Outside the Outside: The New Politics of Sub-urbs

(Hardback)

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One can no longer talk about the the urban centre and the suburban periphery, and in Outside the Outside Matt Hern argues that we must rethink the entire identity of the city itself. Today the majority of the Western world lives in suburbs. Yet these neighbourhoods that once offered security and respite from the perceived dangers of the city centre have been radically transformed in the last few decades. While there is much talk of how gentrification displaces communities, there is little focus on where these communities are moved to. Outside the Outside maps these changes and also comes up with solutions on how to revive the social life of the city in the face of rabid financialisation. In particular, Hern shows the rapid peripheralisation of racial poverty. With on-the-ground reportage in, amongst others, Portland, Vancouver, London, Ferguson, St Louis he shows us how we need to challenge our misconceptions and see the suburbs as vibrant places of resistance and regeneration, and to celebrate the movement, circulation and difference that make so many suburbs so alive.

Reviews

Outside the Outside offers a radical reconsideration of the suburbs, of their potential for living otherwise. Yet, this is not a romantic recasting of the burbs -- of was once imagined as staid, fixed, and always "peripheral to" -- Hern takes up questions local activists, scholars, planners and critics to ask how the suburb got to be, the logics of dispossession and urbanization, of capital accumulation, and so called flight, of racial, and colonial push-out and the refashionings of place and space that have come to make the periphery its own center. Hern moves through cities and burbs in an analysis of those logics to ask beyond the pushout and into the radical possibility of place, mobility, politics and life beyond the centers. -- Audra Simpson, Columbia University
Focusing on the notion of 'movement', Matt Hern's brilliant and captivating Outside the Outside presents an urgently needed, theoretically sophisticated street-level perspective on some of the most pertinent ongoing critical debates about life and politics in our decentered sub-urban world. -- Roger Keil, author of Suburban Planet
Hern's extraordinary book depicts the peripheral areas of contemporary metropolises beyond an ordinary picture of suburbia. His investigation reveals their peripheralization into substandard urban forms. Outside the Outside insists on seeing urbanism in its political-economic totality and demands a new language to transform politics and territory. This insightful book greatly advances our understanding of the increasingly complex and destabilized urban periphery -- Fulong Wu Bartlett Professor of Planning, University College London; author of Creating Chinese Urbanism.

Author Bio

Matt Hern is a community organizer, independent scholar, writer and activist based in Vancouver. He is currently the co-founder and co-director of Solid State Community Industries which is building a network of workers' co-operatives with youth from newcomer and racialized families. He is the author of, amongst others, What is the City [MIT press 2016]