In the fields of architecture and urbanism there are few issues as pressing, or as vexing, as the suburban question. To the young, the cosmopolitan, and the ecologically minded, suburbia counts among our most egregious follies. Since at least the fifties, many have characterized suburbia as tacky, dull, and homogenizing, a position still taken by popular critics such as James Howard Kunstler. More recent anxieties about consumption—especially in connection with the body, racial inequality, and ecology—have generated new arguments that suburbia is environmentally unsustainable, terrible for our waistlines, and an impediment to social, economic, and racial justice.

Yet, as writers like D. J. Waldie, John Archer, and Robert Bruegmann remind us, for the majority of Americans suburbia is not just home, but the preferred kind of home. Despite the current financial and real-estate crisis, suburbia’s pride of place in the American dream seems unshaken. Meanwhile, traditionally less suburban parts of the world, from Beijing to Bombay, are quickly following America’s lead.

Historically, this divide between those who see suburbia as a problem and those convinced of its promise produced an equally large gap in our knowledge. But this has begun to change. The nineties and oughts saw a “new suburban” turn in urban and architectural history, manifest in work by Greg Hise, Richard Longstreth, Becky Nicolaides, Andrew Wiese, Dianne Harris, and Witold Rybczynski, as well as Archer and Bruegmann. This innovative research has been shaped in reaction to the more disapproving scholarship of Kenneth Jackson and Mike Davis, which represented a culmination of suburban critiques dating to the era of Levittown and William H. Whyte. Architects, urban planners, and other designers have likewise become more interested in suburbia, following, rather belatedly, the pathbreaking work of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown in the sixties and seventies on Las Vegas and Levittown.

Much of this new design and scholarship has been informed by an interest in everydayness, with direct connections to the writing of Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, and Pierre Bourdieu; and, closer to home, scholars like Herbert Gans and critics like J. B. Jackson. Of equal importance have been visual artists. This connection between art, artists, and other ways of knowing suburbia was the subject of Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes, an exhibition mounted at the Walker Art Center in 2008, with an accompanying catalogue edited by Walker curator Andrew Blauvelt.

Suburbia is so familiar and stereotyped that we require the artist’s eye to see it afresh. Artists, especially photographers, have long explored places in which other creators of knowledge showed little interest. In the case of ordinary American built environments, we might think first of New Deal figures like Walker Evans and his images of country stores, or Berenice Abbott capturing the slums of New York. Their successors include pioneers in suburban studies like Ed Ruscha, Joe Deal, Dan Graham, Larry Sultan, and Bill Owens, along with contemporary figures such as Julia Christensen, James D. Griffioen, Andrew Bush, and Gregory Crewdson.

The Worlds Away catalogue brings together the work of many of these artists—along with that of a rich range of historians, architects, planners, reporters, and critics—in a heroic effort to bridge our continental suburban divide. What is remarkable about the volume, which won the Society of Architectural Historian’s Philip Johnson Exhibition Catalogue Award in 2011, is that Blauvelt pursues this goal not only by shoring up the fragments of our knowledge with essays on particular items in the landscape (the mall, the office park, the chain store), but by addressing the suburban question: whether suburbs are a boon or boondoggle, and, in turn, why we have struggled to look at suburbia without disdain, reverence, or ironic detachment. Worlds Away takes suburbia seriously.

At the heart of the book are two original essays (a foreword by Olga Viso and a thoughtful preface by Blauvelt that I have already assigned, with happy results, to a graduate seminar on suburbia); three original interviews (with Blauvelt and co-curator Tracy Myers, with Venturi and Scott Brown, and with Christensen); and nine essays, mainly adapted from previously published works, by scholarly critics and historians (Robert Beuka, Archer, Bruegmann, Holley Wlodarczyk), design faculty (Ellen Dunham-Jones, Louise Mozingo), and journalists (David Brooks, Malcolm Gladwell, Virginia Postrel).

Between blocks of essays printed on a rainbow of matte pastels suggestive of Malvina Reynolds’s ticky-tacky little boxes (or, perhaps, suburbia’s contemporary ethnic and racial diversity), glossy plates present works of art, architecture, and urban design by thirty-four individuals and firms. Projects range from Ruscha’s photographs of Los Angeles parking lots taken in the early sixties, to SITE’s unbuilt Parking Lot Showroom for Best Products from the late seventies, to recent proposals by Interboro Partners for transforming a dead mall and by Estudio Teddy Cruz for the repurposing, in Tijuana, of postwar San Diego tract houses. The book concludes with a wonderful glossary of 146 “suburban neologisms” from “adaptive reuse” to “zoomberg,” with usual suspects, like megachurch, SUV, and McMansion, but also specialized terms like CID (common interest development) and “power center” (a big-box mall), and more obscure ones such as “drive ’til you qualify,” Patio Man, and centaur (“a gay man who lives openly in a predominantly heterosexual suburb” (272)).

Although a variety of positions are represented, the argument which most animates, and distinguishes, Worlds Away is, as Viso writes in her foreword, that “the ideas of city and suburb are more often succinct attitudes than distinct places” (6). More specifically, as Blauvelt explores in his preface, it is that city and suburb are best understood as separate, perhaps opposed, cultures and identities. Discussions of suburbia, for example, “almost always posit bigness as the result of excessive consumption, lack of self-control, and moral fallibility . . . [and] bigness is often portrayed as alienating, inauthentic, uncontrollable, and placeless” (13). Such critiques, however, not only fail to see the poetics of suburbia, but ignore that “the most powerful thing about suburbia . . . [is] its symbolism and the idealism associated with it” (12). The concept of “worlds away” captures this animating spirit: suburbia as a distinct physical and social realm, but also a unique conceptual one.

In my courses on suburbia, students inevitably wrestle with the question of how to define this vague terrain. Is it political: about city boundaries? Is it about physical form: land use and building types and density? Is it about class? Blauvelt, reflecting on the blue-and-red election maps of 2000 and 2004, suggests culture and identity. This notion helps to make sense of a place like Atlanta, where I used to teach. From the perspective of New York, the City of Atlanta appears to be almost entirely suburban. To my students, however, it was unmistakably, incontrovertibly “urban”—and only in part because of race. They understood it was an island of blue people in a sea of red state. This explanation also perhaps clarifies what we mean when we refer to all things middlebrow as “suburban,” from economy houses to chain stores. Conversely, so much of what we understand as “urban” falls at the extremes of American culture, from the penthouse to the projects.

In his essay “Our Sprawling, Supersize Utopia,” Brooks elaborates Blauvelt’s proposition, exploring suburbia’s many “radically different subcultures,” including new-immigrant, low-rent, and light-industrial suburbs. For Brooks, our diverse suburban landscape is the product of an egalitarian society where “everything that was once hierarchical turns granular” (27). It is also the product of a “conservative utopia[n]” optimism, as millions move to unfinished places “where everything is new” (30). Brooks flattens and trivializes, but his enthusiasm for the promises of urban life delivered in suburbia and his conviction that for centuries Americans have been “drawn to places where the possibilities seemed boundless and where there was no history” draw sorely needed attention to the wonders and complexity of suburbia (31). Archer (“Suburban Aesthetics Is Not an Oxymoron”) and Bruegmann (“Learning From Sprawl”) address similar themes in their more scholarly, but no less polemical, essays. Both show the historical critiques of suburbia to be deeply tainted by highbrow disdain for the middlebrow and the lowbrow. An overlapping desire to dispel common anxieties about homogeneity animates several other essays, including Postrel’s surprising but convincing “In Praise of Chain Stores” and Mozingo’s fascinating “Campus, Estate, and Park: Lawn Culture Comes to the Corporation.”

If the great strength of the Worlds Away catalogue is its pursuit of new suburban narratives, the main weakness is its celebratory tone, which washes away many deep-seated concerns. Blauvelt warns from the start that the exhibition is not intended to address “real or perceived challenges of living in suburban environments” (12). But suburbs are so thoroughly implicated with issues like climate change, obesity, and persistent inner-city poverty that it is difficult to presume the innocence Blauvelt demands. Disdain for tract housing and SUVs may be elitist, but to point this out does not refute claims that sprawl is unsustainable, unhealthy, and destabilizing. An essay that directly confronted these topics would help inoculate Worlds Away from the critique that it is limited by an aesthetics of inversion.

In spite of this gap, Worlds Away is the richest single volume yet on contemporary American suburbia, and one of the most useful in and out of the classroom. All who are interested in suburbia—love it or hate it—and in the politics of art, architecture, and urbanism, should take note.