Suburban Socialism

Reflecting on his own landslide loss in conservative suburbia, Oly Durose asks how we can transform the urban outskirts of the status quo into centres of transformative change. In December 2019, Oly Durose lost by over 25,000 votes as the Labour Party Parliamentary Candidate for Brentwood & Ongar. Revealing what it’s like to stand on a socialist platform in one of the safest Conservative seats in the UK, this book makes the case for socialism in the suburbs, unveils the challenges of its electoral realisation, and proposes a strategic revolution required to win. Suburban Socialism asks what it would be like to bring white picket fences under collective control instead. To convince suburbanites of this radical alternative inside the electoral arena, this book argues that we must revolutionise our strategy outside of it. From the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution to the shockwaves of the metropolitan youthquake, socialism has predominantly been framed as an urban struggle. Identifying the possibilities for suburban resistance, this book offers a more geographically inclusive invitation to the socialist struggle, revealing why the suburban struggle is global in scale. Turning a suburb that shares from a hopeless fantasy into an electoral reality, Suburban Socialism illustrates why the path to socialism around the world is through the heterogenous suburban terrain.

Suburban Governance: A Global View is a groundbreaking set of essays by leading urban scholars that assess how governance regulates the creation of the world's suburban spaces and everyday life within them.

Reading modern architecture and urbanism in socialist and capitalist cities, this work challenges the twentieth-century divide between East and West in favour of a shared and contested history that plays out on the peripheries of the world's cities.

This book focuses on the spatial transformations in the most dynamically evolving urban areas of post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe. It links the restructuring of the built environment with the underlying processes and the forces of socio-economic reforms. The detailed accounts of the spatial transformations in a key moment of urban history in the region enhance our understanding of the linkages between society and space.

As part of the urbanization process, suburban development involves the conversion of rural land to urban use. When discussing the suburbs, most writers focus on particular countries in the northern hemisphere, implying that patterns and processes elsewhere are fundamentally different. The purpose of The Suburban Land Question is to identify the common elements of suburban development, focusing on issues associated with the scale and pace of rapid urbanization around the world. Editors Richard Harris and Ute Lehrer and a diverse group of contributors draw on a variety of sources, including official data, planning documents, newspapers, interviews, photographs, and field observations to explore the pattern, process, and planning of suburban land development. Featuring case studies from major world regions, including China, India, Latin America, South Africa, as well as France, Austria, the Netherlands, the United States, and Canada, the volume identifies and discusses the peculiarly transitional character of suburban land. In addition to place and time, The Suburban Land Question addresses the many elements that distinguish land development in urban fringe areas, including economy, social infrastructure, and legality.

The first study to consider how Irish writers have regarded, reported and represented London in their fiction, drama and poetry.

Preface – Introduction 1 Heiderose Kilper “New Disparities in Spatial Development in Europe” – several topics are included in both the title and theme of the German Annual of Spatial Research and Policy for the Year 2009. We are frst of all concerned with the concept of spatial disparities, which has its roots in national spatial planning and spatial development policy. Regional development as interregional equalisation policy, for example, is well-anchored in the German constitution through fundamental legal standards and the division of powers among the respective federal states. The “establishment of uniform living conditions within the federal territory” and “securing the uniformity of living conditions beyond the borders of any single federal state” (Section 72 Paragraph 2 of German Basic Law [GG]) are expressly specifed as aims of government action in the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany. With the major reform of Germany’s fnancial system in 1969 and incorporation of the joint task “Improvement 1 of the Regional Economic Structure” in Section 91a of German Basic Law [GG] interventions on the part of the federal government and the wealthy federal states for the beneft of states and regions with less economic success were legitimised in constitutional terms as well. All of this would be inconceivable without the concept of spatial disparities.