Chicago-school suburbanism

The chapter develops the argument that suburbia has become a strategically significant nexus for open-ended, deregulatory experimentation, systematically favouring more decentralized, voluntaristic, privatized, and market-oriented approaches. Since the 1960s, American suburbia has been relationally defined, in ideological terms, as the dispersed other of metropolitan Keynesianism, and in social terms as a haven from both big cities and "big-city problems." As such it has occupied a unique and privileged place within the evolving imaginaries of conservatives, libertarians, and neoliberals in the United States, especially since Milton Friedman's (1962) Capitalism and Freedom. In its idealized form suburbanization is seen as a manifestation of the innate desire for self-rule, expressed through the rationalities of tax-induced residential migration and small government (Husock, 1998; Kotkin, 2005). So positioned, as a kind of deregulatory ebb tide against centralized municipal (over)regulation, metropolitan planning, and sociospatial redistribution, the suburbs have exerted an increasingly strong (but often almost silent) undertow on political life and regulatory capacities in the United States.