I am a huge fan of Stadler's writing, and I admire his intellect, but I went to his Town Hall lecture on the Zwichenstadt and left unconvinced that these "between places" are anything more than suburban America's unkempt backyards.

I admire "Suburban NiteLife" for meeting suburbanites right where they are (at Super Bowl parties, with roots showing) without shame.

I grew up in a rural area, on a largely-defunct farm, actually, and as I learned in college, the suburban kids' experience didn't seem much different than mine. We all had Pizza Hut, McDonalds, video rental places. For me to visit a friend or rent a video, I had 15 minutes of driving -- more than a suburban kid, I suppose. And suburban kids could go to "the city" for an evening, for us it was a whole-weekend thing. Mostly though, our experiences didn't seem radically different.

To me, the big distinction has been between large, central cities, and nearly everything else. I suppose there are some extremely rural places, but for the most part, it seems most of the country lives in some form of suburbia, and the rest of us have our dense transit-friendly (mostly) urban centers.

But I think that it's more how we relate to the land and developed areas that Stadler was trying to get at in his speech.

Land, in some form or another, has always been a commodity, but now it has become more of a globalized type of commodity. Land users are mobile, and land uses are fluid. International firms deal with mortgages and property on a global level, trading them not on the basis of personal relationships or tangible interconnections or actual appreciation of the landscapes but on the basis of abstract, quantifiable numbers processed in head offices. Architecture in Seattle, Beaverton, Amsterdam, China, etc. of whatever shape and form and use is rapidly converging, losing the sense of place. And one can be "urban" and "urbane" and live in a rural setting, losing only part of the experiences that we associated solely with the city in the past.

All this contrasts with the idea of city as "central place", the idea of the "City Beautiful", that controls and shapes the "hinterlands" surrounding it. Urban studies often relegate surrounding suburbs to a second-class status, but truth be told, you could potentially live your entire life in the greater Seattle metro area and never set foot in the city itself. What is central about a place that is not the center of many people's lives?

So instead of being a vital center, the downtown has been transformed into just another neighborhood in a network of nodes, a boutique neighborhood for the rich or dumping ground for the poor, larger only because of historical inertia and not intention, and kept alive merely because of the expense of demolishing it and starting over.

(Oh dear... *that* was a huge, rambling monologue...)

bma:

*that* was also nicely stated, and your point about living an entire life without visiting the city 'center' rings true.

When this topic comes up on blogs, the comments tend to illustrate how much we all buy into the mythologies of the city/suburb that Mudede mentioned. My own prejudice works the opposite of Amy Kate's...I feel many cities are becoming a lot like the suburbs I grew up in, and couldn't wait to leave. Instead of 'Suburban Nitelife', the picture in my head is 'Loft Living', with an article on artisanal pilates.

Stadler has, in the past, taken people on trips to Beaverton. Perhaps the presentation would be more convincing if he combined the lecture with the trip? Living in outer SE Portland, I find myself traveling east to explore Gresham as much as I travel west towards downtown.

I often hear the complaint that metro area dwellers do not visit downtown because of crime, or the homeless. I wonder if suburban dwellers are just finding what they need where they live.

Regardless of the pictures (or voices) in your head, the actual picture here does, in fact, say "Suburban Nitelife." You can theorize about the magical, multicultural patchwork of suburbia all you want, but look for where the intelligent, critical thought is coming from and you'll find the urban center. Although I'm sure that article about the PS3 is fascinating...

Yeah...snowboarding, bikram yoga bloodbaths and a minute by minute slogging of American Idol. It's just like Paris in the 1920's.

This just crossed my screen. Thanks for attending the lecture, those who did. You probably caught that my point was not that either suburb (or city) is "the next site of political, racial, and cultural revolution." As "bma" puts it, "downtown has been transformed into just another neighborhood in a network of nodes." Similarly, many former suburbs have morphed into nodes entirely unlike what we expect when we think of "suburbs."

But no one passed a law against dumb advertising circulars, so you can still find lots of stupid ones, like the one Eric Grandy picked out. You can also find similar blog posts to his, but done by right-wing evangelists — they post a cover of The Stranger to "prove" how depraved the city is.

My lecture, in fact most of my work now, is to suggest that neither side knows much about the other. The "zwischenstadt" is not the suburbs, it is a name for the logic that drives the whole weave, that shapes the whole fabric, from downtown to Capitol Hill to Issaquah and beyond. As "bma" points out, that logic is no longer one of "place," locality, or heritage — it's global capital. And global capital has changed the landscapes we thought we knew.

My suggestion is to go out and see them — use them, return to them — and leave your stereotypes at home.