PUBLIC MARKS with tag suburbia

Among the more fashionable of recently perceived (or contrived) apocalypses is "the end of suburbia," a notion popularized by a documentary of the same name, which argues coming oil scarcity will soon make modern suburbs uninhabitable. If only it were true! For the sake of suburbanites alone, the end of suburbia would be a blessing. But that's not happening. To the extent we understand suburbia as a single place, wherever it occurs -- an uncomfortably definitive mould, a collection of syndromes masquerading as a lifestyle -- it is all too robust. We made our bed over the past half-century, shaping increasingly homogeneous, car-dependent, overconsuming, overworked, socially exclusive suburbs, and now we must lie in it.