Urbanizing Suburbia

Urbanizing Suburbia considers three current and related processes underway in global cities: the hyper-gentrification of inner cities, the financialization of housing, and the structural changes occurring in the outer city. Rocketing housing prices have displaced residents from inner cities and created a rent gap in outer cities. Increasingly, municipalities, developers, and displaced residents search for opportunities in the suburban belts. Changes in demographics, densities, live/work ratios, and tenures are remaking outer cities, rendering them less and less suburban. The book examines these changes by looking at four key European cities: Amsterdam, Berlin, London, and Stockholm. It is a first attempt at understanding the three processes discussed here within one comprehensive explanatory framework.

Leonard Ma is a Canadian architect based in Helsinki. He is a member of New Academy, and teaches Urban Studies and Architecture at the Estonian Academy of Art. His research focuses on neoliberalism, financialization, and the legacy of the welfare state, and has been published in e-flux architecture, The Avery Review, Drawing Matter and AA files. Leonard is a practicing architect and leads PUBLIC OFFICE, with projects and competition awards in Austria, Finland, Japan and Sweden.

Helen Runting is a planner and architectural theorist, as well as a founding partner of the Stockholm-based architecture office Secretary. She holds a PhD in Critical Studies in Architecture (KTH) and regularly publishes essays on the politics of design. Runting is a co-author of the prize-winning 14,495 Flats: A Metabolist’s Guide to New Stockholm (2021) and a co-editor of the anthology Architecture and Feminisms: Ecologies, Economies, Technologies (2018).