Nation's suburbs gain respect in academia - Classes reflect influence on social issues

 

Detroit News, The (MI)

April 19, 2006

 

 

Francis X. Donnelly

 

 

For two generations, pop culture has treated the suburbs as soul-killing, traffic-choked blobs of conformity that represented the very opposite of community.

Scholars were even more dismissive. They ignored the suburbs, never mind the fact that most of the country lived there.

 

No more. Several colleges in Michigan have added courses on the topic -- joining a trend that has spread across the country in higher education. In fact, the course was so popular at Wayne State University that officials are thinking about adding another.

 

Academia, meet suburbia.

 

"It's an enormously important and rich field," said Peter Eisinger, a professor who has taught a political science course on the suburbs at Wayne State University.

 

Besides dozens of such courses across the nation, centers of suburban studies have sprouted in New York, California and Maryland. Academic conferences are broaching the subject.

 

And at the University of Michigan, one professor is writing a book on it.

 

In discovering the suburbs, academics feel that their residents have quietly influenced a wide array of social issues from politics to economics to race relations. For example, suburban voters have helped decide every major election of the last decade, including the three presidential races.

 

Scholars also concede that the suburban terrain has changed from its old image as monolithic enclaves for white, rich people. Today, 38 percent of blacks and 54 percent of Hispanics live there, according to the Census Bureau. Immigrants are settling there in larger numbers as well.

 

Ron Mayo, 61, a retired auto executive from South Lyon who has lived in three Detroit suburbs, was happy to learn that his ilk had finally made the college curriculum.

 

"It's well overdue," he said. "It should have happened many years ago."

 

If suburbia was mentioned in a college class in the past, it was usually as a sidelight to a discussion of the city. The city had its own academic discipline, urban studies, where professors focused on its deterioration.

 

If the topic received any more attention in the classroom, it was for sprawl and its toxic brew: shopping strips, big box stores, highways that went forever.

 

"Academia was no different from the general population: A lot of people liked to look down their noses," said David Warren of the Center for Sustainable Suburban Development at the University of California, Riverside.

 

Matt Lassiter, an assistant professor of history at the University of Michigan, was one of the first instructors at a major college to teach a class on the suburbs, offering the History of American Suburbia in 2002.

 

"You have to take people in the suburbs on their own terms," said Lassiter. "You shouldn't just caricature one group because they live in the suburbs. You're dismissing more than half of the American people."

 

Such courses are aimed at would-be public policy experts who use what they learn as they develop transportation and other regional plans where cities and suburbs need to work together.

 

The new college courses on suburbia focus on the demographics and socio-economic features of its populace and how it changed over 40 years.

 

They teach that suburbs date to the 18th century but became predominant after World War II as veterans flocked there, aided by GI loans and expanding highways.

 

Lassiter's course at U-M also describes how pop culture has long influenced people's views toward suburban life.

 

Students who took the Suburban Paradise course at Wayne State said they were surprised to learn their suburban hometowns were more complicated than they thought.

 

"I learned how big a part of the American landscape they are," said Jason Booza, 28, who took the Wayne State class as a graduate student. "Now it's the suburbs that dominate every thing."

 

Booza, who works at the school's Center for Urban Studies, said he was intrigued by the suburban class because it was so different from all the others in his major, political science.

 

He has no qualms about living in suburbia. After growing up in Hamtramck, he now lives in Clinton Township.

 

While the new school of thought tries to present a more well-rounded view of suburbs, it doesn't shrink from negative views. Scholars still decry the harmful effects of sprawl, which gobble up land and turn them into forests of asphalt.

 

"The way to protect the environment is not to make it available for everyone to live in," said Stephen DeGoosh, a professor at Northern Michigan University.

 

Changing image

 

Suburbia was seen as idyllic in TV shows like "Father Knows Best" and "Leave it to Beaver" in the 1950s but then received a drubbing in following decades.

 

Among the latter TV shows and films that portrayed the suburbs in a less-flattering light :

 

* "Married with Children"

 

* "The Simpsons"

 

* "Desperate Housewives"

 

* "Pleasantville"

 

* "American Beauty"

 

* "Ice Storm"

 

Image Caption: Matt Lassiter explores the suburbs of the Walnut Ridge community in Ann Arbor. Lassiter, an assistant professor of history at U-M rides through suburbs and takes pictures, which he discusses in his classes.

 

Section:  Metro

Page:  01B