The modern era of urban history began with a suburb – Camberwell – and expanded with a creative conference-driven internationalism.Footnote 1 The suburb has always been part of this, a key to interrogating modern urbanism. It was part of the town or city but never quite a complete anything, from culture to economy it was a dependent, earning desirability and contempt within English culture.Footnote 2
It was never quite as simple as that. The approach this collection takes is to look at the names given to entities on the edge of the urban from Asia to Australia. Suburb, like middle class, is one of those words that are impossible to translate. French has at least two options and none of them will do. Even English language cultures have mostly given up and started talking about Edge City.Footnote 3
The Australians are most at ease with the idea of suburb and were happy to keep adding more of them as their cities expanded. North America proved less sure and seems happier when they can identify with a unit of governance, a municipality or with an ethnic or linguistic group. Beyond that, these edge places tangle with the contempt for the village stretching from Bombay to Bulgaria. This overlaps with places out of control; the lawless informal settlements of the Favela has its equivalence elsewhere.
These essays begin with the process of naming and then chase the edges of cities across the globe. This is a valuable way of seeking the commonalities and contrasts of the urban. Several essays ask what we are doing using these names; as one author points out, we classify to increase knowledge and thus to inform governance and actions that vary from planning to taxi rides and residential choices.
At times, these naming contests are haunted by class. Many of the essays are about value judgments. The British after all never call a working-class local authority development a suburb. They just place them on the edge of cities and call them ‘the estate’ or ‘scheme’. They are haunted by battles for control. Many essays verge on the edge of the material and the Weberian issues of authority and dominance. Strangely absent from the debate are issues of movement. The suburb was always based upon ‘travel to work’. The favela, the much-despised villages of Bombay, Indonesia, China, southern and eastern Europe depend on daily movement to ‘work’. Perhaps the ‘commuter’ is the common factor rather than newness.
The outcome on the focus on the linguistic is a collection which is stimulating, valuable but ultimately limiting and unsatisfactory. Debating the edge place continues to be crucial to understanding and trying to control the urban for politicians, journalists, sociologists or just inhabitants tying to answer a questionnaire. For the moment it is back to the novelists from William Gibson (Count Zero) and Orhan Pamuk (A Strangeness in My Mind). Like H.G. Wells and Charles Dickens, they are attracted not just by the incompleteness of the edge place but by its perpetual not quite out of control. It remains these features which the enquiries over names must extend towards.
