Bibliography of suburbs

A large number of books and articles have been written on the subject of suburbs and suburban living as a regional, national or worldwide phenomenon. This is a selected bibliography of scholarly and analytical works, listed by subject region and focus.

Europe

 * Archer, John. Architecture and Suburbia: From English Villa to American Dream House, 1690–2000. University of Minnesota Press, 2005.
 * Boulton, Jeremy. Neighbourhood and Society: A London Suburb in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge Studies in Population, Economy and Society in Past Time) (2005)
 * Dyos, Harold James. Victorian suburb;: A study of the growth of Camberwell (1966)
 * Galinou, Mireille. Cottages and Villas: The Birth of the Garden Suburb (2011)
 * Jordan, Christine. Illustrated History of Leicester's Suburbs (2003)
 * Kuchta, Todd. Semi-Detached Empire: Suburbia and the Colonization of Britain, 1880 to the Present (2010)
 * Robey, Ann et al. Rediscovered Utopias: Saving London's Suburbs (2010)
 * Vaughan, Laura et al. Suburban Urbanities. UCL Press (2015) Available free from https://dx.doi.org/10.14324/111.9781910634134
 * Wilks, John. Walks Through History - Birmingham: Edgbaston: the creation of luxury suburbia (2011)
 * Williams, Guy R. London in the Country: The Growth of Suburbia (1975)

Canada

 * Harris, Richard. Unplanned Suburbs: Toronto's American Tragedy, 1900 to 1950 (1999)
 * Harris, Richard. Creeping Conformity: How Canada Became Suburban, 1900-1960 (2004)
 * Lewis, Robert. Manufacturing Montreal: The Making of an Industrial Landscape, 1850 to 1930.  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
 * Lorimer, James, and Evelyn Ross. The Second City Book: Studies of Urban and Suburban Canada (1977)
 * Morton, Suzanne. Ideal Surroundings: Domestic Life in a Working-Class Suburb in the 1920s (Studies in Gender and History) (1995)
 * Whitzman, Carolyn. Suburb, Slum, Urban Village: Transformations in Toronto's Parkdale Neighbourhood, 1875-2002 (2010)

Surveys

 * Baxandall, Rosalyn and Elizabeth Ewen. Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened. New York:  Basic Books, 2000.
 * Beauregard, Robert A.  When America Became Suburban. University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
 * Bruegmann, Robert. Sprawl: A Compact History. University of Chicago Press, 2005.
 * Duany, Andrés and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream. North Point Press, 2000.
 * Fishman, Robert. Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia.  Basic Books, 1987.
 * Gardner, Todd. “The Slow Wave: The Changing Residential Status of Cities and Suburbs in the United States, 1850–1949.”  Journal of Urban History 27, no. 3 (March 2001): 293–312.
 * Hanlon, Bernadette, John Rennie Short and Thomas J. Vicino. Cities and Suburbs: New Metropolitan Realities in the U.S. Routledge, 2010.
 * Harris, Richard and Robert Lewis. “The Geography of North American Cities and Suburbs, 1900–1950: A New Synthesis.”  Journal of Urban History 27, no. 3 (March 2001): 262–92.
 * Hayden, Dolores. Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820–2000.  Vintage Books, 2003.
 * Muller, Peter O. Contemporary Suburban America. Prentice–Hall, 1981.
 * Mumford, Lewis. The Culture of Cities.  Harcourt Brace, 1938.
 * Mumford, Lewis. “Suburbia — and Beyond.”  In The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects, by Lewis Mumford, 483–503.  Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961.
 * Nicolaides, Becky M. and Andrew Weise, editors. The Suburb Reader.  Routledge, 2006.
 * Palen, J. John. The Suburbs.  McGraw–Hill, 1995.
 * Stilgoe, John R. Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb, 1820–1939.  Yale University Press, 1989.
 * Teaford, Jon C. The American Suburb: The Basics.  Routledge, 2008.
 * Teaford, Jon C. The Metropolitan Revolution: The Rise of Post-Urban America (2006)
 * Teaford, Jon C. The Metropolitan Revolution: The Rise of Post-Urban America (2006)

Specialized studies

 * Archer, John. Architecture and Suburbia: From English Villa to American Dream House, 1690–2000. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.
 * Archer, John. “Country and City in the American Romantic Suburb.”  The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 42, no. 2 (May 1983): 139–56.
 * Baldassare, Mark. Trouble in Paradise: The Suburban Transformation in America.  New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.
 * Baumgartner, M. P. The Moral Order of a Suburb.  New York:  Oxford University Press, 1988.
 * Binford, Henry C. The First Suburbs: Residential Communities on the Boston Periphery, 1815–1860.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
 * Blakely, Edward J. and Mary Gail Snyder. Fortress America:  Gated Communities in the United States.  Washington, D.C.:  Brookings Institution, 1997.
 * Blauvelt, Andrew, ed. Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes. Walker Art Center, 2008.
 * Conn, Steven and Max Page, editors. Building the Nation: Americans Write About Their Architecture, Their Cities, and Their Landscape.  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.
 * Crawford, Margaret. Building the Workingman’s Paradise: The Design of American Company Towns.  Verso, 1995.
 * Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles.  London: Verso, 1990.
 * Donoghue, John. Alexander Jackson Davis, Romantic Architect, 1803–1892.  New York: Arno Press, 1977.
 * Douglass, Harlan Paul. The Suburban Trend.  1925.
 * Downs, Jr., Arthur Channing. “Downing’s Newburgh Villa.”  Bulletin of the Association for Preservation Technology 4, nos. 3–4 (1972): 1–113.
 * Ebner, Michael H. Creating Chicago’s North Shore: A Suburban History.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
 * Flint, Anthony. This Land: The Battle Over Sprawl and the Future of America.  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.
 * Fogelson, Robert M. Bourgeois Nightmares:  Suburbia, 1870–193'.  Yale University Press, 2005.
 * Garreau, Joel. Edge City: Life on the New Frontier.  New York: Doubleday, 1991.
 * Gruenberg, Sidonie Matsner. "The Challenge of the New Suburbs." Marriage and Family Living 17, no. 2 (May 1955): 133–37.
 * Hanlon, Bernadette.Once the American Dream: Inner ring Suburbs of the Metropolitan United States. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010.
 * Harris, Richard and Robert Lewis. “Constructing a Fault(y) Zone: Misrepresentations of American Cities and Suburbs, 1900–1950.”  Annals of the Association of American Geographers 88, no. 4 (1998): 622–41.
 * Hayden, Dolores. Building Suburbia:  Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1920–2000.  New York: Pantheon Books, 2003.
 * Henderson, Susan. “Llewellyn Park, Suburban Idyll.”  Journal of Garden History 7, no. 3 (July–September 1987): 221–43.
 * Hise, Greg. Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis.  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
 * Hope, Andrew. "Evaluation the Significance of San Lorenzo Village, A Mid-20th Century Suburban Community."  CRM:  The Journal of Heritage Stewardship 2 (Summer 2005): 50–61.
 * Hope, Andrew. "Evaluation the Significance of San Lorenzo Village, A Mid-20th Century Suburban Community." CRM: The Journal of Heritage Stewardship 2 (Summer 2005): 50–61.
 * Jackson, John Brinckerhoff. Discovering the Vernacular Landscape.  Yale University Press, 1984.
 * Jacobs, Jane. Dark Age Ahead.  Random House, 2004.
 * Kargon, Robert Hugh and Arthur P. Molella. Invented Edens: Techno-Cities of the Twentieth Century.  MIT Press, 2008.
 * Katz, Bruce and Robert E. Lang, editors. Redefining Urban and Suburban America: Evidence from Census 2000.  Brookings, 2003.
 * Katz, Peter, editor. The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community.  Afterword by Vincent Scully.  McGraw–Hill, 1994.
 * Kay, Jane Holtz. Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile took over America, and How We Can Take it Back.  Crown Publishers, 1997.
 * Keating, Ann Durkin. Building Chicago: Suburban Developers and the Creation of a Divided Metropolis.  Ohio State University Press, 1988.
 * Kelly, Barbara. Expanding the American Dream: Building and Rebuilding Levittown.  State University of Albany Press, 1993.
 * Low, Setha.  Behind the Gates: Life, Security, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America. New York: Routledge, 2003.
 * Lukez, Paul. Suburban Transformations.  New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007.
 * Mattingly, Paul H. Suburban Landscapes: Culture and Politics in a New York Metropolitan Community.  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
 * McKenzie, Evan. Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Government.  New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994.
 * Morton, Marian. "The Suburban Ideal and Suburban Realities: Cleveland Heights, Ohio, 1860–2001." Journal of Urban History 28, no. 5 (September 2002) 671–98.
 * Nicolaides, Becky M. My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965.  University of Chicago Press, 2002.
 * O'Connell, James C. The Hub's Metropolis: Greater Boston's Development From Railroad Suburbs to Smart Growth (MIT Press; 2013) 326 pages
 * O'Toole, Randall. "The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths" The Thoreau Institute.
 * Orfield, Myron. American Metropolitics: The New Suburban Reality.  Brookings Institution Press, 2002.
 * Russell, James S. “When Suburbs Become Mega-Suburbs.”  Architectural Record 191, no. 8 (August 2003): 76–81.
 * Rybczynski, Witold (November 7, 2005). "Suburban Despair". Slate.
 * Rybczynski, Witold. "How to Build a Suburb."  The Wilson Quarterly 19 no. 3 (Summer 2005):  114–126.
 * Salamon, Sonya. Newcomers to Old Towns: Suburbanization of the Heartland.  University of Chicago Press, 2003.
 * Sandul, Paul J. P. California Dreaming: Boosterism, Memory, and Rural Suburbs in the Golden State. West Virginia University Press, 2014.
 * Schuyler, David. Apostle of Taste: Andrew Jackson Downing, 1815–1852.  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
 * Schuyler, David. The New Urban Landscape: The Redefinition of Form in Nineteenth-Century America.  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.
 * Sies, Mary Corbin. “The City Transformed: Nature, Technology, and the Suburban Ideal, 1877–1917.”  Journal of Urban History 14, no. 1 (November 1987): 81–111.
 * Sies, Mary Corbin. American Urban History: The Everyday Politics and Spatial Logics of Metropolitan Life. Urban History Review/Revue d’histoire 32, no. 1 (Fall 2003): 28–42.
 * Sies, Mary Corbin. “Paradise Retained: An Analysis of Persistence in Planned, Exclusive Suburbs, 1880–1980.” Planning Perspectives 12 (1997): 165–91.
 * Smith, Albert C. & Schank, Kendra (1999). "A Grotesque Measure for Marietta". Journal of Urban Design 4 (3).
 * Stevens, William K. “Beyond the Mall: Suburbs Evolving into ‘Outer City.’”  New York Times, November 8, 1987, E5.
 * Sweeting, Adam W. Reading Houses and Building Books: Andrew Jackson Downing and the Architecture of Popular Antebellum Literature, 1835–1855.  University Press of New England, 1996.
 * Tatum, George B. and Elisabeth Blair MacDougall, editors. Prophet with Honor: The Career of Andrew Jackson Downing, 1815–1852.  Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture.  Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1989.
 * Walker, Richard and Robert Lewis. “Beyond the Crabgrass Frontier: Industry and the Spread of North American Cities, 1850–1950.”  Journal of Historical Geography 27, no. 1 (January 2001): 3–19.
 * Warner, Jr., Sam Bass. Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870–1900.  1962.
 * Wilson, Richard Guy. “Idealism and the Origin of the First American Suburb: Llewellyn Park, New Jersey.”  American Art Journal (October 1979): 79–90.
 * Jackson, Kenneth T.. "All the World's a Mall:  Reflections on the Social and Economic Consequences of the American Shopping Center."  The American Historical Review 101 no. 4 (October 1996):  1111–1121.
 * Wright, Gwendolyn. Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America.  Pantheon Books, 1981.
 * von Hoffman, Alexander. Local Attachments: The Making of an American Urban Neighborhood, 1850–1920.  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

Women, family, lifestyles and images

 * Clark, Jr., Clifford Edward. The American Family Home, 1800–1960.  University of North Carolina Press, 1986.
 * Coon, David R. Look Closer: Suburban Narratives and American Values in Film and Television )Rutgers University Press; 2013) 269 pages; explores the critical image of suburbia in such films and TV shows as American Beauty, The Truman Show, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Desperate Housewives, Weeds, and Big Love.
 * Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique.  Norton, 1963.
 * Marsh, Margaret. Suburban Lives.  Rutgers University Press, 1990.
 * Marsh, Margaret. "Suburban Men and Masculine Domesticity.”  American Quarterly 40, no. 2 (June 1988): 165–86.
 * Murray, Sylvie. The Progressive Housewife: Community Activism in Suburban Queens.  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
 * Putman, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.  Simon & Schuster, 2000.
 * Whyte, Jr., William H. The Organization Man.  Simon and Schuster, 1956.
 * Wright, Gwendolyn. Moralism and the Model Home: Domestic Architecture and Cultural Conflict in Chicago, 1870–1913.  University of Chicago Press, 1980

Race

 * Avila, Eric. Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
 * Greason, Walter D. "Suburban Erasure: How the Suburbs Ended the Civil Rights Movement in New Jersey". Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013.
 * Fong, Timothy P. The First Suburban Chinatown: The Remaking of Monterey Park, California.  Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994.
 * Haynes, Bruce D. Red Lines, Black Spaces: The Politics of Race and Space in a Black Middle-Class Suburb.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.
 * Johnson, Ronald M. “From Romantic Suburb to Racial Enclave: LeDroit Park, Washington, D.C., 1880–1920.”  Phylon 45, no. 4 (4th Quarter 1984): 264–70.
 * Kalita, S. Mitra. Suburban Sahibs: Three Immigrant Families and Their Passage from India to America.  Rutgers University Press, 2003.
 * Kirp, David L., John P. Dwyer, and Larry A. Rosenthal Our Town: Race, Housing, and the Soul of Suburbia.  Rutgers University Press, 1995.
 * Kruse, Kevin M. White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism.  Princeton University Press, 2005.
 * Li, Wei. “Building Ethnoburbia: The Emergence and Manifestation of the Chinese Ethnoburb in Los Angeles’ San Gabriel Valley.”  Journal of Asian American Studies 2, no. 1 (February 1999): 1–29.
 * Lipsitz, George. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics.  Temple University Press, 1998.
 * Moore, Shirley Ann Wilson. To Place Our Deeds: The African American Community in Richmond, California, 1910–1963.  University of California Press, 2000.
 * Orser, W. Edward. “Secondhand Suburbs: Black Pioneers in Baltimore’s Edmondson Village, 1955–1980.”  Journal of Urban History 10, no. 3 (May 1990): 227–62.
 * O’ Mara, Margaret Pugh. “Suburbia Reconsidered: Race, Politics, and Prosperity in the Twentieth Century.”  Journal of Social History 39, no. 1 (Fall 2005): 229–44.
 * Pattillo-McCoy, Mary. Black Pickett Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class.  University of Chicago Press, 1999.
 * Self, Robert O. American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland.  Princeton University Press, 2003.
 * Sugrue, Thomas J. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit.  Princeton University Press, 1996.
 * Taylor, Jr., Henry L. “The Building of a Black Industrial Suburb: The Lincoln Heights, Ohio.”  Thesis, State University of New York at Buffalo, 1979.
 * Vicino, Thomas J. Transforming Race and Class in Suburbia: Decline in Metropolitan Baltimore. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
 * Weise, Andrew. Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century.  Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004.
 * Weise, Andrew. “Black Housing, White Finance: African American Housing and Home Ownership in Evanston, Illinois, before 1940.”  Journal of Social History 33, no. 2 (Winter 1999): 429–60.
 * Weise, Andrew. “Places of Our Own: Suburban Black Towns before 1960.”  Journal of Urban History 19, no. 3 (1993): 30–54.
 * Wilson, William H. Hamilton Park: A Planned Black Community in Dallas.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

Environment and geography

 * Blake, Peter. God’s Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of America’s Landscape.  New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964.
 * Jindrich, Jason, “Suburbs in the City: Reassessing the Location of Nineteenth-Century American Working-Class Suburbs,” Social Science History, 36 (Summer 2012), 147–67.
 * Kunstler, James Howard. The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape. Simon and Schuster, 1993.
 * Rome, Adam Ward. The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism.  New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
 * Winkler, Robert. Going Wild: Adventures with Birds in the Suburban Wilderness. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2003.

Politics

 * Dreir, Peter, John Mollenkopf, and Todd Swanstrom. Place Matters: Metropolitics for the Twenty-first Century.  University of Kansas Press, 2002.
 * Gans, Herbert J. The Levittowners:  Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community.  New York:  Pantheon, 1967.
 * Lassiter, Matthew D. "The New Suburban History II: Political Culture and Metropolitan Space.”  Journal of Planning History 4, no. 1 (February 2005): 75–88.
 * Lassiter, Matthew D. The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South.  Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2006.
 * Lassiter, Matthew D. “Suburban Strategies: The Volatile Center in Postwar Politics.”  In The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History, edited by Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak, and Julian E. Zelizer, 327–49.  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.
 * McGirr, Lisa. Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right.  Princeton University Press, 2001.
 * Oliver, J. Eric. Democracy in Suburbia.  Princeton University Press, 2001.
 * Teaford, Jon C. City and Suburb: The Political Fragmentation of Metropolitan America, 1850–1970. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979.
 * Vicino, Thomas J. Suburban Crossroads: The Fight for Local Control of Immigration Policy. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013.

Historiography

 * Archer, John; Paul J.P. Sandul, and Katherine Solomonson (eds.), Making Suburbia: New Histories of Everyday America. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
 * Ebner, Michael H. "Re-Reading Suburban America: Urban Population Deconcentration, 1810-1980," American Quarterly (1985) 37#3 pp. 368-381 in JSTOR
 * Kruse, Kevin M, and Thomas J. Sugrue, editors. The New Suburban History. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2006.
 * McManus, Ruth, and Philip J. Ethington, "Suburbs in transition: new approaches to suburban history," Urban History, Aug 2007, Vol. 34 Issue 2, pp 317–337
 * McShane, Clay. "The State of the Art in North American Urban History," Journal of Urban History (2006) 32#4 pp 582–597, identifies a loss of influence by such writers as Lewis Mumford, Robert Caro, and Sam Warner, a continuation of the emphasis on narrow, modern time periods, and a general decline in the importance of the field. Comments by Timothy Gilfoyle and Carl Abbott contest the latter conclusion.
 * Nickerson, Michelle. "Beyond Smog, Sprawl, and Asphalt: Developments in the Not-So-New Suburban History," Journal of Urban History (2015) 41#1 pp 171–180. covers 1934 to 2011. DOI: 10.1177/0096144214551724.
 * Seligman, Amanda I. “The New Suburban History”.  Journal of Planning History 3, no. 4 (November 2004): 312–33.
 * Shumsky, Larry. Encyclopedia of Urban America: The Cities and Suburbs (2 vol 1998)
 * Sies, Mary Corbin. "Beyond Scholarly Orthodoxies in North American Suburban History", Journal of Urban History 27, no. 3 (March 2001): 355–61.
 * Vicino, Thomas J. "The political history of a postwar suburban society revisited." History Compass (2008) 6#1 pp: 364–388. online