Explores how the suburban imaginary, composed of the built environment and imaginative texts, functions as a resource for living out the "good life"

Since 1997, photographer Beth Yarnelle Edwards has been documenting idyllic suburban middle-class settings in America and Europe. The series begins in California's Silicon Valley - the artist's home - before moving to Germany, France, Spain, Iceland and the Netherlands. Edwards approaches everyday scenes with a mixture of documentary interest and cinematographic staging. She combines real-life settings with philosophical truths, conveying images of loneliness, media exposure and escapism.

Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk are at the forefront of the New Urbanism movement, and in "Suburban Nation" they assess sprawl's costs to society, be they ecological, economic, aesthetic, or social. 115 illustrations.

The suburban landscape is inseparable from American culture. Suburbia does not only relate to the geographical concept, but also describes a cultural space incorporating people’s hopes for a safe and prosperous life. Suburbia marks a dynamic ideological space constantly influenced and recreated by both the events of everyday life and artistic discourse. Fictional texts do not merely represent suburbia, but also have a decisive role in the shaping of suburban spaces. The widely held idealized image of suburbia evolved in the 1950s. Today, reality deviates from the concept of suburbs projected back then, due to e.g. high divorce rates and an increase of crime. Nevertheless, the nostalgic view of the suburbs as the “Promised Land" has survived. Postwar critics object to this perception, considering the suburbs rather as depressing landscapes of mass-consumption, conformity and alienation. This book exemplifies the dualistic representation of suburbs in contemporary American cinema by analyzing Pleasantville, The Truman Show and American Beauty. It examines how utopian concepts of suburbia are created culturally and psychologically in the films, and how the underlying anxieties of the suburban experience, visualized by the dystopian narratives, challenge this ideal.

Spanning a century, Pushing Cool reveals how the twin deceptions of health and Black affinity for menthol were crafted—and how the industry’s disturbingly powerful narrative has endured to this day. Police put Eric Garner in a fatal chokehold for selling cigarettes on a New York City street corner. George Floyd was killed by police outside a store in Minneapolis known as “the best place to buy menthols.” Black smokers overwhelmingly prefer menthol brands such as Kool, Salem, and Newport. All of this is no coincidence. The disproportionate Black deaths and cries of “I can’t breathe” that ring out in our era—because of police violence, COVID-19, or menthol smoking—are intimately connected to a post-1960s history of race and exploitation. In Pushing Cool, Keith Wailoo tells the intricate and poignant story of menthol cigarettes for the first time. He pulls back the curtain to reveal the hidden persuaders who shaped menthol buying habits and racial markets across America: the world of tobacco marketers, consultants, psychologists, and social scientists, as well as Black lawmakers and civic groups including the NAACP. Today most Black smokers buy menthols, and calls to prohibit their circulation hinge on a history of the industry’s targeted racial marketing. In 2009, when Congress banned flavored cigarettes as criminal enticements to encourage youth smoking, menthol cigarettes were also slated to be banned. Through a detailed study of internal tobacco industry documents, Wailoo exposes why they weren’t and how they remain so popular with Black smokers.

Introduction: The new suburban history / Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue -- Marketing the free market : state intervention and the politics of prosperity in metropolitan America / David M.P. Freund -- Less than plessy : the inner city, suburbs, and state-sanctioned residential segregation in the age of Brown / Arnold R. Hirsch -- Uncovering the city in the suburb : Cold War politics, scientific elites, and high-tech spaces / Margaret Pugh O'Mara -- How hell moved from the city to the suburbs : urban scholars and changing perceptions of authentic community / Becky Nicolaides -- "The house I live in" : race, class, and African American suburban dreams in the postwar United States / Andrew Wiese -- "Socioeconomic integration" in the suburbs : from reactionary populism to class fairness in metropolitan Charlotte / Matthew D. Lassiter -- Prelude to the tax revolt : the politics of the "tax dollar" in postwar California / Robert O. Self -- Suburban growth and its discontents : the logic and limits of reform on the postwar Northeast corridor / Peter Siskind -- Reshaping the American dream : immigrants, ethnic minorities, and the politics of the new suburbs / Michael Jones-Correa -- The legal technology of exclusion in metropolitan America / Gerald Frug.

While avant-garde modernism disrupted the art salons, architecture schools, and design studios of the world's more sophisticated urban centres in the 20th century, Calgary slept through the cultural upheavals as a provincial backwater. Calgary's initiation to modernism might be dated to February 13, 1947, when Imperial Oil blew in its famous well at Leduc. Or the 1948 football season, when Tom Brooks and Les Lear wrapped the Calgary Stampeders football team around an innovative and modernist-looking T-formation backfield to win the Grey Cup. Calgarians embraced the modern age after the Second World War, taking modernism into the streets and into the suburbs. They went beyond art, architecture, and design, and redefined modernism to include homes, furniture, appliances, and cars. In the process, Calgarians democratized, feminized, and suburbanized modernism. Suburban Modern examines controversies over "coloured" margarine and "mixed" drinking in post-war Calgary. It shows how new petro office buildings transformed the downtown skyline during the 1950s and 1960s, and how new bus lines, roads, and bridges changed the city's transportation network. As the city sprawled horizontally to engulf its ever-expanding suburbs, shoppers deserted downtown for suburban malls. The book follows young couples into their post-war dream homes with modern furnishings and barbecue-appointed patios. Suburban Modern argues that the suburbs rather than the downtown defined Calgary's approach to modernism.