have their attention drawn to the size of the home, the large lots, and low prices. As with anything else, and as in any city, the pros and cons of suburban living depend on one’s point of reference. But in neither case do Hamilton agents find it useful to use the word “suburb.” And so to ask residents to define “suburb,” or even to sketch where Hamilton’s suburbs are located, begs the question as to whether their answer would be meaningful. One way of probing whether “suburb” is a meaningful term is to ask a more open-ended question: “what type of neighbourhood do you think this is?” And, in fact, that is what we did, before asking anything else. We wanted spontaneous replies, uncontaminated by our own language and expectations. The answers, which differed little by neighbourhood and only slightly by dwelling type, are revealing.6 Three-fifths (37 of 61) answered “suburban,” while 17 said “city,” and 6 offered a mixed or no response. Is the glass three-fifths full or two-fifths empty? This result does indicate that “suburb” is, in fact, meaningful to a suburban majority, and that it is reasonable to ask leading questions about how suburbs should be defined and where they lie. Indeed it puts such enquiries in context. This evidence indicates that, in areas that fit all of

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the criteria that Canadian experts would typically use to define suburbs, two-fifths of local residents did not recognize themselves to be suburbanites. Presumably, then, when they read a newspaper report that indicates that local planners are trying to promote walkability in the suburbs, a large minority of suburban residents will simply fail to register that this is a fact that is relevant to their lives. These insights may help to explain why, when asked directly, only half of the residents (31 of 61) in the three neighbourhoods claimed to have “heard or read people expressing opinions about the suburbs.” On the face of it, this is remarkable. For many years, experts have been criticizing suburbs, and their views have been generously reported and echoed by the media. Those residents who conceded that they had heard or read commentary had clearly received the message: they told us that the opinions they had heard were overwhelmingly critical, and that the main criticisms concerned environmental impacts (10 comments), sociocultural homogeneity (9 comments), isolation (4 comments), and boredom (1 comment). But half of all residents implied that they had not heard any of these criticisms. We did not explore this issue in detail. It may be that some are in denial and that others read fewer newspapers and watch less television news than we might suppose. But it is likely that many have heard such criticisms yet paid little attention. After all, such commentary matters only if you know you live in the suburbs. Discussion People who like to think of themselves as urban experts should pay closer attention to the way that urban residents think, and speak. Even when we seem to, experts do not speak the same language as everyone else. Our use of “suburb” is a case in point. To be sure, the evidence from suburban Hamilton indicates that most people’s understandings of this word are broadly consistent with those of urbanists and planners. They define suburbs in similar, conventional ways – above all, in terms of the physical features that affect their everyday experience, and most recognize the label as meaningful. In the aggregate, the areas that they see as suburban are consistent with those suggested by Gordon and Janzen’s recent academic analysis and confirmed by local planners. However, the story is seriously complicated by major qualifications. The notion of a “suburb” held by most Hamiltonians is simplified; many struggle to provide what they themselves would consider to be a satisfactory definition; and some use criteria that urban researchers would

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consider unusual. Their practical mapping of the local suburbs brings out latent criteria, notably affluence, of which many were at first unaware – or perhaps were unwilling to acknowledge. Most importantly, a large minority do not think of themselves as living in a suburb. There is much uncertainty about what, and who, should be counted as “suburban,” which helps to account for the surprising fact that half of all suburban residents claim not to have heard criticisms of the suburbs. This local evidence speaks to a larger experience. Of course, there is no way of knowing exactly how typical the residents of suburban Hamilton are with respect to their counterparts in other Canadian or, for that matter, American or British cities. But Hamilton is a place where the social and physical contrasts between central and outer residential areas are very marked and generally recognized. If residents feel uncertain about the suburban label here, how much more is this likely to be true in places where the contrasts are weaker or blurred? At the very least, it would seem that the question is worth asking – above all if, as they now claim, researchers and planners aspire not only to understand “the suburbs” but to reshape them. NOTES 1 Under the supervision of Richard Harris, Amy Shanks interviewed the residents of single-family homes for her master’s thesis (Shanks, 2013). As the recipient of an Undergraduate Student Research Award, Victoria Coates undertook parallel interviews with townhouse residents. She also consulted real estate advertisements and interviewed six real estate agents for her BA thesis (Coates, 2013). We would like to thank the “Global Suburbanisms” project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, for financial support, and David Hulchanski, of the Neighbourhood Change and Building Inclusive Communities project, also funded by SSHRC, for permission to use figure 1. 2 For figure 1, the 2010 average individual income of each census tract was divided by the metropolitan area average for that year. 3 The maps may be consulted online at http://media.metroland.com/ thespec.com/statistics_flash/. 4 The Hamilton map is at https://qshare.queensu.ca/Users01/gordond/ Suburbs%202/Charts/Hamilton_T8_2006.pdf The methodology is discussed in Gordon and Janzen (2013).

Doubts about “Suburbs” in Canada  109 5 These differences may be consulted online at http://hdl.handle.net/ 11375/13298. 6 The “suburb”/”city” response ratios for residents of single-family homes and townhouses were 19/7 and 18/10, respectively. REFERENCES Brower, S. 2011. Neighbors and Neighborhoods: Elements of Successful Community Design. New York: Routledge. Coates, V. 2013. “How Real Estate Agents Frame and Market Suburbia in Hamilton, Ontario.” BA thesis, McMaster University. Dear, M., J. Drake, and L. Reeds, eds. 1987. Steel City: Hamilton and Region. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. DeLuca, P.F., S. Buist, and N. Johnston. 2012. “The Code Red Project: Engaging Communities in Health System Change in Hamilton, Ontario.” Social Indicators Research 108 (2): 317–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11205012-0068-y. Eyles, J. 1987. “Housing Advertisements as Signs: Locality Creation and Meaning-systems.” Geografiska AnnalerB 69 (2): 93–105. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.2307/490443. Feldman, R.M. 1990. “Settlement Identity: Psychological Bonds with Home Places in a Mobile Society.” Environment and Behavior 22 (2): 183–229. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0013916590222002. Feldman, R.M. 1994. “Society’s Salvation or Demise: The Meaning of the City/ Suburb Distinction in Contemporary U.S. Metropolitan Society.” Research in Community Sociology 4: 229–51. Filion, P. 1987. “Concepts of the Inner City and Recent Trends in Canada.” Canadian Geographer 31 (3): 223–32. http://dx.doi. org/10.1111/j.1541-0064.1987.tb01236.x. Fishman, R.L. 1987. Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia. New York: Basic Books. Garreau, J. 1992. Edge City: Life on the New Frontier. New York: Doubleday. Gold, J., and M.M. Gold. 1990. “‘A Place of Delightful Prospects’: Promotional Imagery and the Selling of Suburbia.” In Place Images in Media: Portrayal, Experience and Meaning, edited by L. Zonn, 159–82. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Goldsworthy, V. 2004. “The Love that Dare not Speak Its Name: Englishness and Suburbia.” In The Revision of Englishness, edited by D. Rogers and J. McLeod, 95–106. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

110  Amy Shanks, Victoria Coates, and Richard Harris Gordon, D., and D. Janzen. 2013. “Suburban Nation? Estimating the Size of Canada’s Suburban Population.” Journal of Architectural and Planning Research 30 (3): 197–220. Gottman, J. 1961. Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Harris, R. 2004. Creeping Conformity: How Canada Became Suburban, 1900–1960. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Harris, R. 2015. “Using Toronto to Explore Three Suburban Stereotypes.” Environment and Planning A 47 (1): 30–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/a46298. Hummon, D.M. 1990. Commonplaces: Community Ideology and Identity in American Culture. Albany: SUNY Press. Lefebvre, H. 1991. The Production of Space. Trans. Donal Nicholson-Smith. New York: Blackwell. Los Angeles Department of City Planning. 1971. The Visual Environment of Los Angeles. Los Angeles: Author. Mayo, S. 2011. Hamilton’s Social Landscape. Hamilton, ON: Social Planning and Research Council of Canada; http://www.sprc.hamilton.on.ca/ wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Hamiltons-Social-Landscape-Full-ReportMay-20111.pdf, accessed 9 June 2014. Nicolaides, B. 2006. “How Hell Moved from the City to the Suburbs:. Urban Scholars and Changing Perceptions of Authentic Community.” In The New Suburban History, edited by K. Kruse and T.J. Sugrue, 80–98. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nicolaides, B., and A. Wiese, eds. 2006. The Suburb Reader. New York: Routledge. Ouimet, M. 1999. “Crime in Canada and in the United States: A Comparative Analysis.” Canadian Review of Sociology 36 (3): 389–408. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1111/j.1755-618X.1999.tb00581.x. Pavlic, D. 2014. “Fading Inner Suburbs? A Historio-spatial Analysis of Prosper­ ity Indicators in the Urban Zones of the 15 Largest Census Metropolitan Areas.” MA thesis, University of Waterloo. https://uwspace.uwaterloo .ca/handle/10012/5930 Pearson, N. 1957. “Hell Is a Suburb.” Community Planning Review 7 (3): 124–28. Perkins, H.C., D.C. Thorns, and B.M. Newton. 2008. “Real Estate Advertising and Intraurban Place Meaning: Real Estate Sales Consultants at Work.” Environment and Planning A 40 (9): 2061–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/ a39191. Shanks, Amy. 2013. “Residents’ Perceptions and Understandings of Suburbs in Hamilton, Ontario.” MA thesis, McMaster University. Spectorski, A. 1955. The Exurbanites. Philadelphia: Lippincott.

Doubts about “Suburbs” in Canada  111 Spicer, Z. 2012. “Post-amalgamation Politics: How Does Consolidation Impact Community Decision-making?” Canadian Journal of Urban Research 21 (2): 1–22. Stanger-Ross, J., and H. Stanger-Ross. 2012. “Placing the Poor: The Ecology of Poverty in Postwar Canada.” Journal of Canadian Studies / Revue d’Etudes Canadiennes 46 (1): 213–40. Walks, A. 2013. “Income Inequality and Polarisation in Canada’s Cities: An Examination and New Form of Measurement.” Research paper no. 227, Cities Centre, University of Toronto. http://neighbourhoodchange.ca/ documents/2015/02/income-inequality-and-polarization-in-canadascities-an-examination-and-new-form-of-measurement.pdf Watson, J.W. 1979. “Mental Distance in Geography: Its Identification and Representation.” In Congress Proceedings, 22nd International Geographical Congress, Montreal, 1972, edited by J.K. Fraser, 38–50. Ottawa: Canadian Committee for Geography. Weaver, J. 1979. “From Land Assembly to Social Maturity: The Suburban Life of Westdale (Hamilton), Ontario, 1911–1951.” Histoire sociale / Social History 21: 411–40. Weaver, J. 1982. Hamilton: An Illustrated History. Toronto: Lorimer.

5 Defining Peripheral Places in Quebec: A Review of Key Planning Reports and the Media, 1960–2012 Cla ir e Poi tr as

A key consideration in the naming of Montreal is that it contains a number of striking topographical features, including natural assets and landscapes such as the Monteregian hills, the shores of the St Lawrence River, and the lands around several other smaller rivers. Administra­ tively, the metropolitan area is complex, consisting of the central City of Montreal and eighty-one adjacent municipalities that have a high degree of functional socio-economic integration. It is, after all, the largest metropolitan area in the province of Quebec, ranking second in Canada. From the time the region was first colonized by the French in the seventeenth century, its geographical characteristics have influenced the names given to local places. Since the British Conquest in 1760, the arrival of English-speaking immigrants has changed Montreal’s insti­ tutional and political landscape. As urbanization intensified in the twentieth century, local elected officials and private sector actors continued to use the distinctive features of the metropolitan region’s landscapes to identify and designate territorial sub-areas – the Island of Montreal, the South Shore, and the North Shore – including the areas around the central city. In the contemporary context, naming peripheral spaces seems to be problematic for political and economic actors in the Montreal area. Official sources such as the Grand dictionnaire terminologique of the ­Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF) (Quebec’s French Language Bureau) provide many definitions of banlieue, which would normally be translated into Canadian English as “suburb.” As an agency responsible for the definition and the supervision of Quebec’s policy in terms of linguistic approbation, the OQLF plays a key role in providing

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guidelines regarding the revision, the improvement, and the promotion of French language. In its dictionnaire, based on information obtained from published dictionaries and reflecting the diversity of the language within these sources, the OQLF recommends a definition of banlieue that can be translated as “a collection of towns that surround a larger city serving as an economic engine.”1 Banlieue is used only in the singular, because it refers to the entire agglomeration surrounding a large city.2 In English, “suburbs” refers to the residential areas on the outskirts of a city or large town. According to the same agency, the word banlieue can also refer to the “way of thinking that characterizes a suburbanite (banlieusard),” which comes close to the meaning of the English word “suburbia.”3 Finally, suburbs are dependent on their central city, as many residents work there. According to this definition, the suburb is physically connected to the city, which is not the case for a satellite town. The terms employed to label peripheral areas in Quebec are fairly limited compared to those used in France. For instance, the word periurbain, which has been introduced in France as a new administrative category, is absent from the glossary of urban planning terms in Quebec.4 However, over the past decades the relationship between the suburbs and the central city has changed. The same is true for the economic activity of suburban areas, their built environment and urban morphology, as well as their social composition. In the Montreal area, the situation is more complex, due to the coexistence of two linguistic groups that conceive suburbia in specific ways. These preliminary observations encourage us, first, to explore the terminology used since the eighteenth century by francophones and anglophones to label the space around the central city. Second, I will examine how, starting in the 1960s, urban and regional planners have viewed suburban growth during a period when large cities in Quebec, especially Montreal, were undergoing major socio-spatial change as a result of the spatial decentralization of households and businesses. Third, I will compare the technocratic terminology to that used by the mass media to label the periphery. But before we look at how peripheral areas were labelled in Quebec’s largest city, it is helpful to briefly outline how the linguistic history of the metropolitan area changed the balance of power between the two main linguistic communities5 and to describe how this transformation was reaffirmed in the spheres of the media and the political-institutional sector.

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A New Linguistic Landscape, a New Significance for the Suburb Since the early twentieth century, Quebec’s anglophone population, strongly concentrated in the Montreal area, has undergone major changes. Whereas at the beginning of the twentieth century anglophones accounted for a third of the Island of Montreal’s population, by 1971, only a quarter of the island’s inhabitants had British roots, a proportion that has since halved. The decline in the anglophone population has stemmed in part from the departure of many households immediately after the coming to power of the Parti québécois at the provincial level in 1976,6 as well as from the increase of other ethnic groups as a result of immigration (Linteau, 1992: 462). This type of immigration has further increased since the 1980s and the number of allophones (a Canadian whose native language is neither French nor English) has risen. The Parti québécois government enacted the Charter of the French Language (Bill 101) in 1977, and Quebec became a society that operated primarily in French. Bill 101 sparked anger among the anglophone community, and many of its members moved to Toronto, the capital of the adjacent province of Ontario. In Montreal, the francophone majority reasserted its presence in the urban landscape, as Bill 101 required that all commercial signs be in French. The francization of Montreal was also expressed in the strengthening of francophones’ political and economic power. In the Montreal area and elsewhere in Quebec, cities and towns in which the mother tongue of the majority (50% or more) of the population is English are assigned a bilingual status. This is reflected in many municipalities in the Montreal area, especially on the West Island. These municipalities are consequently allowed to use English, particularly in communications and the provision of public services. Despite the measures in effect to protect English-language institutions, including municipalities, the anglophone population has continued to decline. In the greater Montreal area, the population having English as its mother tongue dropped from 21.7 per cent in 1971 to 12.7 per cent in 2001 (Perron, 2012: 1244). Linguistic divisions between the francophone majority and the anglophone minority can be witnessed in all spheres of Montreal’s urban life. This linguistic duality is also reflected in the city’s media, where anglophone and francophone information sources coexist. Anglophone households have been served by the Gazette, founded in 1785 (with a total weekday average circulation of 118,558 in 2014), and the Montreal

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Star (which was published from 1869 to 1979). Francophone households have three daily newspapers (the Journal de Montréal, with a print circulation of 192,000; La Presse, with a print circulation of 177,845; and Le Devoir, with a print circulation of 29,500).7 In addition, electronic media abound in both languages. Montreal has not attracted immigrants in the same numbers as Toronto but, since the 1990s, the absolute number of francophones has increased as a result of an immigration policy favouring French speakers. In addition, the composition of the allophone population has changed significantly. This new linguistic reality has transformed the practices of the institutions responsible for urban planning and development in the metropolitan area. While planning documents at the provincial level have been written mainly in French, at the Montreal metropolitan level short versions or summaries of key documents are prepared in English. Historical Terminology and Its Evolution: Old Words, New Realities In Quebec, how are places labelled that lack the key features of urbanity, such as density, functional mix, and social diversity? Even today, the terminology used to label peripheral space is quite limited. For instance, the term faubourg was in use in Montreal from the 1730s until the 1850s.8 At the time, it served to designate an urban area that had developed outside the city walls and notably along major roads. After the demolition of the stone ramparts between 1804 and 1817, the generic name faubourg continued to be used to label areas that developed outside of the limits created by the former walls. Such areas included, for example, the Faubourg Saint-Laurent, built along the Saint-Laurent road during the eighteenth century, and the Faubourg des Récollets, located at the western edge of the walled city. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, in order to tie the historic city (Old Montreal) to its surrounding areas, these names and others (e.g., Faubourg Québec) were reintroduced in terminology of the urban planner and real estate developer to promote new, high-density residential developments. In Quebec City, the provincial capital, faubourg also designated neighbourhoods (faubourgs Saint-Jean, Saint-Vallier, Saint-Roch) built in the eighteenth century outside the city walls. As mentioned in the introduction of this book, the term faubourg eventually acquired a positive connotation and evoked the charm of the past. Nowadays, the word is also present in

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the names of local community organizations and social service agencies that intervene in inner-city neighbourhoods (for example, the Table de concertation du faubourg Saint-Laurent and the CLSC des Faubourgs). The use of this generic term evokes the working-class character of these neighbourhoods. In Quebec, the word faubourg does not prevail only in cities that were once protected by walls. In recent years, real estate developers in the greater Montreal area have used the term to name new housing developments, even though they are located in peri-urban environments. One example is that of Faubourg Boisbriand, about thirty kilometers from downtown Montreal on a former brownfield where, up until recently, the province’s sole auto plant was situated. The advertisement for the development refers to the site’s location at “the crossroads of Highways 15 and 640” so that it is “at the gates of Montreal and the Laurentians” (Faubourg Boisbriand, 2012). In short, the idea being suggested by the developers is that the territory is both at the threshold of and outside the city. The designation faubourg also serves to emphasize that the territory is not located in the central city or an inner-city neighbourhood. The developers of these new residential districts often try to market a “village” feeling where everything can be done nearby. The word périurbain is another notion used to name space at the urban fringe. Since the 1970s, it has been used in France by scholars and public agencies to investigate and define new urbanization processes transforming the countryside (Granjon, 2003). As Anne Lambert shows in her chapter in the present volume, in France, the word périurbain refers to a geographical and administrative category first used by the Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques in the 1990s. In Quebec, périurbain is seldom used in everyday language or even among urban planners: this scientific term has not yet penetrated common language. Moreover, in the contemporary context, technocrats make use of périurbain to refer to a space shared by humans and wildlife: it designates the hunting and trapping territory located within the inhabited space of Quebec (Fédération québécoise des chasseurs et pêcheurs, 2012). Throughout the nineteenth century, in the titles of maps and plans, the words differentiating the types of space (urban or suburban) changed. For instance, in his 1825 plan of Montreal, the surveyor John Adams referred to the city and its suburbs. In the 1860s, H.S. Sitwell’s plan (1869–71) used the expression “city and its environs.” At that time, the suburban reality to which the maps referred was that of the faubourgs

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settled outside the city walls. In other words, “suburb” was equivalent to faubourg. In the 1870s and 1880s, the usual term to name the areas surrounding the City of Montreal was municipalité de comté (county municipality). This official name was created in 1855 to designate a superior local authority encompassing many localities.9 Furthermore, the names of official territorial divisions, including electoral districts (e.g., Hochelaga County), municipal counties, and municipal parishes (e.g., the Parish of Montreal), were employed throughout the nineteenth century to label the areas surrounding the city. But what is most remarkable for the Montreal region was the use of geographical terms (island, shore) to distinguish different areas undergoing urbanization or suburbanization. Thus, surveyors and cartographers (notably Henry W. Hopkins in his 1879 map) made a clear distinction between the “city” and the “island” of Montreal. Geographical terms such as island (île) or shore (rive) became increasingly standard in the twentieth century. In 1907 Charles Goad, a civil engineer from England, employed the expression “vicinity” to refer to city outskirts on a map. This notion implied a form of proximity to the city centre. Before the introduction of a more specialized terminology, the word banlieue was used to qualify Montreal’s urbanization process. For instance, in 1864 Bishop Ignace Bourget described the Parish of Montreal to Cardinal Alessandro Barnabo in the following terms: “The parish [cure] of Montreal, which includes the city and suburb [banlieue], forms an immense parish up to 11 miles long at its longest by 5 1/3 miles at its widest.”10 Bourget already referred to municipalities located outside the city limits set in 1791. The term banlieue also defined a large area that encompassed all the municipalities surrounding the City of Montreal. This was an area part rural and part urban, where urban development was not continuous, and where urban and suburban growth had made significant gains, but where large parts were still occupied by farms. Prior to the dissemination of a specific terminology, in historical studies and in the print media, a few words continued to designate urban growth occurring outside of the limits of the central city. Banlieue came to refer to municipalities located outside the central city. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Greater Montreal – with about 400,000  inhabitants – included many such suburbs marked by their varied land use and population, industrial and working class in the case of St Henri, for example, but residential and affluent in the case of Westmount. The annexation of many of these suburbs in the first half

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of the twentieth century enlarged the boundaries of the central city. The most distinguished and well-off inner suburbs surrounded by the central city’s urban fabric were not annexed and thus kept their administrative and political independence. At the end of the nineteenth century, the creation of municipalities around central cities such as Montreal and Quebec City introduced new place names that stood out from those of older and former parish municipalities. Gradually, historical and commemorative designations were abandoned and replaced by place names with a geographic or thematic resonance. For instance, on the Island of Montreal, the presence of a hill – called Mount Royal – influenced the names of new suburban towns such as Westmount, Outremont, and Mount Royal. The names of those three localities suggest the presence of the famous hill located in the middle of the island and named by Jacques Cartier during his travels in 1535. Among other topographical features that influenced toponyms, we can mention the points of land extending into a body of water (PointeClaire, Longue-Pointe, Pointe-aux-Trembles), and the bays (Baie-d’Urfé) and islands (Saint-Raphaël-de-l’Île-Bizard, Notre-Dame-de-l’Île-Perrot). There are many other examples in the greater Montreal area where rivers and hills define the metropolitan landscape. The fact that place names refer to the region’s geographical and natural features is not unusual. In the history of human settlement, features of physical geography have always been applied as essential location codes for places. These examples show that what appears to be important in the place names is not so much the meaning given to the generic term (faubourg, banlieue, périurbain) as the toponyms identifying the geographical entities. They suggest the geographical features of the areas described. Thus, in the greater Montreal area – as well as in the Quebec City area – the presence of waterways and the location’s connection with elements of the physical geography are used to name suburban or periurban areas. In the Montreal region, the names Rive-Sud (South Shore) and Rive-Nord or Couronne Nord (North Shore) designate large areas located on the southern shore of the St Lawrence River and the north shore of the Rivière des Prairies. (These areas can be described as suburban if we take into account the features of the built environment, the urban morphology, and the land use dominated by housing.) But the use of such names is rare in urban and regional planning documents, notably the ones produced by the metropolitan communities of Quebec City (750,000 inhabitants) and Montreal (3.7 million inhabitants) in the early first decade of this century.

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Metropolitanization at Work In the early 1960s, the Montreal region experienced strong population growth. Historically a city of multiple-family buildings (duplexes and triplexes), it became increasingly a region covered by single-family detached housing. Researchers at the time attempted to understand the dynamics of urban sprawl at work, which corresponded to a “North American type of metropolitan expansion” (Racine, 1975). From the end of the 1960s up until the 1980s, technocrats working for the province used the words couronne (ring), banlieue (suburb), and périphérie (periphery). In that context, the word couronne rurale (rural ring), which appeared in the 1960s, notably during the regional planning process named Horizon 2000 led by the City of Montreal, designated the rural area bordering the Montreal region that was undergoing rapid urban growth. A few years later, the word referred to spaces located outside the Island of Montreal. These included the North Shore and the South Shore, both labelled as couronne in French. The term thus came to indicate areas on the city’s periphery where households had recently arrived. By the late 1980s, the meaning of the term Couronne Nord (North Shore) had been somewhat diverted from its technocratic origins. This sub-region – which included some twenty municipalities and about 500,000 inhabitants in 2006 – was from then on considered a social environment marked by a strong sense of belonging (territoire d’apparte­ nance). Moreover, its inhabitants wanted to differentiate themselves from the other parts of the metropolitan area, the city and urban community of Montreal, and the South Shore and Laval (Charbonneau, 1993). Judging from how elected officials normally speak, the Couronne Nord is now a preferred place for young, predominantly francophone families wanting to purchase a house. This area has become home to thousands of new households every year. In the print media, the word couronne also refers to a territory far from the central city, the historical landscapes of which are transformed by the arrival of households. As a journalist in L’Actualité commented in 1988: We are more than 30 km from the eastern tip of the Island of Montreal, an hour by car from the centre-ville and closer to Lac Saint-Pierre than Pointeaux-Trembles. It is here that Greater Montreal’s “quatrième couronne” is in the process of developing. Since 1990, more than 1,200 white, pink and grey detached homes have grown up in Lavaltrie, destroying in their

120  Claire Poitras wake pastoral landscapes some three centuries old. (Chartrand, 1998: 28; my translation)

The term couronne has an English translation (“ring”), although this word is not used much in English and lacks the connotations that it has in French. While the 1986 development plan of the Communauté urbaine de Montréal (CUM) used a literal translation (“suburban ring”), the print media and residents have not adopted this concept to designate peripheral places. In the Montreal region, anglophones who speak of areas located outside the island use expressions such as “South Shore” and “suburban Montreal” or, more rarely, “Northern Suburb.” Among anglophones, the word “suburban” has become very common in everyday language. In the 1960s, some scholars referred to it frequently, and evidence suggests that the same was true for the print media. In English newspapers, the expression “suburban Montreal” suggests a geographical area with common social and morphological features. In this regard, the term includes the island’s municipalities characterized by low density (i.e., single-family detached housing). In­ terestingly, this geography of suburban Montreal does not overlap with the territory of the couronnes, which excludes municipalities on the Island of Montreal and another city (Laval) located on a second large island. The English expression “suburban Montreal” encompasses the urbanized territory on the island surrounding the central city. Widely used by its inhabitants, the designation “West Island,” which means the suburban municipalities on a specific part of the island, is another example. It is an unofficial name given to the towns and villages located at the western part of the Island of Montreal where anglophones make up a relative majority of its population. Naming the Periphery in the Media When generic names for the urban fringe are used, the connotations are often pejorative. In the electronic media, the image of the suburb as a specific place is quite negative. Thus, in the 1960s, excerpts from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) audiovisual archives present the suburb as a new but unsightly environment.11 These sources also address the suburb’s popularity among households and businesses, its lack of urban planning, its transportation problems, the daily vicissitudes of the homemakers who live there, its retail spaces, and aspects of consumption.

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The adjective “suburban”/suburbain remains used mainly by researchers, notably when they comment on sprawl. In addition, its usage is relatively recent, becoming more frequent since the 1990s. When an academic comments on suburban development, he critiques the cultural model of urban development to which it refers: Suburban residential developments were attached, firstly, to older areas in order to take advantage of their services. But once effective communications were provided with downtown Montreal, there has been a proliferation of this type of housing, creating a suburban magma without structure or identity, and destroying definitively the balance between compact urban form and decentralized housing that had existed during the industrial period, on the outskirts of the agglomeration. (Marsan, 1992: 327)12

This account can be compared to that of a columnist from the Montreal daily newspaper La Presse describing his experience of the landscape as he drives through the South Shore: I came from the 138, which extends from the Mercier Bridge to the State of New York through Kahnawake, Châteauguay, Mercier, Sainte-Martine, that area, you know? Punk suburb and bald countryside . . . Well, I was fleeing from this suburban freak-out when I discovered this little winding road along the Châteauguay River surrounded by farms and beautiful houses with large front lawns. (Foglia, 1990)13

According to this perspective, suburbs and suburban environments – here synonymous – are characterized by their unsightly development and cultural insignificance. Location outside the central city’s limits determines the suburb’s status, but there is also an ideology behind the discourse. For one of the most militant fringes of public opinion, environmentalism, metropolitan development in the 1980s embodied the “trilogy of waste” based on the automobile, the single-family detached home, and the suburbs (Gagnon, 1989).14 Generally speaking, however, unfavourable opinions of the suburb are based on a criticism of urban sprawl and its consequences, such as the loss of agricultural land, habitat fragmentation, landscape transformation, and reliance on the automobile. These ways of seeing the suburbs continued throughout the 1990s and the first decade of this century. After the municipal mergers that temporarily eliminated the Island of Montreal’s inner suburbs in 2001, these communities attracted less media attention.15 Several formerly

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independent cities became city boroughs (arrondissements), with fairly extensive powers. Despite the restructuring of the municipal map and the integration of suburbs into the central city, the division between the Island of Montreal and its periphery has become more prominent. In the late 1990s, the introduction of a new telephone area code covering the suburban areas surrounding the Island of Montreal reflected this new reality: Are you a 514 or a 450?! It may not look like much but the introduction of a new telephone area code for the outskirts of Greater Montreal confirms an increasingly obvious geopolitical division: two thirds of “Montrealers” live outside the municipalité of Montreal, which is no longer the central area of the real city that stretches from Deux-Montagnes to Repentigny. (Chartrand, 1998: 28)16

The fact that a telephone area code is used to label a place and, by extension, to characterize people has also been reported in other metropolitan areas such as Toronto. When, in 1993, the main phone company of Ontario introduced the 905 area code to handle the growing demand for new phone numbers in the Toronto periphery, it created, according to a national newspaper, “a sharp suburban-urban divide that has come to define the region 20 years later” (Bascaramurty, 2013). Conceptualizing the Metropolitan Area: Technocratic Terminology in Four Regional Planning Processes Since the 1960s, faced with demographic and economic changes that have been affecting Montreal, planning experts have tried to develop a scientific nomenclature for, first, identifying problems generated by urban expansion and, second, offering guidance on urban planning interventions. In addition, the development of regional science has helped diversify the terminology describing the metropolitan area and its various components. Complicating the picture, the scientific and professional lexicon developed in the 1960s also has French and English origins. In the 1960s, the City of Montreal carried out an initial exercise aimed at conceptualizing the metropolitan area. Called Montréal Horizon 2000, this analytical and prospective approach encouraged the development of a diverse terminology for naming the metropolitan area in the making (Ville de Montréal, 1967). Several concepts or terms were proposed to understand and label the new metropolitan urban forms: région

Defining Peripheral Places in Quebec  123

Figure 5.1. Main components of the Montreal metropolitan area. Source: INRS – Urbanisation Culture Société

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métropolitaine (metropolitan area), périphérie (fringe, periphery), villes satellites (satellite cities), villes nouvelles (new towns), unités urbaines (urban units), villes métropolitaines (metro towns), centre des affaires (central business district). This approach to regional planning and the solutions it puts forward is based largely on foreign models – including French, English, and American – of polycentric urban development. Here, the English equivalents are those included in the English version of the documents supporting the planning process. The terms “suburb” (banlieue) and “periphery” (périphérie) are used interchangeably in both languages (City of Montreal, 1967). Still, the authors of the planning documents refer more to proper names than to generic labels in order to categorize and describe these municipalities. The proposed metropolitan model broke with that of a region dominated by a central city surrounded by suburban areas. The authors of Montréal Horizon 2000 suggested two visions of urban planning. The first was technical and related to municipalities located outside the boundaries of the central city. The second involved a critical discourse and addressed the broader metropolitan suburban territory. While the term ville de banlieue is completely absent from the French planning document and the accompanying reports, in English the generic “suburban community” is used. In the English planning documents, the most common expressions are “region,” “metropolitan area,” and “fringe/periphery.” More than a decade later, the Quebec government implemented another planning process aimed at bringing urban sprawl to a halt. Public authorities also sought to ensure greater consistency in their actions. The suburban areas were then perceived as a major problem of urban growth, and this attitude would prevail for years to come. Circulated only in French, the Option préférable d’aménagement addresses urban sprawl and its negative impacts in terms of public spending (Barcelo, Charbonneau, and Hamel, 1990). This critical discourse, like others that would follow, faced the resistance of suburban elected officials who did not accept this challenge to the development of their municipalities.17 Used in the document, the word banlieue had entered the technocratic terminology. But, as we will see, this word would not last. In this planning process, however, banlieue was used extensively and generally meant the space at the periphery of the central city and the municipalities that are institutionally independent from the central city of Montreal. A development plan from the Communauté urbaine de Montréal (CUM), adopted in 1986, also revealed the authorities’ discomfort regarding the uncontrolled urban development affecting the region. The

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CUM was a regional body created in 1970 to manage public services such as transit, public safety, and wastewater treatment. In the plan, covering the Island of Montreal, the CUM distinguished the “suburb of the island” from the fringe, labelled the “suburban ring,” that is located outside the island. The CUM’s discourse appears less critical than that used by planners in the Option préférable d’aménagement mainly because of the territory under its jurisdiction, which includes a large suburban fringe. Operating on the scale of the Island of Montreal, the authors therefore take note of the existence of banlieues de l’île (suburbs of the island). Regarding the suburban area outside the island, the regional plan of 1986 merely evokes the space “in the suburb.” Approved by political actors having divergent interests, this document avoids using a precise terminology to name Montreal’s suburban area. The “suburb” is addressed on two levels: the banlieue de l’île (suburb of the island – i.e., municipalities independent from the central city) that is part of the CUM, and the couronne suburbaine (suburban ring) located off the island. The characteristics of the social and physical geography of Montreal’s region are thus reflected in the words used to label what is not part of the central city. The independent cities are also specifically labelled (banlieue de l’île), even though some are completely surrounded by the central city’s urban fabric. The suburban cities located outside the island are named the couronne suburbaine sud et nord) (north and south suburban ring). The linguistic contortions, then, had become complex! The final planning document that I looked at was published in French by the Communauté métropolitaine de Montréal (CMM), created by the government of Quebec in 2000 in the context of substantive municipal reform. Serving eighty-two municipalities, this body is responsible for planning, coordinating, and funding specific services, including metropolitan planning. More than ever, the process leading to the adoption of the Plan métropolitain d’aménagement et de développement (Metro­ politan Development Plan) by numerous local elected officials in the region in 2011 reflected a certain cleansing of the terminology used to label the periphery. For the first time in the metropolitan region’s planning history, the population living outside the central city was numerically larger than the population living within it. To express this new demographic reality, elected officials of suburban towns that took part in the planning process used the names “Couronne Nord” (North Ring) and “Rive-Sud” (South Shore) to label some of the key areas undergoing population growth. This terminology was also intended to assert

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autonomy and control over urban development. Moreover, it intertwined geographical and political meanings. This is true of the term “agglomeration,” which refers to amalgamated and subsequently demerged cities.18 In the early years of this century, as mentioned earlier, the Quebec government implemented an unprecedented municipal reform that rested on two complementary strategies: the forced merger of local municipalities applied to large cities, including Montreal, and the creation of a metropolitan tier of government. In that context, identifying the issues of suburban and peri-urban growth did not mean that an all-out criticism was articulated. Thus, in its Vision 2025, adopted in 2003 as a first step towards implementing the Plan métropolitain d’aménagement et de développement in 2011, the CMM expressed itself in nuanced terms, reflecting the compromises that the region’s politicians had had to make to achieve common goals: “Urban development can no longer be considered as an opposition between the single-family suburban housing [maison unifamiliale en banlieue] and the dense urban housing in the city centre [logement urbain dense du centre]” (Communauté métropolitaine de Montréal, 2011: 34).19 The fact that suburbs had become more autonomous in terms of jobs, services, and recreation was undoubtedly associated with such restraint. Part of the document presents perceptions of the suburbs: where one thinks that the air is cleaner and the land more affordable (ibid.: 35).20 Certainly the city has its advantages, but the suburb is also viewed favourably by its inhabitants. This depiction contrasts with the critical discourse emanating from environmentalists and urban activists: “C’est vrai qu’il y a plein de choses à faire à Montréal, mais pour élever une famille c’est mieux en banlieue.”21 Key images associated with the North American suburb are still seen as valid as a quote from the Vision 2025 signals: “Il y a moins de violence en banlieue et plus de sécurité et de verdure” (ibid.: 216).22 Consistent with previous planning documents that clearly expressed unease about how to label the different sociospatial constituents of the metropolitan area, the Plan métropolitain d’aménagement et de développement of the CMM displays a certain neutrality on the issue of naming the periphery. With over 3.7 million inhabitants in 2012, the Montreal region consists of five areas: the agglomerations of Montreal (Island) and Longueuil, the city of Laval, and the Couronnes Nord and Sud. To make the metropolitan plan and its urban growth limits more acceptable to elected officials and the population of suburban and peri-urban municipalities, the names “Couronne Nord” and “Rive Sud” are chosen to

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designate areas undergoing strong population growth. The terminology of the CMM tends to intermingle semantics with political and institutional claims. This is true of the term “agglomeration,” which refers to the grouping of merged and then de-merged cities (including Longueuil and Montreal) since the changes triggered by the municipal reform imposed by the Quebec government in the early years of this century. Conclusion In this chapter, I have focused on the ways in which the space around the central city is labelled by different groups of actors, and how this designating process has changed over time, given the declining supremacy of the central city, notably in terms of population concentration and growth. Several conclusions can be drawn. My first focuses on the terminology used to name the periphery and how it reflects the social and political complexity of the suburban landscape and the way it has been perceived by planners, elected officials, external observers, and the population. For instance, the linguistic duality of Montreal generates semantic distinctions. In English, “suburban” does not have the same significance as banlieue or suburbain in French. For the Englishspeaking community in Montreal, the term “suburb” has positive connotations: it refers to a particular form of autonomy from the central city and serves to forge an identity fuelled partly by the local media. For the French-speaking community, the term banlieue is not widely used, but the reasons for this dearth remain obscure. The words banlieue and périphérie are used in an undifferentiated manner, while périurbain is uncommon in both everyday and technocratic language. My second conclusion indicates that words, including proper nouns, have been successfully employed by local elected officials to promote a distinct sub-regional identity since the 1960s. Names such South Shore, West Island, or Couronne Nord refer to a location but also to a specific sociodemographic reality: that of young families living in suburban areas. Such terms also highlight the importance of physical geography in naming the different areas of a metropolitan region. This is especially true for the Couronne Nord and the South Shore. The introduction of a new telephone area code in the late 1990s embedded this distinction in everyday language. For the inhabitants of these areas, the suburbs have a very positive connotation. In Quebec, the American model of suburbia prevails: homeownership, less expensive public services than in the central city, and an environment that is considered more suitable for

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raising children. This includes more space for less money, greater social homogeneity, control over the neighbourhood, better schools, and so on. From the 1970s onwards, as planning experts became more critical and were denouncing the negative impacts of urban sprawl, particularly on the environment and in terms of the loss of farmland, suburbia began to receive bad press. This criticism of the damaging effects of urban sprawl has not limited the aspiration of households and elected officials in Montreal-area municipalities: for many, a suburban home remains a dream to be materialized. My third conclusion deals with the evolution of the terminology and its meaning for suburbanites. Unsurprisingly, suburbanites do not relate to their area through the analytical categories provided by experts for studying the current transformations of city-regions. Instead, suburban households prefer to consider their relationship to the area in terms of specific place names. The terminology for naming the area surrounding the central city reflects the complexity of the suburban landscape, specifically in metropolitan Montreal. Since the 1960s, elected representatives in the suburbs have successfully exploited certain terms to promote a regional identity that differs from the central city’s physical and socio-economic characteristics. This firm commitment to maintaining autonomy in relation to the central city has marked the history of the Montreal area since the early twentieth century (Bérubé, 2014; Trent, 2012). Moreover, in the ways in which the periphery is labelled, the linguistic duality of Montreal generates some interesting semantic distinctions. In addition, the language continues to evolve as a result of socio-political and administrative claims. For instance, in recent years, the term “agglomeration” has to some extent become synonymous with the notion of the central city because it refers to a level that manages and finances local public services. In other words, the terminology dealing with the urban periphery and the social use of this terminology have continued to evolve to reflect institutional changes. NOTES 1 “Ensemble de villes qui entourent une ville plus importante qui leur sert de moteur économique” (my translation). Office québécois de la langue française, Grand dictionnaire terminologique, http://gdt.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca/ ficheOqlf.aspx?Id_Fiche=2077552.

Defining Peripheral Places in Quebec  129 2 Ibid. 3 “La manière de penser qui caractérise un banlieusard” (my translation). Grand dictionnaire terminologique, http://gdt.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca/ficheOqlf .aspx?Id_Fiche=8399522. 4 See Anne Lambert’s chapter on this topic in the present volume. 5 For more on language issues in Montreal in a historical perspective, see Levine (1990). 6 This political party was established in 1967 and advocates Quebec’s independence within Canada. 7 All distribution figures are from 2104. Gouvernement du Québec, répertoire des medias, http://www.gouv.qc.ca/FR/LeQuebec/Pages/ Montreal.aspx?Region=Montreal&Filtre=SectionM. 8 In English, the translated term is “suburb.” However, in Québécois French dictionaries, the definition of faubourg is somewhat different. The sources that I consulted refer to an agglomeration around a parish church, or of villages located along the St Lawrence River (Clapin, 1894; Meney, 1999). 9 Outside Greater Montreal, there were two types of local authorities that also had the status of local municipalities: parish municipalities and township municipalities. They could be considered as the periphery of the suburbs of the towns to which they referred. 10 “La cure de Montréal, qui comprend la ville et la banlieue, forme une immense paroisse de 11 milles dans sa plus grande longueur, sur 5 1/3 milles dans sa plus grande largeur” (my translation). 11 On the French version of the Radio-Canada/CBC website, I used the key word banlieue to locate the relevant audiovisual archives. 12 “Les développements résidentiels de banlieue se sont greffés, dans un premier temps, à des établissements plus anciens de façon à profiter de leurs services. Mais dès que des communications efficaces furent assurées avec le centre-ville montréalais, on a assisté à une prolifération tous azimuts de ce type d’habitation, engendrant un magma suburbain sans structure ni identité, rompant définitivement l’équilibre entre la forme concentrée et desserrée d’habitat qui avait existé, durant la période industrielle, en périphérie de l’agglomération” (my translation). 13 “J’arrivais de la 138 qui prolonge le pont Mercier jusqu’à l’état de New York en traversant Kahnawake, Châteauguay, Mercier, Sainte-Martine, ce coin-là, vous connaissez? Banlieue punk et campagnes chauves . . . Bref, je me sauvais de ce freak-out suburbain quand j’ai découvert cette petite route sinueuse qui zigonne le long de la rivière Châteauguay, bordée de fermes et de belle maisons bourgeoises avec de grands parterres en avant” (my translation).

130  Claire Poitras 14 Gagnon was vice-president of the Union pour la conservation de la nature. 15 On the municipal reform led by the government of Quebec in the first few years of the twenty-first century and its numerous vicissitudes, see Trent, 2012. 16 “Êtes-vous un ‘514’ ou un ‘450’?! L’air de rien, la création d’un nouvel indicatif téléphonique pour la banlieue du grand Montréal confirme une division géopolitique de plus en plus évidente: deux ‘Montréalais’ sur trois habitent en dehors de la municipalité de Montréal, qui n’est plus que le quartier central de la ville réelle, qui elle s’étend de Deux-Montagnes à Repentigny” (my translation). 17 It was not until 2012 that common planning goals were adopted at the metropolitan level. 18 The objective of this municipal reform was to make large cities more competitive and attractive at the national and international level. Two years after the amalgamation, a new provincial premier was elected and, during his campaign, one of his promises was to hold a referendum in order to demerge. Thus, four years after the mergers, 15 of the 27 municipalities of the island of Montreal recovered their independence. Most of these municipalities were predominantly English speaking. 19 “Le développement urbain ne peut donc plus être envisagé selon une vision dichotomique de l’espace opposant la maison unifamiliale en banlieue au logement urbain dense du centre” (my translation). 20 “In the suburbs, one thinks, the air is cleaner, building lots are larger and cheaper” (my translation). 21 “It is true that there are plenty of things to do in Montreal, but raising a family in the suburbs is better” (my translation). 22 “There is less violence in the suburbs, more safety and greenery” (my translation). REFERENCES Barcelo, M., F. Charbonneau, and P. Hamel. 1990. Option préférable d’aménagement et étalement urbain, 1978–1988, dans la région de Montréal. Montreal: Faculté de l’aménagement, Université de Montréal. Bascaramurty, D. 2013. “Twenty Years Later, 905/416 Divide Continues to Define City.” Globe and Mail, 1 October. Bérubé, H. 2014. Des sociétés distinctes: Gouverner les banlieues bourgeoises de Montréal, 1880–1939. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Charbonneau, J-P. 1993. “Le développement de la banlieue ne doit pas être freiné” La Presse, 25 March, A4.

Defining Peripheral Places in Quebec  131 Chartrand, L. 1998. “Le pouvoir des banlieues.” L’Actualité. 1 October, 25–28. City of Montreal. 1967. Urbanization. Technical Report, no 5. Montreal: Author. Clapin, S. 1894. Dictionnaire canadien-français. Montreal: Beauchemin. Communauté métropolitaine de Montréal. 2011. Plan métropolitain d’aménagement et de développement. Montreal: Author. Communauté urbaine de Montréal. 1986. Schéma d’aménagement. Montreal: Author. Faubourg Boisbriand. 2012. Le projet du Faubourg Boisbriand. http://www .faubourgboisbriand.com/projet-résidentiel.html. Fédération québécoise des chasseurs et pêcheurs. 2012. Chasse en milieu périurbain. www.fedecp.com/grands-dossiers/chasse-en-milieu-périurbain Foglia, P. 1990. “Tous les jours.” La Presse (Montreal), 24 April, A5. Gagnon, L. 1989. “L’agence spatiale à Saint-Hubert: Voici comment on transforme une ville comme Montréal en trou de beigne.” La Presse (Montreal), 6 May, B5. Granjon, D. 2003. “La multifonctionnalité de l’espace métropolitain et l’agrotourisme en zone périurbaine (Montréal)” Canadian Journal of Regional Science / Revue canadienne de sciences régionales, 26 (2–3): 403–18. Levine, M.V. 1990. The Reconquest of Montreal: Language Policy and Social Change in a Bilingual City. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Linteau, P-A. 1992. Histoire de Montréal depuis la Confédération. Montreal: Boréal. Marsan, J-C. 1992. “La métropole.” Le Devoir (Montreal), 21 September, 4. Meney, L. 1999. Dictionnaire québécois français. Montreal: Guérin. Perron, N. 2012. “Le fait français: Enjeu montréalais et québécois.” in Histoire de Montréal et de sa région. Volume 2. De 1930 à nos jours, edited by Dany Fougères, 1209–47. Quebec City: Presses de l’Université Laval. Racine, J-B. 1975. “Un type nord-américain d’expansion métropolitaine: La couronne urbaine du Grand Montréal: géographie factorielle expérimentale d’un phénomène suburbain.” Doctoral dissertation, Université de Lille, 2 volumes. Sitwell, H.S., et al. 1869–71. Contoured Plan of Montreal and Its Environs, Triangu­ lated in 1865 and Surveyed in 1868–69. Southhampton, UK: Ordnance Survey Office. Trent, P. 2012. The Merger Delusion: How Swallowing Its Suburbs Made an Even Bigger Mess of Montreal. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Ville de Montréal. 1967. Montréal Horizon 2000. Montreal: Author.

6 Bombay’s Urban Edge: Villages, Suburbs, Slums, and the Expanding City N ikhi l R ao

Any discussion of the expansion of cities raises important questions in relation to the understanding of the urban fringe: what is it, and how do we speak about it? In an everyday sense, the urban fringe consists of suburbs and other settlements on the city’s edge, where municipal jurisdictions and/or built-up areas end and other municipal or districtlevel jurisdictions and/or the countryside begin. But for fast-growing coastal cities such as Mumbai (formerly Bombay), the urban periphery also refers to those edges that border not just other jurisdictions but the sea itself, as well as those spaces that are perceived as not properly assimilated into the formal city. For Mumbai, such spaces include longstanding fishing and agricultural villages that have been engulfed by the expanding city, as well as the large informal settlements that house a majority of the city’s population. The characterization of such large and long-standing communities by the Indian press as “slum pockets” and “seaside shanties” (Nair, 2014) unwittingly underscores the manner in which such settlements are seen to stand in the way of an inexorable progression towards a planned, rational, and orderly city, and thus constitute an urban fringe to the emerging “world city” (Anand, 2006). In the context of Mumbai, “suburbs,” “slums,” and “villages” are all terms that characterize the urban periphery. This essay examines the fluid and interconnected relationship between these terms from around 1910 to the 1960s. Variously used in characterizing the urban periphery in Mumbai, “slum” and, to a lesser extent, “suburb” are terms freighted with political implications and possibilities. As is noted in the introduction to the present volume, historically constituted terms “enabl[e] specific types of thoughts, conversations, and actions.” While its emphasis is on the way in which the

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terms used to characterize the urban periphery undergo changes in meaning in official discourse, both colonial and postcolonial, my chapter suggests that such terms are not restricted to official discourse. They have important resonances in the lives of ordinary people and are therefore incorporated into the everyday speech of ordinary residents of the city, even those who might not be English speakers. The implications of such usage of English words by non-English speakers are suggested by Nikhil Anand, who describes how residents of informal settlements in Mumbai often use the English word “pressure” when speaking about the struggle over water supply, as part of what he calls “the politechnics of water” (Anand, 2011). Explaining the usage of the word “pressure,” Anand suggests that the technical aspects of water supply and water pressure inform and structure the political possibilities available to residents of such settlements. The words “slum” and, to a lesser extent, “suburb,” linked as they are to official discourse and bureaucratic practice, make their way into everyday language. While Marathi and Hindi speakers might use the word upanagar (a rough translation of “suburb”) to describe where they live, the word “suburb” also plays a role in everyday speech, connected as the word is to a long conversation about the city’s periphery. The word “slum” is even more closely tied to the existential survival of the city’s informal settlements, through its usage in policies of “slum clearance,” “slum improvement,” and “slum rehabilitation.” Thus, while Hindi and Marathi terms like basti and zopadpatti are used in politically engaged fashion by residents to refer to the informal settlements in which they live, the word “slum” is also known and used, especially in political contexts. Understanding and elaborating these relationships between the terms “suburb,” “slum,” and “village” offers a historical perspective on how the urban fringe has been perceived, and therefore suggests insights into what kinds of interventions have been possible. Elsewhere, Douglas Haynes and I have argued that, beginning after the First World War, well before Independence in 1947, the term “colonial city,” used to describe Indian urban forms, began to lose coherence as urban governance and administration became increasingly Indianized (Haynes and Rao, 2013). Building on these arguments, this chapter underscores certain patterns that took shape between the late colonial period from about 1910 onward into the early postcolonial period of the 1950s and 1960s. While suburbs, slums, and villages changed in physical character in this interval, perceptions of the urban periphery also changed, and state practices were

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correspondingly modified. In particular, the urban periphery assumed a more variegated and complex nature. No longer was the urban periphery seen merely as the site for the suburb, an arcadian idyll that could solve the problems of the city, as originally envisioned in the late nineteenth century by the Bombay Improvement Trust (BIT), the principal planning entity in the first quarter of the twentieth century for the city. Rather, the urban edge emerged as a site for the location of the urban displaced and for impoverished new migrants to the city. In this sense, the story of modern Bombay, which began with a planned vision for suburban life, converges with the story of other cities in South Asia, where the category of the suburb, in the Anglo-American sense, had not gained much purchase because the urban periphery had always had a variegated character.1 Village, Suburb, and Slum in the Early Twentieth Century The problem of how to bring down structures that were either insanitary or obstructing urban expansion has been around for a long time in Bombay/Mumbai, at least since the tearing down of the city walls in the 1860s, if not longer. However, establishing an eminent domain mechanism became a pressing issue following the plague epidemics of the late nineteenth century, when the congested and ill-ventilated slums of the old city were seen to facilitate the spread of disease. Armed with an impressive new weapon in the form of the recently legislated imperial Land Acquisition Act of 1894, the newly formed Bombay Improve­ ment Trust set about attacking the slums of the old city with vigour, especially in areas such as Nagpada, Agripada, and Mandvi (Hazaree­ singh, 2007; Kidambi, 2007). Following precedent established in late Victorian British cities, the City of Bombay Improvement Act of 1898 formalized and systematized the procedure for slum clearance, establishing improvement schemes for those parts of the city deemed insanitary. In this discourse, no formal connection was made between the insanitary areas that were the target of improvement schemes and the word “slum.” However, by the second decade of the twentieth century, the term “slum” was in regular use to designate the insanitary areas that formed the object of legislation. The connection between slum, insanitary areas, and suburbs was most explicitly made in the debates between the BIT, which was dominated by colonial interests, and the Bombay Municipal Corporation (BMC), which was controlled by the Indian elite, over the Parel Road Scheme. This was a plan to create an

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arterial thoroughfare linking the older parts of the city in the south with the new suburban estates being developed by the BIT in the north of the island. Essentially, this fight between the BIT and the propertied landlords controlling the BMC was over the priorities for urban development, specifically the significance of the planned suburban developments of the BIT. Initially an enthusiastic proponent of slum clearance in the old city, the BIT had, in 1909, moved from “direct attack” on the problem of insanitary housing to what it called “indirect attack,” an approach that argued for developing the suburbs in the north of the island as a solution for the housing shortage in the old city to the south. The principal proponent of the indirect attack approach was the BIT’s chairman, J.P. Orr. The old method of direct attack had proved too expensive and long drawn out. It entailed wholesale acquisition of areas targeted for improvement and subsequent rebuilding, a practice made expensive by speculators’ habit of buying up land in advance. The use of direct attack was bankrupting the BIT. Orr favoured the idea of acquiring undeveloped land at the urban edge in advance and promulgating “street schemes” rather than “improvement schemes.” Acquiring land in advance meant that stricter building regulations could be imposed to prevent the possible expansion and morphing of acceptable buildings into congested and overcrowded slums. Broad arterial roads, such as the Parel Road under discussion here, led northward from the old city into new areas in the north of the island city that were being developed as suburbs through levelling, infill, and subsequent laying out of street patterns (Orr, 1917: 741–42). In the course of this re-orientation in the BIT’s slum policy, a significant transformation came about in the meaning of the “suburb.” In the BIT’s initial report proposing suburban development, made in 1899, its Improvements Committee had argued that “a movement [to suburbs] is natural, and it is the common experience of large towns.” The work of the BIT and the enforcement of building regulation in the old city “must encourage resort on the part of the well-to-do part of the population to the suburbs,” where land would be inexpensive and plentiful, and where “convenient private residences, with at least a proportion of garden space to each,” could be had.2 This understanding of suburbanization as some kind of “natural” process resulting in affluent groups relocating to suburbs where they could have gardens and private houses evoked a loose reprise of the English and German garden city movements in the Bombay setting.3 Just over a decade later, suburbs were envisioned very differently, as the critical element in the BIT’s indirect

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attack on the slum problem in the old city. Suburbs as imagined no longer contained “private houses” and “garden spaces” – an arcadian idyll for the wealthy – but rather were seen as sanitary and affordable housing to solve the slum problem. The suburbs had become nothing less than the means for “rehousing of the middle class slum population” that had been dishoused by earlier slum demolitions undertaken by the BIT in the old city.4 As the title of Orr’s paper cited here suggests (“Social Reform and Slum Reform”), the new understanding of the suburb reflected the growing perception among BIT officials that even large numbers of the city’s middle classes lived in slum-like conditions in the old city areas of Nagpada, and Mandvi, among others. This perception, in turn, was shaped by the realization among observers of the emergence of a new demographic grouping in the city: an upper-caste, lower-­middle-class group employed in the city’s growing service sector from around 1910 onward.5 The suburb thus was posed not just as the planned, sanitary, and orderly negation of the slum, but also as a sort of catchment area for bodies that would be compelled to leave the slum. An emerging semantic relationship between suburb and slum was complemented by an envisioned circulatory relationship in which an initial movement of bodies from slum to suburb would facilitate the eventual transformation of the slum through the logic of real estate economics. This change in the meaning of the suburb reflected an indigenization of the category, even as deployed by colonial planning bodies such as the BIT. While the idea of suburbanization and the word “suburb” had been used in India from the late eighteenth century to characterize the movement of Europeans from fortified settlements to houses in the countryside surrounding company settlements such as Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta, this usage had been in a more conventional European sense of the suburb as an arcadian escape from the congested city (Chopra, 2012: 84–85).6 By the 1920s, an Indianized usage of the word “suburb” was common among Indian residents of Bombay, as witnessed by the proliferation in this decade of columns such as “Suburban Goings On” and “Notes of a Suburban Man” in middle-class newspapers such as the Bombay Chronicle. From this time onward, the word “suburb” gained currency in everyday usage and was used to convey the lower-middleclass peripheral zone of the developed city, usually characterized by inferior services in areas ranging from law and order to infrastructure (Rao, 2013: 4).7 Meanwhile, the landlord-controlled BMC rejected indirect attack and sought to compel the trust to carry out improvement/clearance schemes

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in the older parts of the city, rather than choosing to focus on suburbs. In the lengthy debates on this issue, the BMC’s principal argument against the BIT was the fact that the latter body was obliged, as part of its own charter, to consider representations made by the BMC via the municipal commissioner. According to the arguments put forward in 1915 by Phiroze Sethna, the president of the BMC, the latter body had repeatedly “put up” representations in preceding years urging the BIT to undertake “slum improvement” schemes in the “insanitary areas” of the old city.8 The BIT was required to take these representations seriously, and if it decided not to undertake a slum improvement scheme, it was required to provide its reasoning. According to Sethna, the BIT was disregarding its obligation to provide good reasons for not undertaking improvement schemes, choosing instead to focus blithely on suburbanization and indirect attack, with no regard for the views of the BMC: “over and over again [the BMC has] … made united and strenuous efforts to induce the Board to undertake the work of slum improvements, but in vain.”9 The BIT fought to defend its indirect attack method against the direct attack sought by the BMC for years. From around 1910 onward, there was a growing tendency to legitimate land acquisition for suburbs at the city’s edge in terms of the changing character of this periphery. Whereas, previously, land at the urban edge had been acquired for suburbanization because it was undeveloped and relatively inexpensive, by this time, such a move came to be characterized also as a pre-­emptive strike against villages that were in imminent danger of transforming into slums. The following example of the BIT’s land acquisition in Sion, as part of the Sion-Matunga suburban scheme, captures some of these discursive shifts in the representation of the urban periphery. It involved a typically complex and arduous negotiation in 1911 between the BIT’s officer responsible for making awards in the event of land acquisitions, Special Collector Jehangir Dosabhoy Framjee, and the occupants of this plot of land, one L.C. Pereira and his family.10 As was common, it turned out that Pereira’s father had owed money to one R.D. Sethna, who therefore had a lien on the land. The special collector had to come up with a valuation for the land and the modest structure sitting upon it, factoring in depreciation and allowing for the absence of expected conveniences such as a privy and a finished floor. Following this negotiation, L.C. Pereira and his family petitioned J.P. Orr, already chairman of the BIT, for land in the immediate vicinity of the village on the basis of their claim that they “have been, and are, living in our present localities

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in the ancient village of Sion for a little over a century now” and depended on this land for work.11 Pereira’s claim was based on a logic of belonging and connection to the lands, and of dependence upon these for livelihood, which in turn was premised upon the village-like character of Sion and the agrarian landscape around it. This form of appeal was to gain in sophistication and purchase over the years, but at this stage it was summarily dismissed by Orr, who wrote that even though the Pereiras may live in the vicinity of Sion village, they “are not villagers nor are they dependent for their livelihood on any work, business, or trade carried on near their places of residence, and it is therefore obvious that their request cannot be entertained.”12 Orr’s response was based on denying the Pereiras’ villager status and asserting instead the fact of their incorporation into the peri-urban economy. Further, he was implicitly denying the village-like and agrarian character of Sion itself. Had the region around Sion much of an agrarian future, then perhaps the Pereiras might have remained. Assimilated as they were into the urban economy, they were also subject to its imperatives, such as displacement in the face of the advancing city. Interestingly, Orr followed up the next day with another letter, in which he informed the Pereiras that they could remain at their present site until work on clearing the area for the suburban scheme actually began. However, they would not receive the usual long-term leases, but rather would stay as tenants-at-will, subject to eviction at any point, as and when the BIT developed the lands for the scheme.13 This was also typical practice in peripheral areas where land acquisition for suburbs took place. The BIT was actually a much bigger operator than those it criticized for speculation. It essentially was seeking to capture all new lands and release them judiciously on to the market in such a way as to maximize lease rent returns. At the same time, the agency did not want land to lie fallow until the optimal moment came for alienating it on a long-term lease, a situation that might take years to come to pass. Therefore, it was common practice at the urban edge for the BIT (and later the BMC, after the latter subsumed the former between 1925 and 1933) to simply permit the “evictees” to remain and continue paying rent on a month-to-month basis as tenants-at-will, often for years and years, until it made economic sense to develop the land into urban plots and lease out at maximum possible rates. Over time, of course, this practice had important implications for the pattern of urban development.” On the one hand, urban governance went from the hands of the

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BIT and the colonial state to Indian hands in the form of the BMC; on  the other hand, the occupants themselves eventually mobilized and  gained voice through their political representatives. Both factors led eventually to increased bargaining rights for the occupants of such short-term tenures, whose status as tenants-at-will underwent an important shift: from being dependent on the “will” of their landlord – the BIT and then the BMC – they also became dependent on the “will” of their political patrons for the security of their tenancies. Just as the term “suburb” had shifted in meaning, the term “village” was also undergoing a semantic shift in this discourse, at least as deployed in urban settings. The “village,” as used in government discourse, was previously an official revenue category, a term deployed by the colonial government for an agrarian formation that included a physical settlement of huts and people as well as a certain amount of agricultural land to be assessed for land revenue purposes. In the discourse of the BIT, the villages on the city’s periphery were represented as “insanitary villages,” to be subjected to improvement schemes like the urban slums of the inner city. Although there was as yet no formal or legal connection between the “insanitary villages” of the periphery and the idea of the slum, the term “insanitary village” was being deployed by BIT officers to refer to slum-like settlements on the city’s edge that merited improvement schemes, just as did the inner-city neighbourhoods deemed insanitary. (Such inner-city neighbourhoods also had no formal or legal connection to the word “slum,” but the latter word was being used interchangeably with “insanitary areas” in official discourse to characterize them.) Instances of usage of the term “insanitary village” as almost a synonym for slum were common in the discourse of the BIT. I have written elsewhere of the petition of the villagers of Sion to the BIT seeking exemption from inclusion in the trust’s suburban schemes in the first decade of the twentieth century (Rao, 2013: 46–48). In his terse dismissal of the petition, Commissioner G.O.W. Dunn referred to the villagers as “residents of the small and insanitary villages” of the region before explaining that the “absorption” of such settlements into the expanding city was “in the nature of things,” and part of the “natural expansion” of the city on “sanitary principles” (Rao, 2013: 47). Such discourse changed the meaning of the villages on the urban periphery, with implications for practices. The language used to describe them was similar to that used to describe the inner-city neighbourhoods being targeted

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for improvement schemes. Although they were not yet formally called such, the use of similar language as that applied to inner-city areas was an important step in reclassifying the peripheral villages as slums. Over the course of the second decade of the twentieth century, the BIT and other colonial officers increased their efforts to characterize the villages on the urban edge as nascent slums. In 1914 the municipal commissioner made an official representation to the BIT in which he wrote that he “had received serious complaints as to the insanitary condition of Worli Village.” By seeking to represent this settlement in the northwest of the city as insanitary, he set in motion the mechanism to recast it as a slum.14 The report of the deputy land manager, which routinely accompanied the commissioner’s representations, showed the challenges attendant to recasting a fishing village as a slum.15 The residents are “practically all fisher folk whose landing place is Mahim Bay.” What made this village “insanitary”? The houses were “irregularly arranged” and “mostly old and out of repair.” They were made of timber and “thatched with cadjan leaves.” The debris from these leaves lay in the spaces between the houses, and cleaning up these leaves would “remove a harbouring space for rats.” Note that there is no mention of rats actually being present, or indeed of anything fundamentally wrong with Worli village other than that it was a village and not part of the city. The land manager’s report was essentially wrestling with the morphology of a village to re-present it as a slum by conveying an impression of overcrowding. In 1916, the municipal commissioner made another representation, to declare the village of Sewri Koliwada to be insanitary and the dwellings to be unfit for human habitation.16 Soon after this representation, Orr circulated among the board of the trust a report by the city’s executive health officer in which the latter listed both small and large insanitary areas of the city, including, prominently, the Wadala village and large parts of Mahim, in the northeast and northwest of the city.17 Things moved quickly from there. From about 1916 onwards, the situation in Bombay’s land market changed and a land price boom set off a scramble for land that lasted almost six years (Rao, 2013). If the BIT was bound to deal with insanitary slum areas, as the BMC was incessantly pointing out, and if at the same time it was committed to pursuing its indirect attack by suburbanization, then one way to meet both imperatives was to declare these peripheral villages to be slums and to thereby characterize suburban development in these peripheral areas as a form of slum clearance.

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In other words, the BIT effectively determined that the best way to turn a village into a suburb was to call it a slum. In 1919, fighting a rearguard battle against an increasingly assertive BMC, the BIT prepared and announced three gigantic new schemes on the city’s edge, all centred around long-standing villages that had been characterized as slums: Sewri-Wadala, Worli, and Dharavi. In the report made by the Improve­ ments Committee recommending these areas for development, it was noted that the Wadala scheme “includes the improvement of three very large and insanitary villages,” while the development of Wadala and Dharavi would have the added benefit of improving the values of lands in the BIT’s neighbouring Sion-Matunga estate, at present disadvantaged by these un-illustrious neighbours.18 By about 1920 the BIT’s housing practices, and especially its shift from direct to indirect attack on the slum, had established important patterns that endured. On the one hand, the criticism of its earlier clearance actions had compelled the BIT to acknowledge that rehousing was an important issue, and that slum clearance could not proceed without making allowance for rehousing. On the other hand, as demonstrated above, the BIT established the urban periphery as a space for rehousing the bodies dishoused by urban restructuring. Rehousing people in situ, which the BIT had originally sought to do in Nagpada, had proved too expensive, and, as a result, the agency had simply failed to rehouse those displaced in the early schemes. Moving people out to the periphery was legitimated by a discourse of orderly and affordable suburbs, but in practice many were shunted out to a more modest, often undeveloped urban fringe, where they were expected to gradually improve the land and ready themselves for the next wave of dishousing. Suburbs, Slums, and Gaothans in Greater Bombay The semantic slippage between the terms “suburb,” “village,” and “slum” used to characterize the urban edge continued – even intensified – as the city transitioned into the postcolonial period. The city’s industrial sector expanded and diversified over the course of the Second World War, and new migrants arrived to take up the jobs that were created. Taken in conjunction with decolonization and Partition, which led to an inflow of refugees after 1947, Bombay witnessed extraordinary growth in the 1940s, as a result of which the provincial government was finally able to execute a plan to expand the city by annexing large portions of the neighbouring island of Salsette (Rao, 2013: 198–234). On the

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books since the late 1930s, the expansion plan had been delayed first by the outbreak of the Second World War and then by the onset of decolonization. In the first of two successive annexations, the city of Greater Bombay was created in 1950. (The second annexation took place in 1957.) The physical and administrative expansion of the city had important implications for the ways in which suburbs, slums, and villages were spoken about. With annexation, the suburb in Greater Bombay acquired a specific legal and administrative meaning. Until 1950, the term had been used primarily in a descriptive way to characterize new areas in the north of the island of Bombay that were being developed as part of the indirect attack on the slum problem in the south of the city. These lands – in Matunga, Sion, Wadala, Sewri, Mahim, and Worli – had always been part of the administrative jurisdiction of the city of Bombay. From 1920 onward, large parts of Salsette Island just to the north of Bombay were designated as the Bombay Suburban District, with a view to facilitating planning for transport, communications, and water supply for those areas assuming a suburban relationship to Bombay. Following the eventual annexation of large parts of Salsette, areas that had had very different revenue histories, and that had come under British control much later than the island city, had to be assimilated into a single administrative framework. Such assimilation was partial. While the suburbs were all brought under the rubric of the renamed Municipal Corporation of Greater Bombay (MCGB), they continued to retain a separate identity as the Bombay Suburban District under a separate suburban collector, the official who was responsible for land revenue administration. Pre­ cisely because the suburbs had acquired a specific administrative designation associated with different levels of municipal services, the word had resonances well beyond the administrative world and into the everyday lives of the city’s residents. One challenge was that the parts of Salsette that had been annexed spanned more or less the entire range of forms, from well-developed urban areas such as Bandra to large agrarian tracts dotted with villages. Such a variety in morphology was matched by a wide spectrum of administrative categories, ranging from municipal councils in urban areas to village panchayats in agrarian areas that had previously been under the wing of the provincial land revenue administration. Obviously, such diverse forms of settlements also had widely differing infrastructure requirements, but all were expected to pay municipal taxes calibrated to Bombay city levels. The annexed communities expected the city to

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rapidly close the gap between the existing levels of service and the tax rates. When, predictably, this did not happen as soon as expected, the provision of services such as water, sewerage, electricity, transport, and so on became a major point of contention between the “suburbs” and the “city” (although both were part of the city of Greater Bombay). Meanwhile, the huge difference in character within the (new) suburbs – between the more urbanized areas such as Bandra, Chembur, Andheri, and Santa Cruz, and the large agrarian tracts with scattered villages – meant that “the suburbs” now lacked any unifying or common physical traits, resulting in a varied pattern of subsequent development. This diversity within the urban periphery is illustrated in the following example. Upon the second annexation of Salsette to Greater Bombay in 1957, the Municipal Commissioner of Greater Bombay gave a lecture titled “The Problems before the Expanded Greater Bombay” before a citizens group called the Citizens Civic Welfare Group.19 In this talk, Commissioner P.R. Nayak gave an extraordinary account of the villages of Salsette that were now under the jurisdiction of the MCGB, and of the extreme challenges faced by that body in delivering services: “The best we can do is to ascertain the basic needs of each village. Mind you, this is NOT a typical Indian village. It has a distinct urban bias. The majority of the people come to Bombay to earn their daily bread. Never­ theless the village has a rural background.” This almost nonsensicalsounding representation, with villages that have “distinct urban bias” as well as “rural background,” expressed the challenge of using static categories like “city,” “suburb,” and “village” to describe a fast-­changing urbanizing landscape.20 Nayak was also performing a rhetorical feat by then common among planning authorities, but pioneered in India by the BIT decades earlier. The formerly picturesque village, beloved by Gandhi and still held to be the backbone of Nehruvian India, was transformed in this linguistic operation into the kernel of urban malaise. Yet such a confusion of categories was a product of the very heterogeneity of the urban periphery, a zone where villages that were coming to resemble slums abutted (more or less) planned suburban developments. The linguistic and epistemological transformation of the village into the slum was completed in the annual reports of the MCGB, where the following account was given of the villages in Salsette, which had come under Bombay’s municipal jurisdiction: “Sanitary conditions in the numerous villages, ‘Gaothans,’ and outlying habitations have been far from satisfactory … Nothing short of slum-clearance schemes will however improve materially the sanitation of such areas” (Municipal

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Corporation of Greater Bombay, 1955: 11). The extraordinary prescription of a “slum-clearance scheme” to tackle what, until recently, had been perceived by administrators and residents as a village, illustrates how an epistemological shift precedes – and is a precondition for – state-led action against certain urban formations.21 It also represents continuity with the earlier actions of the BIT, and illustrates the ways in which the suburb, slum, and the village constituted fluid and interconnected elements of the urban periphery. Finally, the prescription of a slum-clearance scheme for an insanitary village signalled a convergence of the terms “slum” and “insanitary village” in legal discourse. From the mid-1950s, the municipal corporation had been granted explicit “slum-clearance” powers. These were different from the earlier powers of the BIT in that, for the first time, the word “slum” was being used in official, bureaucratic terms to characterize a settlement requiring intervention. As I argue above, earlier in the century, the word “slum” might have been used by colonial officials and by Indians to characterize certain kinds of settlements, but the term lacked a specific legal meaning in such discourse. From the mid-1950s, however, with the municipal corporation’s assumption of slum-clearance powers – which could be activated upon a certain area being officially designated a slum – the word acquired a legal force. This movement of the slum towards an official, legal, category culminated with the passage of the Maharashtra Slum Areas (Improvement, Clearance, and Redevelop­ ment) Act of 1971, which generated a specific list of attributes of officially recognized slums, and also outlined various interventions that could be undertaken.22 Even as villages on the urban edge became susceptible to “slum clearance,” some were able to obtain protections on the basis of their long-standing presence. Fishing villages in the island city that were confronted with BIT or BMC schemes were able, from the 1920s onward, to secure some form of in situ rehabilitation and a more or less protected status as koliwadas, or villages of the Kolis, the fishing community that inhabited these villages.23 Having established their longstanding residence in these areas and their dependence on the sea for their livelihoods, the Kolis’ victory in securing in situ rehabilitation marked a change from the case of the Pereiras from just a decade earlier. By the 1920s, urban authorities were occasionally permitting residents of villages that were being encompassed by the city to remain on site. Thus, as the island city of Bombay expanded to fill in undeveloped areas of the island in the 1920s and 1930s, the various remaining

Bombay’s Urban Edge  145

villages secured the right to remain, usually via concessions made by the municipal corporation (rather than through recourse to any piece of legislation). This was the case with Sion Koliwada, which gained just such a concession from the BMC’s Improvements Committee in 1938 (Banerjee, 2012). As the city grew into Salsette, and the agricultural lands surrounding the villages were built up, these villages also secured a more or less protected status as gaothans, a term derived from the earlier agrarian administration of the region, which referred to the space of the village (as opposed to the agricultural land that formerly lay around it). Such protected status, which came with certain extra developmental privileges and tenurial security, was won through struggle; as a result, the term gaothan acquired a new political significance. The term is different from the Hindi and Marathi word gaon, which is used to refer to a village in a rural setting. At various points over the course of the twentieth century, as the villages on the urban edge were swallowed up by the advancing city, the word gaon must have fallen out of usage for these urban villages, to be replaced by the politically more significant term gaothan. As with the koliwadas of the island city to the south, the gaothans also seem to have grown by accretion of subsequent waves of migrants who settled in and around the original village. Such accretions added to the growing illegibility of such settlements to outsiders, especially the state. Not only were slums displaying a wide spectrum of physical appearance, but they also had become much more complex in terms of who lived in them. Original residents belonging to the protected communities were joined by successive waves of migrants who were not necessarily protected, as they could not make the same claims on the land. This is undoubtedly what led to the proliferation of what Ghertner (2010) has called “rule by survey,” a practice of trying to distinguish the “legitimate” inhabitants of slums from the “illegitimate” ones. A final example illustrates the slippage between the terms “suburb,” “village,” and “slum” to characterize the periphery in urban discourse. I briefly alluded to the efforts by Padmakar Sawant of the Goregaon village to fight the impending annexation of his village in 1957 by the expanding city of Bombay, an annexation undertaken in order to better service the village as a suburb. As Nikhil Anand and Anne Rademacher (2011: 1756–57) have described, just a few years after Sawant’s petition, the activist Mrinal Gore was fighting to secure water supply from the city for suburbs like Goregaon. Shortly thereafter, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, Gore extended her campaign to secure water and other

146  Nikhil Rao

services for the city’s informal settlements, where she was already known as paniwalli bai (water lady) from her work for securing water for the suburb of Goregaon. Slum and suburb, rather than being in counterpoint to one another, were now on a continuum of settlements with inadequate services. In her campaigns, Gore was known for her slogan, issued before mass demonstrations of slum residents in front of municipal buildings: “Slum eradication nahin, slum sudhaarne ka kaam karo” (Don’t eradicate the slums, fix their problems and improve them) (ibid.: 1756). This example illustrates how the English word “slum” had found its way into the language of protest and politics of the city’s nonelites, precisely because of its legal-bureaucratic significance and its link to official policy. By 1976, when the state government undertook its first comprehensive effort to enumerate the city’s slums and their residents, only 21 per cent of the slums were concentrated in the island city, while the suburbs housed the remainder (Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai, 2014). The concentration of slums in the city’s suburbs suggests two important changes. First, the concentration of slums on the city’s periphery marked an extraordinary turnaround from the debates earlier in the century, when the well-designed suburbs were intended to absorb the flow of population from the slums to the south and thereby effect a transformation in the slums themselves. Second, the concentration of slums in the suburbs suggests that the meaning of “slum” itself had widened. From the insanitary tenement districts of the old city, the meaning of the term had broadened to include village-like settlements in the suburbs and on the urban periphery. Conclusion This chapter has sought to show the manner in which the urban fringe in Bombay came to assume a complex and variegated nature over the course of the middle decades of the twentieth century. These changes took place at both the physical/material level as well as the level of perceptions. In other words, the physical character of the urban edge changed from a realm of emerging planned suburbs in the early twentieth century to a more complex mixture of suburbs, slums, and villages by the 1960s. At the level of perceptions, such changes led to significant blurring and overlapping of the distinctions between these three terms. State authorities sought to label villages at the urban edge as “slums” in order to subject them to urban intervention and transform them into “suburbs.”

Bombay’s Urban Edge  147

How we label or name the urban fringe also has important implications for the possibilities available to residents in these settlements to assert their own claims. Consider just one recent example: an effort by the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai to officially reclassify several of the city’s gaothans as slums in order to enable slum-clearance and “rehabilitation” actions and bring these spaces into alignment with the vision of Mumbai as a world city (Nair, 2013). As might be expected, this proposal provoked consternation among the residents of these gaothans, who had been expecting the corporation to grant them a secure status by designating them as “heritage” precincts, which meant that they would be protected under conservation rules from redevelopment undertaken by developers, who are extended huge incentives to redevelop (Anand and Rademacher, 2011 describe how this process works.) Thus far, this example illustrates the way in which labelling a space as this or that – in this case, the gaothan as a heritage precinct or a slum – can have important implications for what kinds of actions are possible, be it conservation or demolition and redevelopment. Yet the story does not end here. While most residents of gaothans protested the corporation’s attempted redesignation of their residences as slums, some others supported this move. The argument of the latter group was that the residents of gaothans could avail themselves of their new status as slum dwellers by taking over the redevelopment and taking advantage of the incentives offered by the government. In other words, they could secure extra building rights, which they could then sell off at a huge profit if they successfully executed the redevelopment themselves (Nair, 2013). This example shows that the way in which the urban fringe is labelled structures multiple possibilities for those who reside there. As might be expected, there is no single, consistent designation for the urban edge in large and expanding cities like Mumbai. This chapter has sought to elaborate how a shifting and overlapping set of labels emerged to characterize the evolving cityscape at the urban edge. Pay­ ing attention to how these labels and terms can slide into one another offers insight into political possibilities and constraints. NOTES I am grateful to Richard Harris and Charlotte Vorms for their comments on an earlier version of this article. I am also grateful to Shri Chandrashekhar Chore, then assistant municipal commissioner, Estates Department, Municipal

148  Nikhil Rao Corporation of Greater Mumbai, for permission to consult the records of the department. 1 Richard Harris suggests as much in his survey of the language(s) used to characterize the urban periphery in South Asian cities (Harris, 2017). While he concludes that the “suburb” simply does not have the taken-forgranted sense in South Asia that it has for the Anglo-American context, his essay notes that various terms used to characterize urban expansion, such as “colony” and “extension,” can have a life because of the bureaucratic significations these terms carry. 2 Report of the Improvements Committee No. IV, 1 September 1899, in Minutes of 4 September, BIT Proceedings [1899], 79, MCGM Estates Depart­ ment. The members of this committee are not named, but at this early stage in the BIT’s life, the committee would have been dominated by colonial interests. 3 The idea of the suburb as a retreat from the pressures of city life, especially the slum, was of course quintessential to the way in which these terms were framed in the English context (Dyos and Reeder, 1973). 4 J.P. Orr, “The Dishousing and Rehousing of the Middle Class Slum Population in Bombay,” paper reproduced in Minutes of 25 March, BIT Proceedings [1919], 115–17, MCGM Estates Department. 5 For more on new ideas of the middle class from the 1910s onward, see Rao, 2013: 71–74. See also Kidambi, 2010. 6 For a more detailed consideration of this European form of suburb in the Indian context, see Archer, 1996. 7 See Rao, 2013: 76–82 for a discussion, based in part on letters to the editor of the Bombay Chronicle, of how the word “suburb” was being used by lower-middle-class residents of these areas from the 1920s onwards. 8 Letter of Phiroze Sethna, president, BMC, to chairman, BIT, 30 July 1915, in Minutes of 21 September, BIT Proceedings [1915], 231–38, MCGM Estates Department. 9 Ibid., 236. 10 BIT Scheme VI, Case File No. 1197, MCGM Estates Department, n.p. 11 Petition of L.C. Pereira and others to chairman, BIT, 4 October 1911. BIT, Scheme VI, Case File no. 1997, MCGM Estates Department. 12 Letter of chairman, BIT, to L.C. Pereira and others, 12 October 1911, ibid. 13 Letter of chairman, BIT, to L.C. Pereira and others, 14 October 1911, ibid. 14 Letter no. 37892, Municipal Commissioner to the Board, Improvement Trust, 26 March 1914, Minutes of 11 August, BIT Proceedings [1914], 143, MCGM Estates Department.

Bombay’s Urban Edge  149 15 Report of Deputy Land Manager, BIT, no. 5502 of 8 May 1914, ibid. 16 Letter no. 16337, Municipal Commissioner to the Board, Improvement Trust, 4 August 1916, Minutes of 24 November, BIT Proceedings [1916], 262, MCGM Estates Department. 17 Appendix A to the Minutes of 29 January, BIT Proceedings [1918], MCGM Estates Department. 18 Report no. 1 of the Improvements Committee, 14 March 1919, Minutes of 25 March, BIT Proceedings [1919], 112, MCGM Estates Department. 19 Speech of P.R. Nayak as quoted in “3 Million Problems Need to be Solved,” in Davur, 1957: 3. 20 The problems with using the word “suburb” to categorize fast-changing and heterogeneous landscapes at the urban edge seem to have been noted from early in the history of modern suburbanization. For an account of how the problem with the word was understood in the case of nineteenthcentury London, see Wohl, 2002: 293. The instability of the urban edge, where city, suburb, village, and slum collide against one another, is a welldocumented feature of the fast-growing cities of today, resulting in what Mike Davis calls a “hermaphroditic landscape” (Davis, 2006: 9). 21 For an account of how the words “village,” “suburb,” and “city” were deployed by residents of one of these villages, see the petition of Padmakar Balkrishna Sawant in 1957 against the state of Bombay, challenging the expansion of the Bombay city limits to encompass the village of Goregaon and dissolve that village’s panchayat, or council of village elders. Sawant’s petition explicitly invoked the integrity of the latter body against the encroaching city, emphasizing the authenticity of traditional life. Ironically, the Goregaon village panchayat as it existed at the time was also an administrative unit created by the colonial state, and Sawant’s petition was more a protest against the prospect of increased taxation (Rao, 2013: 202–3). 22 Lisa Bjorkman (2014: 41) discusses the codification of official slums in the 1971 act. 23 See the appeal of Kolis of Worli for in-situ rehabilitation and the subsequent concession by the BIT to provide them with accommodation near their village. Meeting of 2 September, BIT Proceedings 1919, 368–9, MCGM Estates Department. REFERENCES Anand, N. 2006. “Disconnecting Experience: Making World Class Roads in Mumbai.” Economic and Political Weekly 41 (31) 5 August: 3422–29.

150  Nikhil Rao Anand, N. 2011. “Pressure: The PoliTechnics of Water Supply in Mumbai.” Cultural Anthropology 26 (4): 542–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360 .2011.01111.x. Anand, N., and A. Rademacher. 2011. “Housing in the Urban Age: Inequality and Aspiration in Mumbai.” Antipode 43 (5): 1748–72. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2011.00887.x. Archer, J. 1996. “Colonial Suburbs in South Asia, 1700–1850, and the Spaces of Modernity.” In Visions of Suburbia, edited by Roger Silverstone, 26–54. London: Routledge. Banerjee, S. 2012. “Last Stand at Sion Koliwada: Where the Spectre of Demoli­ tion Looms.” The Hindu, 4 June. http://www.thehindu.com/news/states/ last-stand-at-sion-koliwada-where-the-spectre-of-demolition-looms/ article3487219.ece. Accessed 4 November 2014. Bjorkman, L. 2014. “Becoming a Slum in Liberalization-Era Mumbai.” Interna­ tional Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38 (1): 36–59. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1111/1468-2427.12041. Chopra, P. 2012. “Free to Move, Forced to Flee: The Formation and Dissolution of Suburbs in Colonial Bombay, 1750–1918.” Urban History 39 (1): 83–107. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0963926811000794. Davis, M. 2006. Planet of Slums. London: Verso. Davur, D.R. 1957. “Goings on in Greater Bombay.” Bombay Chronicle, 14 January. Dyos, H.J., and D.A. Reeder. 1973. “Slums and Suburbs.” In The Victorian City, edited by H.J. Dyos and M. Wolff, 359–87. London: Routledge. Ghertner, A. 2010. “Calculating without Numbers: Aesthetic Governmentality in Delhi’s Slums.” Economy and Society 39 (2): 185–217. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1080/03085141003620147. Harris, R. 2017 (in press). “Transnational Urban Meanings: The Passage of “Suburb” to India, and Its Rough Reception.” In Making Cities Global: The Transnational Turn in Urban History, edited by A. Sandoval-Strausz and N. Kwak. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Haynes, D., and N. Rao. 2013. “Beyond the Colonial City: Re-evaluating the Urban History of India, ca. 1920-1970.” South Asia 36 (3): 317–35. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2013.814617. Hazareesingh, S. 2007. The Colonial City and the Challenge of Modernity: Urban Hegemonies and Civic Contestations in Bombay City, 1900–1925. Hyderabad, India: Orient Longman. Kidambi, P. 2007. The Making of an Indian Metropolis: Colonial Governance and Public Culture in Bombay, 1890–1920. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.

Bombay’s Urban Edge  151 Kidambi, P. 2010. “Consumption, Domestic Economy, and the Idea of the “Middle Class” in Late Colonial Bombay.” In The Middle Class in Colonial India, edited by Sanjay Joshi, 132–56. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Municipal Corporation of Greater Bombay. 1955. Annual Administration Report for Bombay in 1954–55 (Suburbs). Bombay: Government Printing Press. Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai. 2014. “Urban Basic Services in Slums.” http://www.mcgm.gov.in/irj/go/km/docs/documents/ MCGM%20Department%20List/City%20Engineer/Deputy%20City%20 Engineer%20%28Planning%20and%20Design%29/City%20Development%​ 20Plan/Urban%20Basic%20Services%20in%20Slums.pdf. Accessed 29 October 2014. Nair, M. 2013. “BMC Plans to Declare Gaothans as Slums, Residents to Protest.” Hindustan Times (Mumbai), 10 January. http://www.hindustantimes.com/ mumbai/bmc-plans-to-declare-gaothans-as-slums-residents-to-protest/ story-qSG7yrCI3PSssjNhKC4yIJ.html. Accessed 28 October 2014. Nair, S. 2014. “State Wants MoEF to Revise Slum Redevelopment Clause.” Indian Express (Mumbai), 19 May, 1–2. Orr, J.P. 1917. “Social Reform and Slum Reform, Part 1.” Local Self Government Gazette 3 (10): 740–50. Rao, N. 2013. House, but No Garden: Apartment Living in Bombay’s Suburbs. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.5749/ minnesota/9780816678129.001.0001. Wohl, A. 2002. The Eternal Slum: Housing and Social Policy in Victorian London. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

7 Kampungs, Buitenwijken, and Kota Mandiri: Naming the Urban Fringe on Java, Indonesia F reek C olomb ijn an d Ab idin Ku s n o

The boundary between what we will call the urban “fringe” or “outskirts” and the rural environment of Javanese towns and cities have been vague and porous since at least the first European travellers published their observations of the island. For instance, Willem Lodewycksz ([1598] 1997: 14), sailing on the first Dutch fleet to the Malay Archipelago, was struck by the vastness of the towns on Java, which blended imperceptibly into the surrounding rural areas. Arguably the most important reason for this blurred boundary between urban and rural areas is the fact that kampungs (Indonesian: kampung; Dutch: kampong or kam­ poeng), which can refer to both an urban neighbourhood and a rural settlement, were, and continue to be, elementary components of Indonesian cities. Hence, the British colonial administrator John Crawfurd (quoted by Reid, 1993: 87) wrote in 1820 that cities in the Malay Archipelago were no more than “an aggregate of villages,” referring to kampungs. T.G. McGee (1995: 11) coined the term “desakota” (literally: village­ town) to describe a “last [= outer] zone of urbanization, where nonagricultural activity is increasingly mixed with agriculture.” The physical vagueness of the urban-rural boundary has been matched by a conceptual vagueness. Local meanings of the term kampung differ from place to place, and time to time (Sullivan, 1992: 20), and academics have willingly refrained from giving unequivocal definitions (Krausse, 1978: 11; Nas et al., 2008). Urban kampungs can be characterized by a seemingly unorganized layout and, to the outsider, a lack of “legibility,” which stemmed from their inception and development. Kampungs have sometimes evolved in the urban centre as squatter settlements on vacant land, but more often they began as a rural village, which was absorbed into an expanding city. These villages were

Kampungs, Buitenwijken, and Kota Mandiri 153

initially spaciously built with plenty of land around the houses for fruit trees and without an overall plan of streets. Plots of land were of irregular shapes and sizes, and paths zigzagged between the plots. With the lapse of time, intensification of the built-up area took place by adding new buildings (often after the subdivision of plots of land) and demolishing previous buildings to replace them with new ones, usually of a more permanent nature. The seemingly unorganized layout has remained. Kampungs figured prominently in the popular Dutch colonial imagination, as exemplified by travelogues (e.g., Van Maurik, 1898), guides for European women leaving for the colony (Swaan-Koopman, 1932: 11), postcards (Bonneff and Grant, 1994: 67; Haks and Wachlin, 2006), and city maps.1 Kampungs also became the focus of attention of colonial administrators and intellectuals. The Dutch entrepreneur, benefactor, and member of the Semarang municipal council, H.F. Tillema, self-published books like Kampongwee! (Kampung sadness!) (1919) in an attempt to provoke a state reaction to the appalling living conditions in kampungs. Middle-class journalists who ventured into the kampungs returned in shock (see Van H., 1933). The houses were self-built and made, in part, of whatever material was available. Consequently, no two houses looked the same and often no alignment was discernible. Drain­age and sewerage was insufficient. The colonial image of kampungs as insalubrious and disorderly places, and yet elementary parts of Indonesian cities, is crucial for an understanding of most state and private efforts to create new urban spaces since colonial times. State and private actors have not only attempted to improve the conditions, but they have also developed new concepts, and actually built new neighbourhoods, as counterpoint to kampungs. We argue that, while new towns or suburbs in Indonesia may have been inspired by models from the West, the naming of the new neighbourhoods at different moments in Indonesian history as buitenwijken (outer neighbourhood) and kota mandiri (self-sufficient town) has not been derived from these Western models, but stems from a denial of, or an opposition to, kampungs. In other words, the conception of the kampung is responsible for the formation of suburban neighbourhoods. We show how discourses about the kampung produced conceptions of new neighbourhoods at the outskirts of the city during colonial and postcolonial eras. We start with the Explanatory Memorandum of the 1938 Town Planning Ordinance, which was the first document that sought to conceptualize the city, and proceed to examine discourses of

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colonial development projects and new towns in the postcolonial era. We show how the creation of buitenwijken and kota mandiri, as well as the naming of the new neighbourhoods at the outskirts of the city, stems from the perception of urban kampung as an environment incompatible with what is perceived as the need for the construction of the modern city and the nation. The Kampung in the Colonial Town Planning Ordinance The theorizing of spatial ordering in the colony began with the 1903 Law on Decentralization which opened the way to establishing autonomous municipal councils and administrations. Batavia was the first municipality, established in 1905, soon followed by over a dozen other towns.2 The municipal councils became the first stage where problems and goals of urban development were extensively discussed. Commu­ nication between the respective municipalities and the central government, as well as the establishment of the Association for Local Interests (Vereeniging voor Locale Belangen) in 1912, stimulated an exchange of ideas across the archipelago. The association had a membership of urban administrators, planners, private architects, and others interested in urban development. Its annual congresses and its magazines, Locale Belangen and Locale Techniek, were important platforms where professionals exchanged views and gradually developed a certain consensus on the issues at stake and the way cities should ideally develop. Most of the participants in these debates were Dutch, but a growing number of Indonesian civil servants in high positions and municipal councilors took part in them as well. Leading Indonesian professionals were fluent in Dutch, but in the 1930s most articles in these journals were also published in Malay to make them more accessible for people who were literate but were not proficient in Dutch. Moreover, municipalities disseminated information in Malay through the radio (Van Roosmalen, 2008: 44). In 1938 the debates on urban development in colonial Indonesia culminated in a seminal text, the aforementioned Explanatory Memorandum of a proposed Town Planning Ordinance of Cities on Java (Toelichting op de “Stadsvormingsordonnantie Stadsgemeenten Java”). The memorandum was written and published by a commission, of which the architect and town planner Thomas Karsten and J.H.A. Logemann, an expert in agrarian law, were the principal authors.

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The Explanatory Memorandum analysed tangible problems of urban development by looking at underlying patterns, and presented general views on colonial society and urban life. Colonial society, according to the memorandum, was composed of various ethnic groups who all fought to further their own economic interest, with little regard for society as a whole. The outcome of this situation was a Hobbesian “battlefield” (slagveld), in which all groups competed over urban space (Toelichting, 1938: 82; emphasis in the original). “Disorderliness” (rommeligheid) was the most important negative consequence of this struggle, and state-led zoning was the principal strategy to counter it. Meanwhile, the memorandum indicated that undesirable “peripheral phenomena” (periferie-verschijnselen) had occurred at the urban fringe, such as land speculation, the uncontrolled transition from rural to densely built urban kampungs, and ribbon development.3 Ribbon development (lintbebouwing) resulted in a disorderly mixing of all sorts of buildings. It also disfigured the town as a whole, stretching it too far, driving up the cost of the provision of services, and prohibiting the core function of cities: bringing people together to have intensified contact (Toelichting, 1938: 49). Furthermore, ribbon development brought forth extra traffic; and, according to the memorandum, traffic was “an inevitable disadvantage, which consequently must be kept as minimal as possible.” Ideally, travel would take place in the most inexpensive and healthiest way – that is, on foot (ibid.: 45, emphasis in original). Two years after the Town Planning Ordinance was made public, Karsten (1940) published a seven-page guideline on how to draw up a town plan, which appeared both in the form of a brochure and via Locale Techniek. In that guideline, the most important division of building types – in line with the Town Planning Ordinance – is between detached dwellings and dwellings with a closed front. Karsten also proposed that, if desired, the urban territory could be divided into “‘inner’ and ‘outer city’” (“Binnenstad” en “Buitenstad”). The inverted commas around the terms “inner” and “outer city” indicate that Karsten was not yet sure of the terms. The Dutch version of the guidelines was accompanied by a Malay translation of the text, in which, for want of a local word, the familiar Dutch word buitenwijk was used (Karsten, 1940: 6, 13).4 The unavailability of the local term, like the inverted commas hinting at a certain uncertainty on the side of the usually self-assured Karsten, suggests the newness of the territorial division of “inner” and “outer” areas in the colony.

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Buitenwijk (literally, outer neighbourhood) was a Dutch term that was commonly used in the Netherlands, but in the colony the term stemmed from a relationship between the inner city and the outskirts filled with clusters of kampung growing in population size and density. For Karsten, the buitenwijk, by virtue of inexpensive lands, represented the area of detached houses with large yards in contrast to the centre, where houses (and offices and shops) were built with a closed front (Karsten, 1923, 1936). Colonial Urban and Suburban Development Projects Colonial municipalities did not only attempt to conceptualize urban space by town planning, but they also interfered more directly by purchasing and selling land, building low-cost housing, and executing socalled kampung-improvement projects. By the 1920s, kampungs became the object of state intervention, which focused on the physical appearance: giving dirt roads a hard surface, rebuilding open sewage canals in concrete, and straightening building lines. Through these physical interventions, the state hoped that social and mental changes among the kampung population would automatically follow. The ultimate goal of kampung improvement was therefore not only the built environment, but a paternalistic pedagogic attempt to “modernize” the indigenous people (Colombijn, 2010: 183–227; Colombijn and Coté, 2015; Kusno, 2000: 125–35; Wijono, 2015). The project to improve kampungs constructed the kampung as an underclass neighbourhood, a negative reference for the upper middle class. This middle-class construction was ironic, perhaps cynical, because the root cause of the problems was the displacement of kampungs by middle-class and elite housing, forcing residents to live together in the remaining kampungs. Concomitant with the kampung-improvement project for the underclass was thus the preparation of lands at the outskirts of the city for middle-class and elite housing. However, the first major development projects at the outskirts of large port cities all took place on private estates with seigniorial rights. The estates had been established in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, when the Dutch and English East India Companies sold large tracts of land with seigniorial rights to retired Dutch officials and well-to-do Chinese. Colonial developers (from both the state and the private sector) of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries favoured the large estates in the outskirts and rural environments of the cities because they could develop the land as

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a whole. An early example of this enterprise was the Kepoetran Development Corporation (NV Bouwmaatschappij Kepoetran), established in 1888 to develop the Kepoetran estate on the outskirts of Surabaya. These development projects were called uitbreidingsplan (extension plan; see, e.g., Plate, 1918), but they are better known by the local names of the private estates on which they were established, such as Goebeng and Darmo in Surabaya, Gondangdia and Menteng in Batavia, Mlaten in Semarang, and so on. The popularity of local toponyms rather than the Dutch generic term uitbreidingsplan expresses the historical rootedness of the real estate projects to the locales. These projects, however, remained private and characteristically individualistic. While the street plan within them was carefully designed, it was only poorly connected to the rest of the city (Van Roosmalen, 2008: 74–89). Among the development projects on private estates, Nieuw (New) Tjandi, south of Semarang, occupied a unique place. It offered the idea of heuvelterrein (hHill area).5 The Heuvelterrein of Semarang superficially built on the old colonial belief that the hills are healthy, in contrast to the unsavoury port cities. The development of the Heuvelterrein, however, was not rooted in this trope in the first place, but found its origin in medical statistics compiled by Doctor De Vogel, a member of Semarang’s municipal council, who found that average mortality figures in kampungs in Semarang were highest near the coast and steadily dropped inland. De Vogel had gone as far as to suggest that kampungs had to be moved to the hills and, when he was on leave in the Nether­ lands in 1907, he commissioned an architect to draw the first extension plan of the Heuvelterrein. The plans were revised several times until a satisfactory development plan was finally drawn up by Karsten. In 1939 the mayor of Semarang congratulated the Heuvelterrein residents for the pleasure of living in a “healthy and pretty residential area” (gezonde en fraaie woonwijk), a “glory of hygiene, comfort and beauty for people of all financial means” (glorie van hygiene, levensgemak en schoonheid voor alle beurzen) (Boissevain, 1939: 5). Contemporaries commented especially favourably on the fact that both the elite and kampung housing had been taken care of – all in the extended space of the city (Flieringa, 1930: 165; Westbroek, 1931: 167). The Heuvelterrein was unique in colonial Indonesia: it was the only plan that envisioned a large real estate project as an integral part of the city as a whole. It roughly doubled the size of the city. While downtown offered employment, the Heuvelterrein offered a residential area. By grouping plots with similar sizes, people from a similar class (but with

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different ethnic backgrounds) would come to live together. Kampungs were planned at the foot of the hills or in the valleys not too far from employment opportunities in the centre. These planned kampungs were called gemeentekampongs (municipal kampungs – in our view a contradiction in terms) and constituted emblems of modernity and regularity, the counter image of the older kampungs in the city. A certain class hierarchy was nevertheless retained. The hills formed residential areas for middle-class people and the elite, offering them nice views (Van Roosmalen, 2008: 45–49, 52–57; Westbroek, 1931: 167–71; Wijono, 2015). While the municipal planners deemed regularity essential for the gemeentekampongs, a Baroque pattern of endlessly winding and unpredictable roads was allowed in this elite neighbourhood. Thus, out of the colonial context emerged themes such as urban disorder, class formation, the threat of kampungs, and urban fringe areas as heuvelterrein and buitenwijk. These themes have continued to the subsequent eras. Kebayoran Baru and the Space of Transition Dutch colonial rule came to an end in 1942 following the Japanese invasion of Indonesia. In 1945, two days after the Japanese surrender, the independent Indonesian Republic was proclaimed, but the Dutch accepted the new political reality only in 1949 and only under international pressure. Between 1945 and 1949, the Dutch reconquered most of the cities – while the Indonesian Republic controlled the countryside – and resumed the administration as if they planned to stay for an indefinite time. The 1940s were crucial for urban development in Indonesia, because physical destruction, economic disruption, a partial breakdown of the urban administration, and an explosive growth of the urban population all simultaneously occurred in just one decade. One major problem was the mushrooming of squatter settlements, which we would rather call “irregular” than “illegal” settlements. Squat­ ting had occasionally been tolerated in Dutch times, but only on a modest scale. The Japanese actively encouraged squatters to occupy urban land. During the Indonesian Revolution, Republican leaders encouraged Indonesians to squat on Dutch-owned lands as a gesture of defiance to the resumption of colonial rule by the Dutch. The Republican leaders then discovered that, after the genie had escaped the bottle, it was difficult to get it back in. The postcolonial government tried in vain to end the construction of houses on “illegally” occupied land. The problem of squatting was insoluble because of extremely rapid urbanization,

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especially of Jakarta, which truly became the prime city, growing from half a million residents in 1940 to one-and-a-half million by 1950, and almost three million by 1960 (Colombijn, 2010: 207–24, 414). Squatting, however, was certainly not restricted to Jakarta. No special term was used for a settlement of squatters as a whole, but the houses on these plots were called roemah liar (wild, or unauthorized, houses) and roemah tanpa izin jang sjah (houses without legal permit); the Dutch term wilde occupatie (wild occupation) was also used. The national government was unable to build housing for the masses, but it did make a determined effort to house its own civil servants. By far the most important housing development project of the 1940s was Kebayoran Baru. Kebayoran Baru (New Kebayoran) was a new town built south of Jakarta near an existing village, Kebayoran. It was a product of the postwar struggle over power and legitimacy as the Neth­ erlands, reoccupying its former colony, sought to show its commitment to reconstruct Indonesia. As a project of pacification urgently needed to  help stabilize the Dutch position against the recently proclaimed Republic of Indonesia, the project was carried out in a hurry. The government approved the plan in 1948, and the design was finished and construction already started the following year. The concept of Kebayoran Baru was an innovative idea, going against Karsten’s ideal of a compact city with minimal traffic. According to the then prevalent ideas, a satellietstad (satellite town) had to be built at a minimum distance of fifteen kilometres from the old town to be a viable new settlement, but the Dutch army was unable to guarantee security at such distance from Jakarta. As it was, the Dutch were even unable to control the situation at the chosen site, at only eight kilometres from the city centre, where construction sites were regularly attacked and plundered. Consequently, to the state, the meaning of the urban fringe changed from being a buitenwijk with controllable problems like ribbon development to an outspokenly dangerous and unruly zone, not only in Jakarta, but also in Bandung and cities outside Java. This continued into the 1950s (Colombijn, 2010: 240, 299–304; Van Roosmalen, 2008: 183–85). The plan for Kebayoran Baru was designed by Soesilo, an Indonesian planner trained by Karsten before the war and employed by the Dutch Central Planning Bureau. Soesilo and the head of the planning bureau, Jac. P. Thijsse, wanted the town to be truly autonomous with, at least in appearance, a self-sustainable character. Kebayoran Baru was planned to have seven thousand houses, along with shops, schools, mosques,

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churches, fresh produce markets, and cinemas. The spatial language of its master plan shows an attempt to find a new form in society. The space was organized by income, but all different housing types were equipped with homogeneous modern comforts. Class was not considered as a divisive category. Instead, it was supposed to carry the power of unifying the ethnically segmented society that had just left the War of Independence behind. Class identity, unlike ethnic and religious affiliations, was considered as neutral, and societal upward mobility was a non-political course of action. Without these assumptions about class identity and societal upward mobility, a new town like Kebayoran Baru could not have been conceived as a site for modernization of Indonesians. Yet, Kebayoran Baru was never a utopian space for the lowest income group. Initially, houses in the town were foremost intended for the lowest income group, even though the features of the town are characteristically bourgeois. After the transfer of sovereignty, when the violence had subsided, however, the moderate and higher income groups took over much of the housing stock, demolished the houses that had just been delivered and built their own instead. Since then, Kebayoran Baru has even been perceived as the garden city of the Indonesian elites. In the 1950s the city government of Jakarta (by then in Republican hands) called Kebayoran Baru a kota satelit (satellite town). This was a literal translation of the Dutch word satellietstad, but the meaning was different. For the Dutch it had indicated an independent place, which was actually situated too close to Jakarta for their liking. For the Indo­ nesians, in contrast, Kebayoran Baru was seen as an extension of Jakarta and had to be located within the boundary of the city. In the first book published by the municipality after the transfer of sovereignty, Keb­ ayoran Baru is designed to be located within ten kilometres of Freedom Square (Lapangan Merdeka), the symbolic centre of the city. Kebayoran Baru “should not be too far from Jakarta so that workers and staffs still can work in the city” (Republik Indonesia, 1952: 301). This statement turned the argument made in 1948 that the new town should ideally be fifteen kilometres from the centre on its head. In practice, the connecting road quickly filled with ribbon developments from both ends, so Kebayoran Baru soon lost its character of a satellite town (Van Roos­ malen, 2008: 184). As if to renew the image of the city, in the 1950s, the municipality of Jakarta referred to Kebayoran Baru as its first “new town” (kotabaru). The single word kotabaru seemed to represent an attempt to create a

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new vocabulary to refer to the newness of the place. It embodied modernity. Kebayoran Baru had the art deco Majestic theatre, and it was built with new “modern” machinery such as bulldozers and scrapers. The city government believed that the kotabaru of Kebayoran Baru should be preserved for modern people from Jakarta, and it did not consider the local, rural population as suitable occupants of the new town. The modern people were those considered as middle class. The new town thus symbolized some kind of aspiration and hope for the city and the nation. So iconic was Kebayoran Baru that different attributes were continuously produced. It was once called “Puri Selatan kota Djakarta” (the temple of South Jakarta), with “Puri” connoting the idea of a holy land (Republik Indonesia:, 1952: 301). Ironically, it was a Dutch critic, V.R. van Romondt, who accused Soesilo of having forsaken Indonesian vernacular principles of town planning in Kebayoran Baru, but Soesilo countered that, after independence, Indonesia was reorienting itself towards an international culture, in which Western impulses dominated. Hence the new town had to be Western (Van Roosmalen, 2008: 183–85). Kebayoran Baru received much attention in post-independence Indonesia and became a point of reference for the subsequent building of new towns. Meanwhile, the idea of a new town also stimulated development at a  smaller scale by the Jakarta government in the 1950s. Governor Soemarono Sostroatmodjo recalled how new housing complexes should be built as a “unit of town of its own” (sebuah unit kota tersendiri), which would have “villas, a market, a school, a mosque and houses of minimum standard” (Sostroatmodjo, 1981: 402). Within such a unit, Sostroat­ modjo continued, “the villa owner would have no difficulty in finding a driver who lives in the minimum standard house. Meanwhile [nearby] kampung dwellers [whose kampung condition had been upgraded] could work as house cleaners or cooks in the villas, or they could open food stalls [warung] to accommodate customers who may be coming from the villas” (Sostroatmodjo, 1981: 402). The governor tolerated kampungs as far as they were “orderly” (teratur); only then could a kampung be accepted as a supporting part of a new “unit of town.” This earlier housing project (which sought to integrate kampungs into a new housing project) is fundamentally different from the subsequent housing strategy. Under the New Order of Suharto (1966–98), kampungs occupied a separate domain outside the formal housing provided by the real estate industry and the National Housing Corporation.

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The 1950s were an interesting period, as the decade was filled with experimentation, from the distancing of the kampung in Kebayoran Baru to the incorporation of kampungs into the muncipality’s housing projects. There was the naming and renaming of Kebayoran Baru and the inclusion as well as the exclusion of the kampung. The 1950s were also the decade during which we have encountered the very first use of the word “suburban.” During that decade, Jakarta began to work on the formulation of an outline plan, with the help of British and American experts. The Indonesian head of the Urban Development Section of Jakarta, Lucius O’Brien, wrote a typescript manuscript to explain planning procedures for the benefit of the expat experts. His exposé dutifully follows Karsten’s guidelines of 1940, but the headings (English in the original) “center” and “edge” of one table were corrected with a pencil into “urban” and “suburban” (O’Brien, 1956: 8). Most probably, this change was made on the instigation of the Anglo-American experts, probably by K.A. Watts, an urban planner sent in by the United Natopms. The New Order’s New Towns The optimism from independence gradually gave way to economic hardship, disappointment about corrupt politicians, and hardening political dividing lines. In 1965 General Suharto seized power and established what has been called the New Order, where the state aimed to resume the modernization project from independence, but combined with an oligarchic, market-oriented economy. New towns were created in response to Suharto’s New Order, along with new terms that were considered marketable by the developers that created them. The New Order did not become directly visible in urban development, but 1976 seems to be a special year for urban development, as several real estate projects were exhibited at the Jakarta Fair (Pekan Raya Jakarta). The exhibit was accompanied by models, maps, drawings, master plans, and brochures. They all showed that the future of Jakarta was not going to be located in the city. Instead, it was at pinggiran kota (the outskirts) and in the hands of developers. Indeed, by the early 1970s a strong sense had developed that it was no longer possible to rely on Jakarta to showcase the image of the nation. The city had gained the unflattering reputation of “the largest urban village in the world” (kampung terbesar di dunia). The only way to plan for the future of Jakarta

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was to expand “residential areas that are good and orderly” (pemukiman yang baik dan teratur). The metropolitan press reported that recently “the swamp and farmlands at the outskirt of Jakarta have become the playground for developers. The area has been transformed [dijelma] into locations for residential projects known by the name ‘real estate’” (Kompas, 1976), an English term that was still new in Indonesia. The most prominent of the real estate exhibits was the Pondok Indah (Beautiful Hut), a project located in the middle of rubber trees and farmlands just south of Kebayoran Baru. A newspaper proclaimed it “an ideal location” for a “satellite town” and called it “the new Kebayoran Baru” (Kompas, 1976). Following Kebayoran Baru, Pondok Indah brought together national planners and American architects, who were also involved in designing the expansion of areas of California. The real estate was to be of international standards, with upper-class facilities (including a golf course) and different styles for each house (ibid.). With Pondok Indah, according to a metropolitan press, “we will be able to replace the image of ‘big village’ with the image of a modern city that is not second to any big city in the world” (ibid.). Pondok Indah was only the beginning of a much greater ambition for a larger new town so big that it could be autonomous from Jakarta. Ciputra, the developer of Pondok Indah and many other real estate projects in Indonesia (and abroad), recalled: Jakarta is “a mosaic of chaos … unconnected roads, factories in houses. Construction is everywhere while flooding could be found here and there. I therefore start to dream, a utopian dream … of a city with order [teratur] … Jakarta is already too crowded. You can imagine Jakarta’s population in 2005, about 12 million. Remember it is only 12 years from now” (Ciputra, 1989). Nothing is comparable to Ciputra’s dream of a kota mandiri (self-­ contained city), known then as Bumi Serpong Damai (BSD). It was ­defined loosely by Ciputra as “a city … that is dynamic enough to constitute a life of its own economically, socially and culturally … We don’t want Bumi Serpong Damai to become like a ‘dormitory city’ [kota asrama], such as Pondok Indah, which harnesses Jakarta for facilities” (Suara Pembaharuan, 1989). Instead, BSD is a “future city” (kota masa depan) and it is meant to be “better than Jakarta.” This aspiration is a long way from the efforts to integrate the Heuvelterrein of Semarang into the rest of the colonial city.

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A decade after the dream, in 1995, BSD was featured in a major advertisement: The good life starts now. Ciputra’s dream of developing Bumi Serpong Damai (BSD) into a Self-Contained City (Kota Mandiri) has been realized. The city located in the Southern part of the Tangerang Regency, West Java, now looks amazingly complete, even though only the first phase has been finished. This is because all supporting facilities needed for such a large new city have already been made available. When fully completed, it will cover 6,000 ha of land and be the home of 600,000 people. BSD is much more than just a collection of residences, it includes a CBD [central business district], shopping centres, a hospital, and sporting and recreational facilities. (Indonesia Property Report, 1995)

The sense of newness trumps the idea of being at the outskirt of the city. For Jo Santoso, one of the chief planners of BSD, “the new city project can be seen as an attempt by this new ‘middle class’ of realizing their ‘dream’ to create a new living environment that is able to accommodate their prerequisites for a higher standard of life” (Santoso, 1992: 36; emphasis added). The keywords here are “new” and “higher.” The name Bumi Serpong Damai connotes peace on earth. The notion of peace suggests an affiliation with a cluster of keywords that surrounded the establishment of Suharto’s New Order, such as “order” and “stability.” The notion of bumi, while it refers to the “earth,” connotes the idea of “rootedness” and “stability” of a new centre. Through names, one could see the construction of an unworldly future where “the good life” could start from a city imagined to be autonomous, selfsufficient, and detached from Jakarta. The kota baru of BSD and Pondok Indah connote an outlook of originality, of being relatively autonomous and significantly different, of being more modern, advanced, and forward looking. Developed largely by private developers, these “new towns” are associated with an escape from the untrustworthy, over-burdened, and decaying city. Nationalism and the Politics of Naming All through the New Order era, the names used for the new town were largely neutral with respect to ethnicity or religion, even as one can discern a class dimension in the terms. “Nature” (alam) (often through

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the notion of “garden,” taman) was often evoked, as were the ideas of “prosperity” (jaya) and “peace” (damai). These terms, associated with order, harmony, and beauty, seemed to follow the cultural politics of the state as well as the dreams of the middle class, but they also served to neutralize conflicts over issues of legality, justice, land rights, and the environment that often marked the real estate industry at that time. Terms, however, cannot always be domesticated, especially those that transcend contexts and histories. As more and more loan words from English were incorporated into the repertoire of the real estate industry (and other businesses as well), the alarmed government believed they became uncontrollable and began to threaten the integrity of the national language. In the mid-1990s, when property business was at the peak, the minister of housing was disturbed by what he saw as an excessive use of English terms to represent housing. He stated that about 70 per cent of real estate housing used foreign names: “all kinds of village, all kinds of regency, the term city is very popular. Some like to use grand, apartments, and mall. Some Indonesian words are made foreign, as “seni” becomes art, “legenda” becomes legend. What do all these mean?” (Bisnis Indonesia, 1995). There is an ironic twist of history here: European colonial developers had preferred vernacular names for their housing projects built on private estates, while Indonesian developers had chosen Western-sounding names. The minister of housing, though, was not amused by such irony and urged developers to use “proper Indonesian terms” (bahasa Indonesia yang baik dan benar) for their projects. “It is the time now. Aren’t we celebrating the 50th anniversary of Independence? It is time now to use Indonesian language properly” (Bisnis Indonesia, 1995). After the minister threatened to revoke their licences, many developers changed the names of their projects from English to Indonesian names. Lippo Village became Lippo Karawaci; Sentul Highland became Bukit Sentul, Citra Garden became Perumahan Citra. Ciputra Group, for instance, changed the names of their many properties, an enterprise that cost the company 2 billion rupiah. There was a hidden issue behind this debate among nationalists in the government and the developers (associated with Chinese Indonesians). A major developer declared, “by using Indonesian names, it also shows that we, in the business sector, have a strong commitment to society, to be the pioneers in promoting the spirit of nationalism” (Riady 1995: 35).6 The real estate industry is a business filled with insecurity. Its

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mission of providing a quality-built environment is often seen as dividing the city, and its branding through English terms is seen as unpatriotic and lacking national consciousness.7 The Pondok Indah and BSD projects we have explored so far belonged to private housing industries that provided houses mostly for the upper-middle-class population. If private companies have sought to accommodate the dreams of the upper middle class for a new town, where has the state’s moral economy gone in the housing industry? As indicated, the history of the Indonesian new town came in tandem with the rise of Suharto’s regime and its own moral economy that “the government will permit greater freedom for business, but will continue to put greater stress on the interests of society as a whole rather than individual or group interests” (Suharto, [1970] 1997: 54, emphasis added). In the last section we explore the state housing company and its production of space. Perumnas (the National Housing Corporation) refers to the state housing company that was given a mandate to build houses for the lower class. The division whereby Perumnas builds and sells houses for the lower class while private real estate developers cover the middle- and upper-class market was an invention of the New Order (Kompas, 1984). This division has contributed to a city divided by class and has produced a sense of exclusivity and social tension between the upper- and lower-income neighbourhoods. The Dormitory Town of Depok Through Perumnas, the state has also become involved in the construction of new towns outside Jakarta, in this case for the lower middle class (civil servants), to overcome the seemingly unsolvable problem of kampungs standing in the way of “development” (pembangunan) and the state of “progress” (maju). The first and the best-known Perum­nas housing project was in Depok. The project was expected to turn Depok into a kota baru (new town) for 100,000 people (from its existing 30,000 people) and make the town a cornerstone in the realization of Jabotabek megaurban region (Sinar Harapan, 1975; Zebua, 1976). In 1976, Perumnas built some 5,000 houses in Depok, largely for civil servants working in J­ akarta. This development attracted over 10,000 applicants before the official registration date. Different types of houses were provided to suit individual family needs, but not everyone was eligible for Depok housing. Eligible applicants needed to have Indonesian citizenship, could not

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own another home, had to have a regular income (which meant prioritizing civil servants, military personnel, and salaried staff over self-­ employed people), and could have no past communist affiliation. Depok’s housing is based on the separation between working (in the city) and living (in the suburb). It offers only houses, with very few facilities like shops or schools to support the household. Depok’s housing complex thus was known as a “dormitory town,” referring to a place where (largely) men returned home after work, only to sleep. The Perumnas government housing in Depok was thus received with a mixed feeling of blessing and despair. It started with the idea of providing houses for lower-income, salaried workers, but very little effort was put into making the housing complex attractive for buyers. There were complaints about the poor design (with a toilet in the front yard instead of the back yard), low-quality materials, focus on quantity instead of quality, and little concern with the marketability of the product (Suara Karya, 1979a). Over time, the product of the National Housing Corporation acquired an unfavourable image and was considered inferior. It sought to create orderly housing, which permitted very little change (Suara Karya, 1979b), but, by 1984, seven years after the complex had been occupied, the monotonous Depok housing began to be replaced by varieties of house forms, sizes, and colours. Its face changed. The occupants added space, planted trees, and fashioned the yards according to their needs and tastes (Sumardjan, 1984). The development of new towns that we have discussed so far appeared incidental, gradual, and discursive, but they were consistent with a new planning concept, known as JABOTABEK, an acronym for JakartaBogor-Tangerang-Bekasi, four cities that form a mega-­agglomeration (Pratiwo and Nas, 2005). This concept (itself developed from an earlier proposal by a team of Dutch planners in the late 1940s) was proposed in the 1970s by planners in the Directorate of Human Settlements. The aim of the planning concept was to control the urbanization of Jakarta by including three (and later four) smaller towns (Bogor, Tangerang, Bekasi, and later Depok) in the planning of the metropolitan area. This idea received support from the state and led to the growth of new towns in the surroundings of the metropolis. The conceptualization of megaagglomerations has been followed by Surabaya, with the somewhat difficult to pronounce amalgam Gerbangkertosusila, but like JABOTABEK, the term “Gerbangkertosusila” provided a conception for the production of new space.

168  Freek Colombijn and Abidin Kusno

Conclusion The appearance of a new term represents a production of new space, and a term makes a space that had no significant meaning before. The terms buitenwijken, heuvelterrein, kota satelit, kota mandiri, and others used for housing projects at the outskirts of the city have been attempts to create meaning in new spaces and to mark the arrival of a kind of suburban solution to the city problems. These spatial terms, supposedly beyond the capital or the city limit, were previously unknown to Java, for Javanese spatial conception recognizes no boundary that would differentiate centre and periphery or urban and the peri-urban. These new terms, as this chapter has aimed to show, were invented in response to the accelerated growth of kampungs within the city, which was considered to be potentially dangerous and to threaten the order of the streets. The new spaces at the outskirts of the city were not intended to facilitate the immediate needs of kampung inhabitants. Instead, they were invented to facilitate class formation as well as to mend the inefficiency of city management and inadequate urban infrastructure. They signify a space of hope for those who wish – and are able – to leave behind the city marked by inadequate public services and conflicts over space. The “new towns” at buitenwijken or the heuvelterrein are associated with an escape from the untrustworthy, over-burdened, and decaying city. In this chapter we traced the production of space through new terms back to colonial time and have shown how such formation came in tandem with changes in the politics of governing the colonial city, as well as how town planning intersects with class formation. We have also shown the influence of colonial discourses on the postcolonial creation of new towns and how they were inseparable from the political context of the time. As shown, a major change in representations of Indonesian cities after independence is that naming practices increasingly reflected the actual divisions based on class. Regardless of the difference, we have shown in this chapter how at each attempt to construct new terms and new towns, there is the shadow of the kampung. Meanwhile, kampungs continue to grow irregularly between and around the new towns and middle- and upper-class neighbourhoods. In this sense, kampung is continuously produced in and around the new town, even as the latter is built to negate the former. And there are other

Kampungs, Buitenwijken, and Kota Mandiri 169

contradictions. While the new town is often advertised as a secured gated community, it is always permeated by maids, drivers, security guards, gardeners, and vendors – subjects who are associated with the surrounding kampung and who provide services for the new town. Meanwhile, houses in the new town are often converted to shops, offices, churches, subcontractor’s workshops, and restaurants. They betray the names of the new town. A well-planned new town can become an unplanned neighbourhood once it is occupied. Such an evolution would call for another new town in another expanded space to continue a never completed formation of a suburb. NOTES 1 See, e.g., the 1924 “Plan of Bandoeng” (Weltevreden, Indonesia: G. Kolff) and the 1940 “Gemeente Soerabaja” (Soerabaja, Indonesia: Van Ingen). 2 Batavia (Jakarta) was the largest city in the colony, counting just over half a million residents in the last reliable census from colonial times (1930). 3 Shortly after the publication of the Explanatory Memorandum, the colonial town planner, Jac P. Thijsse, who would briefly be the most influential urban planner after the Second World War, would use the more negative term “periphery excesses” (periferie-excessen; Thijsse, 1940: 51). 4 There is an interesting slippage between the Dutch and Malay text. For example, the Dutch word “guidelines” (richtlijnen) in the title is translated with the more compelling “requisites” (syarat). 5 Semarang, the third largest city of the colony (160,000 residents in 1920), had a progressive government and in the late colonial times often set an example for other municipalities. 6 For a discussion on how the contestation over foreign names in the real estate business is connected to the position of ethnic Chinese in property industries and the Suharto regime, see Kusno, 2000: 156–61. 7 We do not know of words from Javanese or other local languages used in the names of such projects. Neither are we aware of variants in local languages for generic terms like kota satellite or kota baru. Indonesia counts over three hundred local languages. Long before independence, nationalists decided that Indonesian (Malay) would be the national language. Planning concepts were developed at the national level, and we deem it much more likely that national (Indonesian-language) words entered the local languages, than that local equivalents were formed.

170  Freek Colombijn and Abidin Kusno REFERENCES Bisnis Indonesia. 1995. “Pengindonesiaan nama property Padamu Negeri, kami berjanji,” 2 April. Boissevain, H.E. 1939. “Rede van Mr. H.E. Boissevain, Burgemeester van Semarang, op 10 November 1939.” In Nieuw-Tjandi 25 jaar 1914–1939: Supplement op het gedenkschrift uitgegeven door de stadsgemeente Semarang ter gelegenheid van het 25-jarig bestaan van Nieuw-Tjandi, 5–7. Semarang, Indonesia: n.p. Bonneff, M., and Stephan G. 1994. “’Bon baisers de Batavia’: Cartes postales des Indes Néerlandaises.” Archipel: Études interdisciplinaires sur le monde insulindien 47 (1): 53–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.3406/arch.1994.2968. Ciputra. 1989. “Obsesi Ciputra.” Suara Pembaruan, 16 January. Colombijn, F. 2010. Under Construction: The Politics of Urban Space and Housing during the Decolonization of Indonesia, 1930–1960. Leiden, NL: KITLV Press. Colombijn, F., and J. Coté. 2015. “Modernization of the Indonesian City.” In Cars, Conduits, and Kampongs: The Modernization of the Indonesian City, 1920–1960, edited by F. Colombijn and J. Coté, 1–26. Leiden, NL: Brill. Flieringa, G. 1930. De zorg voor de volkshuisvesting in de stadsgemeenten in Nederlansch-Indië in het bijzonder in Semarang. Rotterdam: Rotterdamsche Boek- en Kunstdrukkerij; Amsterdam: L. van Leer. Haks, L., and S. Wachlin. 2006. Indonesië: 500 oude prentbriefkaarten. Rijswijk, NL: Elmar, Atrium. Indonesia Property Report. 1995. 1, 2, 3rd Quarter. Karsten, T. 1923. “Over het klasse- en zonestelsel der Buitenzorgse bouwverordening.” Locale Belangen 12: 348–60. Karsten, T. 1936. “Het ontwikkelingsplan der gemeente Malang.” I.B.T. Locale Techniek 5: 59–72. Karsten, T. 1940. Indische stedebouwkundige richtlijnen. With a Malay translation by Soesilo. Vereeniging voor Locale Belangen, Technische Mededeeling no. 16. Batavia, Indonesia: Kolff. Kompas. 1976. “Pondok Indah menjangkau masa depan dengan lingkungan hidup yang baru.” 17 July. Kompas. 1984. “Sebaiknya Terpisah, Kompleks Perumahan Golongan Ekonomi Tinggi dan Rendah.” 10 December. Republik Indonesia: Kotapradja Djakarta-Raja. 1952. Jakarta: Kementerian Penerangan. Krausse, G.H. 1978. “Intra-urban Variation in Kampung Settlements of Jakarta: A Structural Analysis.” Journal of Tropical Geography 46: 11–26.

Kampungs, Buitenwijken, and Kota Mandiri 171 Kusno, A. 2000. Behind the Postcolonial: Architecture, Urban Space and Political Cultures in Indonesia. London: Routledge. Lodewycksz, W. [1598] 1997. De eerste schipvaart naar Oost-Indië onder Cornelis de Houtman, 1593–1597. Reprint, Nijmegen, NL: Sun. McGee, T.G. 1995. “Metrofitting the Emerging Mega-urban Regions of ASEAN: An Overview.” In The Mega-Urban Regions of Southeast Asia, edited by T.G. McGee and I.M. Robinson, 3–26. Vancouver: UBC Press. Nas, P.J.M., L. Boon, I. Hladka, K. Sudarmoko, and N.C.A. Tampubolon. 2008. “The Kampong.” In Indonesian Houses. Volume 2. Survey of Vernacular Architecture in Western Indonesia, edited by R. Schefold, P.J.M. Nas, and G. Domenig, 645–67. Leiden, NL: KITLV Press. http://dx.doi. org/10.1163/9789004253988_022. O’Brien, L. 1956. “Methods of Preparing Housing and Community Improve­ ment.” Typescript. Het Nieuwe Instituut, Archive Thijsse, Rotterdam. Plate, A. 1918. “Het uitbreidingsplan der Indische gemeenten.” De Ingenieur 16: 274–97. Pratiwo and P.J.M. Nas. 2005. “Jakarta: Conflicting Directions.” In Directors of Urban Change in Asia, edited by P.J.M. Nas, 68–82. London and New York: Routledge. Reid, A. 1993. Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680. Volume 2. Expansion and Crisis. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Riady, J. 1995. “Lippo Group Hails Nationalism.” Indonesia Business Weekly 3 (26), 12 June: 35. Santoso, J. 1992. “The Bumi Serpong Damai New Town: A Large PublicPrivate Partnership Urban Land Development and Management.” Trialog 32 : 35–40. Sinar Harapan. 1975. “Depok menjadi sebuah kota baru: Perumnas bangun 4,791 Rumah.” 13 October. Sostroatmodjo, S. 1981. Dari rimba raya ke Jakarta Raya. Jakarta: Gunung Agung. Suara Karya. 1979a. “Depok II, proyek perumahan terbesar yang diresmikan penghuniaannya hari ini.” 31 May. Suara Karya. 1979b. “Perumnas akan bangun perumahan murah di lebih dari 70 kota.” 10 March. Suara Pembaharuan. 1989. “Lahirnya sebuah Kota – BSD.” 16 January. Suharto. [1970] 1997. “Indonesia Launches Its Development Offensive.” In The Politics of Economic Development in Indonesia, edited by I. Chalmers and V. Hadiz, 53–55. London: Routledge. Sullivan, J. 1992. Local Government and Community in Java: An Urban Case-study. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

172  Freek Colombijn and Abidin Kusno Sumardjan, S. 1984. “Sebaiknya terpisah, kompleks perumahan golongan ekonomi tinggi dan rendah.” Kompas, 10 December. Swaan-Koopman, C. 1932. Vrouwen in Indië. Amsterdam: H.J. Paris. Thijsse, J.P. 1940. “De groei van Bandoeng en de daaruit voortspruitende vraagstukken.” Locale Techniek 9: 51–55. Tillema, H.F. 1919. Kampongwee! Groningen, NL: A.S. Tillema-Weehuizen and H.F. Tillema. Toelichting op de “Stadsvormingsordonnantie Stadsgemeenten Java.” 1938. Batavia, Indonesia: Landsdrukkerij. Van H. 1933. “Op excursie.” Onze Stem 14: 1280–82. Van Maurik, J. 1898. Indrukken van een “Tòtòk”: Indische typen en schetsen. Amsterdam: Van Holkema and Warendorf. Van Roosmalen, P.K.M. 2008. “Ontwerpen aan de Stad: Stedenbouw in Nederlands-Indië en Indonesië (1905–1950).” PhD thesis, Technische Universiteit, Delft, NL. Westbroek, H. 1931. “De woningdienst.” In Gedenkboek der gemeente Semarang 1906–1931, 155–77. Semarang, Indonesia: De Locomotief. Wijono, R.S. 2015. “Public Housing in Semarang and the Modernization of Kampongs, 1930-1960.” In Cars, Conduits, and Kampongs: The Modernization of the Indonesian City, 1920–1960, edited by F. Colombijn and J. Coté, 172–92. Leiden, NL: Brill. Zebua, V. 1976. “Pemerintah mulai membangun perumahan unutk rakyat: Dibangun bukan untuk yang berpenghasilan Rp.90.000 lebih.” Suara Karya, 7 June.

8 From Favela to Comunidade, and Beyond: The Taming of Rio de Janeiro Ra fael Soar e s Gon çalve s a nd Fr an c esca P il o’

Since the end of the nineteenth century, favelas have been a striking feature of the city of Rio de Janeiro. Although the term subúrbio (suburb) has also been widely used since then to refer to poor neighbourhoods along the city’s railway lines, the term favela has gained greater infamy. Unlike subúrbio, which refers to outlying neighbourhoods, the term favela, as we will discuss below, is associated with settlements featuring irregular land ownership and buildings in locations that may be close to the urban centre.1 Valladares (2006) and Gonçalves (2013) have traced the history of the construction of the term favela, showing that a long, cumulative process systematically associated favelas with lawlessness, classifying them as informal land use where builders have ignored regulations. This negative connotation has had significant repercussions on the everyday lives of favela populations and attests to the power of law in assigning social realities and institutionalizing specific classifications of social structures. The law is an act of identification that, as argued by Anselm Strauss (1997), involves placing the object in a category. The fact that favelas are generally identified as informal, marginal, and illegal spaces has allowed them to be considered indiscriminately as uniform spaces whose dwellers are a risk to the city and to society. This chapter examines the different terms that are used to name favelas. First, it discusses the process by which an official conception of favela was constructed; it then examines the gradual spread of the term comunidade (community) used to name favelas; and lastly, it considers current local efforts to promote the term comunidade urbanizada (urbanized community) to distinguish certain favelas from others.

174  Rafael Soares Gonçalves and Francesca Pilo’

What Is a Favela? Genesis and Implications of the Official Concept In 1897, following the armed conflict at Canudos in Bahia State, soldiers who had fought for the Brazilian Republic against the messianic leader Antonio Conselheiro returned to Rio de Janeiro, which was then the federal capital. They were assigned to a hill near the Ministry of De­ fence, between the Central do Brazil railway station and the docks. This hill was soon known as Morro da Favella (Favella Hill), after a hill in the town of Canudos and a plant, Cnidoscolus quercifolius, known locally as favela, that grew there. Records suggest that, by the second decade of the twentieth century, the word favela was being used to describe other hillside settlements that shared similar informal characteristics with Morro da Favella, and soon the term was applied to informal communities in lowland areas as well (Gonçalves, 2013). Valladares (2006) has indicated that the conflict in Canudos was important in sharpening the symbolic contrast between the civilized coast and the backward hinterlands of Brazil. This contrast has also been present since the inception of favelas in Rio de Janeiro, distinguishing them from other neighbourhoods – that is, from the civilized city. The informal occupation of the city’s hills continued unwaveringly despite the negative connotations associated with the term favela since its origins. Once a temporary solution for homeless soldiers, in the early decades of the twentieth century favelas received a steady influx of new dwellers who had been evicted from their homes as public health clearance campaigns demolished aging tenements and a succession of urban reforms transformed the city core. Ever since, favelas have been considered epicentres of disease and urban marginality. Meanwhile, they were also home to the development of a genuinely carioca2 popular culture. This latter aspect is reflected both in the efforts of modernist artists, from the 1920s on, to depict the favelas and in the political interest in the favelas and their inhabitants shown by Mayor Pedro Ernesto (1931–36).3 The mayor toured and campaigned there, subsequently introducing the first public services and granting official recognition of the local samba organizations. However, by 1937 Pedro Ernesto no longer headed the municipal administration. That year saw the enactment of the Municipal Building Code, which officially condemned the favelas. The 1937 code was the first legal text to employ the term favela. This code, which reinforced the systematic association between favelas and illegality, strongly influenced urban policies towards favelas for decades

From Favela to Communidade and Beyond  175

to come (Gonçalves, 2010). Paradoxically, however, introduction of the term favela in this legal document also led to the official recognition of the existence of such communities. The code remained in effect in Rio de Janeiro until the 1970s and served as a model for other Brazilian cities. Today, over a thousand favelas housing more than a million residents are spread throughout Rio de Janeiro. The rapid growth of these communities is attributable largely to the arbitrary and selective use of urban legislation. At least until the 1980s, this legislation defined favelas as illegal areas that were eventually to be replaced by small government-built dwellings. Favelas were tolerated, but neither formally recognized nor officially integrated into the city. In light of this, it is possible to deconstruct numerous statements frequently made regarding favelas. First, public authorities have never been absent from favelas. This is true, even if the argument is currently used to enhance the alleged accomplishments of recent public policies. Favela formation and expansion has never been a peripheral or spontaneous process; it depends on the tolerance and even direct support of the authorities. Many favelas, for example, were set up on public land, often with the consent of the local authority. Similarly, although until the end of the 1970s it was prohibited to install public infrastructure inside Rio’s favelas, such plans were often approved using a variety of subterfuges. For example, since the 1930s, water pipes have been installed in favelas, and authorities allowed individuals and committees to sell electric power long before local companies provided an official supply. Nonetheless, precarious acceptance did not necessarily result in actual recognition. In practice, application of relevant law was informed by the logic of patronage. Tolerance for such spaces was granted as a favour and used as a medium of exchange: the quintessential image is one of community standpipes being installed on the eve of elections. In other words, the public authorities were not absent; rather, they tried to perpetuate the favelas’ precarious and provisional nature. Although the 1937 housing code condemned the favelas,4 it also guaranteed certain rights to favela dwellers: they could not be evicted without being rehoused. Pradoxi­ cally, this provision meant that designating an area as a favela would grant its residents rights not enjoyed by those occupying land in areas not so designated. This situation holds to this day: both Article 234, VI of the Rio de Janeiro State Constitution and Article 429, VI of the Municipal Organic Law guarantee the principle that favelas cannot be cleared, stipulating

176  Rafael Soares Gonçalves and Francesca Pilo’

that the residents may be evicted only where physical conditions place their lives at risk. Even in such cases, certain procedures are mandatory: evictions must be supported by a technical assessment by a competent municipal body; the community and its organizations must have access to effective participation in the process; and any relocation must be to a place near their existing residence or work. Although there are incongruities in the legal provisions relating to favelas, the fact that current urban legislation in Rio de Janeiro expressly prohibits the eradication of favelas makes their legal definition especially important. This is clear when considering the debate over draft amendment No. 9/2005 to the Organic Law of Rio de Janeiro City, which attempted to modify the content of Article 429. This bill proposed not only to broaden the scope of justifications for clearance but also to modify the concept of favela, stipulating that only agglomerations with more than a thousand inhabitants would be termed favelas.5 Despite the term’s negative connotation, the city government’s classification of certain areas as favelas ensures their residents certain rights, as discussed above. As a result, in situations of conflict, favela residents have been able to take recourse that the legal category favela grants them. In fact, another aspect that has to be examined is the role played by favela dwellers themselves. Several studies of favela-based social movements have shown that residents have mobilized from the outset to claim their right to the city (Lima, 1989; Silva, 2005; Fischer, 2008; Gonçalves, 2013). Residents have an advanced legal culture and always had access to lawyers and the courts. This also shines new light on the active role played by favelas residents in what Stephen Conn (1968) has defined as the sui generis legal status of the favelas. From the 1980s onwards, as policies were introduced to extend title and urbanization in favelas, the legal concept of favela had to be reworked to enable them to be integrated into the legal order. The new juridical order introduced by the 1988 Constitution brought new guarantees and rights. Subsequent revised definitions of favelas, however, such as that included in the 1992 Ten-Year Urban Plan, continued to highlight the ambiguous nature of these spaces, underlining particularly their negative features. According to Article 147 of the plan, “For the purposes of implementation of the Ten-Year Master Plan, a favela is a predominantly residential area, occupied by low-income groups, with poor urban infrastructure and public services, narrow, irregular streets, land lots of irregular shapes and sizes, and unlicensed constructions in breach of legal standards.”

From Favela to Communidade and Beyond  177

There have been attempts, at least in regard to land ownership, to broaden the concept of favela, including the definition of aglomerados subnormais (subnormal clusters) introduced into the national census in 1991 by the Brazilian Geography and Statistics Institute (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística, IBGE). The institute applies this expression to “favelas and similar low-income settlements,” defined as a neighbourhood consisting of at least fifty-one residential units (shacks, houses, etc.) occupying – or having until recently occupied – land owned by others (public or private) and generally disorderly and densely arranged and mostly lacking essential public services. Within this definition, favelas are not necessarily disordered or lacking essential public services. Despite the negative connotations of the term “subnormal clusters” utilized to indicate these sites, at least this new concept offers the prospect of considering a new definition of favelas, one that goes beyond thinking strictly in terms of their hazy legal status. However, this process of reconstructing the official concept of favelas is now threatened by renewed efforts to criminalize favelas and their residents. Despite recognizing the entire legal framework for regularizing land title in those areas, Rio de Janeiro’s current Master Plan (Com­ plementary Law No. 111, of 1 February 2011) is primarily focused on containing the growth of these areas. Article 3, VI, for example, states one of the municipal urban policy guidelines as the containment of favela growth and expansion by setting physical limits and establishing special urbanization rules. This policy is accompanied by a furtive redefinition of the concept of favela, characterizing favelas as illegal land occupations, thus imposing value judgments that take no account of the complex and heterogeneous social and land-related situations involved.6 Article 234, paragraph 3 states: “A favela is understood to be a predominantly residential area, characterized by clandestine land occupation and low income; precarious urban infrastructure and public services; narrow, irregularly aligned streets; absence of formal subdivision and property titles; and unlicensed constructions, in breach of existing legal standards.” From Favela to Comunidade: Integration and Rehabilitation of Favelas? Policy changes since the 1980s have significantly changed how favelas are viewed. However, they continue to symbolize a city divided (Ventura, 2000), although this view fails to recognize that formality

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and informality are interrelated components of Rio’s urban makeup. The dichotomies have multiplied, as reflected by the paired terms favela/ cidade (favela/city), morro/asfalto (hill/asphalt), formal city/informal city, and so on, all implying a splintered city. This changing discourse has accompanied the shifting outlines of the “favela problem,” while the term comunidade (community) has supported the transformation in how the “favela problem” is constructed and dealt with. Since the early 1980s, expansion of drug traffic has reshaped the image of the favela, as first drug dealers and later militias7 came to control large numbers of favelas. They are regarded not only as areas of poverty and informality, but also and above all, as sources of urban violence. In this context, the term comunidade (community) to designate favelas has gained ground in the discourse of a growing number of actors, including non-governmental organizations (NGOs), public administrators (local government and city managers), the media (newspapers and television), local associations, and favela residents. This term endeavours to rehabilitate those areas and to avoid stigmatizing them. Increasingly widespread use of the term comunidade constitutes a counter-discourse, emphasizing the good moral qualities of these areas (Birman, 2008). This relabelling, however, has not been enough to change adverse popular perceptions, nor does it reflect a possibly homogeneous aspect of social realities in favelas. Although wider use of the term comunidade is more recent, it can be traced back to the first favelas. Valladares (2006) reports that the idea of comunidade was used in social workers’ early observations of favelas to describe the social organization of the new spaces of urban poverty. She attributes this interpretation to the symbolic significance of the origin of the first favela, when former combatants from the Canudos War settled on Providência Hill (Valladares, 2000). The village of Canudos, described in Euclides da Cunha’s classic Rebellion in the Backlands, greatly contributed to moulding the view of the favela as a community. Valladares highlights two characteristics: the first concerns the favela population’s collective structure: “like Canudos, the favela is seen as a community of extremely poor people sharing a common identity and with an extraordinary ability to survive under extremely unusual and precarious life conditions” (ibid.: 11). The shared precarious situation, the collective strategies, and, finally, a distinct identity, led observers to analyse the favela in terms of comunidade. The second characteristic relates to the rich history of community organizing in favelas: resulting “from living by their own rules, from their persistence in continuing to

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be favelas, from the cohesion among their inhabitants, and because, like Canudos, the favela symbolizes a space of resistance, such an area is a danger, a threat to the moral and social order where it is embedded” (ibid.: 11–12). This early interpretation of favelas as comunidades contributed not only to drawing a first dichotomy between “city” and “favela,” but also to defining the understanding – that was still under construction – of this new urban entity: a different world, governed by its own rules, and a locus of extreme urban poverty. While the term favela seemed still to be poorly defined, the term comunidade gave it content. It expresses both negative and positive aspects and offers avenues for thinking about how the favela became established as a public problem. The favela as comunidade is valued as an area of resistance and as an innovation in modes of urban adaptation to precarious living conditions. Nonethe­ less, it is these same characteristics that the public authorities were subsequently to denounce and treat as a problem to be addressed by “technical, public health” interventions. According to the public authorities, favelas are “poor communities” that constitute a threat to the aesthetics and hygiene of the city. Birman (2008: 107) writes that spreading use of the term comunidade can be explained partly by Catholic values in Brazilian society. The progressive “liberation theology” branch of the church, which advocates a political and egalitarian version of Christian community, spread an ideal embodied in political solidarity with the poor. In this view, the “community” is the poor as an organized collectivity. The influence of this perspective was strongest in the 1970s and 1980s, when Brazil was opening up to democratic movements and tolerated social mobilization by favelas against clearance and in favour of improved living conditions. At this time, the Roman Catholic Church played a key role in alliance building to fight evictions in Rio de Janeiro.8 The references to comunidade, although based on Catholic values, were not explicitly religious, but were anchored in a diffuse Catholicism that continues to influence the actions of government and non-­government agencies (Birman, 2008). Comunidade is supposed to refer to a place of fulfilment based on “traditional” values. The growth of Pentecostalism since the 1980s has complicated this organic vision of favelas, however. Evangelical rhetoric against the Catholic Church and Afro-Brazilian cults has reinforced the perception of favelas as heterogeneous and fragmented. Still, these churches continue using the rhetoric of community to distinguish favela residents from drug dealers and their activities.

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Criticism was already being levelled at the homogenizing notion of comunidade in the 1960s. The academic writings of Machado da Silva (1967) and Medina (1969) emphasized the favelas’ heterogeneous social nature and called into question models that associated these areas as a whole with urban marginality. Later, the work of Perlman (1976) became famous by taking up that position again, criticizing the idea of marginality (“myth of marginality”) imposed on favelas and their residents. In his classic work on Rio’s favelas, Leeds (1978) established a more direct critique of the use of the term comunidade, refusing to use the term to describe the favelas and instead proposing the term localidade (locality). He pointed out that the study of communities did not properly address the supralocal institutions, and that the term localidade was more appropriate for analysing the favela as an ecological entity with its own forms of power and ways of relating to supralocal institutions. This interest in distinguishing comunidade from localidade raised a key issue for understanding the position of favelas in the urban structure: the power relationships between the locality and the organs of state. In other words, the goal was to understand how these areas integrate fully into the overall urban dynamics. According to Leeds (1978: 47), with respect to the local organization of the favela, one can say that the viability and the long-term continuity of the favelas as a phenomenon can be, considerably, guaranteed by their effectiveness as a locus of power to oppose, divert from, or use the pressures of the supralocal institutions in the interest of the locality, especially under highly tense conditions. Today, the usages of favela, a legal and administrative category, and comunidade, a category that makes a positive interpretation of favelas, overlap. Note, however, that, rather than complementing each other, these two terms designed to express the same urban reality seem, paradoxically, to oppose each other. Is a favela a comunidade or is it either a favela or a comunidade? This contradiction is even more evident when one considers to whom these two categories are applied and in what contexts. They are not neutral, and they contribute to constructing both the image and the definition of favelas. First, the use of the term comunidade by the public administration and urban services providers suggests the hypothesis that it represents more the idea of a division in, than integration into, the city. In 1997, Rio de Janeiro’s mayor set up the Coordenação de Participação Comunitária (Coordination for Community Participation) to involve the local population as a part of “its favela upgrading program” (Goirand, 2000: 186). Goirand argues that the use of the term comunidade supports the

From Favela to Communidade and Beyond  181

construction of a “community policy” in which social issues are managed through a spatial framework that contributes to “supporting/­ confirming the fragmentation of the city into separate, socially differentiated spaces” (ibid.: 186–87). Similarly, providers of services, such as electricity and water, use the term comunidade as an operational category when implementing projects to upgrade their networks in the favelas. They use the category “low-income communities” (comunidades de baixa renda).9 This category – which includes not only favelas but also other habitats, such as “irregular/unauthorized subdivisions” (loteamentos irregulares) – uses the generic criteria of “poverty” and “informality” to define the comunidades (Pilo’, 2015). Leeds (1978) explains that the term comunidade, an administrative category neither defined with respect to clear criteria nor deployed in a precise methodological context, alludes primarily to an image of a specific identity built on the fact of sharing the same area, the same communitarian values, the same conditions of poverty and informality, and the favourable behaviours of mutual assistance and cohesion. In this sense, even though the term comunidade seems to have a positive connotation and lessens the stigma attached to the term favela, it does not contribute to ending the dichotomy between favela and city but rather created a dichotomy between comunidade and city. Second, by the ambiguity of its content, the term comunidade increasingly seems to fall victim to possible exploitation for other purposes rather than the simple desire to acknowledge the value of these places. External participants use the term in a variety of manners. As Birman (2008: 106) emphasizes, “under circumstances of negotiation, as in electoral and political contacts, during inaugurations of public works, and other activities, favelas are treated as communities and their residents as citizens capable of exercising their rights, such as voting.” When used by external actors, the term comunidade seems to be a more ambiguous category, without much content. Moreover, its meaning is very different when used by favela residents. In fact, they and their local associations use it widely to confront the violence-related stigma imposed by the outside and to favour a positive image. Birman (2008) mentions that favelas can be vectors for sharing group memories, since it is difficult to affirm the existence of a positive common identity (111). Therefore, favela dwellers’ use of the term comunidade reflects a pride for their place of residence and is widely used by leaders and residents for consolidating the idea of common interest and demonstrating a purported organic

182  Rafael Soares Gonçalves and Francesca Pilo’

organization of the neighbourhood in support of local improvements (Frugoli, 2003). Lastly, the conventional media use the term favela to reinforce adverse aspects and the term comunidade more to enhance the positive aspects of these locations and habitats. Two excerpts from articles in O Globo, the most prominent newspaper in the country – one using the term favela and the other comunidade – will serve as examples: When a city like ours accepts living with favelas it says a lot about our world view. And we should be ashamed of it … Here, by fault of the left, the twisted thinking was created that it is a sin to remove favelas and a good deed to leave them where they are. (Ali Kamel, 10 July 2007) Beltrame, chief organizer of the pacification police program, which today benefits 1.5 million people in the communities of Rio, says the project’s strategic planning includes actions scheduled up until 2018. (Sérgio Ramalho, 15 September 2013)

By contrast, there are dozens of initiatives by residents and/or NGOs that maintain the expression favela, using it in a positive light, to highlight local culture: Agência de Notícias das Favelas (News Agency of the Favelas);10 the social movement Favela Não se Cala (the Favela Won’t Shut Up);11 the web portals Favela tem Memória (Favela Has Memory)12 and Viva Favela;13 and the NGOs Observatório de Favelas (Favela Observatory)14 and Central Única das Favelas (Central One of Favelas – CUFA).15 Based on the initiative of CUFA, the city enacted Bylaw No. 4.383 of 2006, designating 4 November as Favela Day. A web portal devoted exclusively to Favela Day seeks to justify instituting this day to draw attention to the positive aspects of favelas. In this context, the terms favela and comunidade have the same positive meaning: “In addition to being a milestone in attempting to rethink these urban spaces, the commemoration of Favela Day also reclaims the self-esteem and citizenship of the people residing in these communities.”16 While the term favela has always had negative connotations, it has also been used, as mentioned, to express a reality typical of Rio de Janeiro. Thus, on the one hand, favelas are stigmatized yet, on the other, and paradoxically, they are increasingly considered an urban asset, a highly profitable product. This is seen, for example, in the growing market for tourism and commercial lodgings within favelas. In the case of overnight accommodations, the

From Favela to Communidade and Beyond  183

term favela is increasingly employed to sell an image of working-class, exotic, and relaxed communities.17 This does not mean that the use of the expression favela in these cases is necessarily intended to break down the stigma; rather, it may reinforce it to some extent by delineating favelas as exotic spaces in opposition to the rest of the city. Is This the End of the Favelas? From Favela to Ex-Favela In 2011, the Pereira Passos Institute (Instituto Pereira Passos, IPP) and the Municipal Housing Department (Secretaria Municipal de Habita­ ção, SMH) restructured the criteria for classifying Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. The point of departure for the reclassification was the favela’s “situation in the urban fabric,” as a basis for planning more integrated actions in the new favela urbanization program, the Municipal Program to Integrate Precarious Informal Settlements (Programa Municipal de Integração de Assentamentos Precários Informais – Morar Carioca). Introduced by the municipal government in 2010, this program aimed to guarantee access to decent housing and urban infrastructure, as well as to deploy a system to monitor and plan the use and occupation of urban land. The criterion “situation in the urban fabric” provided for two basic types, or “units,” of settlement: Isolated Favelas (Favelas Isoladas), that is, favelas with clearly identifiable limits and land ownership title that are located at a remove from other settlements; and Favela Complexes (Complexos de Favelas), that is, favelas that, by their proximity to each other, constitute a single entity (Valverde Salandia, 2012). Based on this classification, in January 2012, the number of favelas was 1,041, with 462 classified as “isolated favelas” and another 492 favelas grouped into 130 complexes. The remaining 87 favelas were identified as “urbanized communities” (comunidades urbanizadas) (Valverde Salandia, 2012: 2). Despite these statistics, there is no consensus on the number of favelas in Rio de Janeiro. Before the new 2011 classification, the IPP had, as noted above, identified 1,020 favelas, while the official statistics bureau, the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE) had registered only 868, which it called “subnormal clusters” (aglomerados subnormais). The discrepancy between IPP’s and IBGE’s estimates resulted from the different criteria for classification that each institution employed. Con­ sequently, in March 2011, the two institutes began discussions to compare their methodologies and settle their differences. Far from being only an exercise in resolving an operational discrepancy about how to

184  Rafael Soares Gonçalves and Francesca Pilo’

delimit and define favelas, this situation not only drew the public authorities’ attention to the need to review the concept of favela, but also posed a key issue for both public authorities and society as a whole: if the intention is to transform these areas into neighbourhoods considered to be integrated into the city, when is a favela no longer considered to be a favela? The decrease in the number of favelas defined by the new classification was accompanied by another significant change – that is, with respect to how these areas were defined in terms of their degree of urbanization. The municipal authorities considered four components: (1) a road system that is paved and has street lighting and storm drains; (2) the presence of a water supply and sanitation networks; (3) the provision of public services such as education, health, and social care, appropriate to the needs and size of the population; and (4) areas for leisure and sports.18 Using these criteria, five types of settlement were identified: urbanized; partly urbanized; in the process of urbanization; urban type; and unsuitable for urban development. Based on this approach, the IPP announced in May 2011 that forty-four favelas would be reclassified as “urbanized communities.” The IPP president at that time, Ricardo Henrique, explained that this classification differentiates favelas still needing massive investments in urbanization, infrastructure, and health clinics from those that have already benefited from urban development programs. However, he explained, “The new nomenclature does not mean that ‘urbanized communities’ have solved all social, urbanization, and infrastructure issues.”19 This new category of “urbanized community” opens up a space for discussing and recasting definitions of favelas, while leaving their status vague. It appears to be a purely operational subcategory intended to allow the planning of more strategic interventions in favelas. On the other hand, it also conveys an image of favelas as places en route to integration, making improvement in urban infrastructure central to this process. As Ricardo Henriques explained, “What we want is to encourage thinking about the concept of favelas. The case of Providência [city centre] is a good example. It will be re-urbanized and there will soon be no reason to classify it this way – and that, with no loss to the history, tradition and identity of Providência [considered the first favela in Brazil].”20 In this light, “urbanized community” is more than an operational category, but rather is intended to represent the success of the urbanization programs’ goal of physically integrating these areas. Favelas, the objects of

From Favela to Communidade and Beyond  185

that intervention, would then no longer be called favelas, but “urbanized communities.” It did not take long before the media picked up on the new title. On 29 May 2011, O Globo published an article entitled “The City of Rio Gains 44 Ex-favelas”: “Studies by two city agencies – the Municipal Housing Department and the Pereira Passos Institute – have concluded that 44 have ceased to be favelas, because they now have basic services similar to those enjoyed by residents on the asphalt.” Portions of this brief excerpt deserve special note. First of all, the article does not use the term “urbanized community,” as defined by the municipality, but transforms the name into “ex-favela.” The term “urbanized community” would certainly have had shorter-lasting media effect, as the term comunidade had already been widely used and adopted by many social actors. On the other hand, the expression “ex-favela,” paradoxically, uses the language of the favela/city dichotomy, by making reference to the “asphalt.” If the media are considered an instrument mediating between facts and society, a vehicle for opinion formation, it can be asked whether the media believes favelas will one day cease to be favelas. The role of the media in stigmatizing favelas is not new. In the course of their history, they have contributed to situating favelas as the city’s biggest problem. The difference between comunidades urbanizadas and favelas became even clearer with enactment of Decree no. 36.388 on 29 October 2012. For the purposes of the Morar Carioca program, Article 3 of the decree consolidated and adapted the new classification of favelas proposed by the IPP. On the one hand, there would be comunidades urbanizadas, which were no longer favelas and, on the other, “partly urbanized” and “urbanizable favelas,” as follows: I. Urbanized comunidade – one that has either undergone integrated urbanization programs, such as Favela-Bairro (Proap), Bairrinho, PAC and others, whose design has ensured implementation of basic infrastructure, public facilities, and satisfactory levels of accessibility; or, through the efforts of residents and various public actions over time, has attained a satisfactory state of urbanization. II. Partly urbanized favela – one that has undergone integrated urbanization programs but still requires completion and/or restoration of infrastructure, expansion of accessibility, proper treatment of risk areas, and partial de-densification.

186  Rafael Soares Gonçalves and Francesca Pilo’ III. Urbanizable favela – one that has not undergone integrated urbanization programs and can be consolidated into the formal urban grid.21

This new definition of “urbanized community” does not reflect realities in these areas, which still have structural problems and do not have services of the same quality as other city neighbourhoods. At the highest part of Pavão-Pavãozinho, one of the reclassified favelas, there are still wooden and mud-walled houses. Similarly, in Borel, which was also classified as an urbanized community, one resident, quoted in O Globo, said, “our alleys have no lighting, there is a lot of sewage and, with no more local street sweepers, there is garbage spread all over Independência Street.”22 In that connection, it is important to note that installation of official urban services was one of the achievements of urban social movements in the 1980s, and coverage has been spreading since that time. Today, splintered access is not caused by the absence of services, but by their poor quality and the precariousness of related infrastructure (Pilo’, 2016). Another element that has contributed to the use of the term “urbanized community” is Rio de Janeiro City’s having been chosen to host sports mega-events. Gizele Martins, a journalist living in Maré, explains: “The reason for the name change has to do with the State’s interest in showing that Rio de Janeiro, the Marvellous City – future host to the Olympics and the World Cup – is quiet, and has no structural or political problems. This is all to calm down those coming in from outside, to show that all the funding the State has received to invest in the city has been well spent.”23 This new classification has indeed come in a context of major change in Rio de Janeiro. By hosting sports events, as well as others such as Rio+20, Rio aims to put itself among the ranks of leading international cities; to that end, such plans have been accompanied by policies that promote a well-run city. The most glaring example is a public security policy that installed thirty-eight Pacification Police Units (Unidades de Polícia Pacificadora – UPP) between December 2008 and 2015. The aim of the UPPs is to combat drug traffickers in certain favelas located in areas strategic to international sporting events. This policy enjoys strong public support, the enthusiasm of international organizations and public authorities, as well as direct investment by private companies in purchasing equipment and building the police units within favelas. However, this policy has reached its limits in several respects, and has been criticized by civil society for ongoing police violence, human right violations, and lack of accompanying social projects.

From Favela to Communidade and Beyond  187

Conclusion This journey through the terminology applied to favelas shows that these terms have been changing. Today, the expressions favela, comunidade urbanizada, and ex-favela mingle in the production of these definitions, which are part administrative and part journalistic and which contribute to the construction of a new paradigm of integration. Physically speaking, the urbanization policies initiated during the 1990s had already begun the process of integrating favelas with the rest of the city by improving their infrastructure. Meanwhile, recent changes in favelarelated definitions show that the current paradigm of integration also involves changes in the terms of reference relating to these spaces. Physical and symbolic urbanization go hand in hand with the construction of a new image of not only favelas, but also – and most importantly – the city of Rio de Janeiro. Likewise, favelas can be improved without denying their history, which is rich in struggles and mobilizations that, in a way, have defined the history of the city itself. Underlying definition of the words are “struggles over classification, struggles over the monopoly of the power to make people see and believe …[in order] to impose the legitimate definition of the divisions ­of  the social world” (Bourdieu, 1980: 65). This perception reveals the development of types of ownership of new classifications by different social actors. As rightly highlighted by Christian Topalov (2002), the study of the words used to express the divisions of the city invites us to think about the appropriation of, and conflicts between, the lexicons of common use and those used by the public administration. It is still too early to understand how these two lexicons will be expressed in view of the new classifications of favelas emerging today. As it unfolds, this issue will certainly bring new insights to our understanding of the evolution of discursive policies regarding nomenclatures for spatial divisions in Rio de Janeiro City. NOTES 1 There is a large number of academic studies of favelas, but few on Rio’s suburbs. One exception is Oliveira and Fernandes (2010). 2 Carioca (noun and adjective), meaning native to Rio de Janeiro City, comes from the indigenous Tupi for “white man’s house,” applied to the first dwellings built by Portugue se settlers.

188  Rafael Soares Gonçalves and Francesca Pilo’ 3 Pedro Ernesto, a very popular medical doctor, became perceived as a threat to the leadership of President Getúlio Vargas, who had him removed. 4 “Article 349: The formation of favelas, that is, groups of two or more shacks, whether or not disposed in an orderly manner, built with improvised materials and in non-compliance with the orders of this decree, will not be permitted. “Paragraph 1 – In existing favelas, it is absolutely forbidden to raise or build new shacks, do any work on existing ones or do any building work.” Our translation, as are all translations in this chapter. 5 The adverse political impact of this bill affects nearly one-third of the city’s residents, and this prevented its being enacted city council. 6 Slums are not necessarily formed by occupation of land; many were formed, for example, by rental of shacks or land. See Gonçalves (2011). 7 The militias are armed forces and/or police personnel who take over favelas, close down the drug trafficking, but then collect protection money from local residents and businesses and usually operate as violently as the drug traffickers they supplant. 8 It should be noted that the church was present in the favelas before the rise of liberation theology. Catholic institutions were already working in the favelas in the 1940s in conjunction with the municipality, with the primary objective of containing and limiting communist influence in the favelas and then implementing upgrading actions. In this context, Catholic institutions such as the Leão XIII Foundation (founded in 1947) and the St Sebastian’s Crusade Foundation (founded 1956) played an important role in inspiring the notion of comunidade as a positive feature of the poor areas. 9 The legislation identifies the favelas as “low-income communities,” without clearly defining the term. See, for example, Article 37 of Municipal Decree (Decreto municipal) no. 29.881, 18 September 2008. 10 This is the first favela-related information agency in Rio de Janeiro. See http://www.anf.org.br/ (accessed September 2013). 11 See http://favelanaosecala.blogspot.com.br/ (accessed September 2013). 12 The purpose is to highlight memory of collective experiences of political, associative, and religious participation. See http://favelatemmemoria. com.br/ (accessed September 2013). 13 Set up in 2001, this project aims to foster social integration, digital inclusion, and information about the daily life of favela inhabitants. See http:// vivafavela.com.br/ (accessed in September 2013). 14 The Favela Observatory is a social organization for research, consultancy, and public action to produce knowledge and policy proposals on favelas

From Favela to Communidade and Beyond  189 and urban phenomena. See http://observatoriodefavelas.org.br/ (accessed September 2013). 15 See http://www.cufa.org.br/ (accessed September 2013). 16 See http://www.doladodeca.com.br/2010/11/02/cufa-realiza-variasacoes-no-dia-4-de-novembro-o-dia-da-favela/ (accessed December 2015). 17 We can cite, for example, the Pousada Favelinha (http://www.favelinha .com/pt-br/), the Favela Inn Hostel (https://www.facebook.com/ favelainnhostel/) the electronic portal Turismo na Favela, Viva a Favela, Saia da mesmice (https://turismonafavela.wordpress.com/), or the tourism operator Favela Tour (http://www.favelatour.com.br/). 18 See https://www2.senado.leg.br/bdsf/bitstream/handle/id/427126/ noticia.htm?sequence=1 (accessed January 2017). 19 See http://sao-paulo.estadao.com.br/noticias/geral,ninguem-sabequantas-favelas-existem-no-rio-imp-,809440 (accessed November 2012). 20 See http://oglobo.globo.com/rio/cidade-do-rio-ganha-44-ex-favelas2764079 (accessed November 2012). 21 Art. 3° – Para fins da definição das ações a serem adotadas no âmbito do Morar Carioca, ficam os assentamentos classificados e denominados da seguinte forma: I. Comunidade urbanizada - aquela que tenha sido objeto de programas de urbanização integrada, tais como Favela-Bairro (Proap), Bairrinho, PAC e outros similares, cujo projeto tenha garantido a implantação de infraestrutura básica, equipamentos públicos e níveis de acessibilidade satisfatórios; ou que, por esforço próprio de seus moradores e ações públicas diversas, ao longo do tempo, conseguiu alcançar uma situação satisfatória de urbanização. II. Favela parcialmente urbanizada– aquela que foi objeto de programas de urbanização integrada, que ainda requer a complementação e/ou recuperação da infraestrutura, ampliação da acessibilidade, tratamento adequado de áreas de risco e desadensamento parcial. III. Favela urbanizável – aquela que não foi objeto de programas de urbanização integrada e pode ser consolidada na malha urbana formal da cidade.” See http://www.iabrj.org.br/morarcarioca/wp-content/uploads/ 2012/11/decreto_36388.29.10.2012_morar_carioca.pdf. 22 See http://oglobo.globo.com/rio/cantagalo-vidigal-borel-chamadosde-ex-favelas-pela-prefeitura-ainda-tem-lixo-valoes-2763655 (accessed December 2012). 23 See http://of.org.br/noticias-analises/a-invencao-das-ex-favelas/ (accessed December 2012).

190  Rafael Soares Gonçalves and Francesca Pilo’ REFERENCES Birman, P. 2008. “Favela é Comunidade?” In A vida sob o cerco: violencia e rotina nas favelas do Rio de Janeiro, edited by L.A. Machado da Silva, 99–114. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira. Bourdieu, P. 1980. “L’identité et la représentation.” Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 35 (1): 63–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.3406/arss.1980.2100. Conn, S. 1968. “The Squatters’ Rights of Favelados.” Ciências Econômicas e Sociais 2: 50–142. Fischer, B. 2008. A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and Inequality in TwentiethCentury Rio de Janeiro. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Frugoli, H., Jr. 2003. “A dissolução e a reinvenção do sentido de comunidade em Beuningen, Holanda.” Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais 18 (52): 107–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0102-69092003000200006. Goirand, C. 2000. La politique des favelas. Paris: KARTHALA Editions. Gonçalves, R. 2010. Les favelas de Rio de Janeiro: Histoire et droit, XIX–XX siècles. Paris: Harmattan. Gonçalves, R. 2011. “The Informal Rental Market in the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro and Its Regulation from a Historical Perspective.” Revue Tiers Monde, no. 206. http://www.cairn-int.info/resume.php?ID_ARTICLE=E_RTM_ 206_0021. Gonçalves, R. 2013. As favelas do Rio de Janeiro: História e direito. Rio de Janeiro: PUC/Pallas. Leeds, A. 1978. “Poder Local em relação com Instituições de Poder Supralocal.” In A. Leeds and E. Leeds, A Sociologia do Brasil Urbano, 26–55. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar Editores. Lima, N. 1989. “O movimento de favelados do Rio de Janeiro: Politicas do Estado e lutas sociais (1954–1973).” Master’s thesis, Cândido Mendes University, Rio de Janeiro. Machado da Silva, L.A. 1967. “A política na Favela.” Cadernos Brasileiros, no. 41: 35–47. Medina, C. 1969. “A favela como uma estrutura atomística: elementos descritivos e constitutivos.” America Latina 3: 113–36. Oliveira, M., and N. Fernandes, eds. 2010. 150 anos de subúrbio carioca. Rio de Janeiro: Lamparina. Perlman, J. 1976. O mito da marginalidade: Favelas e políticas no Rio de Janeiro. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Paz e Terra. Pilo’, F. 2015. “La régularisation des favelas par l’électricité: Un service entre Etat, marché et citoyenneté.” PhD thesis, Université Paris-Est and Universi­ dade Federal Fluminense.

From Favela to Communidade and Beyond  191 Pilo’, F. 2016. “Rio de Janeiro, ville (inégalement) branchée? Service d’électricité et divisions de l’espace urbain” Métropolitiques. http://www .metropolitiques.eu/Rio-de-Janeiro-ville-inegalement.html Silva, M.L. 2005. Favelas Cariocas, 1930–1945. Rio de Janeiro: Contraponto. Strauss, A. 1997. Espelhos e mascaras: A Busca de Identidade. São Paulo: EdUsp. Topalov, C. 2002. “Langage, société et divisions urbaines.” In Les divisions de la ville, edited by C. Topalov, 375–449. Paris: Editions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme–UNESCO. http://dx.doi.org/10.4000/books .editionsmsh.1254. Valladares, L. 2000. “A gênese da favela carioca: A produção anterior às ciências sociais.” Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais 15 (44): 5–34. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0102-69092000000300001. Valladares, L. 2006. La favela d’un siècle à l’autre. Editions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme. Paris: Horizons américains. Valverde Salandia, L.F. 2012. Consolidação dos critérios de classificação dos assentamentos incluídos no Programa Morar Carioca. H//SUBPO/CPP/GPL, Rio de Janeiro. Ventura, Z. 2000. Cidade Partida. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Companhia das Letras.

9 Naming Rome’s Edge: Cultural and Political Representations of the Borgata F ra nc esc o Bart ol in i

Borgata has been a name used to indicate the farthest periphery of Rome, the area considered more marginalized, without public services and connections to the inner city. From the end of the Second World War to the 1970s, this name has been linked to the idea of a border, a desolate and dangerous place, a territory that the city has had to reconquer for its spatial and social cohesion. Borgata and borgatari (the latter referring to the residents, mostly poor immigrants from central and southern Italy) were once keywords used to describe the havoc of the building development in the capital. Both words had a strong resonance in the public imagination, and they evoked the risks of a continuing uncontrolled urban growth. The word borgata lost its symbolic significance during the last decade of the twentieth century. Until the 1980s, Romans still used to distinguish borgata from quartiere, as these terms expressed two different ideas of the periphery. Unlike the borgata, the quartieri were considered to be part of the city, both for their location, closer to the centre, and for the social connotation of their residents, who were mainly natives and immigrants integrated into the urban economy. At the beginning of the twentieth century, quartieri had already been the official name for the intermediate areas between the historical city, inside the ancient walls, and the outer periphery, which spread to the countryside. In a reorganization of Rome’s administrative subdivisions, planned in 1911 and officially established in 1921, new boundaries separated the rioni, zones inside the walls, the quartieri, peripheral areas built beyond the walls after the annexation of the city to the Kingdom of Italy (1870), and the suburbi, territories under the municipal rule, which were mainly not urbanized.1

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Especially in these largely rural areas, a remarkable development had taken place during the Fascist period and even more so in the 1950s and 1960s.2 Individual builders, cooperatives of civil servants and workers, building companies, and municipal and national public institutes pushed residential development in several different directions, taking advantage of the ambivalent and contradictory regulations of the city plan. Furthermore, a precarious and illegal periphery rose around these newly built areas. Indeed, since the end of the nineteenth century, shantytowns and unauthorized buildings had surrounded Rome. These became more visible after the Second World War, when a massive migration from the countryside necessitated illegal building activities. According to two researchers, Piero and Roberto Della Seta, between 1951 and 1981 the illegal city expanded from about 1,300 to 8,500  hectares, while the number of inhabitants grew from around 150,000 to 800,000. This meant that almost a third of all new dwellings were begun without municipal authorization (Della Seta and Della Seta, 1988: 240–41). As a consequence, a “second” Rome was born, constituted by the uncontrolled urban sprawl, which had been long represented as an “anti-city.” This chapter is divided in four parts. The first part traces the origins of the term borgata and analyses the evolution of its meaning during the Fascist period (1922–43), when the word became a synonym of urban renewal. The second part examines the overturning of the borgate’s representations as icons of urban degeneration after the collapse of Fascism and the impact of the new migration wave in the 1950s. The third part focuses on the uses of the word by scholars and politicians who tried to interpret the activism of the borgate residents in the 1960s and the 1970s. The last part reflects on the different meanings of borgata as an object of memory and history. The Fascist Borgata Originally, the word borgata (from borgo, village) signified a complex of buildings that formed a place just beyond the urban walls. The use of this word with this meaning dates back to the fourteenth century (Vaccaro, 2009). It was very often used as a synonym for borgo rurale (country village). At the beginning of the twentieth century, it continued to signify a recently built suburb, linked mainly to the rural economy (Vallat and Boiteux, 2010). For example, when new settlements were founded in the

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Roman countryside in connection with major works programs for the reclamation of agricultural lands, these suburbs were called borgate. Furthermore, after the First World War, two public institutes built two suburbs around Rome inspired by the English garden city, and the word borgata was used to name one of the two. In the north of the city, Città Giardino Aniene was planned for middle-class civil servants while in the south Borgata Giardino Garbatella was designed for the working class. The former deserved the title of “city” for its size and location, the social composition of its residents, and its access to public transportation. The latter had to be satisfied with the title of borgata because of its smaller size, lower social status, and more rural character (Fraticelli, 1982: 191–224; Sinatra, 2006). Borgata acquired a new semantic meaning during the Fascist regime (Bartolini and Bonomo, 2007; Viccaro, 2007; Villani, 2012). At the end of the 1920s, the ideal of rural decentralization and the urgent need to eliminate the shantytowns around the city pushed the Governatora­ to  (the  municipal government) to build the first borgate rapidissime: Prenestina, Gordiani, Teano, Tor Marancio, Sette Chiese, Appio, parts of Pietralata, and Primavalle. These were groups of rustic dwellings, placed in remote areas, without any essential services, housing migrants and the unemployed who had been relocated from huts or temporary shelters. According to the chairman of the Istituto fascista autonomo per le case popolari (Fascist Institute for Social Housing), the aim was not only to return to “the countryside those men who left it” but also to remove and control “many people who are not desirable in the city’s heart because of their criminal records and way of life” (Villani, 2009: 27). In an official report of 1931, the chief of the Roman police force described these individuals as “social garbage, previous offenders, unemployed idlers, and in some cases revolutionaries and antifascists who left their homes to avoid the control of the police” (Villani, 2009: 41–42). According to the Fascist authorities, the borgate represented both a housing solution for the homeless and a place for the re-education of those “irregular and immoral families who could not be appropriately introduced into healthy social environments” (Ricci, 1930: 149). In the mid-1930s the Istituto fascista autonomo per le case popolari took on the governance of the borgate and started a new building program. It restored some of the old complexes and built others: Tiburtino, Quarticciolo, Tufello, Trullo, and S. Basilio, with expansions of Pietra­ lata, Primavalle, and Tor Marancio. These took a different form: urban

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housing typologies generally replaced the previous rustic models and each dwelling had essential services. The main aim was to have wellbuilt social housing complexes that might stand the test of time. In the Fascist propaganda, this operation entailed demolition and reconstruction in the city’s centre. As a report of the Istituto fascista autonomo per le case popolari outlined, the borgate should have contributed to “evacuating the poorest people from the centre of the Urbe, introducing them to the healthier life of the surrounding countryside” (Bartolini and Bonomo, 2007: 5). Recent studies have shown that few of the people who lost their homes in the centre moved to the borgate (Salsano, 2010; Villani, 2012). Instead, many found a new residence in the city. The borgate became primarly the place for migrants and inhabitants of shantytowns. The regime insisted that these new borgate marked a revival of the Roman periphery, where a “hygienic and spiritual regeneration” was taking place (Ricci, 1931: 84). In the same way, for instance, the head reporter of Il Messaggero, one of the more popular newspapers in Rome, described the borgata Gordiani: “Today, in Gordiani, there are the evicted, or, to be more accurate, people who used to live in dark shanty towns or building complexes without hygienic and healthy facilities. They were moved into these bright, joyful houses, surrounded by gardens, along Via dei Gordiani. The pickaxe demolished their old and filthy houses without air and light ... Il Duce wanted them to enjoy air and light; now their children can breathe the nourishing oxygen of the countryside, after a life in the darkness of the old small houses where the sun could not enter” (Ceroni, 1942: 62–63). Far from the City: The Evolution of the Representation of the Borgata in the 1950s The Fascist discourse established a close relationship between the monumentalization of the centre and the modernization of the periphery. This link changed in meaning after the collapse of the regime. The borgata, as a consequence of the demolitions in the centre, became proof of the failure of Fascism’s social and planning policies. In January 1945, for instance, the communist newspaper L’Unità reported: “They [the Fascists] constructed huge and useless civil service office buildings [palazzi della burocrazia], inaugurated thousands of memorials and monuments, installed floodlights. Meanwhile they forced workers, thousands and thousands of people, to move away from the city. Rome was reserved for grotesque fascist parades and the villas of speculators, while the

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workers were pushed towards the shanty town on the periphery [le catapecchie della periferia]” (L’Unità, 1945: 2). After the war the borgata, the extreme edge, was no longer recognized as part of the city. The idea of a city that grew, decentralized, and created a new relationship with the countryside, ceased to exist. Stripped of all Fascist rhetoric, the borgata became a wild border, a marginalized area, a villaggio africano (African village). As a reporter for L’Unità put it in July 1948: You will arrive in Borgata Gordiani, an African village. It is a clearing without trees, or a blade of grass. A hundred small and low houses, two or three bigger buildings in ruins. A public lavatory broken in two pieces, puddles around two or three drinking fountains, and three public toilets destroyed by the bombs. Then children, many children, who wander quietly, suffering from rickets, or gather under the shade of the houses. People do not speak. In what century are we! How far from Rome, from Italy, from the civilized world are we? (Quoted in Viccaro, 2007: 84)

The borgata had become a place, remote in time and space, often described with images and expressions of Orientalism. The living conditions of borgatari confirmed this remoteness and distance from the urban civilization. After a visit to the borgate Pietralata, S. Basilio, Tiburtino III, Quarticciolo, and Quadraro in February 1947, a group of intellectuals, among them the scriptwriter Cesare Zavattini and the novelist Corrado Alvaro, denounced the neglected state of this “other” humanity who lived in an environment where water and mud dominated. The inhabitants of these borgate are surrounded by a morass of mud, due to the rain and the deficiency of sewers, which makes it difficult to get to the houses, especially at night, because some parts of these borgate have no light ... In some borgate the water overflows regularly and floods the houses. Inside it reaches 1.5 meters and forces the residents to get out and to remove all furnishings, threatened by mud. There is also a problem of overcrowding. In the borgate it is usual to see eight people sleeping in the same bed. (Quoted in Camarda, 2007: 40–41)

This housing emergency can be partially attributed to the huge migration wave that changed Rome after the war. During the 1950s, net migration reached 35,000 a year (Golini, 2000: 123). Thousands of new unemployed gathered in the borgate. In an inquiry into poverty run by

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a parliamentary commission during the first half of the 1950s, the Roman borgate were described as places of depressing misery, which lacked any feature of urban civilization and where “thousands of persons still live, far away from work places, in the worst conditions for their physical and moral lives, who rightly consider themselves to be victims of society.” According to this inquiry, the borgate were “the worst social plagues of Rome, hidden plagues, of which foreigners, especially hurried tourists, are unaware, and even Italians know very little about them, except those who are forced by chance to be interested in them” (Camera dei Deputati, 1953: 106, 83). Furthermore, in this period new groups of illegally constructed buildings, called borghetti, rose, often on state land around the borgate built by the Fascist regime. It is unclear who introduced the word borghetto, whether residents or the scholars and the officials involved in studying and classifying urban growth. This new label, however, became popular to describe the borgata’s sprawl. Along with borghetto, there were also other words and adjectives coined inside the borgate to distinguish some zones from others and which indicated social borders. Examples include the opposition between borgata alta (high) and borgata bassa (low); the use of the expression villaggio abissino (Abyssinian village) as a way to stress the very poor living conditions in a particular area, which resembled Italian colonial settlements; or Sciangai (Shanghai), a stereotyped idea of China to indicate a zone characterized by flooding. As an old resident of Garbatella still remembered in 2003, “in Tor Marancio there were groups of poor dwellings made with scrap materials … It was known as Sciangai … When Tor Marancio boys came to Garbatella, you could easily recognize them … and they often became targets of hails of stones because they were considered foreigners.”3 However, in the discourse of politicians and journalists, the word borgata soon started to signify the entire degraded periphery, the areas farthest from the centre and the bourgeois city: the distinction between borgata (a social housing complex) and borghetto (a group of illegal buildings, often a shantytown) began to dissolve, while the stereotype of the borgatari emerged as an archetype of humanity considered anthropologically different from the inhabitants of the inner city. The marginality of the borgata also made its mark on the neo-realist cinema: the world of the borgate, of poor slums, became the subject of memorable movies, where the borgatari were represented as specimens of  an intense and pure humanity. In this regard, one of the most

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impressive films is Il tetto (1955), directed by Vittorio De Sica, which tells of the adventures of a young couple struggling to build an illegal house on the edge of a Roman borgata. Like in many other contemporary films, the borgata becomes the real protagonist of the story. The borgatari’s social and cultural diversity also had a very important political meaning. While the leftist parties and movements considered the borgate as places of antifascist resistance, the Catholic and conservative parties represented them as revolutionary dens, a threat to social order in the “Holy City,” the capital of the church and of the newborn republic. According to the most traditionalist public opinion, the borgate were territories out of control, where destructive and revolutionary passions could gain the upper hand. In April 1953 a local newspaper, Il Popolo di Roma, reported on “a kind of red belt, a shady banlieue, which includes not only wrecks, unlucky persons, victims of war, of military invasions, of bombings, but also an ambiguous world, populated by swashbucklers of miserable nature, professionals of misery, people who wait for upheaval” (quoted in Camarda, 2007: 82; the term banlieue appears in the original). In July 1958, Il Messaggero described the borgate as a “disgraceful Casbah,” a “crowded society of delinquents camped around Rome: prostitutes and their protectors, occasional and professional exploiters, thieves and murderers,” “a barbarian Rome, a ring of criminality and social anarchism that causes apprehension” (quoted in Berlinguer and Della Seta, 1960: 92). Even Luigi Sturzo, one of the leading figures of the Italian Catholic political world, did not hesitate to denounce the risk that the city could become “antagonistic to the state and enemy of the papacy if the suburban borgate, in a state of disrepair, with an increasing number of outsiders coming into the city without fully understanding the delicate equilibriums of the city,” supported secular and leftist parties (quoted in Bartolini, 2012: 137–38). In the mid-1950s, when the expansion of the city sped up, the borgata also became a symbol of disordered urban development, while the borgatari constituted the icons of the illnesses within Italian society. To many, they personified the incomplete modernization of the capital and, indeed, of the nation: the borgate sheltered people who no longer belonged to the agrarian world, but who also had failed to integrate into metropolitan life. In an article in the important cultural magazine Nord e Sud, published in 1955, the borgata was represented as “a nonurban periphery, which is nonetheless populated by people who consider living in a city an essential conquest”: “the mentality of the residents in the borgate swings between urban attitudes and old provincial

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heritage: a mentality not urbanized so far, because of the lack of the cultural and social influence from the city, but already very far from the values of the provincial world” (Manganella, 1955: 75, 82). What Does Borgata Mean? A Topic for Sociologists and Politicians In 1960 two communist scholars, Giovanni Berlinguer and Piero Della Seta, published a book that gave rise to political debate. Entitled Borgate di Roma, it aimed to be a historical and sociological essay to “seize the hidden links between the conditions of the Roman periphery and the entire city, the monstrous development of the borgate and the role assigned to Rome by national elites.” The authors denounced the consequences of a “policy of social segregation,” which was characterized both as “bourgeois discrimination against the working class” and as “something similar to the apartheid of African and colonial states.” According to Berlinguer and Della Seta, however, something had been changing in more recent times: the borgate had developed their own political identity, voting massively for the leftist parties and becoming “one of the more efficient bulwarks of the popular front in Rome; a warranty, a ‘belt’ against foolish ambitions for the restoration of a dictatorship.” They believed that, in a “political dimension,” the borgate were already part of the city: the urbanization was unfinished only from a “planning and economic point of view” (Berlinguer and Della Seta, 1960: 10, 78, 107, 166).4 The overall city plan of 1962 recognized forty-four borgate, which became part of the municipality.5 This integration was an important achievement, which seemed to reward the activism of the borgatari, supported by the left-wing parties, especially the Communists. These “annexed” borgate, however, were still very far from the city according to many quality of life standards, while a new periphery kept growing beyond the limits of the plan. In this context, it is not surprising that the integration of the borgate into the city became one of the main issues in the public discourse in Rome. Integration was not only difficult and incomplete but sometimes even “wrong,” according to those who viewed the borgata as a space of authenticity and resistance against the homogenizing influences of consumer society. Pier Paolo Pasolini, for example, began to investigate the environment of the borgate in the 1950s, writing stories, novels, and films of extraordinary intensity. More than ten years later, however, he started to denounce the disappointing mutation of the

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borgatari, who, even though they were still prisoners in depressing ghettos, had lost their original purity by trying to imitate attitudes and values of the bourgeois world. According to Pasolini (1999: 676), during the 1960s, a “genocide” took place in the borgate: “a population was culturally destroyed.”6 At the end of the 1960s, the borgatari strengthened their organizations and intensified their protests. They asked for a revision of the city plan in order to legalize more illegally constructed buildings, and they demanded the construction of infrastructure, schools, and clinics. The borgatari’s protest became an important issue in Roman political life.7 It was a proud campaign in the name of the borgate; its leaders, however, were aware of the discriminatory nature of this word. In a recent interview, a former leader of the Unione Borgate (the main association of the Roman borgate), Giuliano Natalini, recalled that he had asked a famous linguistics scholar, Tullio De Mauro, to help him find a word to replace borgata. “I told him: ‘we have to change the name of the borgata.’ De Mauro replied: ‘Sorry, but there isn’t another word’” (Natalini, 2007). Scholars deepened their investigations of the borgate and developed new interpretative models. A group of sociologists, guided by Franco Ferrarotti, undertook several inquiries into the borgate that strengthened the idea of a segregationist policy planned by the ruling elites to hurt the poor. The novelty was the use of the concept of “Third-World” to speak about the borgata. From this perspective, the borgata was one of the results of the more general dependence between centre and periphery in the imperialistic system. “We have the Third World here, at home,” Ferrarotti wrote, because the borgata was like a colony where the down-and-outs lived: “they haven’t got the right of citizenship; they are illegal by definition; they are invisible men and women” (Ferrarotti, 1968: 4; see also Ferrarotti 1970). It is not surprising that, when Ferrarotti remembered the meaning of those studies twenty years later, he stressed the elaboration of a new idea of social marginality as the most important result. According to him, the borgate were marginal because, although they were part of the system, they did not receive the benefits, just like colonies in the imperial world. In fact, “their marginality is forced from the outside, nevertheless they have an essential role in the metropolitan system” (Ferrarotti, 1991: 56). These representations by the “New Left” clashed with the discourse of the Communist Party, which emphasized the union of interests between proletarian and borgataro. According to Berlinguer and Della Seta, there were in “many sociological reflections on poverty, and more

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in the ideas of extremist groups who support the borgate, an unconscious tendency to constitute a middle-class cultural hegemony, which breaks the links between the working class (traditionally organized in parties and trade unions) and the poorest and most oppressed levels of society” (Berlinguer and Della Seta, 1976: 2). These different judgments with respect to the down-and-out reflected both the ideological transformations of the political progressive front after 1968 and the effects of the social evolution in the urban periphery during the 1960s and 1970s. There was, in fact, a new wave of illegal speculative building, which was very different from the old one based on basic needs. During this new wave, builders did not erect temporary shelters but instead complexes of palazzine (structures with four to five floors and eight to ten flats), which were intended for sale. Thus the word borgata became more ambiguous: it no longer reflected a homogeneous and well-defined social entity. Planners began to distinguish between the two types of builders and to replace borgata with a new bureaucratic expression: nuclei edilizi consolidati e spontaneamente sorti (building nucleus consolidated and spontaneously developed). This was a way to mark new borders inside the peripheral city: on the one hand, the nuclei, the older consolidated borgate, which had to be recovered; on the other hand, the new settlements, which had to be destroyed. At the time, Natalini pointed out: “Marking borders is not only an act to recognize the existence of a group of consolidated borgate, but also a political commitment for their urban recovery, for their inclusion in the legal city through a more or less long process. It is the first step towards an amnesty of huge zones of Rome, which currently lack everything” (quoted in Tozzetti, 1989: 303). But this urban recovery moved slowly. In 1976, when the Communist and Socialist parties won the local election and constituted a new government in Rome after more than thirty years of Christian-Democratic rule, the integration of the borgate into the city still constituted one of the main planks of their municipal program. They established a special office for the renewal of the borgate (Assessorato per il risanamento delle borgate). Over the next five years, the “red” government legalized another 85 spontaneous housing complexes, demolishing more than 4,000 baracche (huts), and investing more than 500 billion lire to build infrastructure and facilities in the borgate. By the early 1980s, city council adopted the slogan “the borgate become city.” Looking back, it is apparent that significant improvements to the marginalized periphery were made in this period (Vidotto, 2006: 334–44).

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This program of urban modernization and integration was associated with a gradual abandonment of the word borgata. Indeed, borgata, as it was understood, ceased to exist. The borgata’s space had become part of the city, and the new periphery, spreading beyond the old borders, had acquired new social, cultural, and political characteristics. Aldo Natoli, one of the leading figures among the Roman Communists during the 1950s and 1960s, pointed out the difference between the borgate and the more recent illegally built peripheries: “The borgata ... is a typical proletarian phenomenon, exasperated by the brutal attitudes of the excluded; instead, the illegal quartieri are ... a phenomenon with different social and economic peculiarities, which are determined by devices of profit and income; nevertheless many proletarians live there and suffer the consequences of speculation.” According to Natoli, the new periphery, the illegal quartieri, did not constitute a “red belt,” and its inhabitants were comparable to “an army of small owners” who behaved as “the infantry, which opens the road for the artilleries of the big and small real estate speculation” (Natoli, 1977: 32–33). It is significant that, when the Socialists emphasized their distance from Marxism at the beginning of the 1980s, they accused the Communists of having chosen a populist way of supporting the interests (“or, better to say, the ambitions of revenge”) of the “illegal city,” thus damaging the “needs of the development and the modernization of the ‘legal city”’ (Coen, 1984: 33). An Object of Memory and History In the past two decades, as oral history has flourished, scholars and journalists have collected many testimonies of people who lived in the borgate during and after the Fascist period. Two aspects stand out: one is the memory of the social segregation, often represented as a lager (laager) or ghetto experience, echoing Nazi-Fascist violence; the other is the nostalgia for a community life, which appears to have completely faded after the urban integration. The association between borgate and the oppression of the totalitarian regime is very strong. A retired civil servant who lived in a borgata as a child remembered in 2002: “As the demolition of Rome was going on, [Mussolini] started to build these ghetti, they were real ghetti: he did not build near others housing complexes to encourage social relations, but he pushed us away, very far from the city” (quoted in Viccaro, 2007:

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18).8 Carla Capponi, one of the leading figures of the Roman Resistance, described Borgata Gordiani “a laager, because there was a line of huts, each of them was divided in four, so there were four families, without water! For every ten huts there was a fountain and a line of lavatories, with a half door so that your feet were visible, allowing the police to control everything” (quoted in Portelli, 1999: 84).9 Also, a former house painter who spent about twenty-five years in Gordiani stressed that the borgata “was like a laager without guards. It is true! For many aspects it was even worse, because usually the guards control only those who want to escape. Instead, in the borgata there were always the police, ready to bust into the houses, and the fascists, who did everything during night and day, even spying” (quoted in Tozzetti, 1989: 8).10 But there is also nostalgia for a sense of community life, which contrasts with the representations of social scientists during the 1950s and 1960s. Sociologists, indeed, used to emphasize the lack of neighbourly relations and shared experiences as one of the more striking features of life in the marginalized periphery. According to Corrado Antiochia, one of the researchers in the group led by Ferrarotti, “in the borgata or ­in  the shanty towns the community does not exist because it cannot develop only on the basis of cultural homogeneity, as the latter is a subjective-collective perception of the social structures, historically determined and ecologically located.” Supposedly, it was impossible to “understand how the immigrants, separated from their homeland and their traditional working relations, could constitute a community” ­(Antiochia, 1968: 103–4). In contrast, it is useful to read a passage from the memoirs of a priest, Roberto Sardelli, the leader of a shantytown community located close to the ruins of an ancient Roman aqueduct (Acquedotto Felice). He recalled the community’s reaction after the demolition of the shelters and its move to a satellite suburb at the end of the 1970s: We arrived there as if we had arrived in a desert, without any orientation. We used to dominate the environment, which we had built, day after day. Now, we were in a place that dominated us, furthermore in a hostile way ... Suddenly we found ourselves without any identity, we did not know who and where to look. Our single landmark was the four walls of the flat which we locked ourselves into, in order to find a bit of confidence among fears and doubts. We were lost in that space, inside us as well, while our energies faded. (Sardelli, 1980: 218)

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In some cases the memory of the borgata is connected and even confused with the memory of childhood and youth, representing a scenario of a golden age, a paradise. A man who lived in Borgata Gordiani during the 1950s confessed: “I always see the borgata again, I see it in my mind, I even dream about it with open eyes, because I lived there very well, at least during the period from the post-war to my departure. In other words, all my childhood and my adolescence remain there” (quoted in Viccaro, 2007: 60).11 In this case, the memory of personal happiness eclipses the material privations of the borgata community, and the exit from it marked the beginning of adulthood. Finally, there is another aspect regarding the memory of those who actively took part in the political mobilization of the borgate for the recognition of their rights in the 1960s and 1970s. The eclipse of the word borgata is also connected to the end of a political era characterized by big enthusiasm and hope: a period that seemed to signal a progressive improvement of the material conditions of the working class. In the memories of many political and trade union leaders, the borgata is associated with a “sharing practice,” with an idea of “a community that fights for housing rights,” a “joint ownership,” “a real and authentic place, lived especially by the mothers of the family” (Codispoti, 2007; Matteucci, 2007).12 Today, the word borgata has been largely relegated to memory and history. A few, mainly elderly, people use it to indicate the place where they live. But hardly anyone calls himself or herself, or is called, a borgataro. Generally, the mass media utilizes these words when they talk about the past. Borgata is associated with a world that does not exist anymore. However, it is interesting to note that there is not another single term with a similar semantic strength to name the marginal areas of the city: in the newspaper, one may encounter the terms quartieri degradati, baraccopoli, and sometimes ghetti. But there is no a popular word, like borgata, that can communicate a well-defined social, cultural, and political identity of a periphery. This absence is also symptomatic of the lack of a public policy for the farthest periphery of Rome at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The symbolic significance of the word borgata has always been connected to political programs. First, there were the Fascist ambitions, which were ordained to normalize unconventional and unwanted people. Then, there were different commitments of the Christian-Democrat and leftist parties, which aimed to marginalize or to release the downand-outs as a strategy to affect the balance of power in the city. Today

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there is no a suggestive word for the urban edge because only a few scholars and politicians are able to decode its social and cultural geographies and are committed to give voice to its inhabitants in order to imagine its transformation. Some of these intellectuals still use the word borgata, as does the novelist Walter Siti (2008), one of more suggestive storytellers of the Roman periphery. However, their choice creates a paradoxical effect: it emphasizes the distance of the present from twentieth-century Rome and confirms the difficulty in interpreting the new frontier of the widespread city. NOTES 1 During the medieval era, Rome was divided in rioni. The terms quartieri and suburbi were introduced in the administrative acts in the twentieth century. For more information about the uses of these three words, see Boiteux, 2010; Marin, 2010, and Brucculeri, 2010. 2 Obviously, the literature on the twentieth century about Rome is immense. It could be useful to start from Insolera, 2011, and Vidotto, 2006, two general studies that interpret the urban development of the city in a very different way. See also Agnew, 1995, for an interesting reconstruction in English. See Bonomo, 2009 for a comparative perspective on urban development during the second half of the twentieth century. 3 Antonio (Uccio) Angelucci, born in 1932, interviewed by Gabriele Di Giuseppe and Ulrike Viccaro in Rome, 28 November 2003. The recording is deposited at the Istituto romano per la storia dal Fascismo alla Resistenza (Irsifar). 4 In 1976 Berlinguer and Della Seta published a new edition of this book. Giovanni Berlinguer is the brother of Enrico Berlinguer, the leader of the Communist Party between 1972 and 1984. 5 For information on the Roman borgate in the 1960s and 1970s, see Martinelli, 1986, and Vallat, 1995. 6 The most popular of Pasolini’s works about the world of the borgate are the novels Ragazzi di vita (1955) and Una vita violenta (1959), and the films Accattone (1961) and Mamma Roma (1962). 7 See Tozzetti, 1989, for a historical reconstruction of one of the leaders of the political mobilization in regard to the borgatari’s battle. It is interesting to see also Unione Borgate, 1986. 8 Ernesto Massa, born in 1929, interviewed by Ulrike Viccaro in Rome, 21 November 2002.

206  Francesco Bartolini 9 Carla Capponi, born in 1919, interviewed by Alessandro Portelli, 28 May 1997 and 14 August 1998. 10 Augusto Moltoni, born in 1922, interviewed by Aldo Tozzetti in Rome, no date. 11 Angelo Scotto, born in 1948, interviewed by Ulrike Viccaro in Rome, 31 October 2002. 12 See the interviews deposited at the archive of the Unione Borgate, the historical association of the Roman borgate. Until at least May 2014 these interviews were available on the association’s website: www.borgate.it. In January 2017 this website was temporarily inaccessible, but it was possible to find some of the interviews on YouTube. REFERENCES Agnew, J. 1995. Rome. Chichester, NY: John Wiley & Sons. Antiochia, C. 1968. “La vita economica e sociale di una borgata romana.” La Critica Sociologica 8:102–14. Bartolini, F. 2012. “Roma cattolica e Roma comunista: Le rappresentazioni della capitale e l’uso pubblico della storia urbana negli anni Cinquanta.” In Città e regione: Questioni di metodo e percorsi di ricerca, edited by F. Bartolini and S. Betti, 129–49. Macerata: EUM. Bartolini, F., and B. Bonomo. 2007. “Homes for Working Class and Homes for Civil Servants: Rome between the Wars.”In Urban Europe in Comparative Perspective: Papers Presented at the Eighth International Conference on Urban History, Stockholm 2006, edited by L. Nilsson. Stockholm: Institute of Urban History, Stockholm University (cd-rom). Berlinguer, G., and P. Della Seta. 1960. Borgate di Roma. Rome: Editori Riuniti. Berlinguer, G., and P. Della Seta. 1976. “I borgatari romani: segregati o protagonisti?” Corriere della Sera, 28 November: 2. Boiteux, M. 2010. “Rione.” In Topalov et al., 1062–66. Bonomo, B. 2009. “From ‘Eternal City’ to Unfinished Metropolis: The Develop­ ment of Rome’s Urban Space and Its Appropriation by City Dwellers from 1945 to the Present.” In Informationen zur modernen Stadtgeschichte. Volume 1. Städte in Südeuropa, edited by M. Baumeister and R. Liedtke, 34–46. Berlin: Verlagsort. Brucculeri, A. 2010. “Suburbio.” In Topalov et al., 1192–97. Camarda, E. 2007. Pietralata: Da campagna a isola di periferia. Milan: Franco Angeli. Camera dei Deputati. 1953. La miseria nelle grandi città. Volume 6. Atti della Commissione parlamentare di inchiesta sulla miseria in Italia e sui mezzi per combatterla. Rome: Camera dei Deputati.

Naming Rome’s Edge  207 Ceroni, G. 1942. Roma nei suoi quartieri e nel suo suburbio. Rome: Palombi. Codispoti, S. 2007. “Il termine ‘borgata’.” Video interview deposited at the archive of the Unione Borgate and also available on YouTube. Accessed 8 January 2017. Coen, F. 1984. “Editoriale al dossier ‘Processo al Campidoglio’.” Mondoperaio 2: 32–33. Della Seta, P., and R. Della Seta. 1988. I suoli di Roma: Uso e abuso del territorio nei cento anni della capitale. Rome: Editori Riuniti. Ferrarotti, F. 1968. “Terzo Mondo sotto casa.” La Critica Sociologica 7: 3–8. Ferrarotti, F. 1970. Roma da capitale a periferia. Bari: Laterza. Ferrarotti, F. 1991. Roma madre matrigna. Rome and Bari: Laterza. Fraticelli, V. 1982. Roma, 1914–1929: La città e gli architetti tra la guerra e il fascismo. Rome: Officina. Golini, A. 2000. “La popolazione.” In Storia di Roma dall’antichità a oggi: Roma del Duemila, edited by L. De Rosa, 119–57. Rome and Bari: Laterza. Insolera, I. [1962] 2011. Roma moderna: Da Napoleone I al XXI secolo. Turin: Einaudi. L’Unità. 1945. “Alla periferia della città si lotta contro la miseria.” 14 January: 2. Manganella, G. 1955. “Periferia dell’‘Urbe’.” Nord e Sud 11: 75–98. Marin, B. 2010. “Quartiere.” In Topalov et al., 1017–21. Martinelli, F. 1986. Roma nuova: Borgate spontanee e insediamenti pubblici: dalla marginalità alla domanda di servizi. Milan: Franco Angeli. Matteucci, A. 2007. “Il concetto di ‘borgata.’” Video interview deposited at the archive of the Unione Borgate and also available on YouTube. Accessed 8 January 2017. Natalini, G. 2007. “Il termine ‘borgata.’” Video interview deposited at the archive of the Unione Borgate. Natoli, A. 1977. “A proposito di ‘Borgate di Roma’.” La Critica Sociologica 41: 30–36. Pasolini, P.P. 1955. Ragazzi di vita. Milan: Garzanti. Pasolini, P.P. 1959. Una vita violenta. Milan: Garzanti. Pasolini, P.P. (director). 1961. Accattone (film). Pasolini, P.P. (director). 1962. Mamma Roma (film). Pasolini, P.P. [1975] 1999. “Il mio Accattone in tv dopo il genocidio.” Corriere della Sera, 8 October 1975. Reprinted in Saggi sulla politica e sulla società, edited by W. Siti and S. De Laude, 674–80. Milan: Mondadori. Portelli, A. 1999. L’ordine è stato già eseguito: Roma, le Fosse Ardeatine, la memoria. Rome: Donzelli. Ricci, R. 1930. “L’ufficio di Assistenza Sociale nel 1929: Relazione del delegato per l’Assistenza Sociale Raffaello Ricci al Governatore Principe Francesco Boncompagni Ludovisi.” Capitolium 3: 105–56.

208  Francesco Bartolini Ricci, R. 1931. “L’ufficio di Assistenza Sociale nel 1930: Relazione del delegato all’Assistenza Sociale Raffaello Ricci al Governatore Principe Francesco Boncompagni Ludovisi.” Capitolium 1: 53–90. Salsano, F. 2010. “La sistemazione degli sfrattati dall’area dei Fori Imperiali e la nascita delle borgate nella Roma fascista.” Città e Storia 1: 207–34. Sardelli, R. 1980. In borgata. Florence: Nuova Guaraldi. Sinatra, M. 2006. La Garbatella a Roma, 1920–1940. Milan: Franco Angeli. Siti, W. 2008. Il contagio. Milan: Mondadori. Topalov, C., L. Coudroy De Lille, J.-C. Depaule, and B. Marin eds. 2010. L’aventure des mots de la ville. Paris: Laffont. Tozzetti, A. 1989. La casa e non solo: Lotte popolari a Roma e in Italia dal dopoguerra a oggi. Rome: Editori Riuniti. Unione Borgate. 1986. Dieci anni di lotte dell’Unione Borgate, 1975–1985. Rome: n.p. Vaccaro, G. 2009. “Borgata.” In CNR and Istituto Opera del Vocabolario Italiano, Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini (Tlio). http://tlio.ovi.cnr.it/ TLIO/. Accessed 28 May 2014. Vallat, C. 1995. Rome et ses borgate, 1960–1980: Des marques urbaines à la ville diffuse. Rome: École Française de Rome. http://dx.doi.org/10.3406/ befar.1995.1219. Vallat, C., and M. Boiteux. 2010. “Borgata.” In Topalov et al., 144–49. Viccaro, U. 2007. Storia di borgata Gordiani: Dal fascismo agli anni del “boom”. Milan: Franco Angeli. Vidotto, V. 2006. Roma contemporanea. Rome and Bari: Laterza. Villani, L. 2009. “L’Istituto fascista autonomo case popolari e le borgate romane: Storia urbana, politica e sociale.” PhD thesis, Università di Torino. Villani, L. 2012. Le borgate del fascism: Storia urbana, politica e sociale della periferia romana. Milan: Ledizioni. http://dx.doi.org/10.4000/books.ledizioni.99.

10 Naming Madrid’s Working-Class Periphery, 1860–1970: The Construction of Urban Illegitimacy Cha rlotte V o rms

There is no generic word in everyday speech in Spain to denote the urban periphery. Analysis of the terms used in Madrid from the 1860s to the 1970s shows that periphery has not been a pertinent category in collective representations.1 The terms used emphasized a lasting duality in the new urban extensions, depending on their relationship to public planning and the legal framework of urban development, and also to the social characteristics of their inhabitants. The words thus function in couples, one word referring to the official planned districts and the other to the unplanned working-class ones. Thus, the prevailing criterion was not location with reference to the old city centre (peripheral or central), the date of urbanization of a space (recent or well established), or the functions of spaces, but rather the modalities of urbanization. However, the words changed over time, suggesting a change in the phenomenon or in their representations. In Madrid, the word extrarradio from the 1860s onward referred to the owner-built settlements erected on unserviced subdivisions outside the official extension plan. As this unplanned urbanization progressively extended beyond the municipal borders in the 1930s and 1940s, the word suburbio was substituted. From the 1950s onwards, another word, chabola, supplanted the others to describe informal settlements, while new peripheral districts that conformed to Francoist urban planning were generally referred to as nuevos barrios (new neighbourhoods). The present chapter seeks to reconstitute the history of these successive denominations, a history that follows the classic model of the stigmatization of working-class districts. As with terms such as “slum,” “ghetto,” favela, and taudis elsewhere, we see in Madrid how a word that, at a particular point in time, denoted both an urban fabric and its population is generalized so that

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it comes to represent a paradigm of urban misery, both material and moral (see Depaule, 2006; Fijalkow, 2006 and 2010; Reeder, 2006 and 2010; Schuman, 2006 and 2010; Valladares, 2010). From the 1950s to the 1970s, the city of Madrid, in common with other large Spanish cities, Barcelona in particular, saw its periphery covered with more or less poorly built dwellings erected by working-class families who had left the misery of the Spanish countryside after the civil war in the hope of a better life. The elements of this story are well known, and are common to the countries of southern Europe, which experienced a later urbanization than those of the north. Destruction caused by the war (1936–39), which was particularly serious in the capital, was compounded by the resumption of the rural exodus, leading to an extreme housing shortage. This shortage found a safety valve in the construction of makeshift homes on the periphery, in a legally marginal situation. These dwellings have remained in memory under the name chabola in Madrid (barraca in Barcelona), denoting in the plural the districts that they formed. For the most part, the chabolas of the Francoist era were built on the city periphery on land that had been divided and sold for building plots by its owner or an intermediary, just as nearly a century earlier. As in the past, the purchasers belonged to the working classes and built on their parcel of land a small house in which to live with their families. And again, just as earlier, a market for rental housing developed bit by bit in the districts built up this way. The main difference between these chabolas and the casas bajas (self-built houses of the extrarradio) lay in the greater legal precariousness of the former, generally built without permission on land that had not been zoned for building under the general plan of 1946. Besides, it was the development of planning (the adoption of this initial plan prescribed usage by zone, which was characteristic of this stage in the history of urbanism) that relegated these areas to illegality, by tightening the regulatory framework that had, until that time, been quite loose. This new illegality led to a deterioration of the dwellings and of the districts themselves, which became much more difficult to endow with basic utilities. In terms of the logic of the operation and its actors, however, the chabolas were simply a resumption of the phenomenon of urban extension by way of poor self-constructed developments that had been observed since the mid-nineteenth century and that was only interrupted by the war. How and why did this new word, chabola, come to replace casa baja to denote this old reality? And how did this word come to characterize the

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housing crisis and the wretched state of the urban working class during this period? Is the change of scale, with the very great increase in the construction of this type of building as a function of urban growth, along with its greater precariousness, a sufficient explanation? These are questions this chapter aims to address. It argues that the generalization of the use of the word chabola from the mid-1950s onward, unifying a very diverse reality under a single stigmatized word, serves the public powers’ goal to condemn this kind of development. Starting from the hypothesis about the active role of the public powers in the construction of the successive representations of the extrarradio and the chabola, the present study draws primarily on the archives of those institutions charged with the urban development of Madrid: the municipality, and then the General Commission for the Development of Madrid and Its Surroundings (Comisaría General para la Ordenación Urbana de Madrid y sus Alrededores – CGOUM). The chronology that results from an analysis of these administrative sources was then compared with the systematic research of the occurrence of key terms in the major daily newspaper ABC, which is completely digitalized and accessible for the entire period.2 Finally, the study was completed by the review of reports, articles, and books written by investigators who visited these districts. From Extrarradio to Suburbio: The Persistence of the Category of Marginal Peripheries

Ensanche and Extrarradio The history of urbanization by way of poor self-built developments in Madrid began with the adoption of a development plan in 1860: the ensanche (literally, extension) plan of the engineer Castro. Similar to that of Cerda for Barcelona, this plan envisioned the extension of the city within a concentric zone around the old boundaries, the lines of streets being drawn a priori according to a regular grid pattern. Within this zone, which in Madrid was closed off and bounded by a perimeter marked by a ditch, the public authorities took responsibility for the provision of basic utilities. This plan led to a reclassification of land values on either side of the limit of the ensanche zone. While there were speculative transactions in the ensanche zone, causing exponential price inflation until 1866, the third zone, lying beyond the ensanche perimeter but still within Madrid’s municipal area, was the object of a new type of

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operation. Land in this zone, still designated for agricultural use, was divided into small plots and sold to working-class households, which self-built their homes (there was a construction worker in many such households) (Vorms, 2012). Applications for building permits were at that time the only expressions of this phenomenon that reached Madrid’s town hall. As there was no particular office mandated to deal with building permits in the extrarradio, they were referred to the ensanche office, which invariably noted that, since this land lay “outside the ensanche radius,” there was no reason to refuse issuing permits. Soon this statement was reduced to a simpler one: the land lay “in the extrarradio.” In this way, a word that had belonged to the old vocabulary of taxation, referring to the zone of customs duties, was reactivated to denote this third ring. From then on, in the language of administration, this region of Madrid would always be called the extrarradio, outside of the ensanche zone (Vorms, 2010; Coudroy de Lille, 2010a).3 Two different terms (or sets of terms) were thus used to refer to the districts recently built on the periphery of the old city, the distinction between them seemingly never posing a problem: one with a positive connotation, the ensanche, the other with a negative one, the extrarradio, with its arrabales, barriadas (referring to extrarradio neighbourhoods), and so on. If there was no generic word for the whole of this recent extension, that was quite likely because the ensanche, built on the geographical periphery of the old city, had never been peripheral from any other point of view (i.e., activities, business, public services, population). On the contrary, by its very definition, the ensanche zone became fully urban, with the adoption of the plan and by that fact alone. In many respects (i.e., economy, services, functions), in fact, this zone constituted a new centre (Coudroy de Lille, 2010b). Before the civil war, the word extrarradio remained rather technical, and on the whole was rarely used in everyday language. But it did experience a moment of relative glory when these districts became a major public problem as a result of their rapid growth in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Leaving aside the recent period, when the word has been reactivated in a more neutral sense, the fourteen occurrences of the word in the ABC newspaper (see figure 10.1) all date from the first decade of that century. This word, associated with the particular administrative geography of the Madrid municipality, became redundant when that was reorganized in 1924. The municipal statute adopted by the dictatorship of

1200 suburbio chabola

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Figure 10.1. Occurrence of the words suburbio and chabola in the ABC newspaper, 1891–1985.

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Primo de Rivera, which set out to recast the legislation on municipalities, extended the ensanche legislation to the entire peripheral territory of municipalities. Thus, there was no longer an administrative extrarradio, simply a large space that the law denoted with the neutral term of extensión.4 However, this generic term was used only by the administration and urban planners. Yet the phenomenon of peripheral urbanization continued just the same. Indeed, the 1920s saw a sharp increase in urbanization and migration to cities. The increase in the use of another word is evidence of this: the number of occurrences of suburbio in the ABC took off from the time of the First World War, which were years of growth in Spain (that country remained neutral in this conflict), reaching 145 between 1927 and 1935.

Barrios Nuevos, Polígonos, and Suburbio(s) The popularity of the word suburbio was consolidated after the war (see figure 10.1). The number of occurrences in the ABC matches the curve of rural exodus and urban growth, reaching more than 2,000 when these trends were at their peak, between the 1950s and the early 1970s. First encountered in the early eighteenth century, this word never became a generic term widely used in everyday language in the nineteenth century (Caride, 2010). At the beginning of twentieth century, when it took root in the vocabulary of experts, and thus passed into media vocabulary, it referred to the working-class peripheral neighbourhoods, developed outside public urban planning. So, no more than extrarradio did suburbio include all the districts of recent urbanization. The Bidagor Plan, written in 1939 and adopted in 1946, which established the framework of postwar urbanization,5 distinguished two types of existing peripheral territories: the extrarradio (in the singular) and the suburbios (in the plural), while also envisioning a third: the poblados satelites. The former two were “sectors constructed in a more or less disordered fashion” (Sambricio, 2003), divided according to whether they were within the municipal perimeter (extrarradio) or outside of it (suburbios). To denote new towns that were to be built on the periphery to decrease the congestion of the existing city, the town planners chose the neutral generic term poblado, meaning a built-up area undefined in terms of either size or function. The new districts that were built by either private or public developers, and that followed official zoning plans from the mid-1950s onwards, were never denoted by the word suburbio. In the vocabulary of

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planners, these were polígonos and, more generally, barrios nuevos (literally, new neighbourhoods) (Canosa, 2010). Suburbio, used indifferently in the singular or the plural according to whether it denoted parts of this periphery or the whole, was reserved for zones of self-built structures. These districts were partly rural and partly urban, subdivided without authorization, occupied by the poor, and poorly serviced. They were the supposed targets of urban policy. Like the ensanche and extrarradio before them, therefore, the barrios nuevos and suburbio were not thought of as parts of a common suburban space until the 1970s. As opposed to the ensanche, however, which was basically a space of bourgeois residence, the more working class of the new districts incontestably represented a maligned form of suburbanity, akin to the large housing projects built in the French banlieues, for example. In 1966 and 1968 the first two major “socio-urbanistic”6 studies of the new districts that had been built in the framework of legislation to support housing, speak of barrios nuevos (Gaviria, 1966 and 1968). In France, the large projects built on the periphery were banlieues nouvelles (Clerc, 1967); the term ville nouvelle (new town), envisioned at one point by town planners, never took root for this generation of districts. The word that had been used in France to denote the chaotic and uncontrolled urban extension of the inter-war period – banlieue – was then used to include planned public housing estates that were designed to be their antithesis. In Spain, this was not the case, and there was no inclusive category for the city’s periphery. The Stigmatized City From the Franco era onward, the word suburbio was tainted with a more distinctive moral and political connotation than it had had before the civil war. In Madrid, the suburbios had been bastions of socialism, and their armed residents defended their city against nationalist troops. As a result, at the end of the war, its residents, along with those of the other great republican cities of Barcelona and Valencia, were marked with the stigma of the defeated. After the war, these “red” centres, to use Francoist terminology, were the target of mission work by the church, charged by the new regime with the work of spiritual reconquest. A report on “public morality” written by the Patronato de Protección de la Mujer (1944), a Francoist organization dealing with “fallen women,” thus largely focused on the suburbio as the homeland of immorality. In an article published in 1990,

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which refers to this report, the geographer Francisco Quirós Linares remarked: “The concept of suburbio has always been somewhat ambiguous, sometimes used as a synonym for barrios bajos [literally, low neighbourhoods, the working-class districts of the old city] and at other times as equivalent to the district of chabolas or self-building, when it did not include both together.” He added that, in this early text, a further defining feature of the suburbio appeared to be questionable “forms of ‘moral’ behaviour, as opposed to those of Catholic and bourgeois morality” (Quirós Linares, 1990: 606). In 1946, the state established the General Commission for the Devel­ opment of Madrid and Its Surroundings (CGOUM), charged with implementing the Bidagor Plan. Initially under the Ministry of the Interior (Gobernación), and then from 1957 under the Ministry of Housing, the CGOUM remained active until 1963. A reading of its publication, the periodical Gran Madrid, enables us to appreciate how the simple technical meaning of suburbio is sometimes combined with political and moral connotations specific to Francoism. The first issue of the magazine opens with the words of the head of state, Franco, on the promulgation of the law on the improvement of Madrid: The capital of a nation is the symbol of what the nation is … For this, Madrid has to be a living example for all Spaniards. I have always felt sad, on entering Madrid, at contemplating these wretched suburbios, these barriadas that surround it, these casas de lata [houses made of tin boxes] that were the legacy of a municipal law more than half a century old. (“Ordenación,” 1948: 5)

There were two issues involved here for the caudillo: one social and the other related to prestige. We should note his choice of the expression casa de lata, which shows that the term chabola had not yet imposed itself with this meaning in official language. It also bears witness to Franco’s aversion to the big city in general, for the capital of the republic, and for its working-class districts in particular. The suburbio was freighted with all these connotations in the dictator’s discourse. But the development plan for the suburbios, which was published in the same issue of the periodical and which elaborated the relevant portion of the Bidagor Plan that dealt with the suburbios, made more technical use of the word. It used it in the singular to denote a morphological and sociological type, and also in the plural to denote

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each of the peripheral districts that fell into this category, drawing up a list and offering a description. In this way, the plan gave these districts an image that closely resembled that of the arrabales of the prewar extrarradio. “Its nature [that of the suburbio] has a threefold root: urban, economic and social, and spiritual. The urban one pertains to the wretched conditions of the dwellings and urban services and to the anarchy with which the different barrios have arisen.” With it reference to poor housing, underservicing, and anarchic street patterns, this formulation of the problem was not new. The economic and social root lay in the residents of the suburbios: families “live with no known occupation or by performing rudimentary tasks” (“Ordenación,” 1948: 25). In designating the poor districts, then, the word suburbio was associated with illegality and social marginality. We find here a fairly general phenomenon, observed in many different situations: the Paris îlots insalubres (insalubrious zones) of the first half of the twentieth century (Fijalkow, 1998); bidonvilles in France (Cattedra, 2006 and 2010; Depaule, 2006); and indeed the usage of suburbio before the war. The novel element in descriptions of suburbio after 1939 lay in its “spiritual” aspect, which drew directly from the repertoire of Francoist discourse: “social propaganda left these people without faith or hope in the normal resolution of their problems” (“Ordenación,” 1948: 25). The development plan for the suburbios was thus a “plan of redemption,” a key word in the Francoist lexicon. Basically, the terms of the question and the way in which it was envisioned by the town planners of the CGOUM fit into the history of European urbanism and the continuation of such discussion in Spain of the prewar period (Sambricio, 1999 and 2003; Terán, 1982); only its packaging was modified by a few words and elements of Francoist argumentation. The Bidagor Plan never referred to casas de latas, or to chabolas, but always to modestas viviendas (humble houses). Self-building, moreover, was presented positively, as “the legitimate and preferential aspiration of many workers to own their own home and often to build it themselves,” or again as “the very praiseworthy desire of modest families to build their own home” (“Ordenación,” 1948: 27 and 32). The description of the six zones of Madrid containing the clusters identified as suburbiales always refers to the presence of multi-unit structures along the main communication routes, as well as at the heart of the “cluster,” and to single-family dwellings (vivienda unifamiliar) elsewhere. We may make the hypothesis, however, that the new historical stigma would have an effect on the political handling of the problem.

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The development plan for the suburbios consisted on the one hand in preparing sites and building housing in order to channel future urban growth into buildings that were well constructed and, on the other, to “redeem” the existing suburbios by improving access to them, providing basic utilities, and equipping them with health, urban, and social services. In order to do this, the public authorities drew on the support of the church, whose work in the suburbio was already well under way at that time. The Irruption of Chabolas in the Mid-1950s When the suburbios started to become an important target of urban policies, a new word arose to compete with that term. Suburbio had been well-established in the language of scholars, planners, and politicians. How, then, did a word of working-class origin, chabola, meaning a shack, come to compete with suburbio, to express the paradigm of urban misery and poor urbanization? Between 1936 and 1951, the rare occurrences of chabola in the ABC newspaper involved other meanings, most often military, more rarely rural. The first use of the word in its urban sense of “precarious habitation” dates from 1951, and it soon takes off. There are 15 occurrences in this sense to be found between 1951 and 1953, but then 238 between 1954 and 1962, 267 between 1963 and 1971, and 284 between 1972 and 1980. Subsequently, the number declined as the actual incidence of informal urbanization declined. This curve for the use of the word chabola parallels that for suburbio in the same context – that of urban growth and extensive development of peripheries of irregular and poorly built residences. The difference is that the use of chabola is strictly confined to this period. The word chabola comes from the Basque, where it denotes a hut, a building not solidly constructed, in a rural milieu. Then, its use extended to working-class dwellings on the peripheries of Basque cities (Rodríguez Chumillas, 2010). In the 1920s, it was also used with the same urban meaning in Madrid, but already with a slightly negative connotation; it seems in fact to have denoted, in working-class slang, an individual working-class home self-built on the periphery – a poor version of the casa baja (ibid.). This word is found in the ABC in relation to a story of violent crime committed in Zaragoza, for example, in which one of the malefactors took refuge in a chabola, where he also

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hid the proceeds of his robbery (ABC, 23 September 1923, 24). Mauricio Bacarisse, in a novel published in 1931, uses the word chabola when he describes a working-class peripheral district. His character arrived at a stretch of rough ground in this Madrid half dismantled and half constructed, situated between Tetuán and the Hipódromo. He stopped his metal steed before a hybrid product, between chabola and chalet, all brick and tile of a gum-red colour, adorned with a railing twisted around with a beribboned bodice of vine; dwarf clumps of beans and sage-plant that with good will together made up a good attempt at a garden. (Bacarisse, [1931] 2004)

Bacarisse contrasts chabola with chalet, the word used for a modern urban single-family home, (in distinction to the working-class casa baja, which remained very close to its rural origin). In the 1950s, chabola developed from popular usage into the vocabulary of experts and academics, following a trajectory parallel to that of the word “slum” in Great Britain in the early nineteenth century (Reeder, 2006 and 2010). In the discussions of Madrid’s town-planning commission, an interministerial body in which the main organizations involved in the development of the capital were represented, the word was very rarely used until the mid-1950s. In December 1949, the improvement and sanitation of the suburbios around the capital was intended to prevent the development of cuevas (literally, grottoes),7 chozas (cabins), and other categories of “insalubrious habitation,”8 but chabolas are not mentioned. But a year later, the technical director of CGOUM, Pedro Bidagor, referred to “the serious problem represented by the continued construction of cuevas or chabolas in the immediate environs of Madrid,” thus substituting chabolas for chozas; he added that he wished it were possible “to carry out a systematic demolition.”9 This idea made headway, and an initial decree passed on 11 August 1953 empowered the Directorate of Devastated Regions to “destroy the cuevas, chabolas, barracas, and other similar inhabited dwellings.” The preamble to the decree is explicit about the underlying purpose: the goal was “to embellish the entry to certain cities, as well as the surroundings of routes of tourist circulation.” On 11 November 1953, the representative of the directorate claimed that “by application of the decree of 11 August last on the demolition of cuevas and chabolas in the environs of Madrid, we are proceeding towards an organized cleansing of these suburbios.”10 At

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that time, the question of informal peripheral urbanization was presented as a problem of image. And chabola was one word among others used to describe it. An Ambiguous Administrative Category, from 1957 Between 1954 and 1957, the terms of the question underwent a change, and public attention came to focus on this precarious peripheral urbanization. I have shown elsewhere how the question of the suburbio came to be defined as a major public problem (Vorms, 2013). While certainly bound up with the resumption of the rural exodus, this development also followed from a renewed surge in house building, the result of an active policy that had been undertaken by the Francoist government. In 1954 and 1955, a new housing-support framework was established. Its objectives were simultaneously economic revival, the encouragement of private initiative, and the establishment of a social housing policy. A decree of 1 July 1955 launched a National Housing Plan, which aimed to build 550,000 subsidized dwellings in five years (1956–60); this policy was supplemented by specific measures for the capital under the rubric of the Madrid Housing Plan. The national plan sought to eliminate the housing deficit that the first national census of buildings and dwellings after the war had brought to light (Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas, 1953). The Madrid Housing Plan assigned CGOUM the task of preparing sites for low-rent housing (Galiana Martín, 1995). CGOUM experts were then confronted with the extensive illegal developments of self-built houses. Not only did these sites have to be expropriated and provided with basic utilities, but the existing shacks had to be pulled down and their occupants moved. From 1954–55 on, housing policy thus made these irregular self-built developments that had previously been tolerated into a major public problem: they came to represent a major cost and a barrier to government action. This argument made it possible to put through the Social Emergency Plan (PUS) for Madrid in 1957, a highly publicized policy that was supposed to make possible the resolution of the problem of housing shortages in the capital by the construction of 60,000 dwellings in two years. In his speech presenting this plan to the Cortes, Housing Minister José Luís Arrese indicated as the main expression of the housing crisis the “problem of the suburbio [that] has for several years exhausted the big cities, with Madrid being one of the worst affected.” “As Madrid was unprepared to receive this avalanche [of rural immigrants]

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…, there has formed around it the terrible pain of the suburbios.” He referred to “chabolas built like pig-sties in the middle of fields.”11 Articles 33 to 35 of the PUS dealt with “illegal constructions.” The first envisioned the development of a specific mechanism “to avoid the construction, occupation, and ‘trafficking’ of buildings, no matter what their manner of construction, that have been built illegally for the purpose of housing.”12 The next article provided that “the conduct of land development without municipal authorization for housing, the construction of buildings, the sale or rental of premises thus constructed, and the occupation of this type of building, are considered serious offences against the development of Madrid.” Article 35 spelled out the sanctions: cancellation of sale and rental transactions of such land and of buildings constructed on it, confiscation or expropriation of land (depending on the degree of responsibility of the owner), confiscation and demolition of buildings without compensation, fines for those who had conducted business of this kind, and transfer of the residents to their municipality of origin (Plan de urgencia social, 1958). The decree passed on 23 August 1957 focused on the issue of illegal construction, spelling out “norms with the goal of avoiding illegal settlements in Madrid.” It banned the migration to the capital of any person unable to show in advance proof of having secured an available dwelling (art. 1). It gave CGOUM police powers, authorizing it “to immediately destroy cuevas, chabolas, barracas and similar buildings carried out without authorization in the extrarradio of Madrid” (art. 3) and, in case of need, to return the occupants to their village of origin (art. 4). In order to implement this policy, guardias civiles seconded to CGOUM would make up a “special surveillance corps for the extrarradio of Madrid” (art. 8). We should note the revival of this old technical term. Although this kind of urbanization naturally continued after its adoption, this repressive decree made it substantially more insecure, and thus its structures more poorly built. This authoritarian legislation effected two slippages that would play a role in the more widespread use of the word chabola. One involved a shift in the target of development policy towards building. The other was associated with an expanded definition of the word. The focus of Articles 33 through 35 was not the irregular subdivision of land but the building of shacks: the decree of 23 August targeted buildings, reflecting an urban policy whose focus was on new construction. This policy can be interpreted as a shift from the classic problem of controlling urban growth through planning, delineation of streets, and

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provision of utilities, towards a focus on housing. This shift may explain why, in the Spanish case, the building (chabola) rather than the district (suburbio) is referred to as the problem, with the latter being denoted metonymically by the plural chabolas. In many other places, irregular settlements had their own name: borgata in Rome, favela in Rio de Janeiro, and bidonville in France and its colonies. The history of the Spanish term chabola resembles in some ways the English term “slum,” which originally denoted a dwelling and was later generalized to a district. In the process, its original meaning was largely abandoned. Chabola, however, continued to refer both (in the singular) to a type of dwelling and (in the plural) to a type of district. The decree of 23 August 1957 did not define the categories of chabolas, barracas, and so on. As a result, these were simply assimilated to the legal definition given by the text adopted in November – that is, a building erected without permission for the purpose of residence in the periphery of Madrid. This confusion between morphological characteristics – those of the poor individual dwelling – and a legal criterion – an unauthorized building – was never removed. The failure to do so had significant consequences. A building not suitable for human habitation would have to be demolished, but a district lacking utilities and made up of poor houses of a rural type, or built without a permit, could be regularized and serviced. The city had in fact routinely integrated districts of this kind, starting with those built in the extrarradio since the 1860s. The choice of a term of rural and working-class origin, chabola, for this administrative category of dwelling to be expropriated, or even confiscated, helped to legitimate its eradication rather than its regularization. This usage might offer the key to the sudden success of the word chabola after 1957. Since then, as noted, its occurrences proliferate. A secondary nomenclature still persists, differentiating cuevas from chabolas, but all these types are included by slippage in the word chabola. The 1957 legislation gave the officials of CGOUM a powerful tool. They placed great store on this broad definition, leaving to their own judgment the designation of sites to expropriate and buildings to demolish, enabling them to do so in economic conditions that were very favourable. In a preparatory document for the Plan de absorción de chabolas (a plan for expropriating, demolishing, and rehousing, adopted in 1961), Carlos Trías Bertrán, CGOUM commissioner since 1959, described the “concept” of the chabola as a “ragbag”: “By chabola we understand any building that does not deserve the qualification of dwelling and yet, despite this, houses a family. This ragbag includes the

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whole spectrum of illegal construction: lack of space, absence of services, ventilation or safety.” In this definition, Trías Bertrán maintained the vagueness of the administrative category, half legal and half morphological. He underlined, moreover, the potential extension of a category of this kind: “In a broad sense, ‘chabola’ is any urban construction designed for housing that has not obtained the regulatory licence. Despite this, however, we cannot use such a broad sense, since to try to tackle a problem of such magnitude would be like putting doors on a field.”13 The head of the commissariat’s housing section charged with the surveillance and suppression of chabolas, Luís Martos Lalanne insisted on the necessity of asserting the criterion of legality as the only one valid for defining the category of chabola. Martos Lalanne, a military engineer, proposed to extend the use of this word, with the subsequent prohibition of any construction that did not respect architectural norms: “It would be very useful, if this work [combatting chabolas] is to be genuinely effective, that the competent commissioner or body should quite clearly define that the word ‘chabola’ means any construction built without the necessary municipal permits or not complying with the codes of municipal construction and of the housing commission.”14 In choosing the term chabola to denote the homes in an area they wanted to expropriate, the authorities were invoking the spectre of a threat to public health. This claim legitimized their eradication. We see here how much the choice of a word can be performative. This wide discretionary power bestowed upon CGOUM came into conflict with rights over private property and the interests of proprietors and employers. In fact, those proprietors who sought recourse from the courts often won their case against the public administration. From Chabolas to Chabolismo: Catholics, Sociologists, and the Suburbio If this study has traced the political use of the word chabola, promoted to the status of an administrative and legal category in the mid-1950s, we still have to investigate the use made of it by others. These districts and their residents were described by university researchers – primarily sociologists and geographers – and by social workers, all of whom were generally connected to the milieu of Catholic social action, which took an increasing interest in the suburbio from the 1950s on. Among this group, a discourse critical towards the dictatorship would progressively emerge (Montero, 2009). These writers produced the first

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empirical studies in Spanish sociology, some of these undertaken by Catholic organizations, in particular Cáritas (and later its Fundación Foessa, in charge of social surveys). The Spanish section of this international Catholic charity was founded in 1947 and was very active under Franco. Other researchers were from the newly established Higher Centre of Scientific Research (Consejo Superior de Investiga­ ciones Científicas – CSIC), and in particular its Balmes Institute of Sociology. Several of these studies resulted from a collaboration between several of these institutions. Miguel Siguán, the author of the first major sociological study along modern methodological lines of the rural exodus and the suburbio, which was conducted under the auspices of the CSIC, precociously adopted without criticism the term chabola (Siguán, 1959). He spelled the term chavola, which seems to indicate that its spelling had not yet stabilized in scholarly vocabulary at the time he was writing. We see some of that same instability in the spelling of extrarradio/extra-radio in the 1860s. Constancio de Castro, at that time a young student of geography, spent two years with other students in the Pozo del Tio Raimundo – a major district of chabolas – between 1956 and 1958, the very period when repression was being applied. This was the district where Father Llanos settled. Llanos was a Jesuit who was once personally close to Franco but whose views underwent a change in the course of his mission in the chabolas. He took up the cause of residents and embodied one of the forms of political dissidence that developed within the church under the Francoist dictatorship. At this time, the appearance of young intellectuals in this district was bound up with the Catholic movement of social action within which a discourse critical of the regime progressively developed. In an article de Castro published in 1961, and which he probably began writing the year before, he uses the term chabola without discussing its meaning. The description that he gives of the chabola, anthropological in style, does not suggest a makeshift shack: “the spontaneous construction of the chabolas obliges them to repeat the patterns of their old village house”. “This is not the improvised choza of the gypsy,” he makes clear (Castro, 1961: 514). We should note his recourse to a third term, choza, to distinguish the houses of this district from mere shacks. He describes in detail the materials and building techniques employed, showing how, for many residents, these elements originated from rural districts in the Andalusian province of Jaén. He also emphasizes the directions in which this architecture

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developed. Regional building know-how was adapted to the local situation, particularly with the replacement of baked earth by brick. Some years later, Jesús María Vázquez and Pablo López Rivas, in a work of “urban and religious sociology” entitled Palomeras: Una parroquia suburbana (Palomeras: A suburban parish), which was published by the CSIS in 1966, speak more readily of casas – that is, houses in general. They usually place the word chabola in quotation marks. They use the latter term in two ways, although they do not explicitly note the difference. First, they use it to denote an architectural type, that of the prewar casa baja: “all the constructions are a single storey in the ‘chabola’ type, with walls of clay and brick” (Vázquez and López Rivas, 1966: 42). They also employ it to denote the administrative category referred to above, thereby attesting to its practical relevance: “not all the dwellings classified as ‘chabolas’ are located in the suburban zones that corresponds to this study” (ibid., 15). In the 1960s the chabolas became a favoured site of social work and social action, particularly in the wake of Vatican II, as well as of the sociological studies that accompanied this activity. Indeed, these activities gave rise to a new scholarly category: chabolismo. This term denoted the social and moral pathology that was supposed to characterize these sub-urban spaces. The adoption by the public authorities of a Madrid Plan for the Absorption of Chabolismo in 1961 (Barcelona had a similar one) marked the transition from a repressive policy to one that was more supportive, with the aim of rehousing. The plan envisaged the construction of 30,000 dwellings for this purpose over five years. The “neighbourhood units of absorption” that resulted would soon be the target of heavy criticism on account of their poor quality. In the early 1960s, the chabola was no longer just an administrative category or an architectural type, but also a space in which social action targeting an evil affecting migrants who had come from the countryside and who had still not adapted to urban life. It combined material and “cultural” poverty and also a defective “community life.” To prepare the plan to combat these defects, the public authorities commissioned Cáritas to carry out a study of chabolismo” and then to develop a Plan of Assistance and Community Development for the Neighbourhood Units of Absorp­ tion of Chabolas.” The plan’s wording began as follows: “We have always believed that chabolismo was a problem of shortage of economic means, but also and more deeply a cultural problem” (Cáritas de Madrid, 1963: 5). Now those affected by chabolismo, the inhabitants of the districts of chabolas, had a name of their own: chabolero.15

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The assistance plan noted the stigma associated with chabola, together with its supposed misdeeds: The strong antisocial connotations of some expressions repeatedly used in the last few years, such as suburbio, chabola, chabolista, etc., has had the result that a large part of the Madrid population has formed a vague and erroneous idea of what they really mean. More than a few people have associated “chabola” and all its derivatives with clusters of dwellings in which crime, robbery, and every type of immorality have a permanent base, thus identifying its inhabitants, who generally belong to the weakest economic classes, and by this fact alone, with a population that neither knows nor wants to make use of the most basic rights and duties that their human dignity demands, and certainly does not respect these in their relations with others. (Cáritas de Madrid, 1963: 19)

This quote from Cáritas’s plan concludes our story of the use of the word chabola. The use of this word in official discourse was generalized at the end of the 1950s, precisely for its negative connotations, as it was useful to legitimize a repressive policy. Since the mid-1960s, the word had imposed itself so well to refer to peripheral, self-built, poor housing that its negative connotation came to be considered a problem to be worked out in order to make the social integration of its population possible. Conclusion In Spain, and especially around Madrid, in a context of limited industrialization before the twentieth century, urban growth took the form of extensive peripheries of poor, self-built housing. At the same time, the established town-planning guidelines on the extension of cities gave rise to several generations of planned new districts. This combination led to two types, and two representations of, fringe development. The vocabularies of experts, politicians, academics, working-class residents, and the media distinguished two types of new districts: those that fit into planning schemes and their regulatory framework, and those that did not. The latter were the product of individual initiative and depended in particular on self-building. In Madrid, the words extrarradio and suburbio were used in succession to denote these districts. This distinction, with its social connotations, prevailed from the 1860s to the 1970s, overriding any tendency to contrast the urban centre with

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its periphery. As a result, no generic term to denote the suburbs really took root in Spain. Up to the civil war, the official new districts (the ensanches) were not peripheries; rather, they were new centres of activity. This was not the case with the official new districts under Francoism, whose urban qualities were the target of important criticism from the late 1960s onward. When these new districts were patently in crisis in the 1970s, their inhabitants, together with the residents of the chabolas’ neighbourhoods, participated in collective mobilizations for better urban living conditions. Both chabolas and official nuevos barrios were the target of urban critiques. People started to speak of “vertical chabolismo” to denote the new districts that had been poorly planned under Franco. In the meantime, given very rapid urban growth of the 1950s and 1960s, the word chabola”came to rival the older term suburbio, to denote, in the singular, a precarious dwelling and, in the plural, the districts made up of these. Here there is some parallel with the English term “slum.” This study has shown the role of public housing policies in the generalized use of this word and in emphasizing its negative connotation. The analysis of the shifting contours of what became an administrative category in the course of the 1950s allows us to hypothesize that the choice of this word and its use by the state made it possible to include in a single stigmatized representation urban realities that were, in fact, diverse. Thus, this labelling helped to legitimize choices of expropriation and demolition, giving wide room for discretionary powers on the part of public officials. By the 1960s, the word chabola had arrived. Taken up by the majority of speakers who concerned themselves with these districts, in particular those in Catholic social movements as well as social workers and sociologists (three groups that broadly overlapped with one another), it gave rise to tendencies that led its meaning to evolve in a more social and cultural direction. Chabolismo became a new key notion for these various actors. Since then, the word has survived, beyond the barrios de chabolas of the Francoist time, whose residents were eventually rehoused in the 1980s through municipal programs developed by the first Spanish democratic municipalities. The word is still used to refer to new, precarious housing, which regularly reappears in the major cities, but now on a very small scale. Like the French bidonvilles, once common but now rare, most of the association of chabolas is in the past.

Translation David Fernbach

228  Charlotte Vorms NOTES 1 On the classifications of the divisions of urban space and their names, see Topalov, 2002. 2 http://hemeroteca.abc.es/ 3 In Spain, the word extrarradio has become commonplace and is no longer a term associated with Madrid; it constitutes a fairly neutral term to denote the urban periphery. 4 Estatuto municipal: Decreto-Ley de 8 de Marzo de 1924, 2nd ed. (Madrid: Imprenta Góngora, 1928), article 180, p. 574. 5 Sambricio (2003) traces the complex itinerary of Pedro Bidagor, a conservative who worked alongside the great town planner and architect of the Second Republic, Segundino Zuavo, before the civil war, joined the CNT during the war, and ended up as the leading official town planner of Madrid under Franco. 6 This is how the authors label them. 7 Cave habitation is a category of precarious habitation in several Spanish cities. 8 Actas de la Comisión de Urbanismo de Madrid, 22 December 1949. 9 Ibid., 25 October 1950. 10 Ibid., 11 November 1953. 11 Speech of Don José Luís Arrese, minister of housing, to the Cortes, 6 November 1957, reproduced in Plan de urgencia social (1958), 11–34. 12 Law of 13 November 1957 establishing a Social Emergency Plan for Madrid. 13 Archivo Regional de la Comunidad de Madrid (hereafter ARCM), CGOUM deposit 252414/1, Plan de absorción de chabolas, documento firmado por Carlos Trías, 2 January 1961. 14 ARCM, CGOUM 252414/1, Informe de Luís Martos Lalanne, 5 May 1961. 15 Used, for example, in El chabolismo (Caritás diocesana de Madrid, 1961). REFERENCES Bacarisse, M. [1931] 2004. Los terribles amores de Agliberto y Celedonia: Obras. Madrid: Publicaciones Fundación Banco Santander. Canosa, E. 2010. “Polígono.” In Topalov et al. 2010, 966–71. Caride, H. 2010. “Suburbio.” In Topalov et al. 2010, 1187–92. Cáritas diocesana de Madrid – Alcala. 1961. El chabolismo: Investigación sobre el problema de la vivienda en los suburbios de Madrid. Madrid.

Naming Madrid’s Working-Class Periphery  229 Cáritas de Madrid. 1963. Plan asistencial y de desarrollo comunitario para las unidades vecinales de absorción de chabolas. Madrid. Castro, C. de. 1961. “El Pozo del Tío Raimundo.” Estudios Geográficos 22, 84–85: 501–26. Cattedra, R. 2006. “Bidonville: Paradigme et réalité refoulée de la ville au xxe siècle.” In Depaule 2006, 123–63. Cattedra, R. 2010. “Bidonville.” In Topalov et al. 2010, 125–31. Clerc, P. 1967. Grands ensembles et banlieues nouvelles: Enquête démographique et psycho-sociologique. Paris: PUF, Centre de Recherche sur l’Urbanisme, INED. Coudroy de Lille, L. 2010a. “Arrabal.” In Topalov et al. 2010, 38–41. Coudroy de Lille, L. 2010b. “Ensanche.” In Topalov et al. 2010, 453–59. Depaule, J.-C., ed. 2006. Les mots de la stigmatisation urbaine. Paris: Éditions UNESCO – Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme. Fijalkow, Y. 1998. La construction des îlots insalubres: Paris, 1850–1945. Paris: L’Harmattan. Fijalkow, Y. 2006. “Les mots français du mauvais logement, XIXe-XXe siècle: Taudis, bouge, gîte …” In Depaule 2006, 73–95. Fijalkow, Y. 2010. “Taudis.” In Topalov et al. 2010, 1213–18. Galiana Martín, L. 1995. Suelo público y desarrollo urbano en Madrid. Madrid: UAM – Ministerio de Economía y Hacienda. Gaviria, M.J., ed. 1966. “La ampliación del barrio de la Concepción.” Arquitectura 92 (special issue). Gaviria, M.J., ed. 1968. “Gran San Blas: Analisis socio-urbanístico de un barrio nuevo español.” Arquitectura 113–14 (special issue). Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas. 1953. Censo de edificios y viviendas de 1950. 2 vols. Madrid: Author. Montero, F. 2009. La Iglesia: De la colaboración a la disidencia, 1956–1975. Madrid: Encuentro. “Ordenación General de Suburbios.” 1948. Gran Madrid, 1. Patronato de Protección de la Mujer. 1944. La moralidad pública y su evolución. Madrid: Imprenta Sáez. Plan de urgencia social. 1958. Madrid: Ministerio do la Vivienda. Quirós Linares, F. 1990. “Los suburbios de Madrid en 1943.” Estudios geográficos 51 (199–200): 601–18. Reeder, D. 2006. “Slum et suburb: Les mots de la stigmatisation dans le discours urbain en Angleterre au xixe et xxe siècle.” In Depaule 2006, 57–72. Reeder, D. 2010. “Slum.” In Topalov et al. 2010, 1116–20. Rodríguez Chumillas, I. 2010. “Chabola.” In Topalov et al. 2010, 272–76.

230  Charlotte Vorms Sambricio, C. 1999. De la Ciudad Ilustrada a la primera mitad del siglo xx. Volume 1. Madrid: Ciudad-Región. Madrid: Comunidad de Madrid. Sambricio, C. ed. 2003. Plan Bidagor, 1941–1946: Plan general de ordenación de Madrid. Madrid: Comunidad de Madrid – Nerea. Schuman, A.W. 2006. “‘Ghetto’: Un mot et son US/age au xxe siècle.” In Depaule 2006, 41–55. Schuman, A.W. 2010. “Ghetto.” In Topalov et al. 2010, 529–34. Siguán, M. 1959. Del campo al suburbio: Un estudio sobre la inmigración interior en España. Madrid: CSIC, Junta de estudios económicos, jurídicos y sociales. Terán, F. de. 1982. Planeamiento urbano en la España contemporánea, 1900–1980. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. Topalov, C., ed. 2002. Les divisions de la ville. Paris: Éditions UNESCO – Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme. http://dx.doi.org/10.4000/books .editionsmsh.1233. Topalov, C., L. Coudroy de Lille, J.-C. Depaule, and B. Marin, eds. 2010. L’aventure des mots de la ville. Paris: Robert Laffont. Valladares, L. 2010. “Favela.” In Topalov et al. 2010, 469–75. Vázquez, J.M., and P. López Rivas. 1966. Palomeras: Una parroquia suburbana. Estudio sociológico. Madrid: CSIC, Instituto Balmes de sociología. Vorms, C. 2010. “Extrarradio.” In Topalov et al. 2010, 459–64. Vorms, C. 2012. Bâtisseurs de banlieue: Madrid, le quartier de la Prosperidad (1860–1936). Paris: Créaphis Éditions. Vorms, C. 2013. “Madrid années 1950: La question des baraques.” Le Mouvement Social 245 (4): 43–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.3917/lms.245.0043.

11 To Name or Not to Name: Contradictions in Naming Processes of One Bucharest District Ioa na Flor ea

This chapter explores the names and naming processes surrounding the marginal district of Ferentari, in Bucharest, Romania. It describes and interprets the uses of different names and words, as they “qualify, divide, and classify reality. They are representations that reflect social understandings of the world,” as stated in the introduction to this volume. In accordance with this statement, I propose an understanding of the city as a social theatre and its history as a play, following Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical approach to social phenomena and everyday interactions, introduced through his seminal work, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959). Focusing on how different urban actors negotiate, exchange, challenge, or contribute to the symbolic representations and meanings of the city, this chapter reveals something of the way in which micro-social actions and stories articulate and build cities and history, even while these actions and stories are conditioned by macro-social power structures. Analysed through the lens of Goffman’s dramaturgical approach, these articulations become perceptible: the city’s neighbourhoods, streets, public places, and buildings are part of the setting, while the urban dwellers and the groups they form are actors, taking up roles. Actors are usually trying to turn the play to their own benefit, to push social situations towards their desired outcomes, by manipulating settings. The settings are never just neutral, but integral to the actors’ roles: each role exists within a certain setting and each setting comes to life through the actors’ roles and situations. In order to bend the play towards their own benefit, actors must control the limits and the borders of the settings and interaction situations they are in. Depending on the stakes, and on the combination of publics and settings, the actors practise

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stricter or more flexible forms of social borders control. In this chapter, I call these border-control “tactics,” using the term coined by Michel de Certeau (1984) to describe the ways in which ordinary people negotiate, challenge, appropriate, or avoid the surrounding dominant settings of the dominant social play (imposed by authorities and other powerful urban actors), for their everyday purposes. In this social dramaturgy, names carry symbolic meanings and sustain the building blocks of symbolic exchanges. Naming processes, such as creating, using, changing, and exchanging names, are an important part of the social performances. Names differentiate and individualize elements of the play, and separate what is named from what is not named: in a dual process, naming something always implies not naming something else. Thus, due to the differentiations and separations they imply, names and naming processes can be part of the border-control tactics used by different actors to manipulate the social play in their interest. Employed in this manner, names facilitate the reclaim of spatial and social borders, attach moral values to conflicting goals, and separate desirable or undesirable actors, publics, and settings. The existence of conflicting names and naming processes in a certain social scenario implies and reveals social tensions, as well as the fact that names are being used as border-control tactics in negotiating these tensions. This chapter explores the existence of such conflicting names and naming processes in the social play set in the city of Bucharest, dramatizing the city’s complex relationship with the marginal district of Ferentari and involving diverse urban actors such as local authorities, residents, non-residents, the mass media, social workers, reformers, and researchers. Using the case study of Ferentari in the decades before 2012, and the dramaturgical approach, I propose some answers to the shared questions of our volume: Do people disagree about names and the naming process, and why? Why does a group chose one word instead of another? Moreover, through the case study of Ferentari, we can understand naming processes as part of wider social mechanisms, and we can observe names performing their social roles in a dynamic and interactional manner. As naming processes are embedded in the social realities that they produce and are produced by, analysing their meanings also requires an examination of the recent history of Bucharest, and the story of development and decay in Ferentari. As suggested in the introduction to this volume, “we need to understand them [names] historically, tracing the ways they emerge, evolve, and sometimes die out.” Following the



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connections along this path, with the naming processes as the guiding thread, my work sheds some light on the complex relationship between Bucharest and its Ferentari district, trying to trace the city as it builds itself socially and symbolically (see figure 11.1). Naming Processes in Romanian Cities Much of the morphology, demography, and symbolism of present-day Romanian cities were shaped by the changes that occurred throughout the twentieth century. Starting in the mid-1940s, with the end of the Second World War and the establishment of the communist regime, these cities entered an epoch of intense development and transformation: many buildings and estates were expropriated, new buildings were erected to house the emerging state institutions, factories were built at the urban periphery, rural dwellers were compelled to move to cities to work there, while new neighbourhoods were planned to house the emerging working class and the state clerks (Pásztor and Péter, 2009). In these new urban spaces with changing demographics, naming and renaming processes became vital as legitimizing strategies for the emerging regime. Names of public spaces were changed to commemorate communist heroes, events, or slogans (Mihali, 2001). New neighbourhoods, districts, and industrial sites were given names evoking dominant values – 1 Mai (May Day), 23 August (the date in 1944 when Romania joined the Allies, after a coup against the pro-Axis government), Armata Poporului (The People’s Army), and so on. The dominant regime controlled the settings of the urban play (where, what, and how to built) and, through their names, the symbolic meanings attached to them. This legitimizing strategy characterizes all forms of power regimes and is known to social researchers to be just as common as raising monuments (Verdery, 1999). Indeed, after the fall of the communist bloc, the 1990s witnessed similar naming strategies, this time with the goal of breaking from the past and starting over, in a capitalist regime celebrating competitiveness and individual excellence and success. Thus, in the past two decades, official names of some public spaces were changed, illustrating post-socialist transformations and desires. Still, previous names of certain streets, parks, squares, and public transport stations persist in everyday language – some through inertia, others because the new names lacked legitimacy (Verdery, 1999). The new regime also created its own urban spaces – changing land ownership

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laws in order to facilitate private property restitution,1 ­demolishing or regenerating old neighbourhoods, building new residential districts and office buildings, installing its own monuments (Chelcea, 2000; Mihali, 2005). Newly dominant values were promoted and legitimized through such settings, as well as their names, which often were in English: World Trade Plaza, Liberty Mall, Green Lake Residences, Luxury Hotels, and so on.2 With post-socialism, and in contrast to values under the previous regime, private property became the key to social life and to the social dramaturgy, one focal point for symbolic naming processes, the base for the economy, policy, politics, and status (Stanilov, 2007; Ghiu, 2008). All those who did not own land or dwellings became economically and socially vulnerable (Chelcea, 2000; Pásztor and Péter, 2009; Preda, 2009). In this context, because they had historically been deprived of land, the Roma in Romania were particularly vulnerable (Zamfir and Preda, 2001; Fleck and Rughiniş, 2008) and particularly stigmatized.3 Moreover, migration waves from rural to urban areas left entire villages deserted (Sandu, 2006). Workers became massively unemployed,  as large industries crumbled and factory sites were abandoned (Chelcea, 2008). Economic and social inequality increased, as deep poverty developed in urban areas (Stănculescu and Berevoescu, 2004), while ethnic minority groups, elders, the unemployed, and children and youth in single-parent families found themselves at high risk of social exclusion (Preda, 2009). Thus, behind the dominant stage of development erected by the capitalist regime, on the backstage, the informal performance of segregation, gentrification, housing precariousness, dispossession, and inequality has taken place (Berescu and Celac, 2006; Florea, 2009), with its own vocabularies. The language of segregation renders the vulnerable visible through stigmatization and differentiates the successful through fame. These local vocabularies reveal the macro-social dynamics of individualization and differentiation, the micro-social tactics of border control, as well as the tactics of resistance to borders. Such locally specific vocabularies encompass terms strongly charged with value judgments, as well as other, neutral ones. The generic Roma­ nian term cartiere is an example of the latter. A word of French origin, translatable as either “residential neighbourhoods” or “districts,” depending on the size of the area, it refers to a spatial delimitation recognized informally by local residents.4 It plays a neutral role in negotiating social tensions. Cartiere mărginaşe – that is, neighbourhoods at the edge of



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the city – is also usually a value-free term, denoting simply a geographical position. Terms such as periferie (periphery), la periferia oraşului (at the periphery of the city), and la marginea oraşului (at the edges of the city) are occasionally used colloquially to describe settings, including residential locations and neighbourhoods. The word suburbie (suburb) has not yet entered the general vocabulary, being narrowly used in professional and academic circles. New urban developments, including gated communities, are usually called by their proper names, which illustrate the marketing strategies of developers and, more generally, the ideals of the new economic order. A popular label has not yet emerged for them, but, following the practice of professionals, residents and non-resident refer to them as complexe rezidenţiale, for the high-rise developments, and zone rezidenţiale, for lower-density developments. The present chapter follows the creation and staging of today’s value-charged local spatial vocabularies in the capital city of Bucharest – the largest, richest, and most rapidly developing city in Romania, having about two million people, more than 10 per cent of the country’s population (Institutul Naţional de Statistică, 2011). Bucharest achieved its centre-stage position through rapid growth, developing in less than two centuries from an unplanned, low-density town, first into an industrial hub, and then into an expensive, post-industrial, high-rise city (Tudora, 2009). Bucharest and Its Peripheries Through historical alliances and concessions, medieval Bucharest developed under a strong Byzantine and, later, Ottoman influence (Tudora, 2009). This historical situation was characterized by a lack of urban strategies and regulations, unlimited urban development into more inexpensive rural territory, the spontaneous creation of neighbourhoods through land occupation, and negotiation among owners and residents. As a consequence, most of the city had a semi-rural character: singlestorey houses with large gardens, unregulated paths between properties, the presence of wastelands called maidan (plural, maidane) of wild vegetation, separate neighbourhoods called mahala (plural mahalale) instead of a coordinated urban structure. The Arabic word mahala – meaning “residential neighbourhood,” cartier in contemporary Romanian – was adopted into Turkish and then, through exposure to that language, into medieval Romanian. This adoption was facilitated by Otto­ man economic and military incursions by the end of the fourteenth

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century, and then by the actual development of the first mahalale in Bucharest, inspired by Byzantine models, at the end of the fifteenth century (Olteanu, 2002; Giurescu, 2009). Most mahalale of Bucharest were developed around religious institutions, separated according to the religious and occupational traditions of their residents, rather than by social class. Some of the more peripheral mahalale, especially those on the southern edges, such as Ferentari, were even spreading on marshlands, where inexpensive and basic homes were built beside farms and pastures. Several decades before it became the capital in 1862, Bucharest slowly began to move away from the influence of the Byzantine and Ottoman towards the Western European model of urban development. This shift involved the emergence of the first urban regulations trying to tame unplanned urban growth and to reassert the importance of the city’s initial core. Since then, the word mahala has been associated with poverty, illegality, backwardness, and the lack of hygiene. In time, it acquired connotations of peripherality and marginality, contrasting with the ideals of modern life and “the real urban experience” (Parusi, 2005). The effects of this planning shift were felt throughout the nineteenth century. Major events of the twentieth century – two world wars, which were preceded by major economic development and crises, and followed by communist rule and then decades of post-socialist transition – brought dramatic changes to Romanian cities, which especially affected the capital.5 Each of these eras came with new names for the attendant massive urban restructuring, as entire districts were demolished, developed, or rebuilt. Between 1946 and 1989, Bucharest gained large industrial sites, infrastructure, and numerous working-class and middle class districts with high-density blocks of flats, while losing part of its low-density historical centre. It also gained numerous rural migrants and ethnic Roma – the new industrial workers. The poorer south, including the Ferentari district, remained a mix of rural-like areas, working-class neighbourhoods, and industrial sites. The greener north and, later, parts of the central district were reclaimed and developed for important Communist Party members, the newly dominant class. The eastern and western parts of the city were dedicated to districts with large new blocks of flats for the working classes. After 1989, Bucharest gained skyscrapers, steel-and-glass office buildings and hotels, and large shopping centres, while losing most of its factories to decay and its public spaces to privatization. As the post-socialist



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Figure 11.1. Map of Bucharest, according to architect Mihail Dumitriu, January 2016. Source: Mihail Dumitriu. Used with permission.

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real estate market grew almost unregulated, gentrification forced the poorer and working-class tenants out of the high-priced residential areas and towards the less desirable neighbourhoods. The rich gradually settled in the emerging gated communities built in the past decade, especially in the northern part of the city and in the rural settlements outside its northern administrative edge. Social inequalities grew, and the southern districts and peripheries, such as Ferentari, became even poorer, while the northern ones became even richer, thus creating a vicious circle of economic polarization and separation. The Social Construction of Ferentari as a Peripheral Place Caught in this vicious circle, Ferentari gradually became the poorest and most problematic district of Bucharest, where most of the city’s marginalized and undesirable social groups were concentrated. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, other smaller neighbourhoods all over the city developed as poverty enclaves, especially in the southeast (Stănculescu and Berevoescu, 2004; Berescu and Celac, 2006). In some of these enclaves, residents were forcibly evicted; in others, gradual gentrification occurred. Of all such areas, Ferentari has continued to be the largest, most enduring, populous, and stigmatized district (see figure 11.1). Urban legend (as recorded in field interviews) says that Ferentari received its name from infantry soldiers – called ferentarius in Latin – who performed military exercises in the area in the late sixteenth century (Botonogu, 2011). The half-rural Ferentari mahala thrived until the Second World War. It was noted for its pubs and inns, which were hidden among poor houses and large wild gardens and were protected by the area’s lower property taxes. For these reasons, during the interwar period it was named cartierul veseliei (the neighbourhood of happiness), with one street still bearing this name today – Strada Veseliei. In July 1946, soon after the war and the establishment of the communist regime, the foundations for the first large-scale housing project in the country were laid in Ferentari. This housing project was planned in the middle of vacant lots, successors of the old maidane. Ferentari’s location and morphology – not too far from the centre but still underdeveloped and peripherally located – heavily influenced this planning goal. However, the initially ambitious goal could not be achieved, and only twenty blocks of flats were built in the following decade. Still, this residential complex was the model for many others



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in Bucharest and, indeed, around the country, making it famous at that time and associating Ferentari with a positive image of development and modernization. The workers brought in from different rural areas around the country to build this first residential complex and its infrastructure needed accommodation. Dormitories were built nearby. Most resident workers were young bachelors and people from villages or other cities who had to separate from their families to take up the assigned jobs. They were usually unskilled and poorly paid. As a result, the dorms were named blocuri de nefamilişti (blocks for people living without family).6 With the first workers’ dorms already in place by the late 1940s, it was deemed convenient to build similar ones in the same area. In total, five neighbourhoods of dorms were built in Ferentari. They were named after the main streets crossing or bordering them: Zăbrăuţi, Iacob Andrei, Humuleşti, and Aleea Livezilor–Tunsu Petre, the latter being two adjacent micro-neighbourhoods that constituted the largest area of blocks of flats and former dorms in Ferentari. Living conditions in these dorms were precarious: very small or shared rooms, minimal amenities, poor-quality materials, lack of intimacy, and also a lack of social connections to life in the rest of the city (Rughiniş, 2004a). Most factories and industrial sites were also developed in the southern districts and at the peripheries of the city, in the less attractive urban areas not far from the dorms. In addition, the development of Ferentari included the construction of higher-quality blocks, with apartments of two or three rooms, along the main streets surrounding the district. Even so, a significant part of Ferentari’s landscape remained unchanged, with small houses, gardens, orchards, and vacant lots, reflecting the past maidane. Thus, throughout the communist era, Ferentari gradually became a morphologically and ethnically mixed district, but remained poor. After 1989, industries crumbled; many workers left the dormitories in Ferentari and returned to their families; others stayed to pursue ­opportunities in post-socialist Bucharest, some bringing their families from the countryside. By 1991, many dormitories in Ferentari were deserted, ready for demolition. But new migrants, mostly poor, unskilled, or unemployed, arrived from around the country and informally occupied the vacant apartments.7 Many were Roma, harshly affected by the post-­socialist waves of unemployment and dispossession (Rughiniş, 2004a; Fleck and Rughiniş, 2008). In the 1990s, Ferentari remained

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morphologically and ethnically mixed while becoming poorer and, at the same time, economically heterogeneous, with enclaves of deep poverty. Since then, Ferentari has been mostly associated with its re-occupied blocuri de nefamilişti, with a high percentage of Roma, and with urban problems such as crime, poverty, lack of hygiene, insecurity, and social tensions. Its name gained heavily negative connotations, mirroring these undesirable, even feared, aspects of post-socialist urban life, which are generally viewed as failure on the social stage. This has been the main social image of Ferentari in the media and in the dominant public discourse (Botonogu, 2011). Since the 1990s, researchers and social activists have become interested in exploring these issues about Ferentari and searching for solutions to its problems. The evidence presented in this chapter is the result of such an endeavour, unfolded between 2004 and 2012. The Staging of Today’s Ferentari In this section, focusing on the period 2004–12, I explore how names and naming processes are employed as carriers of symbolic meaning in the social play, and, as well, as border-control tactics in situations of social tension. In 2004, I became involved in a collective student research project, coordinated by professor and sociologist Cosima Rughiniş, about how disadvantaged and marginal neighbourhoods in Romanian cities were presented in the media, on virtual platforms, and in the everyday lives of the neighbourhoods in question. From the beginning, the importance of names in the urban play was revealed by the many negotiations, conflicts, claims, and reclaims associated with them. For several years I continued to gather first-hand ethnographic materials through interviews, informal discussions, and participant observation, while I have also undertaken secondary analyses of books, articles, reports, and websites touching on issues in Ferentari. In 2006, while working on a national research project on the social exclusion of Romanian Roma, I met a Roma “school mediator”8 who introduced me to the residents of the Aleea Livezilor neighbourhood and to the pupils of several schools in Ferentari. From 2004 to 2012, I frequently visited the schools and some of the neighbourhoods in the district, I spoke with about a hundred residents, people working in the area, policy advisers, social commentators, and social workers. Through repeated encounters, I was able to observe how an important part of Ferentari’s social play was staged in the local



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and national mass media. These media constitute the front stage for the dominant actors, the one with the largest public, and the one through which most outsiders learn about Ferentari. The media hold the key to the circulation of social labels, to strengthening or dismantling stigmatization, to maintaining the separation of social groups, and to making borders visible (Coman, 2003). The research project I was part of in 2004 showed that the most popular daily newspapers in Romania published an average of ten articles a year about poor urban neighbourhoods. These articles also brought into discussion the situation of the Roma inhabitants (Rughiniş, 2004b). Like most stories in popular newspapers (Berger, 2003), they highlighted the tragic or the scandalous, taking people and their actions out of their complex social contexts. Specific names of problematic neighbourhoods have figured prominently in these tragic or scandalous media stories: “Ferentari, sperietoarea Bucureştiului” (The Scarecrow of Bucharest) was the title of a recent article about the visit of Australian journalists in Ferentari (Andriescu, 2013). “Ferentari, de Sf. Maria: infecţie, gunoaie, grătare încinse şi miros acru” (On Saint Mary’s Day: Infection, Garbage, Hot Barbecues, and Acid Odour) opened the news on one of the most popular television shows (Ştirile ProTV, 2010). “Somalia de la marginea Bucureştiului” (Somalia at the Margins of Bucharest), declared an older article of the most popular national newspaper (Popa, 2003). “Strada Petre Tunsu, Champs Elysees-ul interlopilor” (Tunsu Petre Street, the Champs Elysees of the Mafia) highlighted the marginality of this neighbourhood of Ferentari by positioning it “close to Bragadiru village in Ilfov county,” although in fact the neighbourhood is not far from the city centre. The same article also describes the micro-neighbourhood of Tunsu Petre in Ferentari as a place unimaginable in Bucharest, similar to those shown in action movies or in accounts of the Bronx at its nadir (Mara21, 2010). In a news article entitled “Infernul taberei ţigăneşti din Paris. De ce nu vor să se întoarcă în România” (“The Inferno of the Paris Gypsy Camp: Why They Refuse to Return to Romania”) and seen by 25,000 online readers, Vlad Teodorescu explained that whoever saw the blocks in Zăbrăuţi, Ferentari, would understand why the Roma prefer the harsh conditions in an improvised migrants’ camp in Paris (Teodorescu, 2012). In most of these stories, the journalists assume the role of courageous explorers, daring to penetrate a dangerous or incredible world where no readers or viewers would want to be. Very few journalists actually

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abandon their central role in the story by giving voice to the poor residents and the Roma affected by housing precariousness. Indeed, the media perform and manipulate the settings to convince the public, and to sell products (Berger, 2003). Thus, most publications enhance the power of existing symbolic borders between the residents of Ferentari and everyone else. The use of proper names – Ferentari, Zăbrăuţi, Tunsu Petre – emphasizes the geographical isolation of these areas, or their link to localized problems, with which the rest of the city dwellers would not identify. Complex processes of pauperization and segregation are thus blurred, the marginal and poor social actors are silenced, and the settings of Ferentari are segregated from the everyday urban reality. These naming practices have persisted down to the present.9 The media are also the front stage for the dominant political actors, policymakers, and opinion leaders (Coman, 2003). These actors need positive visibility, just as the media need their approval. Through this connection, the Ferentari social play is also staged in the discourses of the local authorities, performed for the wide public, and aimed at gaining the support of both district residents and non-residents – which is a problematic task due to their separation and polarization. In the 1990s, the official discourses about Ferentari were scarce, as most decision makers avoided tackling the area’s problems. Some were probably unaware of them; others wanted to avoid taking responsibility or blame (Rughiniş, 2004a). Thus, the authorities avoided naming Ferentari; it was a part of the urban play silently separated from the city. But in 2000, the residents elected as district governor a Roma who actually lived in Ferentari, and the official discursive strategy changed radically: concepts such as cartier defavorizat (deprived neighbourhood), comunitate dezavantajată (disadvantaged community), locuitori săraci (poor dwellers), and zone de locuinţe sociale (social housing areas) started to be associated with Ferentari. These terms were borrowed from the language of international reports and assessments of external observers, international organizations, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as Amnesty International, the Open Society Foundation, Doctors without Borders, and Helsinki Watch, which were observing and evaluating the social impact of the post-socialist transition in Romania (Rughiniş, 2004a; Fleck and Rughiniş, 2008). This relabelling process revealed Ferentari’s problems but also suggested that they were part of a wider social phenomenon, even part of a global trend. Local authorities positioned themselves as reformers legitimized by international expert knowledge. They started to use another



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generic name, “Sector 5,” the administrative codename of the southwestern urban area, which includes Ferentari and other neighbourhoods. They preferred this neutral term to “Ferentari,” with its strongly negative connotations. Although Sector 5 represented and was known as the poorest urban area, its name signalled that it was an integral part of Bucharest, weakening its symbolic isolation and borders. But this era was short-lived. Generic names with negative connotations reasserted themselves when the local and municipal authorities failed to solve Ferentari’s problems. Soon after 2000, community studies began to report that names such as ghetou (ghetto), adopted from American films and music, or ţigănie (gypsy land), adopted from slang, were used by the authorities to excuse their policy failures (Fleck and Rughiniş, 2008). According to my interviews and several other community studies (Rughiniş, 2004b; Fleck and Rughiniş, 2008; Botonogu, 2011), the use of ghetou refers to neighbourhoods of precarious social housing, or informally occupied blocks, where residents live in economic and social insecurity, separated from the rest of the city. The origins of the term in Romanian are unclear. This naming process, again sustained through the media, underlined social borders, representing Ferentari as belonging to a different world. The tactic of pejorative generic naming intensified following a popular revolt in the Zăbrăuţi neighbourhood in November 2006. Legal and illegal occupants of five social housing blocks organized several street protests against the authorities’ decision to shut off their electricity.10 After a violent clash with the police and epic media accounts of the event, all of Ferentari became known as a ghetou or ţigănie, the surreal gypsy land from the movies, despite the economic, cultural, and social heterogeneity of its approximately 100,000 dwellers (Tîrcă, 2008; Florea, 2009). With this event, the term ghetou became strongly racialized, associated with the Roma. The names employed by the media and the authorities are also reproduced by most of those living outside the Ferentari district. They follow news reports, and they feed the media with their money and preferences while supporting the authorities with their votes and taxes. These connections add another layer to the social play of Ferentari and to the complex relationship between Ferentari and the city. As stated in the introduction to this volume, “the words used by nonresidents are … interesting, since they can reflect how social divisions frame, and gain resonance in, the geography of the city. This is how stereotypes are built and how they feed stigma.” During my field research,

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I observed how different people from outside the district performed when finding themselves in the settings of Ferentari. They were mainly taxi drivers, delivery personnel, police officers on patrol, representatives of political parties out on the streets for local elections in 2008, relatives of local residents paying a visit, one social worker who had been assigned to the area, teachers and maintenance workers in the schools that I visited regularly. Their attempts to maintain control over these unfamiliar and undesirable settings, to orient and hold on to their general understanding of the city, revealed social tensions around Ferentari. They also revealed the observed subjects’ need to differentiate themselves, “maintaining face” as economically successful individuals in the post-socialist play. Those who were forced to work in the district were especially likely to use pejorative names to refer to the district in everyday conversations and in front of their clients. Teachers and state workers assigned to district schools talked about the impossibility of good things happening in Ferentari. One person asked me: “Why are you wasting resources in this [school garden]? The kids from ţigănie will ruin it all! Nothing will be left” (sports teacher in a school, informal conversation, 2011). Another exclaimed: “Aren’t there enough programs for children from ghetou? When are we going to focus on the elite and smart children?” (school director, interview, 2009). Still another complained: “We have repaired the upper floors, now it’s all ruined again by the savages” (maintenance worker in a school, interview, 2011). Taxi drivers called to the area warned clients about the dangers of Ferentari and advised them to avoid walking at night, claiming to know better than their unaware clients: “Why are you nice girls going there in ţigănie? What if something happens to you, with all the drug dealers there?” (informal conversation, 2008). This border-control tactic uses self-protection, and the protection of desirable groups such as peers and clients, as a pretext to manipulate the micro-social play. It allows commentators to separate themselves from the undesirables and to maintain face while being in an undesirable setting. Associated with this tactic are hopes for obtaining larger tips and better jobs, or becoming more popular. Like the tactics of the media and officials, those adopted by involuntary visitors also claimed superior knowledge, presumably drawn from media accounts, about what Ferentari is and who its dwellers are. Since 2005, when blogging became popular in Romania, a new social  stage has emerged. In 2008–11, using online search engines for



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Ferentari-related content, I found four personal blogs: one by a district resident, another by a photojournalist, a third that recorded youthful memories of life in the neighbourhood, and a fourth by a group of architecture and art students. All claimed some local familiarity with Ferentari. Most blogs were nostalgic, contrasting Ferentari’s problematic present with a heroic past, referring to the Latin origin of its name, joyful interwar years, and its successful period as a communist development project. Using names with an aura of history and authenticity, such as mahalaua patriarhală (the patriarchal mahala), cartierul veseliei (the happy neighbourhood), and primul complex pentru clasa muncitoare (the first complex for the working class), bloggers generated a new symbolic border, between what Ferentari is and what it once was and might have become. “Aleea ferentari b” (Ionuţ, 2006) was the only blog post I have found that used these names and their positive connotations to emphasize the historic connections between the district and the city, thereby challenging the symbolic borders surrounding Ferentari. Interestingly, several researchers studying and reporting on the social life of Ferentari employ similar tactics, using names with a positive aura of history and authenticity. On the academic stage, different social researchers tried to conceptualize their findings and individualize their work by creating new labels and names for Ferentari. Using new names, each author tried to distinguish her- or himself, generating new categories of knowledge and new borders in the academic discourse, and thus producing a multitude of separate perspectives. On the academic stage, one of the most recent (re)naming tactics was developed by anthropologist Gergő Pulay (2010), who lived in Ferentari and conducted research there for a few years. Drawing on a traditional term, he renamed it a mahala and proposed an analysis of its social life that referred to its historical and cultural origins and to its former semirural and more egalitarian micro-social order. Thus, he suggested a research focus on its ethnic and economic diversity, rather than on its socio-economic problems. Sociologist Cosima Rughiniş, one of the first and most influential researchers to study Ferentari’s neighbourhoods, used the concept comunitate de tranzit (transit community) to describe the constant flow of people in and out of its social housing blocks (Rughiniş, 2004a). In the early 2000s, she found that the Zăbrăuţi neighbourhood (what might be called a “project” in North America) was the destination for those who had fallen into poverty. It was also a point of departure: for those who, having gained some economic stability, moved on to better neighbourhoods, as

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well as for those who had fallen into deeper poverty and who were compelled to relocate further away, sometimes to improvised shelters outside the city. Her use of the term tranzit suggests instability and precariousness. But she also used the term “community,” with its positive connotations, to be a reminder of the shared and semi-rural lifeways in the neighbourhood: the shared spaces, resources, desires, and alternative safety net practices that persisted among the local residents. Inspired by Rughiniş’s work, anthropologist Miruna Tîrcă (2008) coined the term ghetou de lux (luxury ghetto) when describing the Zăbrăuţi neighbourhood after the revolt in 2006. The term was inspired by the locals themselves, who expected their complaints to bring change. They hoped for new utilities and equipment for the social housing complexes. At the same time, they feared that these improvements would lead to higher rents and that utility prices would become unaffordable – a luxury – forcing them to leave. In fact, some improvements to electricity, gas, and sanitation services were introduced by the local authorities. Poorer families did have to move out, sometimes through evictions. This made room for less disadvantaged residents and newcomers. Still, the improvements were insufficient and of poor quality, so that the neighbourhood has remained a ghetou for most of its residents (at least during my time in the field). The contradictory naming of ghetou de lux was meant to, and succeeded in, stimulate a debate about the possible future of Ferentari and its different neighbourhoods, and to highlight the intensity of its social drama staged in between the limitations and opportunities embedded in its settings. In a recent, collective research report, architect Cătălin Berescu (2011) proposed the term comunitate ascunsă (hidden community) to understand Ferentari and especially the Aleea Livezilor neighbourhood. His stated intention was to reveal not only the problems hidden from the public agenda but also the difficulties in studying the complex social life of the district and its social isolation from the rest of the city. More­ over, he intended to show the importance of urban morphology in obscuring both existing problems and possible grassroots solutions. He also reviewed the multitude of actors and perspectives laying claims to knowledge of Ferentari. When it comes to offering solutions, the line between researchers and reformers in Ferentari is blurred: Miruna Tîrcă and Cătălin Berescu intervened as action-researchers in the situations they studied; others, including Cosima Rughiniş, aimed to inform policy; on the other hand, activists and reformers, including the Roma activist Elena Radu,



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provided expertise for several projects, working to inform other research. These social actors collaborated and shared symbolic meanings based on their field experience. Striving to gain support, legitimacy, and visibility for their intervention projects and approaches in Ferentari, activists from different NGOs employed naming processes similar to those used by social researchers. In addition, they adopted the generic names comunitate, ghetou, and cartier defavorizat used by the local authorities, with whom they interacted when they needed support. They also employed the specific locality names of small neighbourhoods and housing projects as used by the media, with whom they communicated when they needed public visibility. The activists employed all these different names and naming strategies to individualize and promote their own projects and endeavours with different sponsors and (potential) beneficiaries of their projects, including children, the poor, drug users, sex workers, and other disadvantaged groups. Thus, different social interventions that were developed to tackle Ferentari’s problems became separated by subtle symbolic borders, and they competed among each other for legitimacy, support, and beneficiaries. Naming processes used by residents overlapped only partially with the researchers’ and reformers’ concepts. For example, residents in Aleea Livezilor and Zăbrăuţi, even the children, stated that they lived in a ghetou, using the same term as the research team coordinated by Botonogu (2011). Indeed, my field research confirmed that many locals talked about their ghetou and, when in informal everyday settings, presented themselves as residents of the ghetou. However, in situations with certain strangers, the same actors changed their naming tactics. Some­ times they focused on the neutral or positively charged places in their neighbourhood and used their actual names, such as Ferentari Park, Toporaşi Park, School No. 136, or Profi Shop. Sometimes they used the names of stigmatized places, trying to balance them with positive traits, for example by commenting that “it’s not so bad in Tunsu Petre,” “most of Ferentari dwellers are like you and me,” or “we have a lot of fun in Aleea Livezilor” (group interviews with parents and youth in the Aleea Livezilor–Tunsu Petre area, 2009). In 2008, I was working with pupils aged 12–14 in one of the schools in Ferentari, gathering interviews and materials for a participatory film and weblog (Asociaţia Komunitas, 2008). We discussed their living conditions and everyday problems. At the end of the editing process, I named the film Şcoala din ghetou (The School from the Ghetto), an

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expression used by the pupils themselves to describe their environment. After presenting the film to the participating pupils and posting it online, I received unexpected feedback: they were angry at me for using the name ghetou and for having posted it online, accessible to the public. They said that even though they called their neighbourhood ghetou, it was not the image they wanted the world to see. They wanted the world to have a positive impression about them and their homes. To balance my negative choice of words with a positive alternative, they named our next project Şcoala creativităţii (School of Creativity). This contradiction between names used on different social stages – the informal, intimate backstage we had during group interviews versus the public online front stage – revealed yet again the high stakes of naming processes in the urban play and the power inequalities they carry, even in the children’s world. In rather formal situations observed in the field, residents avoided naming Ferentari or even referring to Sector 5. This was true in job interviews, in meetings with teachers, or in visits taking place outside Ferentari. If necessary in such situations, the district residents named exact addresses, small streets and block numbers, and sometimes local reference points. These unknown and fragmented place names helped the residents of Ferentari to create neutral micro-stages on which they could better control their performance in front of more formal audiences. In this way, they could temporarily cross social borders and escape the enduring negative representations attached to Ferentari and its neighbourhoods. At the same time, this naming process cuts the district into pieces, generating small enclaves of comfort separated by symbolic borders between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Conclusion Summing up, I have observed a variety of naming processes concerning Ferentari, these being used as border-control tactics by diverse urban actors. The first process involves strengthening the symbolism of specific location names, such as Ferentari itself, or Tunsu Petre and Zăbrăuţi. This tactic was used especially to assert power and superiority on the wide stage of media and public discourses. The second naming process employs generic names, such as the positively charged comunitate, the neutral cartier, but also the negatively charged ghetou or ţigănie. These were tactics used especially to legitimize social interventions and political programs, on stages both outside and inside the



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district. Third, some urban actors used new combinations and names with an aura of specificity, such as comunitate de tranzit, comunitate ascunsă, ghetou de lux, and mahala. These have been constructed and used especially to assert deeper knowledge of the district, on the academic and activist stages. The fourth naming process involved hiding the negative symbolism of specific location names by not naming them as such, instead fragmenting them with pseudo-names of exact addresses. These were tactics used especially on stages outside the district in order to overcome negative stereotypes. These four tactics speak to the unsettled past of Romanian cities, in which the changing of names has been a recurring aspect of urban development and redevelopment, and in which Bucharest has forged a longstanding love-hate relationship with its peripheries and their associated social actors. In this process, Ferentari became a stage of segregation and inequality where resources, including symbolic identities, are intensely negotiated. Employing these tactics in relation to Ferentari, different but interconnected urban actors influence each other, adopt each other’s tactics, and change strategies, depending on their settings and public. All four naming processes include inner contradictions, leading to the persistence of ambiguity around what Ferentari is, what Ferentari residents are and do, and what the city is in relation to its periphery. In October 2012, two online articles sparked a heated debate around the different names, actors, and power roles in the staging of Ferentari. In one article, historian Andrei Pippidi (2012) had reinterpreted the results of Botonogu’s report (2011) and called Ferentari a “slum.” Import­ ing this term into debates about the district and into the intellectual language, he defined it as an extremely poor residential area lacking basic facilities, associating it with lumea a treia (the Third World) and mizerie (filth and misery), demanding its destruction in the name of progress and hygiene. Journalist and social researcher Adrian Şchiop (2012), at that time a resident of the Aleea Livezilor neighbourhood, responded forcefully. He drew attention to the diversity and size of Ferentari; only parts of it were afflicted by severe poverty, and even those areas were socio-economically diverse. He highlighted not only Ferentari’s similarity and connection with other districts of Bucharest, but also to cities and towns around the country, and to the overall socioeconomic conditions in Romania. He used all the terms – ghetou, mahala, and unde se sfârşeşte oraşul (where the city ends) – to name Ferentari’s settings and highlight its complexities, impossible to frame with only

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one term. Moreover, he criticized social activists and NGO workers for exaggerating and for their extensive use of negatively charged names (such as the ones I have observed and illustrated in the previous section) in order to impress sponsors and justify funding, similar names to those that inspired gentrifying discourses such as Pippidi’s. Şchiop’s article was the first to publicly challenge the border-control tactics used for gaining and maintaining power positions in the staging of the Ferentari play, and the first to publicly criticize all symbolic borders separating the district from the city. Thus, the complex relationship between the district, the actors performing and changing its settings, the city, and the wider socio-economic situation in Romania was brought front stage. As of this writing, this debate about the future of Ferentari and the roles of its actors was still in progress. Names and naming processes reveal tensions among actors trying to gain the power to define the urban settings, and thus to reclaim them. Divergent goals, performances, stages, and actors come into contact in Ferentari and are negotiated in border-control situations. Due to the complexity of the social stages of Ferentari and the urban actors’ interdependency, none of the tactics became dominant, although deep power and resource inequalities were observed. This suggests that the social borders they create or maintain are blurred, shifting, and unexpected; that behind contradictions in the social staging of Ferentari there is also coexistence, with symbolic meanings that are mutually dependent. The persistence of these naming contradictions, and the variety of naming processes, points to a continuing ambiguity and uncertainty about the future of Ferentari, and indeed of Bucharest, an unravelling social drama embedded in the post-socialist urban condition. NOTES 1 Of properties formerly nationalized during the early years of the communist regime. 2 Similar phenomena were revealed by researchers in other post-socialist countries. See, for example, the special issue of Studia Sociologia (Bodnar and Poledna, 2009). 3 The Romanian Roma were enslaved until the 1850s. After abolition, very few received compensation, such as land ownership. The study coordinated by Fleck and Rughiniş (2008) showed that the Roma families who



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received compensation in the form of land ownership back in the nineteenth century are much less economically vulnerable nowadays. 4 In Bucharest, as in other Romanian cities, the division of cartiere is usually based on previous historical settlements and separations (Mihăilescu, 2003; Tudora, 2009). 5 Detailed accounts about the changes in the urban settings and the urban names brought about by the prewar and interwar periods of economic development and crises can be found for example in Henri Stahl’s works (1938; [1910] 2003). 6 Initially, the workers were supposed to live in the dorms until the completion of the construction, until they obtained higher qualifications, or until they formed a family with children. 7 Using the term “squatting” in this context would be problematic: first of all, because the occupants do not call themselves “squatters” but ocupanţi fără acte (informal or undocumented occupants); secondly, because in the Romanian context the term “squat” has been used only recently and exclusively by the educated middle class. An analysis of this process and the symbolic meanings attached to the word can be found in Florea (2015). 8 The school mediator is a professional assuming both social work and school tutoring responsibilities, hired by local authorities in areas with a large proportion of Roma. 9 Similar news and terms can be found in the main newspapers – Evenimentul zilei, Cotidianul, Jurnalul naţional, România liberă, Gândul, Adevărul, and Libertatea (Rughiniş, 2004b). 10 Some residents in Zăbrăuţi had water, gas, and electricity debt that had been accumulating. REFERENCES Andriescu, V. 2013. “Ferentari, sperietoarea Bucureştiului.” Adevărul, 29 June. http://adevarul.ro/news/bucuresti/ferentari-cartier-bucuresti1_51ce9defc7b855ff56dc56b4/index.html. Accessed January 2016. Asociaţia Komunitas. 2008. “The School Cinema.” http://the-school-cinema .blogspot.ro/. Accessed January 2016. Berescu, C. 2011. “Ghetoul şi zona de locuire defavorizată (ZLD) Aleea Livezilor.” In Botonogu 2011, 38–57. Berescu, C., and M. Celac, eds. 2006. Locuirea şi sărăcia extremă: Cazul Romilor. Bucharest: “Ion Mincu” University Press.

252  Ioana Florea Berger, G. 2003. “The Journalism of Poverty and the Poverty of Journalism.” Conference Paper for the International Communications Forum, Cape Town. guyberger.ru.ac.za/fulltext/poverty.doc. Accessed January 2016. Bodnar, J., and R. Poledna, eds. 2009. Studia Sociologia: Restructuring the Postsocialist City. Cluj, Romania: Studia Universitatis. Botonogu, F., ed. 2011. Comunităţi ascunse: Ferentari. Bucharest: Editura Expert. Chelcea, L. 2000. “Grupuri marginale în zone centrale: gentrificare, drepturi de proprietate şi acumulare primitivă post-socialistă în Bucureşti.” Sociologie Românească 3–4: 51–68. Chelcea, L. 2008. Bucureştiul postindustrial: Memorie, dezindustrializare şi regenerare urbană. Iaşi, Romania: Editura Polirom. Coman, M. 2003. Mass-media în România post-comunistă. Iaşi, Romania: Editura Polirom. de Certeau, M. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fleck, G., and C. Rughiniş, eds. 2008. Come Closer: Inclusion and Exclusion of Roma in Present-Day Romanian Society. Bucharest: Human Dynamics. Florea, I. 2009. “Public Space and Urban Life Quality.” Revista de Asistenţă Socială 1–2: 63–76. Florea, I. 2015. “The Ups and Downs of a Symbolic City: The Architectural Protection Movement in Bucharest.” In Urban Grassroots Movements in Central and Eastern Europe, edited by K. Jacobsson, 55–78. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Ghiu, B. 2008. “Deconstrucţia pozitivă a spaţiului public.” Liternet.ro http:// atelier.liternet.ro/articol/5890/Bogdan-Ghiu/Deconstructia-pozitiva-aspatiului-public.html. Accessed October 2013. Giurescu, C. [1967] 2009. Istoria Bucureştilor. Bucharest: Vremea Publishing. Goffman, E. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books. Institutul Naţional de Statistică. 2011. Recensământul populaţiei şi al locuinţelor. http://www.recensamantromania.ro/rezultate-2/. Accessed January 2016. Ionuţ. 2006. “aleea ferentari b.” Bükreş Blog.http://bukresh.blogspot.ro/ 2006/12/aleea-ferentari-b.html. Accessed January 2016. Mara21. 2010. “Strada Petre Tunsu, Champs Elysees-ul interlopilor.” Adevărul, 21 February 21. adevarul.ro/news/bucuresti/strada-petre-tunsu-champselysees-ul-interlopilor-sectorul-5–1_50bdea247c42d5a663cfe216/index.html. Accessed January 2016. Mihali, C. 2001. Inventarea spaţiului: Arhitecturi ale experienţei cotidiene. Bucharest: Editura Paideia. Mihali, C. ed. 2005. Artă, tehnologie şi spaţiu public. Bucharest: Editura Paideia.



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Mihăilescu, V. 2003. Evoluţia geografică a unui oraş – Bucureşti. Bucharest: Editura Paideia. Olteanu, R. 2002. Bucureşti în date şi întâmplări. Bucharest: Editura Paideia. Parusi, G. 2005. Cronica Bucureştilor. Bucharest: Editura Compania. Pásztor, G., and L. Péter. 2009. “Romanian Housing Problems: Past and Present.” Studia Sociologia 54 (1): 79–100. Pippidi, A. 2012. “Ferentari.” Dilema Veche, no. 447, 6–12 September. http:// dilemaveche.ro/sectiune/bordeie-obiceie/articol/ferentari. Accessed January 2016. Popa, R. 2003. “Somalia de la marginea Bucureştiului.” Adevărul, 10 April. http://adevarul.ro/news/societate/somalia-marginea-bucurestiului1_50ac9a647c42d5a66386a6c7/index.html. Accessed January 2016. Preda, M., ed. 2009. Riscuri şi inechităţi sociale în România. Iaşi, Romania: Editura Polirom. Pulay, G. 2010. “La crâşma din Ferentari: Talebans and Junkies in .” Blogul de urbană.http://socasis.ubbcluj.ro/urbanblog/?p=598. Accessed December 2013. Rughiniş, C. 2004a. Cunoaştere incomodă: Intervenţii sociale în comunităţi defavorizate în România anilor 2000. Bucharest: Editura Printech. Rughiniş, C. ed. 2004b. “Reprezentări media ale sărăciei.” Working paper of the student research project, University of Bucharest. Sandu, D., ed. 2006. Viaţa socială în România urbană. Iaşi, Romania: Editura Polirom. Şchiop, A. 2012. “Lumpenii Ferentarilor, în capcana îngerilor din ong-uri şi a rechinilor din clasa de mijloc.” Criticatac.ro. www.criticatac.ro/19539/ lumpenii-ferentarilor-capcana-ingerilor-din-ong-uri-rechinilor-din-clasade-mijloc/. Accessed December 2013. Stahl, H. 1938. “Botezarea şi răsbotezarea străzilor Capitalei.” Gazeta Municipală 352 (no. 7). Stahl, H. [1910] 2003. Bucureştii ce se duc. Bucharest. Editura Do-minoR. Stănculescu, M., and I. Berevoescu, eds. 2004. Sărac lipit, caut altă viaţă! Fenomenul sărăciei extreme şi al zonelor sărace în România 2001. Bucharest: Editura Nemira. Stanilov, K., ed. 2007. The Post-Socialist City: Urban Form and Space Transforma­ tions in Central and Eastern Europe after Socialism. Dordrecht, NL: Springer. Ştirile ProTV. 2010. “Ferentari, de Sf. Maria: infecţie, gunoaie, grătare incinse şi miros acru.” 15 August. http://stirileprotv.ro/stiri/social/ferentari-desf-maria-infectie-gunoaie-gratare-incinse-si-miros-acru.html. Accessed January 2016.

254  Ioana Florea Teodorescu, V. 2012. “Infernul taberei ţigăneşti din Paris: De ce nu vor să se întoarcă în România.” Evenimentul Zilei, 19 October. www.evz.ro/Infernultaberei-igneti-din-Paris-De-ce-nu-vor-s-se-ntoarc-n-Romnia-1006415.html. Accessed January 2016. Tîrcă, M. 2008. Raport de cercetare: Aleea Zăbrăuţi, Bucureşti. Bucharest: Human Dynamics. Tudora, I. 2009. La curte: Grădină, cartier şi peisaj urban în Bucureşti. Bucharest: Editura Curtea Veche. Verdery, K. 1999. The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. New York: Columbia University Press. Zamfir, C., and M. Preda, eds. 2001. Romii în România. Bucharest: Editura Expert.

12 Some Reflections on Comparing (Post-)Suburbs in the United States and France Renaud Le G oix

As discussed in the introduction to this volume, there are generic and specific terms for the places that English speakers routinely call suburbs. Interestingly, the term banlieues à l’américaine has been widely used by planners and residents to describe large master-planned subdivisions built in France after the 1960s; these have a positive connotations associated with their novelty and negative ones associated with a sense of the Americanization of urban landscape (Charmes, 2005; Gasnier, 2006). In the academic literature, the categories of suburbanization in France and the United States are often loosely compared, because of the obvious similarities of the suburban landscape produced by subdividers (see figure 12.1), but also because of the production dynamics dominated by large real estate developers, which have radically changed the way suburbs have been produced and named.1 The era of large cluster subdivisions – master-planned communities in the United States (late 1940s−1990s) and large development projects in France (1960s–1990s) – introduced a clean break with previous stages of suburbanization. Referring to this, Lucy and Phillips (1997: 261) coined the expression “post-suburban era,” which they define “in terms of inner suburban population loss and relative income decline, suburban employment increase, suburban out-commuting reduction, exurban population and income increase, and farmland conversion.” “Post-suburban” describes the state of suburbanization in many countries (Wu and Phelps, 2008; Phelps and Wu, 2011; Keil and Young, 2011), insisting on the denser fabric of post-suburbanization in France and Europe and a slower transformation of the monocentric structure of metropolitan areas (Bontje and Burdack, 2011). Of course, a variety of terms have been used: while observing common patterns of urban sprawl, many French researchers,

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Figure 12.1. Typical post-suburbia in southern California. A master-planned development in Moreno Valley, Riverside County. Copyright R. Le Goix, G. Averlant, M. Schwarz, April 2010.

analysts, architects, and planners have borrowed American terms to refer to what has been happening at the fringes of French urban areas. This chapter examines some of the Anglo-American terminology used to name post-suburban dynamics in France. It discusses the problems associated with these naming practices, including that different phenomena are referred to by the same terms, and that this practice introduces interpretative bias in public policies and planning. Is U.S. Terminology Useful When Analysing French Suburban Dynamics? Since the late 1990s, the adoption of new planning regulations, norms, and practices promoting higher density standards has been succeeded by a trail of notions and references widely adopted by academics,



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planners, and developers in many different contexts, often adopting the English terminology. Among them, “smart growth,” “new urbanism,” “edge cities,” and “boomburbs” are preeminent. These notions capture subtle variations in global suburban dynamics: a slower but still dynamic sprawl; a trend towards denser and more clustered development; and a massive decentralization of employment and commuting patterns. This section seeks to analyse different semantics in the French academic literature on such issues and how they have been instrumental in shaping the debates about suburban dynamics.

Direct Transfers of Categories With respect to terminology in France, one trend is that of importing categories to describe patterns, land use, and landscapes. This is a longterm trend, as U.S. developers were initially leading players in real estate development in France – for example, Levitt as well as and Kaufman and Broad, who were pioneers in the market after 1968 (Vogel, 1979). U.S. developers helped transfer models, concepts, practices, and theories and implement them in typical French suburban schemes called nouveaux villages (Vogel, 1979; Kuisel, 1993; Gournay, 2002). Nouveaux villages are master-planned communities, large subdivisions of singlefamily homes with a homogeneous design and often governed by a property owners association. Since 1980, U.S. developers have been less active in the French single-family homes market, as developers from the Netherlands (Bouwfonds-Marignan), the United Kingdom (George V), and France (Bouygues, Nexity, Les Nouveaux Constructeurs) took the lead (Callen, 2011). The role of U.S. players in transferring suburbanization models took a radical turn in 1987 with the master planning of Val-d’Europe by a public-private partnership between the state and the Disney Corporation, implementing new models in planning a resort, surrounded by compact residential and commercial inspired by the new urbanism movement (Bontje and Burdack, 2011; Picon and Orillard, 2012). In this context, planning theories (“new urbanism”), models (“smart growth,” “transit-oriented developments”), and terms describing spatial dynamics (“boomburbs”), gradually generated interest among those French scholars who focus on the dynamics of densification, especially in transit-oriented neighbourhoods. Whereas some papers published in French may be restricted to U.S. case studies (Billard, 2010; GhorraGobin, 2010 and 2011), others focus on the wide use of U.S. terms as

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analytical categories in the French context. Good examples of the latter can be found in case studies of Bussy-Saint-Georges and Val-d’Europe, both located in the “new town” of Marne-la-Vallée, developed in the late 1990s and reflecting the “new urbanism” movement (Picon and Orillard, 2012; Choplin and Delage, 2014) (see figures 12.1 and 12.2). This example of the New Towns program would once have been categorized as an “edge city” by Garreau (1991: 235).2 Recently the term “boomburb” has become increasingly common as an analytical category adopted from the United States. Chalard (2011) has explicitly used it to analyse the dynamics of fifty-four French suburban municipalities with populations of more than 10,000 located in the outer suburban rings around larger metropolitan areas (specifically Paris, Aix-Marseille, Lyon, Rennes, and Toulouse). The term “baby boomburbs” refers to smaller municipalities following the same dynamics (Chalard, 2011). Originally coined by Lang and LeFurgy (2007), the term specifically refers to a trend identified since the 1970s. They define “boomburbs” as “having more than 100,000 residents, as not the core city in their region, and as having maintained double-digit rates of population growth for each census since the beginning year (1970)” (6). Neither Chalard nor Lang and LeFurgy actually discuss the arbitrary (yet very symbolic) choice of thresholds (within a range of 10,000 to 100,000 inhabitants), but they nevertheless use the “boomburb” category as a heuristic device in their analyses of sub-central growth and suburban fragmentation in larger metropolitan regions. They describe “boomburbs” as “accidental cities” because of their lack of planning. In addition, they point to the lack of political recognition such developments are accorded, especially when compared to major central cities.

Analytical Concepts Another trend consists of using analytical concepts classically framed for studying U.S. social, racial, and ethnic segregation dynamics and integrating them into the French debate on city planning and urban public policies, although Wacquant (2008), among others, has clearly demonstrated the risks of the comparison. After Blakely and Snyder’s (1997) analysis of gated communities, much attention has focused on the contributions of such proprietary neighbourhoods to segregation in the United States (Le Goix, 2005; Le Goix and Vesselinov, 2015). In terms of transferring analysis from the United States to the French context, a seminal paper by Donzelot (1999) illustrates the trend. It considers the



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Figure 12.2. Residential subdivisions in Bussy-Saint-Georges (Ville Nouvelle, Marne-la-Vallée), 2007. Marne-la-Vallée’s New Town program is often describe as an “edge city,” a “boomburb,” and a model of “new urbanism.” Copyright, Le Goix, Debicki, 2007.

rise of forms of urbanism based on interpersonal affinity in post-industrial cities, analysing in particular “secessionists” neighbourhoods such as gated and lifestyle communities. He discusses the transfer of normative planning practice: “In the U.S., this suburbanization has become a dominant model, to the point that the population living in the suburbs (a suburbia that broke its ties with the city center) exceeds the total population living in cities or in the countryside. Although with a later start, it seems that the process of suburbanization in European cities will be following the same path, even making up for the lost time” (Donzelot, 1999: 100; my translation).

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Scholar usually argue for similarities between U.S. and European suburbanism in all of the following dimensions: landscapes, of course, but also institutional arrangements (homeowner regimes and private urban governance), the sense of place and centre-periphery relationships, as well as a demand-side analysis for enhanced local security. Some scholars stress institutional contexts and insist that there are many common patterns although systems of local governance are different (Jaillet, 1999; Charmes, 2009). “French periurbs approximately correspond to the outer suburbs and metropolitan fringes, or to what are more and more often called ‘exurbs’ in the U.S. Yet, unlike American exurbs, which in many cases are governed at the county level, French suburbs have always been governed by municipalities – that is, at the territorial level of the commune, the smallest unit of local government in France” (Charmes, 2009: 189). Indeed, debates on the rise of residential privatism, gated communities, and socio-spatial fragmentation have highlighted the specificity of the French context in terms of such fragmentation and the specific role of a sense of place captured by a downtown/peripheries dichotomy that manifests itself in terms of a sense of urbanity: “European cities have resisted the adoption of American-style security-oriented and fragmented forms of urbanism, as described by David Mangin in La ville franchisée (2004). This is explained by historical factors that allowed European cities to turn more slowly into franchised cities” (Mongin, 2013: 61; my translation). For instance, suburbanization driven by the massive use of automobiles, commercial urbanism, and individual housing has led to some oversimplifications in loosely comparing both contexts: “In Europe, car-driven development went from the inner city to the countryside, whereas in the U.S., it went from the countryside to the city. In France, suburban individual housing emerged late, although it has always existed in the U.S. … The attractiveness of historical centres, efficient radial mass transport networks, the taste for public space, and a strong municipal tradition have opposed a North American culture of privatism” (Mangin, 2009; my translation). Some scholars have examined security and have analysed the rapid adoption of security-oriented forms of urbanization and gated communities, comparing American and French trends (Billard et al., 2005). They deploy U.S. concepts to explain the rise of local dynamics of privatism, enclaves, and gated subdivisions as well as the derivatives of NIMBY-ism and defensible space in France (Loudier-Malgouyres, 2013).



Comparing (Post-)Suburbs in the United States and France  261

Yet, many authors underestimate some historical patterns, such as the adoption of identical planning practices for the romantic suburbs (individual housing in elite residential estates) in the 1830s, both in the United States and in France. These practices have strongly determined the structure of property ownership and the early adoption of private residential governance and homeowner associations in both contexts (Fourcaut, 2000; Le Goix and Callen, 2010). This discussion shows that many scholars contend that borrowing descriptive or analytical categories from American post-suburbanism might be useful in constructing categories to capture changing patterns in the outermost ring of suburbs in France. Nevertheless, I contend that several problems arise from this practice. The next section examines a series of issues related to the statistical categories at stake, and the geographies of suburbia as they are inferred when borrowing North American concepts. Comparing with Bias and Nearsightedness The respective statistical agencies of France and the United States use different criteria when defining urban and suburban boundaries. As noted in the introduction to this volume, words, including those related to statistics “qualify, divide, and classify reality”; with respect to analogies between French périurbain and U.S. suburban areas, words also can convey a false sense that similar spatial dynamics are being compared. Périurbain is a statistical category in France (figure 12.3). The French National Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies (Institut national de la statistique et des etudes économiques – INSEE) coined the concept aires urbaines (urban areas) in the late 1990s, dividing them into two main rings: the agglomeration (a continuously built-up area) and the peri-urban fringe. Using the geography of municipal boundaries, this fringe is defined as a continuous territory with fragmented urbanization according to two criteria: that it is at least 200 metres from the continuously built-up area, and that at least 40 per cent of its workers commute to the central cities. The definition has changed over time, but, since 2010, these central cities (pôles urbains) have been defined as agglomerations of more than 1,500 jobs for minor centres; 5,000 to 10,000 jobs for medium-size centres; and more than 10,000 jobs for major centres. Only major centres are actually classified as central cities of urban areas (aires urbaines).3 In the first decade of this century, the

262  Renaud Le Goix

annual rate of growth %

3 2.5 2 1.5 1 0.5 0 -0.5

1962-68

1968-75

1975-82

1982-90

1990-99

1999-2006

-1 First-tier suburbs (banlieues)

Central cities (pôles urbains)

Periurban fringe (couronnes périurbaines)

Figure 12.3. Suburbanization dynamics in France, 1962–2006 (central cities with at least 5,000 jobs). Source: Adapted by the author from Baccaïni and Sémécurbe, 2009.

average size of suburban municipalities was 820 inhabitants (Charmes, 2009), and an estimated 29 per cent of the French population lived in these statistical suburban areas, according to the 2010 definition. Besides the statistical category itself, French suburbs are usually analysed as a set of successive rings. The first bourgeois suburbanization developed in residential estates close to railway stations in the late nineteenth century, and blue-collar workers progressively moved to single-family housing in the first industrial housing suburbs during the first half of the twentieth century, encouraged by a state incentive offering preferential loans for first-time home buyers (Fourcaut, 2000).4 After the Second World War, population growth in France was fuelled by the continuous expansion and densification of urban areas. Nationally, suburbanization dynamics were preeminent between 1975 and the 1990s (see figure 12.3). Three categories of housing prevailed: first, tract housing in large subdivisions called nouveaux villages – which were directly inspired by Levittown on Long Island, New York (and thus described as à l’américaine, or American-style) – especially in the vicinity



Comparing (Post-)Suburbs in the United States and France  263

of the growing Paris metropolitan region; second, smaller subdivisions attached to small countryside villages (rurbanisation); and, last but not least, unorganized and scattered single-family homes built on former individual agricultural lots (mitage). This dynamic has been supported by state-driven incentives to increase homeownership from the 1960s on and bolstered by a reform of housing benefits in 1977. Outer suburbs have long been regarded as the locus for the lower middle class, excluded from more central locations by the high cost of housing. However, some studies have sought to show a greater diversity in population (Berger, 2004; Jaillet, 2004). In France, suburbanization is seen mostly as a movement of residential loosening that cannot be easily compared to the edgeless city (Lang, 2003). Indeed, urban centres have remained the major places of employment; in 2010, suburban areas as a whole account for 12 percent of jobs, whereas a quarter of employees are suburbanites. This growing discrepancy between place of residence and place of work feeds an intense growth of commuting trips between centres and peripheries. However, the suburbs have seen a level of job diversification beyond simply jobs associated with residential services; in addition, there has been a growing trend towards sub-centring in connection with the emergence of secondary job centres (Chalonge and Beaucire, 2007; Drevelle, 2012). The early process of suburbanization in the United States started in the mid-nineteenth century, with the upper classes escaping central city growth, social promiscuity, and the influx of immigrants in inner cities (Jackson, 1985; Fishman, 1987). After the Second World War, the suburbanization movement intensified; it could be differentiated according to three different phases, which were characterized by public investment in highways, change in transportation systems, and state support for the mortgages of middle-class households (Fishman, 1987; Lang et al., 2006). Indeed, the federal government conducted a proactive policy that has fuelled individual property and homebuilding in suburban tract housing (e.g., loan guarantees through the Federal Housing Ad­ ministration and tax deductions for first-time buyers).5 The first phase of mass suburbanization in the 1950s was based on a continuous sprawl of residential areas for the white middle and working classes. A second stage in the 1970s saw the culmination of the development of shopping centres, services, and amenities. In the 1980s, a third wave of postwar suburbanization, led by the decentralization of employment centers, resulted in the creation of suburban centres that were increasingly independent of the central city, and a more diverse pattern of social and

264  Renaud Le Goix

ethno-racial suburban stratification and assimilation (Alba et al., 1999; Clark, 2006; Logan, 2013). In France, municipalities are officially defined as suburban by ad hoc census categories constructed by the census institute (INSEE). In the United States, however, suburbanization is not officially defined by the Bureau of the Census; it defines only individual urban and rural areas.6 The suburban categories used in the literature are derived from the geography of the metropolitan statistical areas (MSA) typology (see figure 12.4). Suburban categories constructed by Frey (2012) are aggregations of counties within the hundred largest metropolitan areas, which are classified into four categories: city/high density suburb, mature suburb, emerging suburb, and exurb. By such categorization, Frey, among others, highlights the rapid dynamics of suburbs, and in particular the sharp growth of the outer suburban rings and the relative decline of mature suburbs, with some rapid fluctuations after 2005. The lack of an official statistical definition of “suburb” raises methodological questions in any analysis of the different phases of suburbanization (Le Goix, 2016). Neighbourhood characteristics are helpful in discussing the different types of suburbs – for example, in terms of functions, densities and urban attributes, the share of commuters, the pioneering position, the share of homeownership, and new developments: While not officially classified by the Census Bureau, low-density outer suburbs and exurbs are typically contrasted with inner, more urbanized suburbs that have many of the attributes of core cities. These outer suburbs often contain more residents (many commuters) than workers, and have typically been the frontiers of population growth in both fast and modestly growing metropolitan areas, often due to more new and affordable homeownership opportunities. (Frey, 2012: 11)

Studying suburban dynamics in the United States with government statistics involves working with sometimes inadequate geographical resolution, consisting either of counties peripheral to the central county (see table 12.1), or areas outside of the MSA city centre (Frey, 2012). This inadequacy has been discussed in academic papers. Nelson and Sanchez (2005: 43) comment that “the research questions posed … require a finer grain of geographic resolution. After all, how can we measure exurbanization in San Bernardino County, California, which has decidedly urban, suburban, exurban, and rural development – and is larger than most New England states?”



Comparing (Post-)Suburbs in the United States and France  265

Figure 12.4. Annual growth rate by county urbanization, large metro areas, 2000–10. Source: Adapted by the author from Frey (2012).

Table 12.1 summarizes some of the concepts and criteria analysed in reports and scholarly works to define the recent phases of suburban development. The geographical sensitivity of the evaluation of suburban dynamics shows different practices: some prefer to rely on a finer grain, such as suburban places and municipalities where available (Lucy and Phillips, 2001), whereas others consider the availability of data and dismiss the question of the unit of analysis (Berube et al., 2008). While it is often assumed that French and U.S. suburbs can be easily compared in terms of processes and dynamics, the comparison falls short with respect to context, statistical terms, and categories. On the one hand, the French definition is static and considers as strictly suburban only the outer ring of the urban edge, where leap-frog development dominates the landscape. On the other hand, in the United States, suburbs are defined as a component of MSAs (a geographic unit composed of entire counties), a definition that lacks a convenient geo­ graphy because the spatial unit or geographical resolution (based on counties) is considered to be too large to actually account for the structural differences between the different stages of urbanization (Nelson and Sanchez, 2005). Considering the problem of statistically defining the elements of suburbia, in both cases the analysis of suburbanism, sprawl, and the outer periphery is constrained by a logical trap, or a relative mismatch,

266  Renaud Le Goix Table 12.1. Competing definitions: Examples of the geographies, concepts, and criteria used to characterize the dynamics of suburbs and exurbs in the United States Source

Geography

Concept

Criteria

Spectorsky (1955)

counties and places

exurbanites

Residents using transit to work in New York City (from CT and PA)

Blumenfeld (1986)

metropolitan areas

metropolitan fringe

Pop. outside SMSAs,* in a radius of 70 miles (SMSA > 2 million inhabitants); in a radius of 50 miles (SMSA between 500,000 and 2 million inhabitant)

Nelson (1992)

county

exurbs

Pop. outside MSAs**. Same thresholds as Blumenfeld, 1986

Davis et al. (1994)

cities, towns and unincorporated areas

exurbs

In Portland MSA, individual survey on travel to work, place of residence, etc.

Wolman et al. (2005)

census tract

sprawl

Urbanized areas and contiguous tract, according to settlement criteria (more than 60 dwelling units) and pop. commuting to work > 30%

Nelson and Sanchez (2005)

block groups

exurbs

Density 115–380 inhabitants / sq. km

Berube et al. (2006)

census tract

exurbia

> 20% of workers commuting to work. Density (first-tier). Pop. growth > MSA average or 3 times national average growth

Clark et al. (2006)

Landsat raster grid

exurbia

Fragmentation of local governments, income, local services, travel time to work, occupations. Density (100– 1000 inhabitants / sq. km); settlement patterns

Lang and LeFurgy (2007)

Places in MSAs

boomburbs

Growth > 10% / year over the previous 30 years.

Berube et al. (2006); Berube et al. (2008)

county

exurbia

> 20% of workers commuting to work. Density (first-tier). Pop. growth > MSA average or 3 times national average growth

Frey (2012)

county

emerging suburbs and exurbs

Low residential density (first tier). Emerging suburbs are counties with 25–75% of pop. located in urbanized areas; exurbs are counties with < 25% of pop. in urbanized areas.

* Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas ** Metropolitan Statistical Areas



Comparing (Post-)Suburbs in the United States and France  267

between a priori categories defined by official statistics and the categories and objects actually existing and observed in the built environment in a very fragmented landscape. Planning Suburbia as Places and Mass Consumption Products The fragmentation of suburbia is not only morphological, but also political. When comparing patterns in France and the United States, scholars and planners not only compare two incompatible statistical systems, but they also introduce an analytical bias, as they do not refer to the same geographical, planning, and political objects. An important point to address is how residential subdivisions are planned and produced as places, neighbourhoods, and mass consumption products. Developers typically package residential estates as neighbourhoods. The houses are built and delivered with a certain level of services, lifestyle, and amenities (i.e. access to a golf course, parks, leisure facilities, and so on) and a bundle of rights attached to the residence, which will define its characteristics and price. In the United States, the most generic terminology used by experts and planners to refer to suburbs are “subdivisions” and “planned developments.” A “subdivision” consists of the division, by any subdivider, of parcel(s), serviced or not, previously identified in the property tax rolls as a single unit, in order to be sold, rented, or serve as investment.7 “Planned development” or “Planned unit development” (PUD) is a category found mostly in planning documents. If we consider the state of California alone, PUD represents up to 52 per cent of proposed new housing (see table 12.2).8 Such a project must include maps and regulations (parcel maps, tentative and final maps), as well as the various ordinances issued by regulatory authorities, the phasing of the project, and infrastructure works required for the project (Knox and Knox, 1997). Most housing estates follow PUD planning procedures. The schemes are governed by regulations and run by associations, which remain the owners of all public areas, including streets. The homeowner is an ex officio member of the association. Large exurban tract housing developments are called “masterplanned communities,” defined as new urban developments on agricultural or vacant land that are subject to a general planning process negotiated and discussed with the authorities, and in which the developers gain complete land control. This type of project – which can be seen, for example, in Radburn, New Jersey, or Sun City, Arizona –

268  Renaud Le Goix Table 12.2. Categories of subdivisions approved in California between 2000 and 2010 (development permits and housing units) California Dev. permits Community apartment

Housing units

Southern California %

Housing units

13

204

%

23

337

Condominium

15,459

559,469

37.3

11,339

379,585

41.9

Planned development

23,271

756,316

50.4

16,600

472,814

52.2

4,069

155,859

10.4

943

41,624

4.6

254

19,543

1.3

75

7,348

0.8

Standard Timeshare Other Total

579

9,946

43,655

1,501,470

0.02

Dev. permits

0.6 100

90

4,805

29,060

906,380

0.02

0.5 100

belongs to an intermediate planning scale, between the large subdivision and the new town. Even though the lineage between masterplanned communities and New Town projects is obvious, the latter usually pertain to large integrated urban projects, combining higher density, a greater mix of land use, the development of local job hubs, commercial and recreational amenities, transportation (e.g., rail transit systems, a regional airport) with special attention given to the quality of life and social diversity of the project, as in Irvine, California. Governments are often directly involved in the planning effort, even if the project is operated by a private body of governance (as in Irvine) (Forsyth, 2002). In general, major suburban development projects from the 1960s in the United States have been characterized by a social utopia vision: in Columbia, Maryland, for example, James Rouse, the developer, envisioned the project as a community allowing a racial mix (Kato, 2006). Irvine, California, and Woodlands, Texas, were developed as “balanced communities,” a term that designates a social and racial mix and a balance between the number of residents and jobs, while land use planning allowed for the provision of social housing (Forsyth, 2002). In France, the generic terminology used in planning documents as well as in the academic and non-academic literature to describe tract housing is lotissement (literally, subdivision). Generally speaking, a subdivision is primarily a legal planning category, a transaction that



Comparing (Post-)Suburbs in the United States and France  269

subdivides a lot into at least two lots. The actual construction of the structure on such subdivided lots must occur within ten years after the subdi­vision permit is granted. Following the massive wave of blue-collar “failed” subdivisions (lotissements défectueux) in the early twentieth century that were developed with insufficient infrastructure (Fourcaut, 2000), subdivisions have been regulated by a series of laws and decrees that requires the developer to provide utilities, allows municipalities to finance the acquisition of unsold or ill-equipped lots and to enhance urban design.9 Planning for a development consisting of single-family homes is tightly regulated. Such a development requires a legal arrangement that produces a specific space in the urban and suburban landscape. The subdivision process requires control over land. Local authorities, such as a municipality or private entities (e.g., landowner, developer, real estate company), may own the land to be developed. The term lotissement is, however, a confusing category, as it is often used to loosely and indifferently describe various forms of types of single-family housing, suburban landscapes, and different forms of legal arrangements. Public databases (e.g., the Sit@del2 database) do little to clarify matters, as permit statistics differentiate only two categories of single-family housing (table 12.3). The first category, individuel (for “individual permits”) pertains to both individual houses built on rural lots (mitage) and subdivisions with single-family homes. In the latter case, a two-step procedure is required: the subdivider applies for a permit before selling vacant lots, then builders apply for an individual building permit for each home. At least two actors are involved in this case: a subdivider and a builder of individual houses, the builder being an individual choosing a house from a homebuilder catalogue, or opting for a popular self-construction system (Bourdieu, 2000). As shown in table 12.3, the “individual” category represents up to 50–70 per cent of individual housing built in the Paris region. Another category, tract housing (groupé), is defined as development permits. When developments are planned under the groupé category, the developer files a single development permit, and then sells the built properties individually after full completion of the project. This planning category leads to the greatest architectural homogeneity (see figure 12.2), and is therefore also referred to in the general literature (as in the famous Télérama paper describing the ugly suburban landscapes – “Comment la France est devenue moche” [De Jarcy and Remy, 2010]) as the quintessential model of

270  Renaud Le Goix Table 12.3. Housing typology by type of permit and surface area of new housing built in Ile-de-France between 1999 and 2007 Single-Family Housing Individuel (individual permits)(a)

Groupé (tract housing)

Collectif (multifamilyhousing)

Total

% square metres of (a) / total singlefamily housing

Hauts-deSeine

290,515

292,232

3,979,227

4,561,974

50.1

Seine-SaintDenis

603,087

319,452

2,376,400

3,298,939

34.6

Val-de-Marne

617,519

371,402

2,316,393

3,305,314

37.6

Seine-etMarne

2,670,280

1,423,139

2,251,046

6,344,465

34.8

Yvelines

1,880,886

754,877

1,568,777

4,204,540

28.6

Essonne

1,689,572

750,107

1,409,809

3,849,488

30.7

Val-d’Oise

1,343,496

551,350

1,454,448

3,349,294

29.1

lotissements that were massively produced between the 1970s and the late 1990s by international developers, although it is not recognized under the legal category of a lotissement. Therefore, although apparently convergent, the residential developments differ in their legal basis, their logic, and their production locations (see table 12.3), in the actors involved in production, and in the market segments they are targeting, with regional or international developers focusing on different niche markets or particular areas in the region (Vilmin, 2005; Callen, 2011). Governance Governance is another important dimension to be considered when comparing post-suburban dynamics in France and the United States: “the mutation of suburban into post-suburban ideology and politics has entailed governance at new spatial scales” (Phelps and Wood, 2011: 2601). The boundaries of settlements, residential subdivisions, or edge cities rarely coincide with already established institutional boundaries. At a local level – that of the neighbourhood or municipality – postsuburbanism introduces a blurring of lines between private and public



Comparing (Post-)Suburbs in the United States and France  271

governance (Fishman, 1987), which is associated with a fragmentation or “splintering” of the provision of infrastructure and service (such as public transportation, power and water supply, and sewerage) and a privatized structure of governance building upon a club economy (Webster, 2003 and 2007; Webster and Glasze, 2006). Indeed, an array of terms describing the blurred boundaries between the public and private governance of suburban areas (“private urban governance,” “private neighbourhoods,” “clubs,” and so on) has been widely adopted by scholars discussing exclusionary urbanism, privatism, and secessionist attitudes (Donzelot, 1999), but also by planners and architects (LoudierMalgouyres and Vallet, 2010; Loudier-Malgouyres, 2013; Mongin, 2013) and by commentators and journalists describing the privatization of civic space in suburbs. The governance perspective requires a clarification of the terminology used and the level of governance it describes. Many analysts describe the implementation of private urban governance as a side effect of the most recent phases of suburbanization, and, indeed, planned communities, homeowners’ association, and gated communities do implement forms of private urban governance (McKenzie, 1994 and 2011; Glasze et al., 2006). The implementation of infrastructure (e.g., water, sewage) is often transferred to districts and paid for by homeowners through non-fiscal levies. Ad hoc municipalities have also been created, which are instrumental in transferring public money for the use of large planned developments and gated communities. A study in the region of Los Angeles showed that these are, in many cases, fully incorporated municipalities, while some special purpose districts are also common instruments (Le Goix, 2006). Legally speaking, all forms of residential subdivisions and planned communities rely on property rights arrangements and regulations, implemented by homeowners associations (HOAs) or property owners associations (POAs) that are designed to exclude outsiders and protect property values. These governing bodies are formed by residents tied by contract to a common set of interests (McKenzie, 1994); a variety of such contracts, more generally named Common Interest Developments (CIDs), have been used in different local contexts. Gated communities and walled neighbourhoods are members of this CID class that includes master-planned communities and condominiums governed by collective tenure and incorporated organizational arrangements (Glasze, 2005). Such morphologies rely on forms of scrutiny as social strategies support comfort and social homogeneity (Low, 2003; Gordon, 2004;

272  Renaud Le Goix

Kirby, 2008). Gated communities became, for some, both symbols and symptoms of a line that is being crossed from voice-based citizenship to exit-based citizenship (Tiebout, 1956; Foldvary, 1994) and from politically organized to market-based civic society and neighbourhoods. The economic theory of clubs (Buchanan, 1965) challenges the neoclassical notion of public goods. A club, in economics, is a method of supplying jointly consumed goods efficiently on the basis of controlled membership and fees. This line of argument sees private urban governance in terms of neither public nor private spaces. Rather such governance is viewed in terms of club spaces – spaces governed by “small publics” – that is, homeowners associations and shareholders. Com­ pared to classical municipal governments, they are alleged to be more efficient organizations for allocating scarce resources, for a number of reasons. Residents can vote with their feet and choose the bundle of shared goods and services they prefer at a given price. From this derives a comparison between the club community market and the spatial economy of Charles Tiebout (1956). The exclusionary mechanism of “membership” means that there is a more precise relationship between payment and benefit received than there is in publicly managed neighbourhoods. Significant investments made by POAs are capitalized in land rents. Not only do owners have an incentive to invest in their local environments but they can also recover investment costs from rents. The sustainability is ensured by the existence of the POA, which has three basic characteristics: elected boards act as neighbourhood decision makers; contracts govern resident behaviour (through convenants, conditions, and restrictions, CC&Rs); and monthly fees finance local amenities and services. By interpreting private urban governance as a mechanism for supplying environments, security, and other goods and services that are neither private nor public goods, the club economy model allows a more nuanced and specific debate about the roles of markets and governments in shaping, governing, and managing the city. In the United States, this club economy realm has been adopted to describe the very fragmented political structure produced by private neighbourhoods and master-planned communities (Le Goix, 2006), and to analyse how it contributes to a greater sense of place, neighbourhood building, or sense of community (Kirby, 2008). But in France, authors such as Charmes (2009) and Jaillet (1999) contend that small municipalities (with an average population 820 inhabitants) are local bodies of government whose principles perfectly match those of the club



Comparing (Post-)Suburbs in the United States and France  273

economy, as a local organization managing the interest of its members, most notability by means of slow-growth policies and control of land use. There is no need to build large, privately governed, planned communities to create exclusive neighbourhoods from scratch in France, as small municipalities perfectly implement exclusionary policies. Indeed, a mayor of such a municipality is allowed to determine zoning regulations and the type of authorized construction (collective or individual housing, for example). Periurban municipalities govern the provision of goods and control social homogeneity: The impact of land use by-laws and of local policies on building values (through “capitalisation”) allows action to be taken on the entry fee required to be part of the municipality. Annual dues associated with residency in the municipality can also be set through local taxes … French periurban communes [municipalities] are an environment conducive to the formation of a market of bundles of local collective goods. (Charmes, 2009: 193)

Furthermore, a well-established policy regarding land use and planning in these smaller municipalities is to maintain a belt of rural and agricultural land around the built-up area (see figure 12.3). As the built-up area remains a modest size, it frequently appears to be isolated. When this built-up area is underlined by the relief of the surrounding natural or agricultural land, the visual effect of an “autonomous village” can be striking. The place-building process in French postsuburbs are the landscapes resulting from planning policies and municipal by-laws arranging the entry fee, and planning choices that are dedicated to sorting and selecting prospective homebuyers. For instance, real estate agents often advertise not only the property and the seclusion, exclusivity, and tidiness of the built environment, but also the level of services nearby (e.g., schools, parks, recreation, transportation), and this level of service has an explicit influence on locational choice; this is the case in French as well as in U.S. suburban contexts (Berube et al., 2006; Le Goix and Callen, 2010). Conclusion When describing French dynamics of outer suburbanization, many American terms have been borrowed by analysts and academics, and

274  Renaud Le Goix

these words have been integrated into planning practices and analytical categories. Many problems arise with this procedure, from (at least) three sources. First, the respective statistical agencies of the two countries use different criteria in defining urban boundaries, boundaries that define the spaces to which researchers and planners must refer. Second, settlement patterns differ, most notably because places of employment have decentralized more slowly around French than U.S. cities. Third, the local governance associated with planned communities strongly differs in the two countries. Whereas in France the municipal level conveys sufficient control for homeowners, such local control is better performed through private urban governance structures in the United States. The municipal power in France can also be strong enough to allow growth while controlling the population influx (see the discussion in Anne Lambert’s chapter below). Purchasing a property within a private planned development in the United States or within a small “publicly operated and developed” lotissement in France is not only a way to access a bundle of rights over the property, but it also comes with a set of services and amenities that are implicitly bundled with the properties. This bundle derives mostly from the municipal provision of services, implemented according to club principles in France while in the United States the club realm derives from the HOA system. Comparing French and U.S. post-suburbs requires a careful look at the finer local grain of analysis that actually allows comparison: how postsuburban neighbourhoods and developments are legally (planning), politically (clubs), and socially constructed at the local level. NOTES 1 Cf. the chapter by Topalov in the present volume: the terms villas (small private housing estate), cités, and hameaux, have been used to distinguish between small subdivisions built by small local developers, business owners, or trade unions. 2 The New Towns program (Villes Nouvelles) was originally planned in the mid-1960s along principles such as compactness, higher densities, mixed land use, walkable centres with access to mass transit system corridors, and a local balance between jobs and housing so as to avoid uncontrolled sprawl on the peripheries of Paris, Lyon, Lille, and Marseille (Merlin, 1991).



Comparing (Post-)Suburbs in the United States and France  275

3 See Anne Lambert’s chapter in the present volume for details regarding the périurbain statistical category, and how this term remains irrelevant for most of the residents. 4 Cf. The chapter by Christian Topalov in the present volume. 5 As a remarkable long-term public policy, the Mortgage Interest Deduction, a major driver for suburbanization in the twentieth century, has been applied to support the real estate industry after the subprime crisis, with a homebuyer tax deduction applied to homeowners who bought in 2008–9 and 2010. The author wishes to thank the reviewer for this input. 6 Urbanized areas (UAs) of 50,000 or more people; urban clusters (UCs) of between 2,500 and 50,000 people. “Rural” encompasses all population, housing, and territory not included within an urban area. https://www .census.gov/geo/reference/urban-rural.html 7 The term “subdivision” includes condominium or condominium-type projects as defined by section 1350 of the California Civil Code, and apartment complexes as defined by section 11004 of the Business and Professions Code. 8 This chapter elaborates on data collected during projects involving field research in southern California and the Paris metropolitan region (Île-de-France). 9 An act of 19 July 1924 (Loi du 19 juillet 1924) require the provision of utilities; decrees passed in 1973 and an act of 31 December 1976 (Loi du 31/12/1976 portant réforme de l’urbanisme) allow municipalities to finance the acquisition of unsold or ill-equipped lots; and a decreee from 1977 enabled municipalties to enhance urban design. REFERENCES Alba, R.D., J.R. Logan, B.J. Stults, G. Marzan, and W. Zhang. 1999. “Immigrant Groups in the Suburbs: A Reexamination of Suburbanization and Spatial Assimilation.” American Sociological Review 64 (3): 446–60. http://dx.doi .org/10.2307/2657495. Baccaïni, B., and F. Sémécurbe. 2009. “La croissance périurbaine depuis 45 ans: Extension et densification.” Insee Première 1240 (June). https://www.insee .fr/fr/statistiques/1280801. Berger, M. 2004. Les périurbains de Paris. Paris: CNRS Editions. http://dx.doi .org/10.4000/books.editionscnrs.9397. Berube, A., R. Lang, and T. Sanchez. 2008. “The New Suburban Politics: A County-Based Analysis of Metropolitan Voting Trends Since 2000.”

276  Renaud Le Goix In Red, Blue, and Purple America: The Future of Election Demographics, edited by R. Teixeira, 25–49. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Berube, A., A. Singer, J. Wilson, and W. Frey. 2006. “Finding Exurbia: America’s Fast-Growing Communities at the Metropolitan Fringe.” In Living Cities Census Series. Washington, DC: Brookings. Billard, G. 2010. “Smart growth: Un nouvel urbanisme américain ... durable”. Urbanisme. Special Issue: La démarche écocité, villes durables en projet 36: 62–64. Billard, G., J. Chevalier, and F. Madoré. 2005. Ville fermée, ville surveillée: La sécurisation des espaces résidentiels en France et en Amérique du Nord. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. http://dx.doi.org/10.4000/ books.pur.1784. Blakely, E.J., and M.G. Snyder. 1997. Fortress America, Gated Communities in the United States. Washington, DC, and Cambridge, MA: Brookings Institution Press and Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. Blumenfeld, H. 1986. “Metropolis Extended: Secular Changes in Settlement Patterns.” Journal of the American Planning Association 52 (3): 346–48. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1080/01944368608976441. Bontje, M., and J. Burdack. 2011. “Post-suburbia in Continental Europe”. In International Perspectives on Suburbanization: A Post-Suburban World? edited by N.A. Phelps and F. Wu, 143–163. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/9780230308626_8. Bourdieu, P. 2000. Les structures sociales de l’économie. Paris: Le Seuil. Buchanan, J.M. 1965. “An Economic Theory of Clubs.” Economica 32 (125): 1–14. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2552442. Callen, D. 2011. “La ‘fabrique péri-urbaine,’ système d’acteurs et production des ensembles pavillonnaires dans la Grande Couronne francilienne.” Doctoral thesis, Université Panthéon-Sorbonne – Paris 1, Paris. Chalard, L. 2011. “Des boomburbs à la française.” Population et Avenir 2011/5 (705): 15–17. Chalonge, L., and F. Beaucire. 2007. “Le desserrement des emplois au sein des aires urbaines: Dépendance, autonomie, ou intégration?” Annales de la recherche urbaine 102 (1): 97–101. http://dx.doi.org/10.3406/aru.2007 .2698. Charmes, E. 2005. La vie périurbaine face à la menace des “gated communities.” Paris: L’Harmattan. Charmes, E. 2009. “On the Residential ‘Clubbisation’ of French Periurban Municipalities.” Urban Studies (Edinburgh) 46 (1): 189–212. http://dx.doi. org/10.1177/0042098008098642.



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278  Renaud Le Goix Glasze, G. 2005. “Some Reflections on the Economic and Political Organisation of Private Neighbourhoods.” Housing Studies 20 (2): 221–33. http://dx.doi .org/10.1080/026730303042000331745. Glasze, G., C.J. Webster, and K. Frantz, eds. 2006. Private Cities: Global and Local Perspectives. London: Routledge and Taylor and Francis. Gordon, T.M. 2004. Planned Developments in California: Private Communities and Public Life. San Francisco, CA: Public Policy Institute of California. Gournay, I. 2002. “Levitt France et la banlieue à l’américaine, premier bilan.” Histoire urbaine 1 (no. 5): 167–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.3917/rhu.005.0167. Jackson, K.T. 1985. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jaillet, M.-C. 1999. “Peut-on parler de sécession urbaine à propos des villes européennes?” Esprit (Paris, France) 11 (no. 258): 145–67. Jaillet, M.-C. 2004. “L’espace périurbain: Un univers pour les classes moyennes.” Esprit (Paris, France) (no. 303): 40–62. Kato, Y. 2006. “Planning and Social Diversity: Residential Segregation in American New Towns.” Urban Studies 43 (no. 12): 2285–300. http://dx.doi .org/10.1080/00420980600950187. Keil, R., and D. Young. 2011. “Post-Suburbia and City-Region Politics.” In International Perspectives on Suburbanization: A Post-Suburban World? edited by N.A. Phelps and F. Wu, 54–77. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/9780230308626_4. Kirby, A. 2008. “The Production of Private Space and Its Implications for Urban Social Relations.” Political Geography 27 (1): 74–95. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1016/j.polgeo.2007.06.010. Knox, N.H., and C.E. Knox. 1997. The California General Plan Glossary. Palo Alto, CA, Planning Roundtable, Governor’s Office of Planning and Research. Kuisel, R. 1993. Seducing the French: The Ddilemma of Americanization. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lang, R. 2003. Edgeless Cities: Exploring the Elusive Metropolis. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Lang, R., and J.B. LeFurgy. 2007. Boomburbs: The rise of America’s Accidental Cities. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Lang, R., J.B. LeFurgy, and A.C. Nelson. 2006. “The Six Suburban Eras of the United States: Research Note.” Opolis: An International Journal of Suburban and Metropolitan Studies 1. http://escholarship.org/uc/item/739425j0.



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13 Périurbain, from Woes to Words: Political and Social Uses of a New Administrative Category A nn e Lambert

In France, the word périurbain (peri-urban), a geographical and administrative category first used by INSEE (the Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques) in the mid-1990s, initially had a positive connotation before taking on a negative one in the early 2000s. Until the 1980s, the growth of peri-urban areas had been linked with an increase in new middle-class employees favouring the political left and the welfare state. Attention at the time was focused on a new style of rurbain (rurban) inhabitants, specially committed to the local environment, who settled in small towns in the countryside (Bidou, 1984). In the 1980s, with the arrival of mass unemployment and austerity policies, the growth of this third space, between rural areas and big cities, came under increasing criticism. The French presidential elections in 2002, 2007, and 2012, sealed the image of peri-urban space as a refuge for petits blancs (lower-class white people) who were afraid of seeing their social rank slip and tempted to vote for the Front national (Guilluy, 2010; Rivière, 2013). This shift in perception was summed up in 2010 by the succinct headline of a feature article on peri-urban growth in Télérama magazine: “Comment la France est devenue moche” (how France got ugly). While numerous criticisms have been levelled at these areas and their inhabitants – for example, for their moral and political conservatism, poor taste, economic irrationality, and environmental indifference – very little work has been done on newcomers and on the effect of residential mobility on the day-to-day life of men, women, and children. How do the inhabitants of these areas, which are home to the working class and, increasingly, immigrant households, talk about their quality of life? What words do they use? And what do those words reveal about

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their perception of the social hierarchy in these areas? To answer these questions, I conducted fieldwork in a small peri-urban municipality called Cleyzieu-Lamarieu. The municipality, of roughly 6,000 inhabitants, is in Lyon area. I looked at administrative sources, made observations, and interviewed new homeowners and elected representatives. At first glance, none of them used the word périurbain to describe the local environment. Longtime residents and new householders with diplomas and high incomes didn’t use the word périurbain, even though they are more familiar with formal and statistical categories than are working-class people. Most of low-skilled workers didn’t use the word périurbain, as they didn’t know it. Moreover, as they worked in local industries and didn’t commute from Cleyzieu-Lamarieu to Lyon, the word périurbain didn’t correspond to their day-to-day experience. The only ones who used that word from time to time were the elected representatives. In doing so, they were able to describe the demographic and urban growth of Cleyzieu-Lamarieu yet avoid the word banlieue (suburb), which is associated with negative connotations (poverty, underemployment, riots, and so on). Method: A Survey Blending Ethnography and Statistics Thirty-five kilometres east of Lyon in the north of the Isère département, Cleyzieu-Lamarieu is a municipality located in a formerly rural area that has experienced strong demographic growth since the 1960s through in-migration. According to the census, its population almost tripled between 1962 and 2006, from 2,029 to 5,435. Forty-four per cent of its area is classified as agricultural, and 86% of the employed population works outside the municipality (50% of whom work outside the département itself). For these reasons, Cleyzieu-Lamarieu is classified as a peri-urban municipality (commune périurbaine) by INSEE. Driven initially by the industrial development of the nearby town of Pont-­ de-Chéruy, to which Cleyzieu-Lamarieu was historically attached, the growth of this municipality later stemmed primarily from the dynamic and the urban sprawl of Lyon. But Cleyzieu-Lamarieu still remains rural, with few industries and buildings. Single-family homes con­ stitute 91% of its housing. In 2007, 83% of its inhabitants were homeowners, which is much higher than the national level (57%), and public housing remains at a very low level. Such trends illustrate why Cleyzieu-Lamarieu appears more attractive than the other municipalities in the area.

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This chapter is based on an in-depth ethnographic survey carried out in Cleyzieu-Lamarieu between 2008 and 2012, with a particular focus on a new housing development called Les Blessays, where forty-three single-family homes have been built between 2007 and 2011. I contacted the forty-three households in this development door-to-door and I interviewed all of them individually. This survey was supplemented by interviews with fourteen elected representatives (the mayor and deputy mayors), an analysis of the municipal archives (the register of the deliberations of the municipal council since 1945, building permits, municipal news bulletins), a content analysis of urban planning documents (including land-use planning (plan d’occupation des sols – POS), municipal urban planning (plan local d’urbanisme – PLU), inter-­ municipal land development plans (schéma de cohérence territoriale – SCoT), and territorial development directives (directive territoriale d’aménagement – DTA). The census data helped me describe social transformations of the population and its political representatives. These data enabled me to retrace the phases in the residential development of Cleyzieu-Lamarieu, showing how social transformations in the local environment change the ways in which power is exercised and legitimated in urban planning. The Emergence of an Administrative and Geographical Category The term périurbain appeared only relatively recently in the French scientific context. It was with INSEE’s new spatial classification in 1996 that the word périurbain became an official statistical category (Le Jeannic, 1996). A number of terms had been used until that point, including zone de peuplement industriel et urbain (industrial and urban settlement area – ZPIU), used by INSEE since 1962, and rurbanisation, coined by geographers Bauer and Roux (1976) to describe the resettlement of former city dwellers to the countryside. Considering these terms to be ill-adapted to the rapid transformation of the French spatial landscape, the French Ministry of Agriculture, the Interministerial Delegation for the City (Délégation interministérielle à la ville – DIV), and the Inter­ ministerial Delegation for Territorial Development and Regional Attrac­ tiveness (Délégation interministérielle à l'aménagement du territoire et à l'attractivité régionale – DATAR) commissioned a study from the Société d’études géographiques, économiques et sociologiques appliquées (SEGESA) that two years later led to the emergence of the periurban category. The term was used in INSEE’S classification system to increase knowledge on these rapidly growing areas and develop a better

Périurbain, from Woes to Words  285

understanding of their functional dependency on cities, notably in terms of employment. According to INSEE, peri-urban fringes consist of municipalities where at least 40 per cent of the resident population works outside of the municipality, in an urban unit with at least 5,000 jobs (called a pôle urbain). By this definition, more than ten million people, that is to say onesixth of the French population, lived in this type of area, in some 15,000  municipalities, in 2006 (Briant, 2010). After a slowdown in the 1990s, peri-urban areas entered a new growth phase. They grew 1.3 per cent a year, growth linked to the increase in property and land prices in large agglomerations and to the expansion of homeownership subsidies and zero interest loans. Focused on new construction, this assistance encouraged the growth of inexpensive private housing developments at the peri-urban fringe of large agglomerations, where low-income people could afford a home (Gobillon and Leblanc, 2005; Baccaïni and Sémécurbe, 2009; Lambert, 2015). Yet the definition of “peri-urban” is not without its problems. It mixes geographical and social realities that vary significantly from one local context to another. Locally, residents with increasingly diverse social and geographical trajectories do not use the word périurbain to give meaning to a way of life, and elected representatives use it in a very ambivalent manner. The Peri-urban as a Non-space for Inhabitants In Cleyzieu-Lamarieu, three groups of inhabitants live side by side in private housing developments built since the mid-2000: young couples from Lyon, working as managers and employees, who see their house as a stepping stone towards more prestigious areas; older workers from the area with stable jobs in local industries, ending their residential carrier in Cleyzieu-Lamarieu; and low-income families originating from public housing in the suburbs of Lyon (including Vaulx-en-Velin, Bron, and Vénissieux) taking advantage of housing finance subsidies to improve their living conditions. This last group has the most ambivalent feelings about residential mobility, since home ownership, far from their former neighbourhood, weighs heavily on household budgets and distances them from their social and support networks. The indepth interviews revealed the diversity of the inhabitants’ relationships with the new residential space. They also showed that the terms they used to describe this space were in line with the social trajectories of the households. While “peri-urban” falls into an administrative

286  Anne Lambert

and geographic category, the term has not been adopted by the periurban population. For manual workers previously living in the area, moving to a singlefamily house is seen as upward mobility and it does not disturb their lifestyles. These households do not belong to the 40 per cent of the inhabitants who commute every day to the large urban area: they are employed in local industries as low-skilled workers. Residential mobility is of short distance (from 100 metres to 10 kilometres maximum) and comes late in the life cycle, after several years spent in old houses or the public housing sector located in the neighbourhood (e.g., Pontde-Chéruy). Being “local,” then, constitutes a resource in the residential choices of these households: it helps them understanding the social hierarchy between the different municipalities (Retière, 2004). They chose their house for the social environment, as illustrated in the words of a forty-seven-year-old Algerian worker, who has lived for nearly twenty years in the Pont-du-Chéruy agglomeration after renting an apartment in a small social housing estate: Moi, je m’en fous si la maison est belle ou elle est pas belle, tout ce qui m’intéresse c’est l’environnement. Parce que je peux acheter une maison, mais je ne sais pas avec qui je vais vivre … C’est pour ça, la commune de Cleyzieu, par rapport à l’environnement, par rapport au calme, la tranquillité aussi, ça tombait bien … C’est la meilleure des trois. (Interview with Ahmed Ben Haïm, November 2010) I don’t care what the house is like – the only thing that counts for me is the environment. Because I can buy a house but I don’t know who I’ll be living with … That’s why the Cleyzieu municipality, for its environment and for the peace and quiet, was a good thing … It’s the best of the three [municipalities].

These criteria are shared by another worker and father who moved to the private housing development after living in a social housing estate in the neighbouring town: J’ai visité un autre terrain, une fois, à Pont-de-Chéruy, mais c’était cher. Et puis c’est bien, Cleyzieu, c’est réputé: le Leclerc est à côté, la Poste... Dans le canton d’ici, c’est le meilleur. C’est connu pour la tranquillité: il n’y a pas de HLM ici, pas de bâtiment. (Interview with Riad Abdelaziz, October 2010)

Périurbain, from Woes to Words  287 I visited another plot of land once in Pont-de-Chéruy, but it was expensive. And Cleyzieu’s got a good reputation. You’ve got the Leclerc, the post office … Life is good in the canton [an administrative area for election]. It’s known for its peace and quiet – there’s no social housing and no building.

Space is not valued according to the degree of urbanity (town/country) but according to social criteria, including the low density (no public housing blocks) and the new commercial infrastructure (the Leclerc hypermarket as opposed to the numerous low-end supermarkets in Pontde-Chéruy). In this respect, the use of canton to describe one’s living area shows the salience of political hierarchies for most households. In contrast, families arriving in Cleyzieu-Lamarieu from the close suburbs of Lyon see it as un trou, un patelin paumé, un bled (a hole, a godforsaken place, a backwater). They didn’t know Cleyzieu-Lamarieu before moving there, and had distorted perception of the local space, which sometimes led to disillusionment. Moving to Cleyzieu-Lamarieu reflected greater mobility (around thirty kilometres). For immigrants from large African and Asian cities, who had lived for a long time in public housing units in Lyon suburbs, the choice to “have a house built” in Cleyzieu-Lamarieu represents a big step, and it sometimes tends to disrupt family organization. For such households, the move to Cleyzieu-Lamarieu appears as a compromise between men and women, with hesitations over tenure (rental or homeownership), housing type (apartment or house), and location (staying close to the old neighborhood or moving away). This move does not appear to be motivated by the appeal of the countryside but by the relative affordability of land and houses in the area, and by the social image associated with a single-family house. Private housing developments embody an alternative to units in the public housing sector, which had become unbearable due to their deterioration and rising rental charges. Developments such as Cleyzieu-Lamarieu stand as an individual solution to the growing stigmatization of les banlieues and their inhabitants. Also, while private housing developments at first seem more favourable to the future of children than so suburban highrises, the countryside aspect is not seen as an advantage in terms of residential status, with the rural character of the municipality rejected in both the discourse and practices of the inhabitants. Instead, the population insists on the urbanization of Cleyzieu-Lamarieu, including the new shopping centre, the construction of private housing developments, the enlargement of streets and sidewalks. They spend more time

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in the commercial area, La Plaine, rather than in the old village centre on top of the hill, with its traditional habitat organized around the municipal school, the town hall, the post office, and the war monument. Like Zahra, the mother of two children and a childcare assistant of Algerian origin, they prefer the La Plaine, generally denigrated for its proximity to the small industrial town of Pont-de-Chéruy: “Heureu­ sement qu’il y a Pont-de-Chéruy à côté! Parce que quand je vais là-haut, vers la mairie, je me dis: oh là là, c’est quoi ce petit patelin paumé!” (It’s a good job we’ve got Pont-de-Chéruy nearby! Because when I go up there, towards the town hall, I say to myself “Wow! What is this godforsaken place?!” [Interview with Zahra, November 2010]). The difference between the households coming from les banlieues and the blue-collar families living in the neighborhood is linked to their experience of immigration and big cities. The peri-urban spaces, and more generally the countryside, are associated with a number of stigmas – racism and poverty – in line with the households’ socializing experiences “here” and “there.” On one hand, rural spaces for these families, most of whom were originally from large urban centers in Africa or Asia, are connected with ancestral societies and an economy based on subsistence farming, far removed from the image of modernity and economic growth associated with large cities. The practice of families sending money back to the “village” serves to fuel and reinforce this binary and hierarchical perception of city and country. On the other hand, these families now live in an area where immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa and Asia are largely underrepresented; they fear from not being integrated socially and politically.1 Fuelled by gossip (Elias and Scotson, 1997), the “fear of racism in the village” also concerns Rosa, a cashier of Congolese origin and mother of three, and reveals the ambivalent perceptions of the residential space and the associated ethno-racial hierarchies: Nous, normalement on dépendait de l’école du Village. Et ils nous ont envoyé un courrier pour dire que le rectorat avait décidé qu’il fallait équilibrer les effectifs entre les deux écoles, donc du fait qu’il y avait trop d’enfants, il fallait qu’on nous envoie à la Plaine. Je ne connaissais pas la différence, ça m’était égal. En plus, à l’école, ça se passe super bien parce qu’il y a des petits Noirs, des petits Arabes, il y a tout le monde franchement. C’est très mélangé. C’est la voisine, elle m’a dit “mais tu sais, on a de la chance d’être à la Plaine, parce qu’à l’école du village ils sont super racistes!” (Interview with Rosa Seloussi, December 2010)

Périurbain, from Woes to Words  289 (Normally, we were supposed to go to the village school. Then they sent us a letter saying that the education office had decided that the pupils had to be balanced out between the two schools. So because there were too many children, we were sent to La Plaine. I didn’t know there was a difference and it didn’t matter to me. Also, things are going well at the school because there are black kids and Arab kids – all sorts, really. It’s very mixed. Then my neighbor said, “But you know, we’re lucky to be in La Plaine, because they’re really racist at the village school!”)

Zahra and her husband, Hocine, were particularly disappointed by the municipality’s policy on schools; the school in La Plaine, which their children finally attended, was classified as a ZEP (zone d’éducation prioritaire), that is to say a school with specific needs in terms of social support: Lui: Normalement, ils auraient dû aller au Village mais tous ceux d’ici [2ème tranche], ils sont là-bas [à la Plaine]. Ils n’avaient plus de places. Cet été, quand ils m’ont appelé pour inscrire les enfants à l’école, c’est là qu’ils m’ont dit “finalement, c’est là-bas.” J’ai dit “comment ça, c’est là-bas?!” En fait, le maire, il m’a dit la sociologie avait complètement changé: à l’époque c’était plus prioritaire parce que socialement c’était d’autres personnes. Mais aujourd’hui à la Balme, c’est que des propriétaires, la topologie du secteur a changé, donc il n’y avait plus aucune nécessité de classer l’école comme ça … même s’il paraît que c’est mieux une ZEP parce que les classes sont moins chargées… [air dubitatif] J’ai dit “bon bah, allons-y” … Elle: Quand j’avais parlé avec la maîtresse de Ryan, j’avais dit “je ne suis pas très contente, c’est une ZEP.” Elle m’avait dit “non, c’est bien une ZEP, ils ont plus de subventions de la mairie, ils font plus de sorties, moins d’enfants par classe, des ATSEM et tout ça.” (Interview with Zahra and Hocine Chaker, September 2010) Hocine: They were supposed to go to the village, but everyone here [in the second part of Les Blessays] is there [at the school in La Plaine]. They didn’t have any places left. This summer, when they called me to register the children for school, that’s when they said “In the end, it’s over there.” I said, “What do you mean, over there?!” The mayor told me that the social composition of the area has completely changed. At the time, it was more of a priority because socially it was other people. But now at La Balme, it’s just home owners. The characteristics of the area have changed, so there was no need any more to classify the school like that …

290  Anne Lambert even if people say a ZEP’s better because there are fewer children per class … [looking doubtful] I said “OK, then, let’s do it” … Zahra: When I talked to Ryan’s teacher, I said “I’m not very happy, it’s a ZEP.” She said to me, “No, ZEPs are good, they get more subsidies from the town hall. They go on more school trips, there are fewer children per class, nursery school assistants and all that”

Families were disappointed at learning the schooling hierarchy in Cleyzieu-Lamarieu: their children appeared to be treated worse than the children of the middle-class families who settled in the first part of the development Les Blessays. It clearly affected their hopes for social mobility. Above all, their disappointment reveals a misunderstanding of the social hierarchy of peri-urban spaces and the associated perceptions, based in part on the use of racial categories to understand the social world. A number of families have moved to a residential space not of their own initiative but based on the advice of real estate agents and property development companies; but they can no longer afford commuting to work or to visit friends and family. For Souad, the daughter of Algerian immigrants and mother of four children, who grew up in a social housing estate in Saint-Etienne and then lived in a high-rise in Saint-Priest, Cleyzieu-Lamarieu is geographically and financially speaking un trou (a hole), especially given the extreme economic and physical effort made by the household to access property: Ici, à part la maison et l’école, il y a rien à faire. Heureusement que j’ai ma voiture! Et heureusement que Cleyzieu se développe beaucoup, ils vont construire des lotissements et tout ça, ça sera moins la campagne … Mais quand on a un coup de blues, qu’on en a marre, on se dit: “qu’est-ce qu’on est venu faire ici, dans ce trou!” Et puis voilà … il faut s’adapter. (Interview with Souad Abadi, June 2010) Apart from the house and school, there’s nothing to do here. Thankfully I’ve got my car! And thankfully Cleyzieu is developing a lot. They’re going to build private housing developments and all this will be less like the country … But when you get a bit down, when you’ve had enough, you say to yourself “Why did we ever come to this hole!” But then … you just have to adapt.

Since she moved to the housing development, Souad has specialized in housework, underscoring the traditional gender division of labour

Périurbain, from Woes to Words  291

and contributing to the perception of Cleyzieu-Lamarieu as a symbolic and emotional “non-space.” The rural environment of the private housing development appears to be the most rewarding for young couples working as managers, even though these households most closely match the profile of commuters used in the statistical definition of “peri-urban.” For these young households arriving from central Lyon, buying a small house in a private housing development is seen above all as a step towards a more prestigious area of the agglomeration where they continue to work. Their younger age when becoming a homeowner (around thirty, and with young children or a pregnancy underway) and their higher education level (two years or more of higher education) legitimize their hopes for social and spatial mobility, in contrast with the blue-collar families or families coming from les banlieues. As such, their appreciation of the place corresponds as much to the recreational use of the countryside connected to their social position as it does to the need to justify residential choices limited by tight economic resources at the start of their careers. The well-being of children is connected to an education in the countryside, far from the pollution of the city and its supposedly dubious influences. These young couples with upward mobility are all the most attached to the countryside when they had grown up in the countryside or in small towns in the surrounding regions of Lyon before moving to the big city for their education and their first job. The link between family and residential trajectories is extremely clear in the following interviews. “Matteo was born in January and we got the keys to the house in April,” says Vanessa, twenty-nine, a young nurse living with a technician. Residential experiences during childhood are reactivated throughout life and underscore the importance of residential strategies of social mobility: On est tous les deux de la campagne. On est venus à Lyon pour les opportunités de travail. Moi, je travaille en néo-nat à la Croix-Rousse, ça fait huit ans que j’habite Lyon. Mais bon, on avait envie d’avoir une maison, un petit bout de terrain. On savait qu’on voulait avoir un enfant, donc on se disait qu’on n’avait pas envie de l’élever en appartement, sans verdure et tout ça, même si on ne voulait pas trop s’éloigner de notre travail. On a cherché pas mal de temps parce que notre budget n’est pas énorme, énorme. Quand on est autour de Lyon, c’est difficile de trouver un terrain abordable… Donc on a cherché pendant quasiment deux ans. (Interview with Vanessa Bodin, November 2010)

292  Anne Lambert We’re both from the country. We came to Lyon for work opportunities. I work in the neonatal service at La Croix-Rousse and I’ve lived in Lyon for eight years. But we wanted a house and a small plot of land. We knew we wanted a child, and we didn’t want to raise it in an apartment, with no greenery and all that, even though we didn’t want to be too far from our jobs. It took us a long time because we haven’t exactly got an enormous budget. It’s hard finding an affordable piece of land in the Lyon area … So we had been looking for almost two years.

In the end, these couples in some ways resemble the peri-urban pioneers of the 1970s, when the first major wave of private housing development expansion took place in France. Analysis at the time focused on middle-class people with significant cultural capital as the so-called pioneers behind the “utopian exoduses” of the 1970s.2 Yet, newcomers differ from their predecessors through their lower level of education and their rural roots. In contrast to the first wave of newcomers, they don’t embrace agrarianist perspectives (the supremacy of nature over cities), nor do they fit a back-to-the-earth myth (that is, urban people coming “back” to the countryside). Their houses are also smaller than the ones of the pioneers, a reflection of their more limited incomes. Access to peri-urban property is no longer described as an ideological and political choice by the people living there. It no longer evokes the optimism of the period of economic growth (called les Trente Glorieuses) and the socialist wave that followed the events of May 1968 in France (Pagis, 2014). The social mobility of today’s young couples seems more uncertain than that of their predecessors. During the interviews, none of them used the word périurbain, a technocratic term that potentially undermines their residential strategy of social advancement. Indeed, in the eyes of the mayor, the term evokes an unappealing image of a dormitory suburb. Political Uses of a Category of Local Space: Opening Urbanization while Controlling the Population Influx Elected representatives committed to opening their municipalities to urbanization have an ambivalent view of the peri-urban category. Depending on their focus, they either reject or value the term. They use it in a strategic way because decentralization laws have increased the urban planning role and they now need to justify their urban policy.3

Périurbain, from Woes to Words  293

The common idea that peri-urban municipalities have turned into select clubs with restricted access has recently gained ground in France (Charmes, 2011), but it fails to take account of the renewed growth of numerous small municipalities since the early 2000s. In a number of communities, openness to urbanization is not simply necessary to maintain schools and keep local shops alive; it is also imposed in France by territorial development directives (DTA) aimed at bringing order to urban sprawl and fighting against land waste (Lambert, 2013).4 Cleyzieu-Lamarieu, an old, working-class, rural municipality, fully embraced urbanization, a process in which the town’s elected representatives have played a central role. The liberal phase in the 1970s saw the construction of several large housing developments by private developers on old farmland, guided by speculation. Then, the re-election of representatives in the municipal elections in 1983 and CleyzieuLamarieu’s leftward political shift led to a change of direction in the town’s urban policies. Urban planning has become the main form of intervention by the new municipality, with housing increasingly used as an instrument of social and territorial regulation as part of a new competition arising between municipalities. Major private property developments have been built in Cleyzieu-Lamarieu, followed by new infrastructure (such as schools, a gymnasium, a library, and a community hall) and U.S.-style private housing developments aimed at attracting Lyon’s middle class, while a small proportion of social housing is reserved as a priority for young people and families with modest income. Between 2005 and 2012, three large private housing developments were built in the form of ZAC urban development zones,5 with a total of nearly 250 houses and several dozen social housing units. With the residential specialization of the municipality, elected representatives use different terms to stress alternatively their technical competence and management skills. They try to depoliticize the issues connected to the growth of this former village, a growth that does not meet with the approval of some inhabitants. The main issue for the mayor, Paul Perrissin-Fabert, as expressed in interview, is to link development and settlement policy. The aim is to elevate the image of the rural and working-class municipality to that of a residential village situated close to Lyon. According to this goal, the majority of public and private investments are made with the middle class in mind. This is why the mayor refers to as “U.S.-style” housing developments for households accessing property, with relatively

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standardized “Provençal” houses (of the same pale pink, orange, or yellow hues), no walls between plots (“too cage-like,” according to the mayor), wide roads, and generous space for parking. This middle-class focus is also evident in the new facilities financed through a mandatory contribution from property developers, including bike paths, gymnasium and library extensions, and new childcare services. The large shopping centre, with its fashion and home decoration brands, also targets new middle-class families, the prices being prohibitive for part of the local working class, who continue to shop at the supermarkets in Pont-de-Chéruy. The mayor is also backing the reopening of the old railway line linking Cleyzieu-Lamarieu to Lyon, and its transformation into a tramway. For newcomers, the tramway is very important and allows them to refer to themselves as rurbains (rurbanites). The mayor’s promotion of “city life in the country” more broadly expresses the process of political construction of rurbanité (rurbanity). The rapid urbanization and strong demographic growth of Cleyzieu-Lamarieu since the early 2000s has not been entirely well received by the inhabitants of the historic centre of the village or elected representatives in the opposition. With the demographic growth of Cleyzieu-Lamarieu increasingly linked to the vitality of the Lyon agglomeration, Mayor Perrissin-Fabert is seeking to keep at a distance the unsightly face of large social-­housing districts in the inner suburbs, the image of which has worsened severely in the past twenty years. The mayor stresses control over urbanization and avoids the word banlieue (suburb), which he now sees as largely pejorative. He acknowledges only in passing that the town is part of the “third fringe” of Lyon: Le terme banlieue a tellement une connotation négative! Mais on est dans la grande banlieue si on veut … Mais bon, même si on a grandi un petit peu, on essaie de garder un esprit sympa, rurbain – parce qu’il n’était déjà plus rural. On essaie de rester à taille humaine. Donc c’est pour ça que quand on fait un lotissement, on aime bien mettre un peu de social dans le lotissement, que ça ne soit pas que des propriétaires. Et puis pas mettre dans un quartier tous les … tous les problèmes de location. (Interview with Paul Perrissin-Fabert, January 2010) The word banlieue has such a negative connotation! But we are in the outer banlieues if you like … But even if we’ve grown a bit, we try to maintain a nice, rurban spirit – because it was already no longer rural. We

Périurbain, from Woes to Words  295 are trying to keep things on a human scale. That’s why when we build a housing development we want it to have a social side and not be just about home owners. And not put all the … all the rental problems in one neighbourhood.

Efforts being made to introduce regulatory criteria on plot sizes in future property development programs are also aimed at choosing the new inhabitants of the municipality and in particular at attracting the middle class from the Lyon region – a process that is very much like that in the United States. When drawing up the PLU in 2002, the mayor sought to impose a minimum plot size of 800 square metres (8611 square feet) to safeguard “a typical landscape feature” of the municipality. But the draft PLU received an unfavourable response from state authorities, as the new Solidarités et renouvellement urbain (SRU) law on urban solidarity and renewal, fighting against urban sprawl, denied municipalities the power to introduce a minimum size for plots. As part of the political window dressing of this rapid urbanization, based on the use of laws and regulations, local representatives readily present themselves officially as defenders of the municipality’s interest against the state, which is portrayed as the driving force behind urban development. At the PLU voting session in 2005, the mayor strategically reiterated his role as moderator: “The PLU in its present form is considerably less than it could have been if the working group had followed the government directives with no thought for the consequences of an increase in the population.” Conclusion The perceptions of and terms associated with spaces defined as periurban in INSEE’s geographical and administrative categories vary with the resources and social mobility of households. The term bears no relationship to the lived experience of some households who, having moved between 100 metres and 10 kilometres from their former homes, have no functional or symbolic dependency on the city. For others, “peri-urban” is a technocratic term, stigmatizing their residential strategies for social mobility. Rejecting this term, young couples working as managers and workers stress the rural nature of the municipality in their discourse, despite the fact that they work in the centre of the Lyon agglomeration. Perception of geographical space appears, then, to be

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linked to the social experience and housing trajectory of the households (Lambert, 2015). Elected representatives make strategic use of the periurban category according to the context, calling for controlled urbanization, but they are criticized by older inhabitants, whose social status is threatened by the arrival of new households. One of those older inhabitants, Alain Robert, a retired technician having moved from a social housing estate in the inner suburbs of Lyon to a small house in Cleyzieu-Lamarieu in 1982, has systematically refused to vote for the majority’s urban projects. At a municipal council review of municipal urban planning on 5 December 2005, he said: “In the end, according to this survey, we are already part of Greater Lyon, and we are preparing to take in a population eager to leave the city for a small plot of land in the country. When you see what’s really being put in place, the word ‘small’ is almost an exaggeration!”1 NOTES 1 The discriminatory practices of some elected representatives received considerable media coverage in the Lyon region in the 2000s. In particular, the mayor of one of the municipalities in the Pont-de-Chéruy agglomeration was taken to court by SOS Racisme and charged with having systemati­ cally refused to approve building permits for households of Turkish and Algerian origin. 2 See in particular Léger and Hervieu (1979). 3 The laws of 1982 and 1983 strengthened local planning power. Mayors are now authorized to design urban planning documents (land management, administrative authorizations, and building permits). But their initiatives remain subject to state control, via judicial reviews. In addition, the transfer of competency from central to local government is effective only in municipalities with land-use planning, designed together with the state. The state (the central government and departmental and regional offices of infrastructure) also remains responsible for the financing of housing. 4 DTAs are state-issued urban planning documents that are part of a national policy on town and country planning led by the central government. They have a prescriptive value for urban planning documents of lesser importance, such as intra-municipal land development planning and municipal urban planning. Cleyzieu-Lamarieu falls within the scope of the territorial development directive of the Greater Lyon area, put forward

Périurbain, from Woes to Words  297 by the government in 1999 and adopted in 2006, aimed at organizing the development of the Lyon region. 5 Created by the French Land Act of 1967, a ZAC is an urban planning procedure whereby the development of some districts and areas is delegated to private concerns. The main idea is to help local government control urbanization in a given area by specifying the nature of the housing and the development schedule to the private development company. Construc­ tion can also be staggered over time so as to regulate the population influx. In its role as project manager, the municipality may also impose technical and architectural guidelines on the development company, as well as a financial participation in the production of infrastructure (schools, roundabouts, gymnasiums, and so on). REFERENCES Bauer, G., and J.-M. Roux. 1976. La rurbanisation ou la ville éparpillée. Paris: Seuil. Baccaïni, B. and Sémécurbe F. 2009. “La croissance périurbaine depuis 45 ans: Extension et densification,” Insee Première, 1240. Briant, P. 2010. “L’accession à la propriété dans les années 2000”. Insee Première 1291. Bidou, C. 1984. Les aventuriers du quotidien: Essai sur les nouvelles couches moyennes. Paris: PUF. Charmes, E. 2011. La ville émiettée: Essai sur la clubbisation de la vie urbaine. Paris: PUF. Elias, N., and J.-L. Scotson. 1997. Logiques de l’exclusion: Enquête sociologique au coeur des problèmes d’une communauté. Paris: Fayard. Gobillon, L., and D. Leblanc. 2005. “Quelques effets économiques du prêt à taux zéro.” Economie et statistique 381 (1): 63–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.3406/ estat.2005.7209. Guilluy, C. 2010. Fractures françaises. Paris: Bourin. Le Jeannic, T. 1996. “Une nouvelle approche territoriale de la ville.” Economie et statistique 294 (1): 25–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.3406/estat.1996.6080. Lambert, A. 2013. “La gauche et le périurbain: Les ambiguïtés de la politique de mixité sociale dans une petite commune pavillonnaire et ses effets sur le peuplement.” Politix 101 (1): 105–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.3917/pox .101.0105. Lambert, A. 2015. “Tous propriétaires!” L’envers du décor pavillonnaire. Paris: Seuil, 2015. Léger, D., and Hervieu, B. Au fond de la forêt … l’Etat. Paris: Seuil, 1979.

298  Anne Lambert Pagis, J. 2014. Mai 68: Un pavé dans leur histoire. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po. Retière, J.-N. 2004. “Autour de l’autochtonie: Réflexions sur la notion de capital social populaire.” Politix 63: 121–43. Rivière, J. 2013. “Des ploucs de droite aux pavillonnaires lepénistes: Sur la construction médiatique du vote des ruraux.” Agone. Histoire, Politique et Sociologie 51: 65–83.

14 The New Neighbourhoods: The Discursive (and Other) Transformation of South Sofia’s Modest Beginnings S o nia H ir t

People live on this planet so that someone can go around giving names to everything. Jostein Gaarder (1994): 118

Despite the difficulties of defining what a “suburb” is (Harris, 2010; Forsyth, 2012), the term is firmly established to the point where it is inconceivable that anyone proficient in the English language would not know what it means. The typical definition centres on a “low-density, socially exclusive, purely residential area located at or near the urban fringe” (Harris, 2015: 660). Yet, “suburbs” are not necessarily a common term in other languages, as this volume amply documents: in some languages the term is missing altogether; in others there are multiple terms of such areas, and the images they evoke may be different from or even contrary to the common English interpretation. This reality has not stopped English-speaking scholars from freely using the terms “suburbanization” and “suburbs” in myriad international settings, as the introductory chapter explains. Those terms are widely used to describe peri-urban growth in central and eastern Europe, for example, where the lack of suburbs was commonly identified as a defining characteristic of the socialist city during the period of state socialism (1945–90) (Hirt, 2007). The literature on the post-socialist city, on the other hand, has identified “suburbs” as a major component of recent metropolitan restructuring in this part of the world (Stanilov and Sýkora, 2014). Is the English term meaningful in central and eastern European settings? Does it accurately represent socio-spatial processes and outcomes?

300  Sonia Hirt

In this chapter, I reflect on these questions using the Bulgarian capital of Sofia as a case study. Like other large cities in central and eastern Europe, Sofia has suburbanized considerably over the past quarter of a century, since the end of state socialism in 1990, in the sense that its periphery has experienced substantial housing and population growth (Hirt, 2007, 2008, and 2012). The outcomes of this process appear consistent with findings on other central and eastern European capitals (see, e.g., Dingsdale, 1999 and Kok and Kovacs, 1999 on Budapest; Sýkora, 1999a and 1999b on Prague; Rudolph and Brade, 2005 on Moscow; Ruoppila, 1998 on Tallinn; Brade et al., 2009 on multiple large cities in the region). In Sofia’s case, census data from 1992, 2001, and 2011, as well as available surveys show notable residential movement, primarily of middle- and upper-class households, from the central areas of the city towards its scenic southern fringe. This process of upper- and middle-­class urban outflow is reminiscent of what we commonly dub suburbanization in the Global North (Stanilov and Hirt, 2014). In particular, Sofia’s district of Vitosha (one of the city’s twenty-four administrative units), which includes some of the metropolitan area’s most desirable landscapes, located in the foothills of Vitosha Mountain, has been the fastest growing part of the capital city. During the past twenty years or so, the population of this district has grown by nearly 60%, whereas the number of dwellings in the area has increased by nearly 150%. These are very high rates compared with the population and housing growth rates of 10% and 32%, respectively, for Sofia as a whole. Yet despite this aggressive new growth, a single Bulgarian word describing this area is missing. Harris (2010) articulates three definitional aspects of suburbs: urban peripheral location, low density, and newness. The suburbs of Sofia that have been quickly growing during the post-socialist period appear to conform to two out of these three aspects. They are located at the urban edge and are characterized by low residential density (primarily single-family homes), relative to the rest of the city and especially in comparison to the very high-density, mass-housing projects that were erected during the state socialist period. They do not fully comply with Harris’s third paradigmatic feature of suburbs: newness. True, of course, the peripheral growth comprises many new houses and, in them, many new residents. However, this peripheral growth has been occurring, especially during the 1990s, in a hodge-podge fashion, with most new homes constructed by individual owners or in small groups, intermixed with modest old residences that have existed for many years. This type

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of development proceeded in the highly unplanned, ad hoc, and unregulated manner that characterized many central and eastern Euro­ pean countries, including Bulgaria, in the aftermath of state socialism (Nedovíc-Budić, 2001; Hirt, 2005). However, after 2000, when relative political and economic stability returned to the country, peripheral growth in Sofia and other large Bulgarian cities began to take the form of more “organized,” socially homogeneous, and truly new, wholesale residential developments that are located on open land, far and away from the built fabric of earlier decades (Hirt, 2012). The housing mixture that one finds in most of Sofia’s suburbs consists of three types of homes: pre-socialist, socialist, and post-socialist (Pojarliev, 2010). The first were homes built primarily in the early part of the twentieth century, at a time when open fields and agricultural areas on the periphery of Sofia were dotted by a few sela (villages) such as Simeonovo, Knyajevo, and Dragalevtsi, located some ten kilometres from the city centre. These villages, which were first officially incorporated into the metropolitan region in the 1930s and are today part of Sofia’s southern administrative districts, date back to medieval times and had for centuries existed autonomously of the city. For many centuries Sofia had been just a small town; it began to grow intensely only after it was declared a national capital in 1878, when Bulgaria gained independence from the Ottoman Empire. In the early 1900s, poverty in the villages around Sofia was rampant, but community life must have been intriguing enough (at least to foreigners) to the point that the respected American sociologist Irwin Sanders, a professor at Boston University, used them as the focus of his research on “typical” Balkan life in his monograph Balkan Village ([1949] 1975). To this very day, descendants of village “old-timers” occupy modest kolibi (huts) in the area, passed on from generation to generation. Walking through the beat-up streets, one sees them still leading their sheep and goats. The animals (and the people caring for them) often look startled at the people in fastmoving SUVs that belong to the class of post-socialist newcomers. The second housing type that makes up today’s suburbs of Sofia – socialisticheskite vili (socialist villas) – constitutes homes that belong to the now-impoverished socialist-era intelligentsia and families of the former nomenclatura (the upper echelon of Communist Party bureaucrats). During the socialist period, several of the villages of metropolitan Sofia, especially on the south side, were given the status of vilni zoni (recreational zones). Because of their desirable natural characteristics and their proximity to the city, during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s the

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areas became popular sites for the construction of villi (secondary homes – the equivalent of the famous Russian dachi). Building permits were given generously, especially if one had good connections with the Communist Party. By western standards, some of these homes were not all that luxurious, but in socialist Sofia having one in the foothills of Vitosha was a matter of serious distinction; having a villa in the area of Boyana was especially prestigious. Unlike its lower-status neighbours, Boyana did not start as a village but as a princely estate. Back in the 1200s, it had been home to two of Bulgaria’s most beloved historic figures, Sevastokrator (count or duke in Byzantine) Kaloyan and his wife, Desislava, esteemed sponsors of pre-Renaissance arts. Ever since, Boyana has attracted the cream of Bulgarian society and has been, through the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the site of the official residence of Bulgaria’s heads of state. Still, despite their appeal, the southern outskirts of Sofia had retained their rural feel up until the 1990s. They had not yet turned into true suburbs, at least if suburbs are taken to mean, in Fishman’s tradition (1987), settlements for permanent living. Finally, the third main type of residence in the southern periphery of Sofia comprises ednofamilni domove or kushti (single-family homes) occupied by Bulgaria’s post-socialist burguazia (bourgeoisie) or novobogatashi (the newly rich). This category includes legitimate upper- and upper-middle-class professionals (lawyers, business owners, managers, representatives of foreign firms, sport stars and other celebrities, and so on), as well as some shady characters whose considerable wealth is of unclear origin. The difference in wealth between the new and the old residents is significant. According to a small but representative survey of about 400 residents conducted in Sofia’s southern outskirts in 2006, over 40% of the newcomer households had monthly incomes of more than 2,000 BGN ($1,340) as compared to only 5% of the long-time residents (Hirt, 2007). The 2,000 BGN figure was around four times Bulgaria’s average at the time (Nacionalen Statisticheski Institut, 2007). Lifestyles are different, too. Unlike socialist bureaucrats, post-socialist elites reside in the area permanently. According to the survey from 2006 cited above, most of the new residents have moved out from the city for quality-of-life reasons, including clean air, greenery, spaciousness, a family-friendly setting, and so forth (Hirt, 2007). And unlike the residents from the pre-socialist periods, who were selyani (villagers) and who sustained themselves by farming, the newcomers are closely linked to the city. They commute daily to the city, which is their main

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source of wealth and leisure, even if they perpetually complain of its crowds, chaos, and pollution. If we again adopt Fishman’s (1987) definition of a suburb as a permanent settlement on the urban fringe that is dependent on the city for jobs and services, then it is precisely this last transformation of Sofia’s southern periphery that warrants a suburban label. Yet, unlike western suburbia, so much of which is the result of heavy public subsidies for roads, highways, and other infrastructure, as well as state-backed mortgage financing, Sofia’s suburbs are marked by poor public investment, reflected in a lack of sewers and street lights, irregular water and electricity supply, and poorly paved roads. The inferior nature of the public services has forced the newly rich to provide services to their households privately. In this chapter, I attempt to trace the evolution of Sofia’s periphery not so much in terms of types of people and places, but in terms of names and labels. I argue two main points. First, this case study shows that labels such as “suburbs” may reflect only a partial reality. If multiple realities (multiple historic legacies, multiple types of people, multiple housing types, multiple lifestyles, and so on) coexist, then multiple, potentially contradictory, labels apply and are used in everyday life. Second, different labels are discursively employed, consciously or subconsciously, by different actors (e.g., old residents, new residents, planners, real estate agents, and so on), not just to reflect their view of reality but also to shape it. What an urban periphery is, what name should be given to it, becomes a contested issue – a symbolic battle not so much over the area’s past or present, but over its future. The Naming Game As with other Slavic languages, Bulgarian lacks a neat, unequivocal equivalent to the English word “suburb.” The closest literal translation is predgradie – a word related to the Russian prigorod. Predgradie literally means “before the city” or “in front of the city.” It surely connotes a peripheral location, as well as a strong connection to (or dependency on) the city. However, it does not imply the other social and spatial characteristics typically associated with the English term “suburb”: low density and social exclusiveness. If one is to judge by everyday conversations, blogs, and newspapers, the word is rarely used to denote lowdensity residential developments like those in the foothills of Mount Vitosha, south of Sofia. More often, predgradie refers to high-density, mass-housing projects built during state socialism. In fact, one of these

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socialist projects, on the north side of the city, is officially called Moderno Predgradie (Modern Suburb). With its aging spartan towers occupied by lower-middle-class families, this district has little in common with the sprawling southern outskirts – in demographics, building age, or building patterns. An alternative near-literal translation of the word “suburb” would be kraen kvartal – meaning “end neighborhood” – an older term that is still used, albeit rarely, today. But unlike the relatively neutral predgradie, kraen kvartal has historically carried strong negative underpinnings. It indicated social and spatial marginality. Arguably, it was the near equivalent of the English word “slum” (the English term “suburb,” too, had negative connotations but much earlier, prior to the eighteenth century; see Fishman, 1987). In 1923, one of Bulgaria’s best-known poets, Christo Smirnenski, wrote one of the most famous and also most heartwrenching poems in Bulgarian literature. Based on life in the kraen kvartal, Smirnenski’s “Winter Evenings” (Zimni Vecheri) describes blind old men, withering maidens, drunk and unemployed fathers, and weeping mothers and children living their lives of “eternal poverty and worry” in miniature, dark and broken huts. Today, several other terms are in use as well, especially in reference to the fastest-growing part of Sofia’s outskirts – those along the city’s southern rim. For aging people whose families have lived in the area for generations, the settlements are still sela (villages) – as they were officially designated in the past – and they themselves are still called selyani (villagers). For aging socialist-era intellectuals who had acquired the privilege of having a secondary home, the areas are still vilni zoni (as they were officially called during socialism), and their homes are still called villi. The term vilni zoni still persists, although many of these people are long retired and many have sold their city apartments and converted their cherished villas into their sole and permanent dwellings. For the wealthy newcomers to the area, however, both sela and vilni zoni may be used to express contempt for the past. The negative connotation likely exists because Bulgarian countryside folk have yet to acquire a positive image in the eyes of urban elites (unlike the English countryside folk, for example). In Bulgaria, to be called a selyanin is to be accused of being unsophisticated and backward, if not plain stupid. To be called soc (short for “socialist”) is to be so passé as to be laughed at. For example, one of the newcomers, an affluent middle-aged manager of several gas stations, whom I interviewed as part of the 2006 survey of 400 residents of southern Sofia, shared his opinion of his

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neighbours and his surroundings as follows: “As I was saying, I thought I will be moving into a nice area for normal people but to be honest, here, there are a bunch of villagers, what can say? And I personally have to live by that soc dinosaur, my neighbour” (Hirt 2012; my translation). A kinder assessment of social difference between old and new residents in the area was expressed in in the same survey by a young manager of a local branch of a Greek bank in Sofia. In his view, “it’s an interesting area to live in … Like, seriously, I am in a hurry for a meeting [in downtown Sofia] and [must] stop for someone walking their entire herd of sheep right in front of … my car. And when I say walking, I mean that if they went any slower, they’d stop! Now, I don’t really have anything bad to say about these people. I mean, most seem friendly and nice enough, I mean that, although they seem to move through life at a slower speed” (Hirt, 2012: 121, my translation). Over the past two decades, however, the historically based, traditional labels used for Sofia’s outskirts have been increasingly challenged by new ones. Vilni zoni is slowly fading. Sela, too, is used less frequently: fondly by those with generations-old family ties to the area and contemptuously by those who complain about the area’s backwardness (inadequate infrastructure, presence of people with rural lifestyles, and on so). This transition is occurring within the context of change in the official nomenclature: the former villages and villa zones located about ten kilometres south of Sofia were legally reclassified to gradski kvartali (urban neighbourhoods) in recent years; thus, they were for the first time officially included within the city limits. This means that the area is now subject to urban building and zoning regulations and the municipality is obliged to upgrade its infrastructure to meet city standards – a process that is just beginning. The legal change has prompted the term novite kvartali (the new neighbourhoods), which is now used widely by residents, the media, and policymakers alike. Technically, the term is correct, as the districts, despite their long history, are newly incorporated into the city. They also do include many new houses, even if the new ones are commonly adjacent to houses erected in previous decades. But the term has a subtle normative connotation, too: new means something modern and progressive, definitely not socialist. Municipal officials seem to wish the old labels would go away so that Sofia’s southern outskirts can become a key ingredient of the spatial modernization of the capital city. Thus, they often speak of rupture with the past and emphasize the special role of the “new neighborhoods” in the ongoing development of Sofia. Part of this mindset seems to stem from the commonly

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held conviction that major western cities are characterized by well-­ developed and affluent outskirts and that, to join them, Sofia should follow the same path. As one city planner explained: “We want to encourage new types of dwellings, in a new type of environment of a totally different character, and encourage a lifestyle that is closer to nature … In socialist times, the government had an interest in cramping people in high-density housing complexes [naguchkani jilishtni komleksi] because this would save it money. But in a market economy, in an information-type society, in a democracy, the compact city [kompaktniyat grad] is no longer the right choice” (Hirt, 2005: 157; my translation). Sofia’s first post-socialist master plan, written in 2001 and officially adopted a few years later, includes language that directly promotes the benefits of “dispersed living amid nature, since it [this type of living] is an expression of new forms of spatial organization that correspond to an information society” (Stolichna Obshtina, 2001, cited by Hirt, 2007: 156). This transformation of spatial form was initially envisioned for the immediate southern outskirts of Sofia but is eventually to reach its less developed northern rim as well. The process has been enabled by policy steps such as the quick privatization of vacant lands in the urban periphery (as well as elsewhere in the city), the elimination of the rigid building restrictions that existed during socialism, and the preferential treatment of large real estate developers proposing new developments in Sofia’s outskirts (Stanilov and Hirt, 2014). While municipal sources use the relatively neutral term novite kvartali (the new neighbourhoods), the real estate industry is promoting several more colourful alternatives. In reference to the southern outskirts, the word kvartali, which in Bulgarian implies urbanity rather than rurality or sub-urbanity, has become a matter of consensus. As one real estate agent put it, the old alternatives, sela (villages) or vilni zoni (villa zones), would not sell: “Nobody, but nobody, I mean … nobody with any sort of means, would want to think they would live in some village [na selo]” (my translation). The issue is, rather, what adjective to use in front of kvartali so as to best convey the high-class status of Sofia’s southern outskirts. Several labels are commonly featured on the websites of the most popular real estate firms operating in Bulgaria (e.g., Colliers International, Lux Imoti, Mirela, Bulgarian Properties). These include elitnite kvartali (elite neighbourhoods), luksoznite kvartali (luxurious neighbourhoods), prestijnite kvartali (prestigious neighbourhoods), and tuzarskite kvartali (posh neighbourhoods). In such real estate ads, the mixed population, dubious infrastructure,

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and all other remnants of the village-ness of southern Sofia are suppressed and replaced by depictions of serene surroundings, equipped with modern infrastructure, where one could live shoulder to shoulder with society’s most successful. Space, serenity, and prestige combined within ready access to the city – all classic suburban advantages – are the most important qualities that real estate advertisements emphasize: for instance, this from the Lux Imoti site: “Luxurious home located in the prestigious neighborhood of Boyana offering great quality of life. The area is calm and quiet, rich in greenery with beautiful views of Mount Vitosha and the city. Commuting to the center … is quick and easy.”1 And a more eloquent example: There is not a single person who does not wish to live in a beautiful place, with a gorgeous view and an enormous, beautifully landscaped yard. When you are considering the choice of a home in a prestigious neighbourhood, the first that come to mind are the most prestigious ones in Sofia such as Boyana, Dragalevtsi, Simeonovo, Lozenets … Of course, in these neighbourhoods live a large proportion of the richest, most famous and best-known people in the country, but it is possible that you could find a heavenly place for yourself, too. The prestigious neighbourhoods of Sofia are preferred by the rich because they captivate with their beauty, their lavish, large homes, their good infrastructure and, last but not least, their proximity to the city centre [gradskiyat centur] … So why would you not try to buy a luxurious home? What prevents from at least taking a look at the offers from our brokerage firm?2

The process of renaming Sofia’s southern outskirts involves not just coming up with a label covering the entire region but also with labels for the individual settlements, especially the new housing developments with their many dwelling units that have become more common since 2000. The established parts of the area typically carry traditional Slavic names such as Simeonovo (Simeon’s, coming from the Bulgarian version of Simon), Manastirski Livadi (Monastery’s Lawns), or Krasno Selo (Beautiful Village) that reflect these settlements’ long history. These names, which would be difficult for foreigners even to pronounce, however, do not connote high-class western lifestyles; only English (and sometimes French, German, or Italian) names are perceived to do so. Thus, the new residential developments located within or nearby the old villages and villa zones have names that are either English or combine English and Bulgarian: Residential Park

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Sofia, Simeonovo River Park, Mountain View Village, Boyana Fantasy, Magdalena Village, and so on. On websites, in magazines, or on billboards, these names are on occasion written entirely in English and on occasion in Bulgarian, with the Cyrillic alphabet. Sometimes the names are written in English but the accompanying text is in Bulgarian. Sometimes part of the name (e.g., Mountain View) is in English, but the remainder in Bulgarian (e.g., “Village” spelled using the Cyrillic alphabet). Not everyone can read these advertisements. Whereas this may not be a problem for younger people, because English is now taught starting in elementary school, for older Bulgarians, educated when the second language of instruction was Russian, the ads must remain somewhat of a mystery. Debates about names have in fact become a common occurrence at public hearings. Some residents and municipal officials worry about the degradation of the Bulgarian language, as increasingly more English words and names become part of everyday speech and of the official nomenclature. Others, however, claim that it is democratic for the builders and residents of new subdivisions to use whatever names they want. For example, a recent public debate in Pancharevo, another southern area of Sofia, focused on whether a new housing area, Sofia Village, should be shown on the official municipal map not only with its obviously English name but also whether than name should be written in English or in Cyrillic (Aradjieva, 2009). The growing southern outskirts of Sofia are sometimes discussed in newspapers and in the social media by residents and visitors, as well as members of the disenchanted intelligentsia (architects, landscape architects, artists, ecological activists), humorously or angrily to poke fun at the contradiction between the area’s undeveloped public infrastructure and its projected image as modern, high-class suburbia. On the pages of one of Bulgaria’s most popular daily newspapers Sega (Now), luksoznite kvartali (luxurious neighbourhoods) – a label used sarcastically by the author – were declared “long-lost for urban planning”: The buildings are new, pleasant, vibrant – yellow, green, red, white … all colors of the rainbow. They are everything that the old, gray mass-housing blocks were not. There are homes with beautiful green yards – at least those yards hidden behind solid gates. But not all homes are that lucky; some are half-built, others still vacant … Around them, however, it looks like the area has been bombed. This thing which cars are moving along can be called a street only if you use the word “street” liberally. It is more

The New Neighbourhoods  309 of a dirt road, leading to a dead end. Sidewalks are considered an unattainable luxury and, as all things luxurious, are rare. Street lights – no, none of that. (Koleva, 2011; my translation)

A recent award-winning project for the southern periphery prepared at the University of Architecture and Civil Engineering in Sofia explained that, “until recently, the areas of Simeonovo, Dragalevtsi and Boyana were considered rural outskirts of the capital city, but now they have become the preferred habitat of the Bulgarian high-life” (Geleva, 2012: 15). Pointing to their extremely meagre public spaces and the lack of jobs and services, the project critiqued novite kvartali (new neighbourhoods) as “sterile bedroom satellites” (sterilni spalni sateliti) (15). An architectural blog went further, to suggest that the new neighbourhoods should be called novite geta (new ghettos) or zlatnite geta (golden ghettos). According to the blog’s manager, the label is appropriate because the term implies isolation, and the neighbourhoods, where almost everything new is built by private capital, woefully lack three basic elements necessary for collective habitation: social infrastructure, public spaces, and green spaces (including kindergartens, schools, parks, gardens, sidewalks, playgrounds, sports facilities, and public gathering spaces). Sarcastically, the author noted that, “the territory offers conditions only for the satisfaction of individual basic human necessities: sleeping, making money (in an office), eating and … car-wash (?!)” and speculated that the lack of public gathering spaces would foster a spirit of social isolationism and anomie in the long run (Cvetanov, 2012: 1; my translation). Whether such noir portraits of Sofia’s growing southern periphery are warranted or not, it is clear that the area has become a culturally contested space, where competing labels apply and reflect different viewpoints and different interests. The multiple worlds that coexist sometimes cause confusion among the residents themselves. Some are perplexed by their surroundings and the social and spatial mixture they see; they find it impossible to fit their surroundings into a single category. A local resident, who was interviewed by a Bulgarian sociologist, was apparently maddened by this impossibility: A conglomerate of that many people – some raising chickens and letting them roam the street, another caring for sheep, another for sheep and cows which are dragged to the pasture to the [old, socialist-era] sport stadium, so that all summer the cows are in the stadium. What is this? Is this a neighbourhood [kvartal] or what are we talking about? Is Dragalevtsi a

310  Sonia Hirt neighborhood of Sofia and (if so) then it should meet all city standards or it is a village [selo] … or it is not a village … Well, for me [Dragalevtsi] is a fantasy of some sort. There cannot be such a real thing, such a thing cannot be explained elsewhere in the world; it does not fit into any criteria and cannot be explained. There are [here] … people like us who don’t have another dwelling, live here all-year-long; there are people who have rented their houses, like to foreigners, but they themselves do not live here; there are people, for example, who use their houses for villas [kushti za vili] – they come only in the summer … There are all kinds [of people and houses]; that is, this is neither a tourist place [kurortno selishte], nor a villa zone, nor a village – where you can have sheep, goats and cows – nor a neighborhood, where people live permanently; so it is a nothing. (cited by Pojarliev, 2010: 134; my translation)

Discussion and Conclusion One does not need to be a language expert to know that every word implies a generic category. Each includes a number of phenomena perceived as reasonably akin to one another, and reasonably different from others. There is no single colour red, for example, but a spectrum of shades that, through some social consensus formed at various times and various places, are regarded as sufficiently similar. This process of building linguistic taxonomies is necessary: without them we would lose, as Foucault (1970) says, the very possibility of discourse. But whereas, at least to my limited knowledge, all languages designate a colour red, much as all languages designate some term for a city and many designate several – undoubtedly, a category complex enough to warrant an entire literature deconstructing its meaning – not all languages have a generally accepted term for the urban fringe. And Bul­ garian is one of those languages. The word “suburb” has also not been directly incorporated into Bulgarian or other Slavic languages, to my knowledge, even though many other Latin-based English words – say, “piano,” “radio,” or “computer” – have been used verbatim for decades. In Bulgaria, I have yet to hear anyone (aside from people who have lived in England or the United States) uttering the word “suberbi,” which would be the Bulgarian pronunciation of “suburbs.” Yet, all kinds of new English additions to the language exist as part of the upper- and middle-class vocabulary – “media,” “narrative,” “fashion,” “billboard,” and even “building,” although the latter is used only for cool new buildings, to distinguish them from the old boring socialist ones.

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The process of making categories through language is inevitably a theory-building process. As Stephen Jay Gould (1989: 98) put it, “taxonomy … is often undervalued … [But] classifications are theories about the basic natural order, not dull catalogues compiled only to avoid chaos.” Ultimately, a word for “suburb” must be based on some theory or shared cultural understanding: say, a widespread belief that some connection exists between urban peripheral location and its desirability for, or at least its association with, a certain class of people. This understanding may be based on some empirical evidence in the English-speaking world: for some two hundred years, upper- and middle-class residents have been suburbanizing. But in other countries, certainly those in central and eastern Europe, this phenomenon has either come later in history or is only one of several phenomena that characterize the development of urban peripheries. In these countries, “suburbanites” – people who have purposefully traded the city for its edge – may be intermixed with people of a different, lower class, who may live nearby but for different reasons and in different ways. Thus, as in this case study, differences in class, settlement history, and building patterns demand several, potentially competing categories. Of those, “suburb” could be only one. In Sofia, municipal planners seem to share the aspiration of the burgeoning real estate industry to transform the once-rural periphery of the city into a modern high-class habitat. In­ vestment – in buildings and infrastructure – would be an obvious way to speed up this process but, apparently, names can play a role in reshaping it, too. The more that terms like “new neighbourhoods,” “prestige neighbourhoods,” or “elite neighbourhoods” become part of everyday speech, the more likely it is that upper-class people will crave such spaces and that buildings will follow. Thus the settlements will become the elite neighbourhoods that their labels purport them to be but that they only partially are. Still, there is a catch in Sofia’s case. Note that the most popular new labels that apply to the southern outskirts – novite kvratali, elitnite kvartali, lukzoznite kvartali – all include the word kvartal, which in Bulgaria implies urbanity, not sub-urbanity. And even though all of these labels refer to places in the urban outskirts, they are also employed to refer to places in and around the city centre (Doktorski Pametnik, Lozenetz, Oborishte), which command comparable and often higher prices that the southern outskirts (“Nai-skupite kvartali na Sofia,” 2012). So if the old labels of the southern outskirts die and the outskirts do eventually become unequivocally known as “the new neighborhoods,” “the elite

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neighborhoods,” and so on, they will share these labels with the city centre. Renaming Sofia’s “suburbs” will not involve a reference to the fact they are at the urban edge. The new name will ignore one of the three basic elements of the term “suburb,” as defined by Harris (2010): peripheral location. Thus, even if Sofia’s southern outskirts do over time acquire some of the socio-spatial characteristics of Western suburbia, they would be called something urban in nature. The discursive transition of Sofia’s suburbs would thus be from a rural (selo) or a parttime recreational (vilna zona) label, to an urban one; but not to a suburban one. Perhaps this is because Sofia’s elites still see more advantages to urbanity than to sub-urbanity, to the point that to make suburbia more attractive, it must be given an urban name. And although the new “suburbs” may be of much lower density than, say, the socialist housing estates, most single-family homes in these suburbs are located on quarter-acre or eight-of-an-acre lots (a rather high density for Western standards), social mixture is yet to be rooted out, and small stores and other services do pop up everywhere in a manner unbefitting “classic” Western suburbia. Nomen est omen – name is destiny. Or is it? I may be taking the risk of nominative determinism here, but let me ask: What does it mean if the English term “suburbia” never develops in Bulgaria? Does the lack of an equivalent name suggest the lack of an equivalent destiny? Will Sofia’s suburbs retain or develop quasi-urban qualities (such as relative density, social and land-use mix, and so on) so that the foreign label and the lifestyle it connotes remain just that, still a bit foreign? NOTES 1 See http://www.luximoti.bg/Kushti_v_Bulgaria/AD6684BG_Kushta_ prodava_v_Sofia.html; accessed 25 June 2013; my translation. 2 See http://prodajba.luksoznikashti.com/продажба-на-луксозни-къщи/ сбъднете-мечтите-си-за-луксозни-къщи-в/, dated 12 September 2012; accessed 25 June 2013; my translation. REFERENCES Aradjieva, P. 2009. “Umuvat za imenata na novite kvartali v Sofia.” [Thinking about the names of new neighbourhoods in Sofia]. Novinar, 21 May. http://

The New Neighbourhoods  313 novinar.bg/news/umuvat-za-imenata-na-novite-kvartali-v-sofiia_ Mjk1MTs5NA==.html. Accessed 25 June 2013. Brade, I., G. Herfert, and K. Wiest. 2009. “Recent Trends and Future Prospects of Socio-spatial Differentiation in Urban Regions of Central and Eastern Europe: Lull before the Storm?” Cities (London) 26 (5): 233–44. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2009.05.001. Cvetanov, V. 2012. Новите гета [The New Ghettos]. http://provocad.com/ novite_geta/. Accessed 26 June 2013. Dingsdale, A. 1999. “Budapest’s Built Environment in Transition.” GeoJournal 49 (1): 63–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/A:1007080111774. Fishman, R. 1987. Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia. New York: Basic Books. Forsyth, A. 2012. “Defining Suburbs.” Journal of Planning Literature 27 (3): 270–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0885412212448101. Foucault, M. 1970. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Random House. Gaarder, J. 1994. Sophie’s World: A Novel about the History of Philosophy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Geleva, B. 2012. “Koncepciya za integrirano razvitie na yujnite kvartali na gr. Sofia” [Concept for the integrated development of the southern neighborhoods of Sofia]. Stroitelsvo-Gradut [Building the city]. 7 May. http:// stroitelstvo.info/show.php?storyid=1821817. Accessed 26 June 2013. Gould, S.J. 1989. Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. New York: Norton. Harris, R. 2010. “Meaningful Types in a World of Suburbs.” Research in Urban Sociology 10: 15–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/ S1047-0042(2010)0000010004. Harris, R. 2015. “Suburbanization and Suburbanism.” In International Encyclo­ pedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. 2nd ed. 660–66. London: Elsevier. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.74044-X. Hirt, S. 2005. “Planning the Post-communist City: Experiences from Sofia.” International Planning Studies 10 (3/4): 219–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/ 13563470500378572. Hirt, S. 2007. “Suburbanizing Sofia: Characteristics of Post-socialist Peri-urban Change.” Urban Geography 28 (8): 755–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.2747/02723638.28.8.755. Hirt, S. 2008. “Stuck in the Suburbs? Gendered Perspectives of Living at the Edge of the Post-communist City.” Cities (London, England) 25 (6): 340–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2008.09.002.

314  Sonia Hirt Hirt, S. 2012. Iron Curtains: Gates, Suburbs and Privatization of Space in the Post-socialist City. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ 9781118295922. Kok, H., and Z. Kovacs. 1999. “The Process of Suburbanization in the Agglomeration of Budapest.” Netherlands Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 14 (2): 119–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF02496818. Koleva, D. 2011. “Novite tuzarski kvartali na Sofia: luks vurhu septichni yami” [The new posh neighborhoods: luxury over septic tanks]. Sega, 20 September. http://www.segabg.com/article.php?id=566377. Accessed 26 June. Nacionalen Statisticheski Institut. 2007. “Obshti Dohodi na Domakinstvata po Iztochnici na Dohodi” [Total household income according to income sources]. www.nsi.bg/BudgetHome/BudgetHome.htm. Accessed 4 April 2007. “Nai-skupite kvartali na Sofia” [The most expensive neighbourhoods of Sofia]. 2012. http://fakti.bg/imoti/46703-nai-skapite-kvartali-v-sofia. Accessed 28 June 2013. Nedovíc-Budić, Z. 2001. “Planning Practice to the New Eastern and Central European Context.” Journal of the American Planning Association 67 (1): 38–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01944360108976354. Pojarliev, L. 2010. “Proekcii za socialnoto prostranstvo v praktikite na objivyavane na fizicheskoto prostranstvo” [Forecasts of social space in the practices of rejuvenating physical space]. Godishnik na Sofiiiskia Universitet “Sv. Kliment Ohridski.” 102: 129–60. Rudolph, R., and I. Brade. 2005. “Moscow: Processes of Restructuring in the Post-Soviet Metropolitan Periphery.” Cities (London, England) 22 (2): 135–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2005.01.005. Ruoppila, S. 1998. “The Changing Urban Landscape of Tallinn.” Finnish Journal of Urban Studies 35 (3): 36–43. Sanders, I. [1949] 1975. Balkan Village. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Smirnenski, C. 1923. “Zimni Vecheri” [Winter evenings]. http://www.slovo .bg/showwork.php3?AuID=50&WorkID=3106&Level=2. Accessed 21 June 2013. Stanilov, K., and S. Hirt. 2014. “Sprawling Sofia: Post-socialist Suburban Growth in the Bulgarian Capital.” In Stanilov and Sýkora, 215–44. http://dx.doi .org/10.1002/9781118295861.ch6. Stanilov, K., and L. Sýkora, eds. 2014. Confronting Suburbanization: Urban Decentralization in Post-socialist Europe. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1002/9781118295861.

The New Neighbourhoods  315 Stolichna Obshtina [Municipality of the Capital City]. 2001. Obsht Ustrojstven Plan na Grad Sofia i Stolichnata Obshtina: Faza Predvaritelen Proekt, Etap 2, Scenarii za Socialno-ikonomichesko i Teritorialno Razvitie na Grad Sofia za Perioda do 2020 g [General development plan of the city of Sofia and the Municipality of the Capital City: Preliminary phase, stage 2, scenarios for the socio-economic and territorial development of the city of Sofia until the year 2020]. Sofia: Author. Sýkora, L. 1999a. “Changes in the Internal Structure of Post-socialist Prague.” GeoJournal 49 (1): 79–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/A:1007076000411. Sýkora, L. 1999b. “Processes of Socio-spatial Differentiation in Post-communist Prague.” Housing Studies 14 (5): 679–701. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/ 02673039982678.

15 Lost in Translation: Names, Meanings, and Development Strategies of Beijing’s Periphery Xu efei R en

The train northbound from downtown Chicago snakes along the lakefront as it passes by one predominantly white middle-class suburb after another – from Evanston and Wilmette to Glencoe and Lake Forest. Trains heading south pierce another stretch of residential suburbs – this one less well known and more racially mixed – Kensington, Riverdale, Harvey, and Matteson. The demographic landscape in America’s suburbs has changed radically since the 1950s (Jackson, 1985; Keil, 2013), but the “suburban” label itself seems to be still useful, as both experts and non-experts routinely use it to describe low-density and automobile-dependent residential settlements developed outside the central city. The term, however, becomes confusing when used to denote the periphery of cities outside Great Britain and North America (Harris, 2010). In China, for example, the urban periphery exhibits landscape and socio-economic features different from those of American suburbs. A passenger aboard a train departing a downtown area in a Chinese city lacks recourse to any single word to describe the landscape on the periphery – high-rise buildings, villages, small towns, shopping malls, development zones, industrial parks, and more high-rise buildings. If “suburb” refers to settlements with low density, new construction, and peripheral location (see the introduction to this volume), then the urban periphery of Chinese cities cannot be labelled “suburban” because, first, these places often have high density and, second, the buildings and infrastructure are not necessarily newer than those found in the central city, because of massive demolitions and new construction in many city centres. In spite of the differences between American suburbs and Chinese urban peripheries, however, “suburbanization” is routinely used in

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English-language academic publications to describe the outward expansion of Chinese cities (Zhou and Ma, 2000; Song et al., 2007; Feng, Zhou, and Wu, 2008; Wu and Phelps, 2011; Wu and Shen, 2015). The indiscriminate use of “suburb” and “suburbanization” in the urban China scholarship, I argue, reflects a larger trend of uncritical borrowing of foreign terms and concepts from “elsewhere” to describe urban structures and processes in China. Concepts developed in the West, such as gentrification (Glass, 1964; Lees, 2012), entrepreneurialism (Harvey, 1989), neoliberalism (Brenner and Theodore, 2002), and the creative class (Florida, 2002) are ubiquitous in the scholarship on urban China, even though these terms capture only fragments of the political economy of Chinese urban development. When used in a critical and comparative perspective, these borrowed terms can illuminate path-dependent urban processes taking place in different historical-institutional contexts, and achieve what Robinson and others have envisioned as the most fruitful scholarship on comparative global urbanism (Robinson, 2011; Brenner, 2001). However, if used uncritically, such meta-concepts obscure more than they illuminate. Unfortunately, rigorous historical and comparative analyses are rare, and many contemporary studies on urban China are not mindful of the gap between the concepts’ original meanings and Chinese contexts (Ren, 2013). Instead of narrating China’s urban growth with meta-concepts borne out of different times and places, it is time to scrutinize the language we use and develop a more context-sensitive vocabulary. This chapter takes a first step in this direction, and in doing so, I leave aside the label of “suburb” for a moment and examine the various names ascribed to the urban periphery by Chinese local residents, experts, and planners, and the meanings associated with these names. Using Beijing as an example, this chapter examines how the periphery of Beijing is described in the everyday language, in urban scholarship, and in the official discourse such as urban master plans. Among the various names and expressions, jiaoqu (郊区) is a Chinese word frequently used to refer to the urban periphery or outskirts, but it entails different layers of meanings for different groups, and none of these connotations suggests low-density American-style suburbia. There­fore, when Beijing’s jiaoqu is equated with “suburb,” much is lost in translation. I examine the use of jiaoqu for three groups in particular – residents, urban geographers, and the government and planners. I draw upon conversations with a number of Beijing residents to examine the vernacular use of jiaoqu, key publications in the genre of

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suburbanization studies to examine expert use of jiaoqu by urban geographers, and, lastly, government documents and urban master plans of Beijing to trace the meaning of jiaoqu in the official discourse. The vernacular use of jiaoqu implies a lack of urbanity, sophistication, and progress; the absence of any clear boundary; and does not take into consideration the geographic distance from the city centre. When jiaoqu is used by urban geographers, however, it has clear boundaries based on administrative divisions of urban districts; in Beijing, anywhere beyond the historical city (i.e., within the second ring road) is categorized as jiaoqu for the sake of international comparisons. In the official discourse, the meaning of jiaoqu, again, differs. During the socialist years, jiaoqu was used to refer to the hinterland, an inferior space that provided food supplies for privileged city residents. But the term is now used sparingly, gradually being replaced by xincheng (new cities) in Beijing’s urban master plans published after 1990. The change from jiaoqu to xincheng reflects a major shift in Beijing’s urban development strategies. The once inferior space on the periphery is now repositioned as a strategic site for property development and for absorbing the large migrant population pouring into the capital city. But before delving into the intricate meanings of jiaoqu, I will first examine how the centre and the periphery of Chinese cities are variously imagined and described. Centre and Periphery: Names and Meanings In both everyday language and professional circuits, only a handful of Chinese words refer to the urban centre, while at least a dozen – freighted with different connotations – commonly describe the urban periphery (see table 15.1). This array of linguistic options to describe the periphery reflects the diverse character of this vast space on the urban edge. The market logic can be observed merely from the names used to characterize the centre and the periphery: the centre is described as “old” to suggest the potential for redevelopment, whereas the periphery is called “new” to signal directions for future development and investment opportunities. The centre is often called zhongxincheng (中心城, central city), shiqu ­ (市区, urban district), or simply shizhongxin (市中心, city centre). Whether the centre refers to the downtown area specifically, or the inner city districts more generally, it constitutes a clear geographic entity in the popular imagination, and the names for it are interchangeable and largely neutral in meaning. By contrast, the periphery is described by a variety

Lost in Translation  319 Table 15.1. Key terms describing urban centres and peripheries

Urban centre

Urban periphery

Chinese

Romanization

English translation

市区

shiqu

urban district

中心城

zhongxincheng

central city

市中心

shizhongxin

city centre

中心区

zhongxinqu

central district

旧区

jiuqu

old district

郊区

jiaoqu

suburb

近郊

jinjiao

inner suburb

远郊

yuanjiao

outer suburb

新区

xinqu

new district

新城

xincheng

new city or new town

卫星城

weixingcheng

satellite city

边缘集团

bianyuan jituan

fringe clusters

城中村

chengzhongcun

urban village

城乡接合部

chengxiang jiehebu

urban-rural intersections

农村

nongcun

rural village

外县

waixian

outer county

of terms that convey very different meanings. Some of them are associated with negative images, such as chengxiang jiehebu (城乡结合部), meaning “urban-rural intersection” and chengzhongcun (城中村, urban villages), referring to migrant enclaves formed on pockets of collectively owned rural land. These two terms often invoke images of a transient population of rural migrant workers, poor infrastructure, and even criminality. Other terms for the periphery have unmistakably positive overtones, such as xincheng (新城, new city) or xinqu (新区, new districts), with xin meaning “new.” Across the country, real estate developers use xincheng to promote and market their projects and differentiate them from old and dilapidated residential quarters. More technical terms are also used to describe the urban periphery. Not commonly used in ordinary daily speech, these specialized terms appear in urban master plans and government documents: bianyuan jituan (边缘集团, peripheral clusters), for example, refers to large residential settlements on the edge of

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the city, and weixingcheng (卫星城, satellite cities) refers to new town developments further away from the central city. When the Chinese words for “centre” and “periphery” are examined together, two types of distinctions become evident: the names for “centre” often invoke the old and urban, whereas the expressions for “periphery” often imply the new and rural. Since the late 1980s, when large cities launched their urban renewal programs, local governments have often labelled the centre as the “old city” (laocheng or jiucheng), thus targeting many of the inner-city buildings and neighbourhoods for demolition and redevelopment – even if they are relatively new constructions. Led by Shanghai in the 1990s, cities across the country have initiated redevelopment programs to demolish the old city quarters and replace them with new buildings (Ren, 2008; Shao, 2013). These programs are often called jiucheng gaizao, meaning “remaking the old city.” By contrast, the term xin (new), as in xincheng (new cities, new towns), is used to describe the periphery, projecting an image of better infrastructure and amenities that is not necessarily accurate, given the lack of transportation and basic service infrastructure in many of China’s new towns. By declaring that there will be new towns and new cities, in the form of master plans or five-year plans, city governments and their affiliated urban planning agencies can send a strong signal to the market about proposed sites of future development. For example, in Beijing’s Eleventh Five-Year Plan of 2006–10, three areas on the periphery were identified as places to receive targeted funding and be developed into “new cities,” and eight more were added in the Twelfth Five-Year Plan of 2011–15 (Beijing Municipal Government, 2006, 2010). In addition to the differentiation between the old and the new, the names for “centre” and “periphery” also suggest the divide between urban and rural, a hierarchical relationship that is deeply rooted in Chinese society. The names for the centre imply urbanity and the names for the periphery suggest a lack thereof. In spite of the fact that much of the periphery land is urban land belonging to municipal governments, the terms nong (rural or agricultural) or cun (village) are often used in everyday language to refer to the urban periphery.1 The urban-rural hierarchy in China is firmly institutionalized through the hukou system, where urban residents enjoy more privileged access to social security benefits than their rural counterparts. Therefore, by calling the urban periphery nongcun (rural village), even if technically it is state-owned urban land, a sense of inferiority is ascribed to the periphery. Together, these various terms suggest that the centre is urban but old and

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therefore in need of redevelopment and upgrading, whereas the periphery is rural and less developed but that, with proper policy guidance, both can become strategic sites for building new towns. The Vernacular Jiaoqu Jiaoqu is the most commonly used Chinese word to refer to outskirts and the urban periphery. The way it is used today still contains layers of meanings from the past, such as imaginaries of rural, remote, desolate, uncivilized, and vast, unsettled lands. The letter jiao (郊) is a simplified picto-phonetic character in a Chinese calligraphy style known as lishu (隶书). The left part (交) means “intersecting with” or “next to,” and the right part (邑), as written in an older calligraphy style known as xiaozhuan (小篆), means a city or a government seat. If we trace the word to its traditional form of writing as in xiaozhuan, the letter jiao (郊) means areas next to, outside, or intersecting with a city or a government seat. During the Zhou dynasty (BC 1059–255), areas within 50 li of the state capital were referred as jinjiao (jin meaning “close”) and areas beyond that but within 100 li of the state capital were called yuanjiao (yuan meaning “far away”).2 The character jiao was frequently used in historical records to refer to areas outside city walls, where plenty of farmland could be found (e.g., 郊田, jiao-tian, “farmland”), where urban literati would go for sightseeing (e.g., 郊游, jiao-you, “fieldtrips”), and where emperors would visit ancestral tombs and hold ceremonies to worship the heaven and earth (e.g., 郊祀, jiao-si, “worshipping outside the city”).3 In general, the word jiao, as used in classical texts, invokes a sense of remoteness, isolation, and lack of human settlements of any significant size, as seen in the Chinese idiom huangjiao yeling (荒郊野岭), meaning “deserted outskirts, wild ridges.”4 To get a sense of how jiaoqu is used in everyday language today, I interviewed a number of residents in Beijing – both natives and migrants who have lived in the city for at least a decade. My sample is small and not meant to be representative, but even from these limited examples, some patterns emerged as residents tried to articulate what they meant by jiaoqu.5 For example, all of the residents I interviewed resisted calling their neighbourhood jiaoqu, even though some of them live on the far outskirts of Beijing’s metropolitan area. From these conversations, it becomes clear that the vernacular use of jiaoqu refers to a stage of development, or lack of development, rather than peripheral locations. It cannot be measured by the distance from the city centre, or

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defined by administrative boundaries of urban districts. Rather, it is the counterpart of the city, a vague notion of the rural hinterland that is somehow inferior to the city. Ms Xu, a film producer and a Beijing native, associated jiaoqu with the rural and a lack of development, which had little to do with the geographic distance from the centre of Beijing. To illustrate her point, Xu gave the example of Shunyi, an area adjacent to the international airport on the northeastern edge of Beijing. In recent years there has been much upscale housing construction catering to foreign expatriates and wealthy Chinese in the area. It is far from the city centre, but for Xu, it should not be called jiaoqu because the area is developed and the property prices are high: “Jiaoqu for me doesn’t mean how many kilometers it is away from Tiananmen Square. For example, Shunyi is very far, but I wouldn’t call it jiaoqu, because it has many posh neighbourhoods and upscale villas. Jiaoqu for me means those really rural places.”6 Inhabitants of Beijing often use the city’s ring roads – there are six expressways circling the city centre – as spatial references. In a conversation, Mr Wei, a college student born in 1992, when the third ring road was still being built, remarked how the perceived boundaries of jiaoqu have shifted outward. Today, the area near the third ring road is the prime real estate market in Beijing, with the construction of the new central business district (CBD) and a number of high-profile buildings such as the World Trade Center, the CCTV (Chinese Central Television) building, and luxury hotels.7 An area once dismissed as nowhere became somewhere, with the massive investment and construction before the Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008 (Ren, 2012). Wei acknowledged that the situation has changed as Beijing continues to expand outward – after the completion of the third ring road in 1994, three more ring roads have been constructed, with the sixth finished in 2009. He commented, “My family lived near the second ring road in south Beijing, and for my mom, she would call anywhere beyond the third ring road jiaoqu. But I think now the situation is different.” The reluctance to identify one’s neighbourhood as jiaoqu reflects the negative connotation of the word in the daily discourse. Similarly, Ms. Zhang, an urban professional who has lived in Beijing for more than a decade, commented on the rapid expansion of Beijing and how the periphery has shifted outward from the third to the sixth ring road. Zhang herself lives outside the fifth ring road on the northeast side, in a large housing complex with many young families who cannot afford to buy properties within the third ring road. But Zhang is reluctant to label her

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neighbourhood as jiaoqu, since, despite its distance from the city centre, it lies within the Chaoyang district, one of the most prosperous urban districts in the country and home to Beijing’s new CBD and a large number of offices of multinational firms. In 2013, the per capita gross domestic product of the Chaoyang district was US$16,874, more than twice the national per capita GDP of US$6,807 (Chaoyang District Gov­ ernment, 2013). Here Zhang employs the same logic as Xu to interpret what jiaoqu is – that is, it is less about the geographic distance to the city centre, and more a stage of development. Jiaoqu does not apply to her neighbourhood, because the area belongs to the affluent Chaoyang district, but her residential compound straddles the very edge of the district. As Zhang observed, Beijing has been developing and expanding so fast in recent years. Maybe ten or twenty years ago outside the third ring road was already jiaoqu. These days jiaoqu probably means outside the sixth ring road. Generally speaking, I think Beijing’s jiaoqu should refer to the outer counties, such as Fangshan and Shunyi … I live outside the east fifth ring road, but it’s not jiaoqu, because it’s still within the jurisdiction of Chaoyang district. More to the east from where I live is Tongzhou, but Tongzhou shouldn’t count as jiaoqu either, since it is one of Beijing’s administrative districts.

The vernacular use of jiaoqu is messy and inconsistent, as people often contradict one another with respect to which parts of Beijing can be called jiaoqu. For example, Zhang insists that Tongzhou is not jiaoqu, because it is one of Beijing’s districts, but other counties such as Daxing and Shunyi can be called jiaoqu. But in fact all three places – Tongzhou, Daxing, and Shunyi – have shed their former classification as counties and share the same administrative status of urban districts. Zhang singles out Tongzhou, perhaps because she is more familiar with the area, as her apartment complex is adjacent to Tongzhou. But unlike Xu, her example of a jiaoqu was Shunyi, the expat colony near the international airport. Another resident I talked to, Ms. Sun, acknowledged the vagueness and confusion of the term jiaoqu. Sun, who is not a native Beijinger, has been living in a rental apartment near the third ring road in south Beijing. She also associated jiaoqu with the lack of development and pointed out the unevenness of development in Beijing: “It depends on which direction you go. For the east side, even beyond the fifth ring road it’s still not jiaoqu because it’s very developed in that area. But for

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the south side, places outside the third ring road can be jiaoqu. On the west side, you hit the mountains beyond the fourth ring road, so that’s already jiaoqu.” Jiaoqu, as used in the everyday language, connotes lack of development and urbanity, very different from the low-density suburban development in the United States, for example. If that is the case, are there American-style suburbs in Beijing? I asked an American who knows Beijing well, speaks fluent Mandarin, and has lived in the city at different times over the past decade. In my questions, I deliberately avoided the word jiaoqu and used the English term “suburb” instead. Aut h o r: Do you think Beijing has suburbs? Mr. L e i (Chinese name): Yes, of course. Shunyi is a suburb. Every expat family with children I know lives in Shunyi. It has Starbucks, grocery stores with imported food, Western and Japanese restaurants. It’s got good amenities. The schools are good too – there are many international schools. The location is very convenient. It’s right off the expressway going to the airport. Aut h o r: What about Tongzhou? A lot of people have moved to Tongzhou in recent years. Would you call Tongzhou a suburb? Mr. L e i : Well, if I call Tongzhou a suburb, then I’m using the word more broadly. Tongzhou is a poor, lower-class suburb, perhaps. There are no Starbucks, good restaurants to eat, as least when I was there back in 2008. I have two Chinese friends living in Tongzhou. Both are artists. They moved there because they couldn’t afford an apartment in the city.

As an American, Lei is clear about what “suburb” means to him, and he identifies the places with amenities that resemble middle-class American suburbs, such as larger homes, good schools, and car dependence. Shunyi is one of the pockets in Beijing where a large number of foreign expatriates live, so it seems natural that Lei calls Shunyi a suburb. The notion of “suburb,” for expatriates and some English-speaking cosmopolitan Chinese, suggests posh, upper-middle-class, and largely foreign residential quarters on the outskirts of Beijing, whereas the notion of jiaoqu among the Chinese-speaking locals conveys images of a lack of development and urbanity. The Experts’ Use of Jiaoqu Compared to the vernacular use of jiaoqu, which is often vague, contradictory, and has negative connotations, the experts’ understanding of

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the word is abstract, neutral, and subject to clear boundaries. In the academic literature on Beijing’s urban expansion, anywhere beyond the two inner-city districts – Dongcheng and Xicheng – is routinely categorized as jiaoqu/suburb by urban geographers (Zhao et al., 2001; Zhou, 2004). As used by experts, jiaoqu contains the entire Beijing metropolitan area except the historic centre, and it is further divided into two subcategories – jin jiaoqu (inner suburbs) and yuan jiaoqu (outer suburbs). The districts of Chaoyang, Haidian, Shijingshan, and Fengtai belong to the former category, while the remaining districts such as Tongzhou, Shunyi, Mentougou, Fangshan, Daxing, and Changping to the latter. If one examines the geographic area covered by these artificial categories, the city covers only 86 square kilometers, whereas the jinjiao/inner suburbs encompass 1,289 square kilometers and the yuanjiao/ outer suburbs 5,809 square kilometers. Considering the reluctance to call one’s own neighbourhood jiaoqu, discussed in the previous section, the average Beijinger would strongly disagree with such categorization by experts. My reading of the suburbanization literature about Beijing suggests that the category “suburbs” was invented for the purpose of international comparisons. Since the early 1990s, Chinese geographers have compared urban expansion patterns in China with those in the Unit­ ed States (Song et al., 2007; Wang and Yang, 2010). But unlike in the United States, the concept of “suburb” as an autonomous legal and administrative entity does not exist in China, so a new category had to be invented to make international comparisons possible. In fact, all the places classified as “suburb” by geographers are urban districts or counties under the jurisdiction of the Beijing municipal government. Senior urban geographer Zhou Yixing at Peking University explained that establishing the boundaries of suburbs was a necessary first step for studying the suburbanization of Chinese cities: “Research on suburbanization in China must adopt the approach of dividing the cities being studied into inner city, inner suburbs, and outer suburbs. Once we determine the boundaries of the inner city, inner suburbs, and outer suburbs, we should not easily alter it, because suburbanization is a process of centrifugal movement of urban processes and only with fixed boundaries can we track the changes in this process” (Zhou, 2004:9-10; my translation). Urban geographers undertake spatial analyses to examine population movement and urban sprawl. The vast majority of such studies have identified clear trends of suburbanization, based on the evidence that the two inner city-districts have lost population and industry to

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jinjiao/inner suburbs and yuanjiao/outer suburbs (Zhou and Ma, 2000; Zhao et al., 2001; Yang and Fan, 2006). This is not surprising because little space for growth remains in the two small districts that urban geographers categorize as “the city.” As Beijing’s population increased to twenty-one million in 2015, most of this growth took place beyond the historical city, in the areas designated in the literature as “jiaoqu/­ suburbs.” The image of the urban periphery as projected in the literature resembles suburban development in the West, according to urban geographer Feng Jian and colleagues at Peking University: “Residential suburbanization is driven by rising car ownership and preference for suburban villas and quality housing; industrial relocation is facilitated by the development of suburban industries; and retail suburbanization began to appear in the form of large shopping malls and retail parks” (Feng et al., 2008: 84). The Chinese urban periphery is a mosaic of different social worlds, which contain but are not limited to residential villas, shopping malls, and relocated industries. Many other types of old and new urban spaces can be found on the cities’ edge, such as new towns planned by publicprivate partnerships, urban villages of migrant workers, artist quarters, gated communities, large lower-middle-class housing complexes, old workers’ villages from the socialist era, as well as new eco-cities and CBDs (Ren, 2010). These different social mosaics on the periphery are not captured in the generic narrative of middle-class living and suburbanization as quoted above. Jiaoqu and Its Disappearance from Urban Master Plans Adding to the confusion in the understanding of jiaoqu among locals and experts is yet another variation of the term as used in the official discourse, such as in Beijing’s urban master plans. From the 1950s to the present, the Beijing municipal government has had a number of urban master plans that laid out land-use, economic, and spatial planning for the coming decades. The word jiaoqu appeared frequently in the earlier master plans in the socialist decades (1949–78) and also in the 1980s, referring to the vague space of rural hinterlands outside the built-up city. The development of this peripheral area, however, was never encouraged except for the occasional mention of weixingcheng (satellite cities) – a type of development that did not materialize, because of the local government’s limited resources for investment in infrastructure. Since the early 1990s, however, the term jiaoqu has been gradually

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dropped from the master plans and replaced by xincheng (new city). The substitution of xincheng for jiaoqu in the urban master plans signals a shift in China’s new urbanization strategies – one in which the peripheral hinterland from the socialist years is repositioned as the key site for building China’s new cities. In the socialist years, the state conceived jiaoqu mainly as places that provided food supplies to urban residents. Instead of developing jiaoqu, the state strictly controlled population growth at the periphery to minimize its social welfare obligations. Since those living in jiaoqu with urban hukou were counted as part of the urban population and entitled to social welfare services, the socialist government ordered cities to “shrink” (suoxiao, in Chinese) this zone. Notably, this policy was articulated in 1963 in a document published by the State Council. Here, jiaoqu was defined as comprising five types of places in the areas immediate surrounding cities: (1) places that are necessary for urban construction, (2) residential areas that house urban workers and that lie outside the city boundary, (3) outskirt areas that supply fresh produce for urban residents, (4) agricultural areas located in the middle of city, and therefore hard to separate from the city, and (5) other places that are difficult to separate from the city due to topographic factors. All other fringe areas that did not fit in these five categories were to be classified as rural areas under the jurisdiction of county governments (State Council, 1963). In the case of Beijing, the term jiaoqu was occasionally mentioned in the urban master plans between the 1950s and 1970s, as denoting agricultural regions and sites for developing industries. It was suggested that Beijing should develop about forty satellite towns at the periphery, industrial production should be limited in the old city, and large factories should be relocated to yuan jiaoqu (outer suburbs) (Beijing Municipal Government, 1957). However, due to the slow economic growth at the time and also the disruption wrought during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), these calls for building satellite cities at the periphery were never realized. The urban periphery drew some attention from planners after the launch of market reforms in 1978, but in the 1980s and 1990s jiaoqu was seen primarily as a dumping ground for relocating industries and resettling families displaced by urban renewal. In the master plan of 1982, for example, it was proposed to redevelop laocheng (old city), construct residential housing in jinjiao (inner suburbs), and actively develop yuanjiao (outer suburbs) by building satellite cities (Beijing Municipal Government, 1982). Specifically, the 1982 plan suggested

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that redeveloping the old city should be carried out in conjunction with new residential construction in jinjiao, so that residents and enterprises displaced from urban renewal could be resettled here. The rationale for urban renewal, as stated in the master plan, was to make space for widening roads, to create more green space to ease congestion, and also to improve infrastructure in the city. Frequently carried out in the name of “eminent domain,” urban renewal in the 1980s and 1990s in Beijing was driven by profit making by the local government and the private sector. Urban renewal and demolition further accelerated after 1993, when the city government proclaimed its goal of building Beijing into a “modern international metropolis” (xiandai guojihua dadushi). After Beijing won the Olympic bid in 2001, its periphery became an “under city” for accommodating the undesired population and polluting industries so that the city could stage an international mega-event to spotlight the most powerful Chinese global city. As jinjiao (inner suburbs) quickly filled up, the notion of jiaoqu began to disappear and was replaced by xincheng (new cities) in the next master plans released in 1993. The Beijing urban master plan of 1991–2010 suggested that the area within the fourth ring road, about 300 square kilometers, should be considered as the city, and the rest as yuanjiao/ outer suburbs (Beijing Municipal Government, 1993). Thus the category of jinjiao was merged with the planned city area, and the Beijing metropolitan area was divided into shiqu (the city) and yuanjiao, with the fourth ring road as the boundary. The 1991–2010 plan announced a strategic shift in the city’s development directions – that is, the target areas of urban construction should change from the city to yuanjiao. The government’s rationale was its concern about the overconcentration of people and industry in the city; by planning and developing satellite cities in yuanjiao, the city aimed to redirect growth to subcentres in the larger metropolitan area. The word xincheng (new city) appeared in the 1991–2010 plan, which suggested that fourteen satellite cities should be developed into independent new cities, with a population of between 100,000 and 250,000 for each, and be equipped with modern infrastructure and amenities. Thus, the 1991–2010 Beijing urban master plan marks a shift from its predecessors in its repositioning of the periphery. The development of weixingcheng (satellite cities), never realized in the socialist years, was identified as the basis for making relatively autonomous, full-fledged new cities. The shifting emphasis of development to the periphery became even more pronounced in the current Beijing master plan for 2004–20 (Beijing

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Municipal Government, 2004). Here the term yuanjiao (outer suburbs) has been replaced by xincheng (new cities), and so Beijing is conceived as composed of zhongxincheng (central city) and xincheng. Beijing announced eleven new cities, which are grouped into the east and west development belt (Beijing Municipal Government, 2004). Among these new cities, three – Tongzhou, Shunyi, and Yizhuang – are the targets of concentrated investment, and the projected population capacity for each of these is between 700,000 and 900,000. For example, Tongzhou New City has a planned area of 677 square kilometers, and the land to be used for construction encompassing 155 square kilometers. The Beijing Municipal Government plans to develop Tongzhou into a regional hub for modern service industries, cultural industries, and ­sustainable residential settlements. By 2020, it is projected to have a population of 900,000, and the surrounding townships and villages will have another 200,000 residents. Much more so than in Great Britain or North America, master plans in China are powerful instruments for steering development. Although there is always a gap between plan and implementation, and some of Beijing’s new towns will probably fail to attract the population growth envisioned by the government, these master plans nevertheless send a strong signal to the market on where the government will direct funding in future years. Therefore, it is not surprising to see that the former jiaoqu or satellite cities have been repackaged with a new name – xincheng, as the periphery has become the centre for incoming investment and construction. It remains to be seen whether the planners’ language will be adopted in everyday use. At the time of this writing at least, my Beijing interlocutors seem to resist the term xincheng. Conclusion Chinese cities have experienced rapid population growth and physical expansion over more than three decades of market reform. As China urbanized, a plethora of terms and concepts have been borrowed from the West and used to describe urban structures and processes. Analysing the terms “suburb” and “suburbanization,” I have shown in this chapter that many of the meta-concepts borrowed from elsewhere fail to capture the unfolding urban processes taking place in Chinese cities. The low-density and car-dependent developments resembling American suburbia are the exception rather than the rule in Chinese cities. The urban periphery in China is often composed of a

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variety of mixed-density, mixed-use developments that cannot be captured with a single word. Leaving aside the label of “suburb,” this chapter has examined, instead, how the locals – both ordinary residents and experts – describe the vast space of the urban periphery of Beijing. I specifically examined the different meanings invested in the term jiaoqu, a Chinese word referring to urban outskirts. For ordinary Beijing residents, jiaoqu implies lack of development and is only loosely associated with peripheral locations. Places far out in the outskirts are not called jiaoqu if they are well developed, and places more proximate to the city centre are sometimes called jiaoqu if they are less developed. For urban geographers, Beijing’s jiaoqu has clear boundaries – it covers the entire Beijing metropolitan area except the two districts within the second ring road. However, this division of Beijing into the city and jiaoqu is artificial and does not resonate with Beijing’s residents. The residents I talked to all lived outside the second ring road but none of them saw his or her neighbourhood as jiaoqu. Lastly, I examined the meaning of jiaoqu as used by government and planners. In socialist-era urban master plans, jiaoqu referred to the rural hinterlands that supplied food for city residents. After market reform, jiaoqu has been gradually replaced by xincheng (new towns) in Beijing’s urban master plans, signalling the changing directions of land development towards the periphery. These various layers of meanings in the word jiaoqu suggest different imaginaries of the vast territory of Beijing’s periphery, and none of them resembles American suburbia. This chapter shows that it has become increasingly inadequate to use unqualified, borrowed concepts to describe Chinese urban processes. Such concepts limit our imagination, prevent theoretical innovation, and fail to capture more than fragments of the political economy of China’s urban development. A step forward, I argue, is to scrutinize the very vocabulary we use to represent and capture the urban. Otherwise, the historical and present-day transformations of Beijing’s jiaoqu will be forever lost in the generic account of suburbanization. NOTES 1 There are two types of land ownership in China. The first is urban land, which is classified as state land belonging to the government and

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state-owned enterprises. The second is rural land belonging to villagelevel authorities. 2 See Zaixian Xinhua Zidian (Online Chinese Dictionary), at http:// xh.5156edu.com/html3/2258.html, accessed 20 January 2015. The length of li varied in different historical periods. One kilometer is about two li. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 To get a sense of how locals (i.e., non-experts and non-academics) use various terms to describe Beijing’s urban edge, in January 2015 the author conducted phone interviews in Chinese from the United States with seven residents in Beijing. 6 The translations of these interviews are mine. 7 Beijing has more than one central business district (CBD). In competition with one another, district governments started building their own CBDs since the mid-1990s. The CBD in the Chaoyang district on the east third ring road has the largest concentration of specialized business firms.

REFERENCES Beijing Municipal Government. 1957. Beijing chengshi jianshe zongti guihua chubu fang’an [Beijing Urban Construction Master Plan]. Beijing Municipal Government 1982. Beijing chengshi jianshe zongti guihua fangan [Beijing Urban Construction Master Plan]. Beijing Municipal Government 1993. Beijing chengshi zongti guihua 1991–2010 [Beijing Urban Master Plan, 1991–2010]. Beijing Municipal Government 2004. Beijing chengshi zongti guihua 2004–2020 [Beijing Urban Master Plan, 2004–2020]. Beijing Municipal Government 2006. The Eleventh Five Year Plan (2006–2010). http://zhengwu.beijing.gov.cn/ghxx/sywgh/t833176.htm. Accessed 18 January 2015. Beijing Municipal Government 2010. The Twelfth Five-Year Plan (2011–2015). http://zhengwu.beijing.gov.cn/ghxx/sewgh/t1176552.htm. Accessed 18 January 2015. Brenner, N. 2001. “World City Theory, Globalization and the ComparativeHistorical Method: Reflections on Janet Abu-Lughod’s Interpretation of Contemporary Urban Restructuring.” Urban Affairs Review 37 (1): 124–47. Brenner, N., and N. Theodore, eds. 2002. Spaces of Neoliberalism: Urban Restruc­ turing in North America and West Europe. New York: Oxford University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/9781444397499.

332  Xuefei Ren Chaoyang District Government. 2013. “Statistical Report of the Economic and Social Development of Chaoyang District in 2013.” http://www.bjchy.gov .cn/affair/tjxx/bulletin/8a24fe8345f410840145f8be044800c3.html Accessed 31 January 2015. Feng, J., Y. Zhou, and F. Wu. 2008. “New Trends of Suburbanization in Beijing since 1990: From Government-led to Market-oriented.” Regional Studies 42 (1): 83–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00343400701654160. Florida, R. 2002. The Rise of the Creative Class. New York: Basic Books. Glass, R. 1964. London: Aspects of Change. London: Centre for Urban Studies, University College London. Harris, R. 2010. “Meaningful Types in a World of Suburbs.” In Suburbanization in Global Society: Research in Urban Sociology. Volume 10, edited by M. Clapson and R. Hutchison, 15–47. Bingley, UK: Emerald Books. Harvey, D. 1989. “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transfor­ mation of Governance in Late Capitalism.” Geografiska Annaler 71B (1): 3–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/490503. Jackson, K. 1985. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Keil, R., ed. 2013. Suburban Constellations. Berlin: Jovis Verlag. Lees, L. 2012. “The Geography of Gentrification: Thinking through Compara­ tive Urbanism.” Progress in Human Geography 36 (2): 155–71. http://dx.doi .org/10.1177/0309132511412998. Ren, X. 2008. “Forward to the Past: Historical Preservation in Globalizing Shanghai.” City and Community 7 (1): 23–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ j.1540-6040.2007.00239.x. Ren, X. 2010. “Territorial Expansion and State Rescaling: A Critique of Suburbanization Studies in China.” In Suburbanization in Global Society: Research in Urban Sociology. Volume 10, edited by M. Clapson and R. Hutchison, 347–70. Bingley, UK: Emerald Books. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1108/S1047-0042(2010)0000010017. Ren, X. 2012. “From Peking to Beijing: Production of Centrality in the Global Age.” In Global Downtowns, edited by M. Peterson and G.W. McDonogh, 48–64. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.9783/9780812208054.48. Ren, X. 2013. Urban China. Cambridge: Polity Press. Robinson, J. 2011. “Cities in a World of Cities: The Comparative Gesture.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35 (1): 1–23. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2010.00982.x. Shao, Q. 2013. Shanghai Gone: Domicide and Defiance in a Chinese Megacity. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Lost in Translation  333 Song, J., Enru Wang, We. Zhang, and P. Peng. 2007. “Housing Suburbanization and Employment Spatial Mismatch in Beijing.” Acta Geographica Sinica 62: 387–96. State Council. 1963. Zhonggong zhongyang guowuyuan guanyu tiaozheng shizhen jianzhi, suoxiao chengshi jiaoqu de zhishi [The State Council’s Instruction Regarding the Adjustment of Urban and Town designation Criteria and Shrinking Urban Suburbs]. Wang, C., and S. Yang. 2010. “A Comparative Study on the Changing Population Spatial PPattern and the Resultant Inner-city and Suburb Conflicts between American Metropolises and China’s Metropolises: The Case of Shanghai.” Urban Planning International 25: 74–79. Wu, F., and N. Phelps. 2011. “(Post)suburban Ddevelopment and State Entrepreneurialism in Beijing’s Outer Suburbs.” Environment and Planning A 43 (2): 410–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/a43125. Wu, F., and J. Shen. 2015. “Suburban Development and Governance in China.” In Suburban Governance: A Global View, edited by P. Hamel and R. Keil, 303–24. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Yang, Z., and L. Fan. 2006. Zhongguo Dadushi Jiaoquhua [The suburbanization of China’s metropolises]. Beijing: Huaxue Gongye Press. Zhao, S., G. Chen, and Q. Zhang. 2001. Beijing Jiaoqu Chengshihua Tansuo [Exploring the suburbanization of Beijing]. Beijing: Beijing Normal University Press. Zhou, Y. 2004. “Jiu chengshi jiaoquhua de jige wenti yu Zhang Xiaoming taolun” [Discussion with Zhang Xiaoming on suburbanization]. Xiandai Chengshi Yanjiu [Contemporary Urban Research], 8–12. Zhou, Y., and L.J.C. Ma. 2000. “Economic Restructuring and Suburbanization in China.” Urban Geography 21 (3): 205–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.2747/ 0272-3638.21.3.205.

16 Concluding Suggestions Richar d Har ris

Academics usually conclude by saying that we need more research. I have no desire to break with this fine tradition, but would like to end on a more useful note. Charlotte Vorms and I hope that some readers will have been persuaded that it is important to pay more attention to the terms that people use in talking about their cities, but we expect that only a minority of our readers will put this into practice by undertaking sustained research on the subject. In these concluding suggestions, I would like to direct a number of my comments to that particular group, but I will conclude by offering something useful to those, far more numerous, whose interest in the subject will necessarily remain more casual. The Present For those who are inspired to find out exactly how local residents think and speak about their neighbourhoods at the urban periphery, there is no substitute for field work. Talk to people, informally on the street or in a café, or more formally through interviews, as did Amy Shanks and Victoria Coates in Hamilton, Anne Lambert in peri-urban Lyon, and Sonia Hirt in south suburban Sofia. If you are really serious, such interviews can be combined with and extended by sustained ethnographic research, as Ioana Florea undertook in Bucharest’s Ferentari. We need reports from many more people, such as Lambert, Hirt, and Florea, who are comfortable working in something other than English. Ethnog­ raphy, of course, is what a few other suburban researchers have done over the years, although not usually with the purpose of probing language. Herbert Gans’s (1967) classic study of Levittown is probably the best-known example. This sort of strategy is most obviously needed

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in order to make sense of profoundly unfamiliar places, such as the inner suburban “undercity” of Mumbai that the reporter Katherine Boo (2012) immersed herself in, on and off, for three years (. (Significantly, while the title of the American version of her book uses the term “undercity,” the British title uses “slum.”) Such studies are, of course, a major personal and cultural challenge, as Boo, and several generations of anthropologists, can testify. They may require learning a language and culture, and they depend on the researchers being accepted as a trusted acquaintance. But ethnography and interviews can also tell us something new about places that seem familiar. Amy Shanks grew up in suburban Hamilton, and I have lived there since 1988, but we were both surprised to discover how many local residents were unclear or ambivalent about what counts as a suburb. Rather less taxing, one can read local newspapers, listen to local talk radio, watch local television news, or, of course, check social media. It is reasonable to assume that the language of reporters will reflect local usage. If it does not, they will be challenged, readers and viewers will tune out, advertisers will go elsewhere, and journalists will be out of work. Of course, despite recent trends in their industry, journalists still tend not to live in the poorest areas of the city. In many U.S. cities this may mean that they are most familiar with the suburbs (Macek, 2006: 149); elsewhere, the reverse may be the case. In relation to both types of areas, they may share the ignorance and prejudices of outsiders, a problem that is compounded for areas where low status and peripheral location go together (Howe, 2009). In Toronto, for example, coverage of the city’s inner suburbs, and of a recent mayor who made these areas his electoral base, was coloured by that mayor’s well-publicized antics but also, to some extent, by the media’s ignorance and prejudice (Harris, 2015). Critical readers should always be alert to such biases and blind spots. But one of the great advantages of daily newspapers is that they track local events as they happen, so that it is possible to home in on their coverage of specific places or issues – new or controversial developments, elections, and so forth – that might illuminate the meanings associated with suburbs. In rare instances, where there is more than one newspaper and each directs itself at a distinct readership, it may even be possible to detect nuanced social differences – or their absence. Multiple media are likely to be associated with different political and social filters that, carefully interpreted, can provide their own information. Newspaper coverage of fringe gecekondu settlements in Istanbul in the 1970s is an intriguing

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case in point. It is telling that papers of all political stripes demonized these settlements, though not necessarily their residents (Avci, 2014). The same was broadly true of the way in which three Scottish papers reported events in some of Glasgow’s public housing estates after 1998, although they gave these events varying prominence (Kearns, Kearns, and Lawson, 2013). In cities with large immigrant populations, and with a diverse ethnic press, it may also be possible to compare how different language communities speak about the same place. Toronto is a good example of such diversity. There are three English-language dailies, one of which pitches itself as a national newspaper, another that speaks to a broad but educated middle-class audience, and a third that is a conservative populist tabloid. The city also boasts a substantial ethnic press, as well as a diverse media landscape, which includes ten ethnic dailies and more than two hundred weeklies (Lindgren, 2011). Such numbers are perhaps unusual, but many cities contain diverse immigrant communities. It would be very interesting, for example, to know how the Arabic-language press in cities like Brussels and Paris describes places in the inner and outer peripheries of these urban areas. In such places, a sophisticated and significant comparison of word usage may be possible. None of the contributors to this volume employed newspapers in a systematic way for this purpose, but several, including Francesco Bartolini and Ioana Florea, found them helpful in demonstrating everyday usage. Once upon a time, it was necessary to page through fragile sheets of yellowing paper or scroll through microfilm, but today most newspapers are online and support keyword searches. Many papers are beleaguered, and some have closed, but it has never been easier to extract meaningful information from them. Displacing newspapers and television, of course, has been the Inter­ net and, in particular, social media. There has been much debate about whether and how such media have changed the way we experience, and attach significance to, the places in which we live. Despite some overheated rhetoric, the available evidence suggests that the effects have been more limited than we might suppose (e.g., Wellman et al., 2006). But as sources of evidence, the “volunteered information” that is provided in such media clearly has great potential (Poorthuis and Zook, 2014). These days, a rapidly growing number of researchers are mining Twitter, Facebook, or their local equivalents for what these media can tell us about how people think. There are few places where this is impossible. Restraints on free speech in countries like China, and more recently Turkey and Russia, have often had less impact on social

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media than on television and newspapers. Sites such as Wechat (微信), Renren (人人), and Weibo (微博) in China, or Vk.com and OK.ru in Russia, should be rich sources of local usage, particularly on aspects of the topic of the treatment of geographical space that do not offend political sensibilities. None of the contributors to the present volume used such sources, and because the social media environment is in such rapid flux it is neither possible, nor perhaps even helpful, to offer specific suggestions about how best to mine it. But, for the foreseeable future, it will provide an opportunity to read how people are talking casually in at least one type of public setting. The Internet also makes the thinking of land developers more visible. Researchers have long appreciated the value of real estate advertising as a source of information about new suburban developments. In the present collection, Sonia Hirt and Graeme Davison both make use of this source. In the past, newspapers often carried extensive sections devoted to local real estate, which often included generous amounts of advertising. They still do. But today, all major developers also have their own websites, and these provide a rich source of information about the ways in which they try to pitch their product. By extension, and because de­ velopers are even more attuned to local tastes than reporters are, the words used on these sites also reveal the beliefs and aspirations of prospective residents. Of course, as Shanks, Coates, and Harris report here, it may be that generic words do not figure very prominently at all. Of all sources, it is easiest to get a picture of what words planners and urban experts use. Reports, official documents, and published materials of all kinds are readily available, and were mined effectively by many of our contributors, including Freek Colombijn and Abidin Kusno, Rafael Soares Gonçalves and Francesca Pilo’, Renaud LeGoix, and Claire Poitras. Little needs to be said about the usefulness of these works, except to offer a caution: except where the authors explicitly state otherwise, these sources should never be taken as an indication of the wider popularity of word usages. As experts, we are members of a club, with our own handshakes and lingo that are often foreign to everyone else. The Past Arguably, all fields of social research can benefit from a historical perspective; but for making sense of names, history is surely essential. As we have argued and as, in different ways, all of our contributors have shown, the naming process typically extends over a period of many

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years, sometimes decades, and in some cases centuries. Words may change in their popularity and meaning, and Christian Topalov, with his distinction-dissemination-devaluation (DDD) formula, suggests that this is normal, indeed inevitable. Then, too, words have “legacy” meanings that lurk in the background. These can trip up the unwary, or be invoked by the unscrupulous. Even if we only want to know something about a word at a moment in time, we cannot ignore its history. The problem, of course, is that it can be very difficult to reconstruct the ways in which most people spoke in the past. We cannot ask them; oral histories are unreliable; most people have left no written or audio records; and over time all sorts of records decay or are destroyed. These sorts of problems are familiar to social and intellectual historians, who have devised various more or less unsatisfactory workarounds, and there is no need to recapitulate them here. But two tools are worth emphasizing because they are very useful and yet have not been extensively mined. Both are available on the Internet. The first is Google’s Ngram Viewer, freely available to anyone with an Internet connection. The Net has made it possible for various agencies to make available all sorts of records, ranging from planners’ reports through books to daily newspapers. By far the most extensive database is accessible through the Viewer, which covers more than five million published works over several centuries and in eight languages: American English, British English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Hebrew, and Chinese. (Italian is also available, based on its usage in other language texts.) This source has various limitations. It is most reliable from 1800, and, for some languages (e.g., Chinese), only for recent decades. For many purposes, this is a minor limitation. A more substantial difficulty is that, while it includes a wide variety of materials, including reports, fiction, and non-fiction, these cannot easily be narrowed down by place or country. The mix of materials varies over time, and ­its very diversity undermines our ability to make accurate inferences about word usages to specific audiences. There is also a geographical fuzziness. For example, works in the British English database include those published in a number of countries, in addition to the United Kingdom. Results can be narrowed down, and to a limited extent interpreted, because links are provided to the texts in which search words appear. But this involves a great deal of effort. Thus, while Ngram offers unparalleled opportunities to track changes in word usage over long periods of time, it must be used with care.

Concluding Suggestions  339

A comparison of two graphs illustrates its potential to raise as well as to answer questions. In British English (see figure 16.1), since the 1930s (and in fact before) “suburb” has dominated all other terms that have been used to refer to the urban fringe (). “Sprawl” has recently been on the rise, though that term was itself challenged by “conurbation” from the 1960s to the 1980s, when “urban fringe” also made a move. In American English (see figure 16.2), except for a brief period in the 1950s when “urban fringe” enjoyed some attention, “suburb” and increasingly “sprawl” have together been overwhelmingly dominant. There are, then, subtle contrasts that invite interpretation: they surely reflect differences in both the character and meaning of the suburbs in these two countries.1 Other trends are apparent in other languages. Prigorod (Пригород), the word that is usually treated as the equivalent in Russian for “suburb,” has been on the rise since (exactly) 1918, pausing only during the height of communist rule, 1950s–1970s (see Moine, 2010). The Chinese term jiaoqu (郊区), discussed by Xuefei Ren in her chapter in this volume, boomed in the early part of the twentieth century, appears to have fallen into disuse, but then underwent a resurgence from the 1950s, peaking in the 1990s. It has been challenged since the 1980s by xinqu (新区,new districts) and since the middle of the first decade of this century by xincheng (新城,new city). In Madrid, chabola, discussed by Charlotte Vorms, has been on the rise since the 1950s but all terms, including suburbia, are dominated by periferia (c.f. Chumillas, 2010; Villareal, 2010). Such information raises more questions than it answers, and does not necessarily provide a guide to usage in particular countries, still less a chosen city. The frequency of usage of ‫פרבר‬, the Hebrew for suburb, fluctuated considerably over the centuries from 1500 before taking off in a more consistent way from the 1940s. It is unclear whether it was used to refer to any of the areas named on the map of Jerusalem that adorns our cover. But such quantitative data do offer an interesting counterpoint to the judgments included in the City Words survey (Topalov et al., 2010) and, in contemporary settings, provide a check on the anecdotal evidence and the qualitative impressions that we all carry with us. They give us an invaluable context for local research. For such research, a second source – or, in truth, a type of tool – is invaluable: digital versions of historical newspapers. The most ex­ tensive databases are for prominent newspapers with national or in­ ternational reach: the London Times, for example, reaches back to the

Figure 16.1. Terms for the urban periphery in British English, 1930–2009. Source: Google Ngram Viewer

Figure 16.2. Terms for the urban periphery in American English, 1930–2009. Source: Google Ngram Viewer

342  Richard Harris

eighteenth century; the New York Times and Toronto’s Globe and Mail to the nineteenth. Some of the best of these, including good keyword search support, are available only through subscription, although a number may be accessible to non-academics through public libraries. In recent years more and more have been made freely available on the Web. To pick examples at random, at the time of writing it is possible to consult the Gazeta Lwovska, the daily newspaper in Lvov, Poland for any year between 1811 and 1939; the Магнитогорский металл (Magni­ togorsky Metall), for Magnitogorsk, Russia, from 1935 to the present: and Argentina’s La Nacion from 1995 onwards.2 However, many of these do not readily support keyword searches. Some urbanists have begun to mine such sources to track usage (e.g., Rodger, 2012). Like current newspapers, their great merit is that they allow for the exploration of coverage of specific places, events, and issues that have a suburban angle. In a more limited way, and for the postwar period, it is sometimes possible to probe coverage on television. In the United States, for example, the Vanderbilt Television News Archive has indexed reports from the major networks since 1968, but comparable archives are rare. The problem is that, for the most part, digital indexes and copies of truly local television stations and newspapers are either unavailable or do not reach back very far in time. For example, the online version of my own local paper, the Hamilton Spectator, begins only in 1990, and that is probably better than the average, even in the global North. Such local papers do offer an invaluable historical perspective on urban words, and among the contributors to this collection Graeme Davison and Charlotte Vorms have exploited some of their potential. But, as yet, they are not able to provide the sort of long-term view available in more prominent media such as the Times, or in the Ngram Viewer. Encouragement Individually and in combination, the various sources that are now available via the Internet can support a wide-ranging and subtle analysis of the words used to speak about suburbs, cities, or indeed anything else. They are invaluable research tools. But they are also useful for those – whether they be academics or simply curious observers – whose interest is more casual. It is not necessary to spend a lot of time and effort in order to get a sense of what language is being used locally, how

Concluding Suggestions  343

this usage compares with national and international trends, or with the language of experts. Often, of course, we should already know that the words with which we, as researchers, feel comfortable are not necessarily those that have local resonance. Seriously, who would expect Egyptians to talk about “suburbs” or banlieues? But sometimes, as in India for example, the situation is not as clear-cut. To be sure, most Indians do not speak English, but this is still an official language and some English terms have entered everyday speech. In such situations, all we need to do is remain alert. Read critically, the experts themselves can provide witting, and unwitting, clues. Two decades ago, in a study of Surat city, India, Biswaradoop Das (1994) referred awkwardly to that city’s “‘sub’-urban growth.” The fact that he felt so uncomfortable with the word indicates that this was not one that locals used – nor did he himself, for that matter. Omissions can be just as telling. The Oxford Handbook of Urbanisation in India, coauthored by scholars from the region, makes very limited reference to “suburbs” or “sprawl,” and neither word is indexed (Sivaramkrishnan et al., 2007). Such a silence would be inconceivable in a comparable work on Britain or the United States. We just need to pay attention in order to notice it. Better still, we could outsource the job of making sense of local usages. The people who are best qualified to interpret words and meanings are local residents, including journalists, planners, and academics. Hitherto, perhaps feeling the need or the professional pressure to use the English lingua franca, they have often chosen not to use local terms. If we show that there is a demand for their language, then the supply might increase. Figuring out local usages need not be difficult or time consuming. We do not have to be as observant as Sherlock Holmes: if a dog has not barked in the night, then we have a clue that something is going on, that there are hidden meanings, signs that we need to dig deeper. It is reasonable enough to speak in generic terms about urban density and suburbanization if we are interested in statistical trends in land coverage and settlement, and if we are confident that these terms are being measured in the same ways. Such things do matter, and a generic language is necessary if we want to speak about global patterns. But if we want to understand what is really going on in each place, and what it means, we must look closer, much closer, to everyday life and to the conversations of those who live it. Once we do, new worlds unfold.

344  Richard Harris NOTES 1 A cautionary note: the two corpora are of works published in Britain and the United States, respectively. But, of course, not all works published in these countries were also about those countries. 2 There are various indexes of newspapers that are available online. See, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_online_ newspaper_archives and https://news.google.com/newspapers?hl=en. REFERENCES Avci, O. 2014. “The Making of a Gecekondulu Identity: Journalistic Represen­ tations of the Squatters in Turkey in the 1970s.” Journal of Urban History 40 (2): 211–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0096144213508613. Boo, K. 2012. Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. New York: Random House. Chumillas, I.R. 2010. “Chabola.” In Topalov et al., 2010, 272–76. Das, B. 1994. Socio-economic Study of Slums in Surat City. Surat, India: Centre for Social Studies. Gans, H. 1967. The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community. New York: Pantheon. Harris, R. 2015. “Using Toronto to Explore Three Suburban Stereotypes.” Environment and Planning A 47 (1): 30–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/ a46298. Howe, P.D. 2009. “Newsworthy Spaces: The Semantic Geographies of Local News.” Aether: Journal of Media Geography 4: 43–61. Kearns, A., O. Kearns, and L. Lawson. 2013. “Notorious Places: Image, Reputation, Stigma – The Role of Newspapers in Area Reputations for Social Housing Estates.” Housing Studies 28 (4): 579–98. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1080/02673037.2013.759546. Lindgren, A. 2011. “Interpreting the City: Portrayals of Place in a Toronto-area Ethnic Newspaper.” Aether: Journal of Media Geography 7: 68–88. Macek, S. 2006. Urban Nightmares: The Media, the Right, and the Moral Panic over the City. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Moine, N. 2010. “Prigorod.” In Topalov et al., 2010, 989–93. Poorthuis, A., and M. Zook. 2014. “Spaces of Volunteered Geographic Infor­ mation.” in Ashgate Companion to Media Geography, edited by P.C. Adams, J. Crane, and J. Dittmer, 311–28. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Rodger, R. 2012. “The Significance of the Metropolis.” In Thick Space: Approaches to Metropolitanism, edited by D. Brantz, S. Disko, and G. Wagner-Kyora,

Concluding Suggestions  345 85–104. Bielefeld, Ger: Transcript Verlag. http://dx.doi.org/10.14361/ transcript.9783839420430.85. Sivaramkrishnan, K.C., A. Kundu, and B.N. Singh. 2007. Oxford Handbook of Urbanisation in India. 2nd ed. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Topalov, C., L. Coudroy de Lille, J.-C. Depaule, and B. Marin, eds. 2010. L’Aventure des mots de la ville. Paris: Laffont. Villareal, C.C.Z. 2010. “Periferia.” In Topalov et al., 2010, 904–9. Wellman, B., B. Hogan, K. Berg, J. Boase, J.-A. Carrasco, R. Côté, J. Kayahara, T. Kennedy, and P. Tran. 2006. “Connected Lives. The Project.” In Networked Neighbourhoods: The Online Community of Interest, edited by P. Purcell, 161–216. Guildford, UK: Springer. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/1-84628-601-8_8.

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Contributors

Francesco Bartolini is an associate professor at the University of Macerata, Italy, where he teaches contemporary and urban history. His main research topics are cultural representations of the modern and contemporary city, urban policies and political ideologies, social housing, and irregular settlements. Major publications include La Terza Italia: Reinventare la nazione alla fine del Novecento (2015); Roma: Dall’Unità a oggi (2008); Rivali d’Italia: Roma e Milano dal Settecento a oggi (2006); and Roma Borghese: La casa e i ceti medi tra le due guerre (2001). Victoria Coates is a planner with Urban Solutions, in Hamilton, Ontario. She has a BA from McMaster University, in Hamilton, where she earned several academic distinctions, including the Mary Keyes Award, and an M.Pl. from Queen’s University, in Kingston, Ontario. She is interested in the character and planning of Canadian suburbs. Freek Colombijn, PhD, is an associate professor, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and a social anthropologist and historian who specializes in Indonesia. He has done research on urban development, environmental issues, pre-colonial state formation, violence, and urban and environmental history between 1600 and the present. His current fieldwork is on middle-class environmental awareness, waste pickers, and community initiatives to clean up urban neighbourhoods in Indonesia. His publications include Cars, Conduits and Kampongs: The Modernization of the Indonesian City, 1920–1960 (edited with Joost Coté, 2014); and Under Construction: The Politics of Urban Space and Housing during the Decolonization of Indo­ nesia, 1930–1960 (2010). In 2007 he was awarded the Professor Teeuw

348 Contributors

Award for promoting Indonesian-Dutch cooperation in the field of arts and science. Graeme Davison is emeritus professor of history at Monash University, Australia. He has written widely on Australian urban, cultural, and public history. His publications include The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne (1978, 2004); The Unforgiving Minute: How Australia Learned to Tell the Time (1994); Car Wars: How the Car Won Our Hearts and Conquered Our Cities (2004), which won the Nettie Palmer Prize; Trendyville: The Battle for Australia’s Inner Cities (2015); Lost Relations: Fortunes of My Family in Australia’s Golden Age (2015); and City Dreamers: The Urban Imagination in Australia (2016). He co-edited The Oxford Companion to Australian History (1998). He is a former president of the Australian His­ torical Association, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and of the Academy of Humanities, and an Officer in the Order of Australia. He is currently writing a history of suburban Australia. Ioana Florea has been involved in urban studies and social action research since 2004. She has a master’s degree in anthropology and community development (2008) and a PhD in sociology from the University of Bucharest (2011). She has been researching socio-spatial dynamics in poor neighbourhoods in Romanian cities, youth experiences of outdoor public spaces, and spatial processes of social inequality. She has also contributed to the transnational research activities of the Inequalities, Migrations and Territories Department within the Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology, University Institute of Lisbon (2010–11). Since 2006, she has been working with several grassroots organizations in Bucharest on projects in emancipatory education, ecology, and urban education for children and youth. Richard Harris is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. He is a professor of geography at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario, and currently president of the Urban History Association. He has published widely on the modern history of residential segregation, housing policy, home ownership, the house-building industry, and suburban development, with particular reference to North America, Kenya, and India. His most recent book is Building a Market: The Rise of the Home Improvement Industry, 1914–1960 (2012). He is currently writing a book about the history of neighbourhoods in Canadian cities since 1900.

Contributors 349

Sonia Hirt is dean of and professor in the School of Architecture, Plan­ ning, and Preservation at the University of Maryland. She previously served as professor at the College of Architecture and Urban Studies of Virginia Tech and as visiting associate professor at the Gradu­ate School of Design of Harvard University. Her research focuses on the relationship between culture and the built environment. She has published extensively on urbanism in post-socialist Eurasia. She is the author (with K. Stanilov) of Twenty Years of Transition: The Evolution of Urban Planning in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, 1989–2009 (2009) and Iron Curtains: Gates, Suburbs and Privatization in the Post-socialist City (2012). Iron Curtains received honourable mention for the Book Prize in Political and Social Studies sponsored by Harvard University’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. Her research has been funded by organizations such as the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Association of University Women, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Abidin Kusno is a professor in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University, Toronto. His area of expertise includes architecture history and theory, urban politics and symbolism, postcolonial studies, and Jakarta/Indonesia. He is the author of Behind the Postcolonial (2000), The Appearances of Memory (2010), After the New Order (2013), and Visual Cultures of the Ethnic Chinese in Indonesia (2016). Anne Lambert is a full-time researcher at the Institut national d’études démographiques (INED) in Paris. She also teaches urban sociology in Sciences Po Paris and Dauphine University. Her recent publications ­include “Tous propriétaires!” L’envers du décor pavillonnaire (2015); “Pro­ priété et classes populaires: Des politiques aux trajectoires,” Politix (2013); and “Travail salarié, travail domestique, travail au noir: L’économie domestique à l’épreuve de l’accession à la propriété en lotissement périurbain,” Sociologie du travail (2012), which received first prize for a young author. Renaud Le Goix is a professor at the University of Paris Diderot – Paris 7, member of the Géographie-cités research laboratory. He teaches human geography, urban geography, and spatial analysis. His research focuses on suburbanism in France and in the United States, analysing the contextual patterns of the suburban built environment (subdivisions) in terms of property values, segregation patterns, and the relationships

350 Contributors

between private residential governance and local government. He has expertise in spatial analysis of social facts, modelling, and mapping of social differentiation patterns. He has been awarded several research grants (for instance, from the U.S. National Institute of Health and the French Agence nationale de la recherche) and has been Alliance Visiting Professor at Columbia University (2013) and a Fulbright Fellow at UCLA (2003). Francesca Pilo’ is a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for Urban Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She holds a PhD in urban ­planning (2015) from Université Paris-Est and Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil (joint supervision). Her research revolves around electricity politics in the cities of the Global South, particularly in informal settlements and peripheral areas. Through a socio-technical perspective, her research explores how political and material processes reshape forms of belonging and citizenship in urban contexts. Her recent publications include “A Socio-technical Perspective to the Right to the City: Regularizing Electricity Access in Rio de Janeiro Favelas” in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (2017) and “Co-producing Afford­ ability to the Electricity Service: A Market-Oriented Response to Addressing Inequality of Access in Rio de Janiero’s Favelas” in Urban Research and Practice (2016). Claire Poitras is the director of the Centre Urbanisation Culture Société of the Institut national de la recherche scientifique in Montreal, Canada, and the scientific director of Villes Région Monde, an inter-university network. She earned her PhD in planning and built environment from the Université de Montréal. Her areas of research include nineteenthand twentieth-century urban and metropolitan history in North America, the built environment, and urban technical networks. Her publications include “Les banlieues résidentielles planifiées dans la région de Montréal après la Seconde Guerre mondiale: Un modèle en redéfinition?” in Histoire de la région montréalaise, ed. D. Fougères and N. Perron (2012) and “Montréal on the Move: The Surprising Consequences of Highways,” in Metropolitan Natures: Urban Environmental Histories of Montreal, ed. S. Castonguay and M. Dagenais (2011). With J.-P. Collin and G. Cloutier, she co-edited a book reviewing ten years of urban studies in Quebec, Dix ans d’études urbaines au Québec: Bilan et perspectives d’avenir (2011).

Contributors 351

Nikhil Rao is associate professor of history at Wellesley College, in Massachusetts, where he teaches courses on South Asian and urban history. His current research is on the histories of land and property in South Asian cities. He is the author of House, But No Garden: Apartment Living in Bombay’s Suburbs, 1898–1964 (2013). He has also recently coedited (with Douglas E. Haynes) and contributed to a special issue of the journal South Asia (September 2013) titled Beyond the Colonial City: Rethinking the Urban History of India, ca. 1920–1970. Xuefei Ren is associate professor of sociology and global urban studies at Michigan State University. She holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago and an MA in urban planning from Tokyo Metropolitan University. She is the author of Building Globalization: Transnational Architecture Production in Urban China (2011), Urban China (2013), and co-editor of The Globalizing Cities Reader (2017). She is currently working on a project comparing urban governance and citizen rights in China, India, and Brazil. Amy Shanks is a planner with the town of Grimsby, Ontario. Supported by a scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, she obtained her MA in geography at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. She also holds an M.Pl. from Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. She is interested in how the residents of the suburbs perceive their neighbourhoods. Rafael Soares Gonçalves, jurist and historian, is assistant professor at Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Rio de Janeiro. His research concerns the urban history of Rio de Janeiro, with particular reference to favelas. His book Les favelas de Rio de Janeiro: Histoire et droit (2010) has been translated into Portuguese (2013) and will also be published in Spanish (2017). He currently works on the notion of urban informality in the Latin American context. Christian Topalov is director of studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and director of research emeritus in sociology at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. He was invited professor or invited researcher at Colegio de Mexico (1978), Architectural Association School of Architecture (1983), Columbia University (1984– 19), King’s College Cambridge (1988), Universidade federal do Rio de

352 Contributors

Janeiro (1988), New School for Social Research (1989), Istituto universitario di architettura di Venezia (1990), Universidad autónoma de Mexico (1993), Harvard University (1994–1995), University of Michigan (2006) and Université de Lausanne (2013). He is a member of the editorial board of Genèses: Sciences sociales et histoire, a journal that he co-­founded. His main publications include Histoires d'enquêtes: Londres, Paris, Chicago (1880–1930) (2015), Naissance du chômeur, 1880–1910 (1994), and Le logement en France: Histoire d’une marchandise impossible (1987). He edited Maurice Halbwachs: Écrits d'Amérique (2012), L’Aventure des mots de la ville (with Laurent Coudroy de Lille, Jean-Charles Depaule et Brigitte Marin, 2010), Les divisions de la ville (2002), La ville des sciences sociales (with Bernard Lepetit, 2001), and Laboratoires du nouveau siècle: La nébuleuse réformatrice et ses réseaux en France (1880–1914) (1999). Charlotte Vorms is assistant professor (maître de conférences) at the Uni­ versity of Paris – 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, where she teaches contemporary social and urban history and Spanish history. She is a junior member of Institut Universitaire de France (since 2016). She is a member of the editorial board for Vingtième siècle: Revue d’histoire and for www.metropolitiques.eu. She has written about the development of Spanish workingclass urban periphery (Bâtisseurs de banlieue. Madrid: Le quartier de la Prosperidad, 1860–1936 (2012). She co-edited a book on the production of Spanish cities since the 1970s (L’urbanisme espagnol depuis les années 1970: La ville, la démocratie et le marché), with Laurent Coudroy de Lille and Céline Vaz (2013). She is currently preparing a book on the administration of shacks and irregular neighbourhoods under the Francoist regime in Madrid and coordinating a project on the genesis and administration of the informal urbanization in the twentieth century.

Index of Generic Place Names

afueras, 7 banlieue: as a name in Canada, 6–9, 11, 23, 112–13, 117–19, 124–27, 129; as a name in France, 7–9, 24, 49–50, 63, 215, 255, 283, 287–88, 294; character of, 13, 20–21, 25, 38, 47, 198 banlieusards, 7, 49–50 basti, 12, 24, 133 bidonville, 13, 41–42, 45, 217, 222, 227 borgata, 7, 13, 15, 21, 192–205 borghetto, 197 buitenwijken, 23, 153–54, 168 bustee. See basti chabola, 21, 46, 209–11, 213, 216–27, 339 cidade, 57, 178 colony (in India), 6, 12–13, 19, 23, 76, 148, 155, 200, 323 Common Interest Developments (CIDS), 271 comunidade, 44, 177–83, 185, 187, 188, 189

comunidades urbanizadas, 183, 185 couronne rurale, 119 dahiya, 6, 10, 13 edge city, 83, 89, 258–59 ensanche, 13, 211–12, 214–15, 227 extrarradio, 7, 13, 17, 209–12, 214–15, 217, 221–22, 224, 226, 228 exurban, 4, 14, 255, 260, 264, 266–67 faubourg, 7, 49, 69, 115–18, 129 favelas, 11, 13, 17, 19, 21, 24–25, 40–41, 43–45, 48, 62, 173–87, 188, 189, 209, 222; isolated, 183 gaothan, 143, 145, 147 gated community, 5, 10, 19, 83, 169, 235, 238, 258–60, 271–72, 326 geçekondu, 6, 13, 21, 335 grands ensembles, 8 informal settlement, 13, 42, 132–33, 146, 183, 209 jiaoqu, 6, 10, 317–19, 321–30, 339

354 Index kampung, 15, 152–58, 161–62, 166, 168–69 kota mandiri, 153–54, 163–64, 168 megalopolis, 6, 27 musseques, 5, 13, 19 neighbourhood, 259, 264, 267, 271–72, 274, 305–7 new city, 10, 164, 319, 327–29, 339 new town, 12, 14, 19, 124, 153–154, 159–64, 166–69, 214–15, 258–59, 268, 274, 319–21, 326, 329–30 ngoai thanh, 11 outskirts: character of, 70, 122, 152–54, 162–64, 302, 324, 327; naming of, 6, 10–12, 44, 47, 72, 113, 117, 156–57, 168, 304–9, 311–312, 317, 321, 330 penurbia, 4, 6 periferia, 7, 196, 235, 339 periphery. See urban periphery périurbain/periurban, 4, 8, 10–12, 21, 113, 116, 118, 127, 261–62, 273, 275, 282–86, 292, 295–96, 299 pirate settlement. See unauthorized settlement post-suburbia, 256, 274 predgradie, 21, 303–4 prigorod, 6, 13, 17, 303, 339 satellite city. See satellite town satellite town, 113, 159–60, 163, 319, 327 shacktown. See shantytown shantytown, 13, 49 slums: as a name, 17, 19–20, 45–47, 132–37, 147, 197, 209, 219, 222,

227, 249, 304, 335; naming of, 42–43, 49, 54; suburban, 149; urban, 139–47 small town, 58, 91, 106, 282, 291, 301, 316 sobborgo, 7 sprawl: in Australia, 69, 76–79, 81–83; in Canada, 119, 124, 128; character of 27, 257; in China 325, 339, 343; in Europe, 193, 197, 255, 274, 283, 293, 295, 304; as a name, 4, 10, 14, 339, 343; naming of, 22, 121, 257; in the United States, 263 stadtrand, 6, 11 suburbio, 173, 209, 211, 213, 214–24, 226–27 suburbs, as a name: in Australia 9, 14, 27, 68–82; in Brazil, 173–90; British English use of, ix, 3–6, 15–16, 339; in Canada, 8, 11, 22–23, 89–108, 112–30; in China, 316–330; in India, 10, 12–13, 132–49, 335; in Indonesia, 153–69; in the United States, 9, 19, 23, 255–74 unauthorized settlement, 4, 159, 173, 181, 193, 222 upanagar, 133 urban fringe, 4, 12, 5, 19, 26, 93, 95, 116, 120, 125, 132–35, 137–41, 146– 47, 155, 158–59, 205, 261–62, 265, 299–300, 303, 310, 312, 318–19, 339 urban periphery 3–10, 12–15, 17–19, 21–22, 26, 27, 36, 72–73, 81, 128, 132–134, 137, 139, 141, 143–44, 146, 147, 198, 201, 209, 228, 233, 303, 306, 316–21, 326–27, 329–30, 334, 340–41 xincheng, 318–320, 327–30, 339

General Index

Aboriginal, 70, 72, 74 advertisements, 20, 22, 74–75, 106, 108, 307–8, 337 African American, 19, 50 apartment, 4, 53, 95, 99, 165, 239, 268, 275, 286–87, 292, 304, 323–24 Arabic language. See languages asfalto, 4, 178 Auckland, 70 Australia, 5, 9–10, 14, 23, 25, 27, 68–83 automobile, 57, 98, 121, 260, 316 autonomous: municipalities as, 154, 159, 325; suburbs as, 126, 163–64, 273, 301, 328

built environment, 113, 118, 156, 166, 267, 273

Bangalore, India, 6 Beijing, 10, 316–31 bilingual, 8–9, 26, 114 Bombay. See Mumbai bourgeois, 7, 16, 55, 129, 160, 197, 199–200, 215–16, 262, 302 Brazil, 5, 13, 40–41, 48, 56, 174–87 Bucharest, 11, 231–51, 334 Buenos Aires, 46, 48 builders, naming by, 16, 52–53, 55–56, 308. See also developers

Delhi, 12 Denver, Colorado, 91 developers, naming by: 4, 16–18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 52, 54, 56, 106, 115–16, 162–66, 214, 235, 255, 257, 267–69, 319, 337 Dutch colonialism, 70, 152–61, 167, 169 Dutch language. See languages

Cairo, 4, 10 California, 91, 264–68, 275 Canada, 9, 26, 73, 89–108 car dependency, 80–81, 95, 97, 329 China, 10, 316–30, 336 colonial newspapers. See newspapers council estate, 8, 53, 56 culture, 9, 15–16, 23, 50, 61, 161, 174, 176, 182, 260, 335

etymology, 37, 39, 52, 58–61, 63, 69

356 Index Fishman, Robert, 16, 70, 73, 89, 263, 271, 302–4 France, 7–9, 17, 22–24, 42, 46–47, 58, 113, 116, 215, 217, 255–75, 282, 292–93 francophone, 8–9, 11, 113–15, 119 French language. See languages garden city, 135, 160 garden suburb, 19 gated communities, 5, 81, 235, 238, 258, 260, 271–72, 326 gentrification, 93, 234, 238, 317 Germany, 11 Hamilton, Canada, 11, 26, 70, 90–108 Hebrew language. See languages Hobart, Australia, 71–72, 74–75 home ownership, 127, 263–64, 285, 287 housing estate. See council estate identity, 19, 121, 127–28, 178, 181, 184, 203. See also sense of place illegal occupation of land, 27, 48, 158, 173–75, 177, 193, 197–98, 200, 202, 210, 220–21, 223, 236 immigrant settlements, 7, 17, 42, 50, 192, 203, 282 India, 5, 7, 10, 12–13, 17, 19, 23–24, 70, 132–36, 143, 343 indigenous settlements, 15, 24, 44, 70, 72, 156, 187 Indonesia, 23, 26, 153–54, 157–59, 161, 163, 169 industrial land use, 39, 117, 141, 226, 233, 235–36, 239, 283–84, 288, 316, 326–27 informal settlement, 13, 42, 132–33, 146, 173–74, 178, 181, 183, 209, 350

inner-city neighbourhoods, 10, 68, 93, 116, 139–40, 320, 325 Internet, 22, 306, 308, 336–38 Iran, 7 Italian language. See languages Italy, 40, 192, 196 Jakarta, 159–69 Japan, 4 Java, Indonesia, 152–69 journalists, 21–22, 24, 41, 89, 92, 119, 153, 186–87, 197, 202, 241, 249, 271, 335, 343 land developers. See developers land ownership, 74, 173, 177, 183, 250, 251, 330 languages: Arabic, 41–42, 235, 336; Dutch, 152, 154–57, 159–60, 169; English, x, 6, 25–27, 37, 40, 46, 50, 57–58, 69, 112–15, 120, 122, 124, 127, 146, 165–66, 222, 227, 255, 257, 299, 303–4, 311–12, 317, 334, 336, 338–39; —, prestige of, 5, 10, 12–13, 23–24, 61, 74–75, 133, 163, 194, 234, 307–8, 310, 324, 343; French ix, 6, 8, 12, 34, 40–42, 46–47, 49, 54, 57–59, 61, 63, 69, 112–15, 119–20, 122, 124–25, 127, 129, 257, 261, 282, 284; Hebrew, 39, 338–39; Italian, 7, 39–40, 57, 59, 62, 80, 197–98, 307, 338; Latin, 58–59, 238, 245, 310; Spanish, 7, 13, 17, 42, 44, 46, 48, 59, 61, 210, 222, 224, 227, 228, 338 Latin language. See languages London, England, 15, 19, 40, 45, 51–53, 56, 60–61, 62, 69, 74–75, 77–78, 106, 149 London, Jack, 50

Index 357 Los Angeles, 92, 271 low-density housing, 81, 235–36, 264, 299–300, 316–17, 324, 329 Madrid, 209–28, 339 magazines, 154, 308 marketing, 4, 6, 19, 166, 235 mass media: naming by, 8, 16, 18, 20–23, 68, 107, 113, 115, 117, 119–21, 127, 154, 178, 182, 185, 204, 214, 226, 232, 240–44, 247–48, 296, 305, 308, 310, 335–37, 342. See also social media Melbourne, 72, 74–76, 78–80 Mexico City, 46 migrants, 4, 80, 134, 141, 145, 194–95, 225, 236, 239, 241, 318–19, 321, 326 Montreal, 6, 8–9, 11, 23, 26, 70, 112–30 Mumbai, 10, 23–24, 132–47, 335 Netherlands, the, 156–57, 159, 257 New Orleans, 6 newspapers: as a source, 26, 69, 211, 335–39, 342; colonial newspapers, 74; naming by, 20–22, 49, 74–76, 78, 107, 120–22, 136, 163, 178, 182, 198, 204, 211–13, 218, 241, 303, 308, 322 New York, 48, 266 New Zealand, 70, 73 NIMBYism, 90, 260 Paris, 11, 40, 42, 45, 49–50, 54–56, 60–63, 217, 241, 258, 263, 269, 274, 275, 336 Portugal, 46, 57 postwar suburbs, 93, 263 planners: naming by, 8, 10–14, 16, 18, 20, 22–24, 76, 92, 107, 115–16, 127,

201, 214–15, 217–18, 228, 255–57, 271, 303, 311, 317, 329–30, 337–38, 343. See also urban planning print media, 117, 119–20. See also newspapers private developers, 61, 73, 164, 293–94 Quebec, 112–28 Quebec City, 115, 118 real estate: agents, 11, 90, 106, 108, 273, 290, 303, 306; industry, 161, 165, 275, 306, 311; speculation, 52, 72–73, 135, 155, 195, 202, 293 Rio de Janeiro, 24, 40, 44, 173–88, 222 Rome, 7, 39, 59–60, 192–206, 222 rural-urban fringe, 4, 12 Russia, 5, 40, 50, 336–37, 342 San Francisco, California, 50, 91 sense of place, 260, 272 social media, 308, 335–37. See also mass media social scientists, naming by, 18, 22–23, 25, 37, 43 social workers, 178, 223, 227, 232, 240, 244 Sofia, Bulgaria, 24, 299–312 South Africa, 19 Spain, 39, 209, 214–15, 217, 226–28 Spanish language. See languages squatting, 4, 13, 152, 158–59, 251 stereotypes, suburban, 8, 19, 21, 80, 95, 97, 99, 197, 243 stigmatization of neighbourhoods, 26, 47, 209, 241, 287 suburban landscape, 127–28, 255, 269

358 Index suburbanite, 68, 78, 80, 90–91, 100, 106–7, 113, 128, 263, 311 surveyors, 72–74, 116–17 Sydney, Australia, 70–83 Teheran, 9 telephone, area code, 122, 127 television, 8, 20, 107, 178, 241, 335–37, 342. See also mass media Topalov, Christian, 187, 338 toponym, 38–42, 45, 50–51, 53, 56, 60, 62, 118, 157 Toronto, 9, 21, 122, 335–36 tourism, 44, 182, 197, 219, 310 unemployment, 239, 282 United States, 7–9, 40, 47, 50, 62, 79, 92–93, 255–74, 324–25 upper-class housing market, 5, 7, 163, 166, 168, 300, 302, 311

upper middle class, 14, 166, 302, 324 urban planning: naming of suburbs 69, 76, 78, 113, 115, 120, 122, 124, 209, 214, 219, 226, 292–93, 296, 297; western planning approaches, 4–6, 12–13, 40, 153, 161, 236, 302–3, 306–7, 312 urban renewal, 17, 193, 320, 327–28 Venice, Italy, 39, 62 Vietnam, 12, 13 Williams, Raymond, ix, 15, 16 working class: experience of, 56, 199, 201, 204, 209, 215, 218, 222, 226, 236, 245, 294; in urban periphery, 7, 44, 77, 117, 183, 194, 210–12, 214, 219, 233, 238, 263, 282 Zambia, 12, 13

GLOBAL SUBURBANISMS Published to date: Suburban Governance: A Global View / Edited by Pierre Hamel and Roger Keil (2015) What’s in a Name? Talking about Urban Peripheries / Edited by Richard Harris and Charlotte Vorms (2017) Old Europe, New Suburbanization? Governance, Land, and Infrastructure in European Suburbanization / Edited by Nicholas A. Phelps (2017)