Wild Suburbia

Wild Suburbia guides us through the process of transforming a traditional, high water-use yard into a peaceful habitat garden abounding with native plants. Author Barbara Eisenstein emphasizes that gardening is a rewarding activity rather than a finished product, from removing lawns and getting in touch with a yard's climate to choosing plants and helping them thrive. Supplementing her advice with personal stories from her decades of experience working with native plants, Eisenstein illuminates the joys of tending a native garden--and assures us that any challenges, from managing pests to disapproving neighbors, should never sap the enjoyment out of a pleasurable and fulfilling hobby. For plant lovers curious about their own ecosystems, Wild Suburbia offers a style of gardening that nurtures biodiversity, deepens connection to place, and encourages new and seasoned gardeners alike to experiment and have fun.

In Domestic Wild, Franklin Ginn sets out to find a new sense of the wild at the heart of modernity. Inspired by experienced, skilful gardeners, Ginn analyses what happens when plants, animals and people meet in the suburbs of London. Weaving major theories of landscape, memory and nonhuman subjectivity with the practical wisdom of gardeners, this book offers a radical new account of everyday gardening. Amid spectacular horizons of planetary loss, Domestic Wild argues that gardening offers a means to cultivate a renewed sense of intimacy with nature and ourselves.

Infinite Suburbia is the culmination of the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism's yearlong study of the future of suburban development. Extensive research, an exhibition, and a conference at MIT's Media Lab, this groundbreaking collection presents fifty-two essays by seventy-four authors from twenty different fields, including, but not limited to, design, architecture, landscape, planning, history, demographics, social justice, familial trends, policy, energy, mobility, health, environment, economics, and applied and future technologies. This exhaustive compilation is richly illustrated with a wealth of photography, aerial drone shots, drawings, plans, diagrams, charts, maps, and archival materials, making it the definitive statement on suburbia at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

While suburbs provide a rich field of research for sociologists, architects, urbanists and anthropologists, they have not been given much attention in literary and cultural studies. The Suburbs: New Literary Perspectives sets out to enrich the limited existing body of critical analysis on the subject with a landmark collection of essays offering a far larger perspective than the books or collections published so far on the topic. This interdisciplinary and wide-ranging approach includes literary and art studies, philosophy, and cultural comment. It examines the suburbs across cultural differences, contrasting British, South African and North American suburbs. The specificity of this book therefore lies in a cross-national and cross-continental exploration of these unchartered territories. The suburbs are redefined as those rebellious margins whose geographical borders are necessarily fuzzy and sketch out a common place where cultural frontiers can be transcended. They are, to use Sarah Nuttall’s terminology, places of “entanglement” where contraries meet and where new ways of being in the world is reborn. Seen through the prism of art and literature, the suburbs may then be recognized, as philosopher Bruce Bégout argues, as a “new way of thinking and making urban space.”

In this eloquent plea for compassion and respect for all species, journalist and gardener Nancy Lawson describes why and how to welcome wildlife to our backyards. Through engaging anecdotes and inspired advice, profiles of home gardeners throughout the country, and interviews with scientists and horticulturalists, Lawson applies the broader lessons of ecology to our own outdoor spaces. Detailed chapters address planting for wildlife by choosing native species; providing habitats that shelter baby animals, as well as birds, bees, and butterflies; creating safe zones in the garden; cohabiting with creatures often regarded as pests; letting nature be your garden designer; and encouraging natural processes and evolution in the garden. The Humane Gardener fills a unique niche in describing simple principles for both attracting wildlife and peacefully resolving conflicts with all the creatures that share our world.

A moose frustrates commuters by wandering onto the highway; an alligator suns himself in a strip mall parking lot. DeStefano draws on decades of experience as a biologist and conservationist to examine the interplay between urban sprawl and wayward wildlife. He asks us to rethink the meaning of progress and create a new suburban wildlife ethic.

During the last few decades suburbia has grown enormously and become a phenomenon attracting the attention of scholars as well as practitioners by whom it is seen as an increasingly significant and complex area of modern life. The essays in this volume consider a range of representations of suburban life from the late nineteenth century to the present day, including fiction, film, and popular music, drawn from America and Australia as well as Britain. They explore and challenge traditional views of suburbia so that, rather than a location of conformity and stereotypicality, it can be viewed as a site of social conflict, division, and ambiguity as well as a source of significant creativity across a range of cultural texts. The volume takes a thematic approach, considering the rise of suburbia, imagined and real suburbias, alternative suburbias: all of the essays have a strong historical dimension and the overall approach is characterized by interdisciplinarity.

This book is the first critical assessment of Humphries' entire oeuvre, especially his career as an author. Arguing that Humphries is one of Australia's greatest writers, the author reveals a multi-faceted artist whose success is rooted in the British music hall tradition, Dadaism and grotesquerie. Being Australian has also fundamentally shaped the performer and writer, and the author's defence of Humphries against charges of expatriatism is pertinent to the debate on Australian national identity.