Suburban Dreams: Imagining and Building the Good Life

by Greg Dickinson

Overview

2016 Choice Outstanding Academic Title and Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Book Award finalist

Explores how the suburban imaginary, composed of the built environment and imaginative texts, functions as a resource for living out the “good life”

Starting with the premise that suburban films, residential neighborhoods, chain restaurants, malls, and megachurches are compelling forms (topos) that shape and materialize the everyday lives of residents and visitors, Greg Dickinson’s Suburban Dreams offers a rhetorically attuned critical analysis of contemporary American suburbs and the “good life” their residents pursue.
 
Dickinson’s analysis suggests that the good life is rooted in memory and locality, both of which are foundations for creating a sense of safety central to the success of suburbs. His argument is situated first in a discussion of the intersections among buildings, cities, and the good life and the challenges to these relationships wrought by the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The argument then turns to rich, fully-embodied analyses of suburban films and a series of archetypal suburban landscapes to explore how memory, locality, and safety interact in constructing the suburban imaginary. Moving from the pastoralism of residential neighborhoods and chain restaurants like Olive Garden and Macaroni Grill, through the megachurch’s veneration of suburban malls to the mixed-use lifestyle center’s nostalgic invocation of urban downtowns, Dickinson complicates traditional understandings of the ways suburbs situate residents and visitors in time and place.
 
The analysis suggests that the suburban good life is devoted to family. Framed by the discourses of consumer culture, the suburbs often privilege walls and roots to an expansive vision of worldliness. At the same time, developments such as farmers markets suggest a continued striving by suburbanites to form relationships in a richer, more organic fashion.
 
Dickinson’s work eschews casually dismissive attitudes toward the suburbs and the pursuit of the good life. Rather, he succeeds in showing how by identifying the positive rhetorical resources the suburbs supply, it is in fact possible to engage with the suburbs intentionally, thoughtfully, and rigorously. Beyond an analysis of the suburban imaginary, Suburban Dreams demonstrates how a critical engagement with everyday places can enrich daily life. The book provides much of interest to students and scholars of rhetoric, communication studies, public memory, American studies, architecture, and urban planning.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780817388119
Publisher:	University of Alabama Press
Publication date:	06/15/2015
Series:	Rhetoric, Culture, and Social Critique
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Greg Dickinson is a professor of communication studies at Colorado State University and coeditor of Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials. In 1995 he received the Gerald R. Miller Dissertation Award from the National Communication Association and in 2012 received the NCA’s Golden Anniversary Monograph Award.

Read an Excerpt

Suburban Dreams

Imagining and Building the Good Life

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By Greg Dickinson

The University of Alabama Press

Copyright © 2015 University of Alabama Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8811-9

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CHAPTER 1

Everyday Practices, Rhetoric, and the Suburban Good Life

Suburbia is the site of promises, dreams, and fantasies. It is a landscape of the imagination where Americans situate ambitions for upward mobility and economic security, ideals about freedom and private property, and longings for social harmony and social uplift.

— Dolores Hayden

In the years following World War II, more and more US Americans dreamed their good lives in the bedrooms of their new suburban homes. These new dreams of the suburban good life — first imagined in the early part of the twentieth century and fully realized in the suburban boom of the last sixty years — remade the country both spatially and culturally. Imaging the nation as composed primarily of suburbs demanded new ways of understanding what it meant to be American. Indeed, the postwar era drew increased attention from scholars and pundits concerning the meaning of this spatial transformation. Critics regularly argue that this shift from city to suburb is negative. With neither the diversity nor richness of the city nor the simplicity or purity of the countryside suburbia is often imagined as a place of banality and anomie. Suburban communities, critics often assert, are based more on homogeneity than on passionate commitments to people and place. Insular, unchallenging, environmentally unsound, and culturally deadening, suburbs, these critics argue, are a wasteland.

And yet people keep moving to the suburbs. Many US Americans across the spectrum of ethnic and class differences continue to choose suburbia as a nearly ideal place to make a life. Even as popular and academic critics excoriate suburbia, individuals settle into new suburban homes, shop at the latest lifestyle centers, choose their evening's meal from the new row of restaurants, and worship in megachurches; they move in, settle down, and make a life. Are the critics correct that suburbanites are duped by a powerful and ideologically wily commodity culture that fosters and depends on suburban living and are seduced by the promise of community-built comforts of homogeneity? Or are residents who keep choosing suburbs right when they suggest that far from being soulless, deadening, and devoid of community, their new hometowns fulfill the hopes for a good life in an increasingly difficult world? Perhaps there is some space between these poles. Perhaps there are good reasons for choosing suburbs as the place to perform a good life even as suburbs depend on unsustainable practices and enforce racial, ethnic, and class-based exclusions. It may be the case that suburbanites understand the difficulties of making community in a commodified space and recognize the deadening potential of block after block of look-alike houses and nonetheless, or, perhaps therefore, choose suburbia as the place to stake their claims to the good life.

I will argue throughout this book that suburbs offer compelling dreams of the good life while responding to real difficulties and important challenges. Indeed, my contention is that suburbs embody, perform, and construct the good life within a world nearly overwhelmed with tenuous and contested understandings and enactments of the good life. Even as suburbs offer their own visions of the good life, they are also deeply felt responses to a series of modern spatial anxieties. These anxieties circulate around confounding difficulties of home and city and are constitutive of and constituted within the rapid changes of modernity. Modernity, with its world-altering and nearly cataclysmic changes, fostered the spatialized anxieties of nostalgia, the uncanny, and agoraphobia. Each of these anxieties circulates around and troubles the idea of home. Nostalgia is the (sometimes disabling) desire for a childhood home. The uncanny is the fear of homes made unhomely or haunted. And agoraphobia is literally the fear of the marketplace that forces its sufferers to stay home. While taking the home as a central figure, these anxieties are also often linked to the city, as the rise of the modern city serves as a material and symbolic location for life-altering changes of modernity. It is in these cultural, social, political, and economic contexts that postwar suburbs are built. In fact, postwar suburban dreams I am focusing on in this book are deeply linked to the urban nightmares crucial to postwar politics and imagination. Against these anxieties and nightmares, the suburbs comprise, extend, and challenge rhetorical constructions of the good life that entangle memory and locality with the hopes and dreams of home.

In this chapter and the next, I trace the historical, cultural, and visual framing for the suburban built environment I will analyze in sections II and III. I begin this chapter with a consideration of the long rhetorical and philosophical conversation about creating a communal and public good life. The good life, I am going to suggest in the first part of the chapter, is a rhetorical project that is symbolic and material and depends on a rich and ancient sense of ethos or a sense of dwelling together. And yet, as I argue in the second part of the chapter, the spatial anxieties characteristic of modernity and late modernity produce difficulties surrounding home and threaten to turn dreams of a safe and comforting home into nightmares and thus impinge on the hopes for a suburban good life. Although modern spatial anxieties — and particularly anxieties located in both the home and the city — make imagining and enacting the good life difficult, I will suggest in this chapter's conclusion that memory and locality provide meaningful rhetorical resources out of which suburbs strive to imagine and construct a rhetorically appealing landscape. Appeals to home and history are affective and effective rhetorical inducements that can draw residents away from the concerns performed by modern spatial anxieties even as these appeals enact particular material and symbolic visions of the suburban good life.

The Suburban Good Life

As both the site of and response to the anxieties of the present, suburbia is a material and symbolic landscape of constitutive of the contemporary good life. Even as suburbanites continue to express their fears and anxieties within and about suburbia, for many residents the suburbs remain the best hope for finding comfort in a difficult world. It is in this sense that we can turn to the suburban built environment to begin analysis of the forms of the good life at the turn of the twenty-first century. In fact, just as philosophers debate about the relation between pleasure, goods, and projects and the good life, suburban theorists, planners, builders, designers, and residents also perform these debates. Suburbia's worth, for example, can be judged in terms of its ability to foster something that feels like community, to encourage the moral growth of its residents, or to tie residents to region and nation. Within these debates, suburbia's worth depends on its ability to "order" life, to create an overall good life, to foster not just present pleasure, but long-term and life-wide goodness. Others judge suburbia on much more immediate questions of pleasure and pleasurable goods. These debates hinge on judgments of suburbia's ability to offer the commodity goods and worthwhile projects that maximize individual, familial, and community pleasure. Regardless, as home to a majority of US Americans and as the site of recent explosive growth, it is within suburban landscapes that we must look for the building of the contemporary good life.

While it is not my intention to trace a fully developed theory of the good life, what I do want to suggest is that the problem of the good life is one that has both rhetorical and spatial dimensions. Crucial to this understanding is a basic assumption that the good life is not a completed result, a resting place, or a final consequence of beliefs or action. Instead, a good life is a practice, a performance, or a striving. A good life is not something one has or attains; it is something one tries to do. Following Plato, David Russell argues that "the key to happiness is found not in the goods or even the projects that form the 'ingredients' of a person's life, but in the agency of the person herself that gives her whole life direction and focus, and which therefore determines her happiness." The good life is one, then, that is directed toward a particular goal — happiness — and happiness comes from the interweaving of the pleasurable goods and projects. The good life is a performance that combines theory that imagines some sort of ultimate good and practice that enacts some imperfect version of the good constrained by the contingencies of everyday life. The actualized practice of the hoped-for good life is rhetorical action; that is, action that constitutes and materializes the good life within the difficulties of day-to-day practice. Crucially, images, imaginations, and hopes for the good life motivate us in our daily practices and performances. While we may not be explicitly referencing well-conceptualized contours of the good life when we make everyday decisions, these decisions and actions are often structured by implicit theories of goodness and, at the same time, reveal and enact whatever principles of the good life we in fact believe.

What is more, this enactment of everyday lives — lives that are more or less structured by principles of what it means to live a good life — must have a space of their appearance. As a number of twentieth-century theorists have argued, analysis of the everyday or of everyday practices inevitably involves analysis of the spaces of those practices. Indeed, as both Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau argue, everyday practices and space (or place) are co-constitutive. For Lefebvre, space is always a social product, constructed and brought into being by the (often banal) movements and gestures of people. For Certeau, individuals carve agency out of the structures of place. This carving out he variously calls tactics, enunciations, or walking rhetoric. But we can reach further back in Western thinking to recognize the connection between the striving for the good life and the construction of space. Isocrates, for example, places the polis as the central achievement of humans, an achievement made possible by rhetoric.

In short, the good life is never simply an individual performance or an individually ordered life but is also always lived in relation to others. The organization of the good life in relation to others results in cities and in citizenship. Building the polis, or "making the city," is a practice, a result, and a staging ground for the performance of the good life. Making cities and suburbs is always a moral act and is guided by images and imaginations of the good life. The good life, then, needs its space of appearance and enactment. For the ancients, the city served as this stage, while for many of us today, suburbs are the scenes of our enactments of the good life. These enactments are not only emplaced, they are very distinctly rhetorical. Most obviously, cities are built of brick and stone but also of and by rhetoric. Rhetoric is necessary to compel and create the cooperative action necessary to building the city and is characteristic of city dwelling. This building of the city, though, is much more than simply organizing the material resources to put roofs over citizens' heads; it is the creation of citizenship itself.

The polis, politics, rhetoric, and the good life circulate around the ancient concept of ethos. While in fifth century BCE ethos means character, according to Charles Chamberlain its earlier meaning is "the places where animals are usually found." Meaning something like animal haunts or habitat, ethos indicated the place where an animal belongs, its natural habitat, and, in the case of domesticated animals like horses, was imagined as the place to which these animals long to return. This early meaning of ethos includes more, however, than a sense of place but also of habit, for the horse desires not simply to return to its ancestral pasture but to its natural way of being and acting. In this ancient meaning of the word, place (the place an animal belongs) and performance (the habits that best describe the animal in its natural setting) are commingled.

Over the course of several hundred years, ethos shifts from this idea of a natural haunt toward character, but, as Chamberlain argues, the new form of character retains some of its older meaning. The word begins to expand in meaning, including not only the haunts and habits of animals but also to embrace the natural setting and ingrained behaviors of humans, and then, under the influence of Plato, Isocrates, and Demosthenes, ethos moves into the human soul. Chamberlain suggests that this shift from pasture to soul retains the sense of ethos as the "center of belonging." Finally, it is this idea of ethos as a center of belonging that influences the political meaning of the word: cities, states, constitutions, and the groups of people named by and contained within these institutions can be said to have ethos or character. From the natural spaces and habits of animal belonging to the richly textured meaning of the ethos in the writings of Plato, Aristotle, and other Greeks, ethos brings together space and habit, individual and collective, and finally rational and irrational — as some habits are not easily tamable and are intractable in the face of reason.

It is possible to imagine rhetoric as the mode that brings together space and habit, sutures individual and collective, and negotiates between the rational and irrational. The ethos of rhetoric can "transform space and time into 'dwelling places' [that] define the grounds, abodes or habitats, where a person's ethics and moral character take form and develop." Ethos, then, is a distinctly spatialized concept. It does not simply imply that rhetoric happens in or at some place; ethos is also constitutive of the place creating places that are good or potentially good. This goodness of place involves its aesthetics, its materiality as place-in-time, and also its ability to foster communing or dwelling together. This version of ethos moves us away from simply a mode of proof (or a way of arguing toward some other goal), but is, itself, a goal of rhetoric. The ethos of rhetoric offers evidence or argument for a position but at the same time creates the conditions under which consideration of how to live is possible.

Creating the conditions for individuals to discuss and enact the good life, ethos looks very much like the rhetoric necessary for creating the polis. Just as political rhetoric creates the polis-city and, thus, citizens, ethical rhetoric invites or calls into being dwelling places and inhabiting individuals who strive for ethical action. As Michael Hyde writes, "The call of the human being, of conscience, calls on us to be rhetorical architects whose symbolic constructions both create and invite others into a place where they can dwell and feel at home while thinking about and discussing the truth of some matter that the rhetor/architect has already attempted to disclose and show forth in a specific way with his or her work of art." Here we see again the hope for home, or better, a feeling of being at home. And this home-ness provides the rhetorical structures for discussing and creating visions of the good life. In response to the agoraphobia and unhomeliness of the present, suburbs offer images of safe and secure homes as the landscape for imagining new forms for the good life.

But as rhetorical architects, suburbanites — builders, designers, and most particularly residents — do not simply create symbolic constructions but material ones as well. Houses, parks, shopping malls, restaurants, and churches are, without a doubt, symbolic. They are also material. These spaces bound and constrain, enable and restrict with walls, sidewalks, medians, curbs, doors, windows, and gates. The built environment — and suburbs in particular — offer compelling ethical rhetoric because they create both symbolic and material dwelling places — homes — for individuals and communities to stake claims to the good life. While the history of Western philosophy and city building indicates that the good life and the built environment have long been inextricably linked, the particular contours of these links are constantly and consistently shifting. Contemporary suburbs rhetorically construct their claims to the good life within very particular historical, material, cultural, and social conditions. Crucially, post–World War II suburban builders and residents create the good life within the context of the deep and profound changes that mark modernity and late modernity.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Suburban Dreams by Greg Dickinson. Copyright © 2015 University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: Rhetorical Constructions of the Good Life I. Imaging the Suburban Good Life 1. Everyday Practices, Rhetoric, and the Suburban Good Life 2. Imaging the Good Life: Visual Images of the Suburban Good Life II. Home and Kitchen: Building Safe and Authentic Space 3. Housing the Good Life: Residential Architecture and Neighborhoods 4. Eating the Good Life: Authenticity, Exoticism, and Rhetoric’s Embodied Materiality in the Italian-Themed Suburban Restaurant III. Consuming Suburbs: Building Sacred and Civic Space 5. Worshipping the Good Life: Megachurches and the Making of the Suburban Moral Landscape 6. Buying the Good Life: How the Lifestyle Center Became Suburbia’s Civic Square Conclusion: Remembering and Rethinking Suburbs Notes Bibliography Index

Editorial Reviews

Studying the suburbs is not new, but despite venturing down a semi-beaten path, Dickinson has written an intriguing study of the peripheries. . . . The suburbs often take a backseat to cities, despite their interrelatedness, and Dickinson astutely puts the suburbs back in the forefront. The references are impressive. Highly recommended.”
—CHOICE

“For a richly current sense of today's suburbs caught in spirals of economic doubt and leaning outward to capture locality amid the increasingly global crush of contradictory forces, Greg Dickinson's newest work provides essential reading.”
—Rhetoric and Public Affairs

“Suburban Dreams represents an original contribution to rhetorical studies. It cements Dickinson’s existing reputation as one of the foremost authorities in rhetorical studies on the rhetoric of space, place, and consumer culture.”
—Bradford Vivian, author of Public Forgetting: The Rhetoric and Politics of Beginning Again and Being Made Strange: Rhetoric Beyond Representation


“Greg Dickinson has for some time been on the leading edge of research into the communicative and rhetorical dimensions of space and place. This book extends that important program of research by considering American suburbia, a long-standing target of scorn and dismissal. Dickinson skillfully analyzes how suburbia serves as a locus of desire, motivation, and affiliation by its detractorsHe is able to place the suburb at or near the center of American popular culture, and his work will demand fresh attention to that space/place. This book will be of interest to scholars in rhetoric, communication studies, geography, American studies, architecture, and farflung students of the city.”
—Barry S. Brummett, author of Rhetoric in Popular Culture, Techniques of Close Reading, and  Rhetorical Homologies: Form, Culture, Experience

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