•We’ve now moved ahead with the discussion of sociology of urban growth into the 1970s
•By 1970s, suburbanization particularly in North America has now been around for
about quarter of a century
•It’s beginning to move to the edges – suburban is not as wonderful as it wants
•Part of the course is that suburbs is no longer new, is beginning to age
•Nowhere is this more evident than when it comes to commercial side, in particular
shopping centres
•Growth of suburban subdivisions and malls go hand in hand
•One reason had to do with zoning – suburban zoning was strictly residential and not
commercial
•Zoning regulations prohibited this
•Instead, stores, movie theatres, restaurants were clumped together in malls ranging
from small neighbourhood malls to regional malls
•If you want to go shopping particularly in US cities, you had no choice to drive to the
mall
•One of the things that certainly happened with malls was the line-up of stores became
very similar from mall to mall
•It didn’t matter whether you went to Fairview Mall or Yorkdale Mall or Mississauga’s
Square One or whatever, but all the store were the same
•Particularly the clothing stores were all chains, over time these chains have changed,
some have gone up some have gone down, some have closed
•In essence, the mall got boring
•In addition to that, what would be a big attraction to malls – parking – became difficult,
couldn’t find a space to park (half a kilometre away)
•The advantages of parking seemed to be minimized
•The malls themselves became rather than exciting places to shop, became more of a
chore
•Certainly by 1970s, the boom was off the roads
•In addition to that, suburban life itself began to show issues
•Partly, in connection with gender issues
•When suburbs were built, there was strict gender division – the expectation was that
women would stay home and look after the kids, while the dad would work in the city
away from the community
•Over time, that idea became to go away from that – the kids from 1950 are grown up
when it’s 1970s, so they left home
•In initial phases, the suburbs were friendly, but by 1970s kids have left home
•Kids were not alright, kids were too young to drive, nothing to do, nothing except to find
the mall and hang around, but the mall operators eventually cracking down on the
bunch of teenagers affecting business, so security guards asked parents of teenagers to
pose curfews
•Suburbs were supposed to be crime free in contrast to the inner city
•Suddenly, suburbs are seeing many of the kind of problems that were attributed to the
inner city
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•You cannot blame the problems on minorities (Blacks, Latinos, etc.) because these were
the white middle class kids
•So things began to break down
•For a while, the trend is to build bigger malls (e.g. Yorkdale = supersized mall)
•Then you look at the inner cities, particularly the US, are in bad shape
•In cities like Detroit that have bailed out, leaving the inner city, are run down
•Part of it is it doesn’t have a tax-based anymore – this is a problem
•The inner city is characterized in many parts of it by crime, racial problems
•All this boils over in the late 1960s when you begin to have urban rise
•Cities after cities in US (Detroit, New Jersey, Los Angeles, Miami) suddenly in late
1960s when people think of inner cities, they think of fires
•In other places like Britain, this is happening
•In some ways, the inner city problems in UK are closer to US than in Canadian cities
•Growth of middle class suburbs in UK has been tremendous immigration into UK from
South Asia, Caribbean, and many of these immigrants are suffering from poverty,
discrimination, lower incomes, all kinds of problems
•UK has its own riots that are beginning during that period
•By the time it reached the mid 1970s, first of all, it’s become quite evident that
something has to be done
•Part of what has to be done is somehow reactivate and revitalize the central city
•What we can see is we’re not successful in Detroit, that’s the future if nothing is done
•Something that has to do with investment money
•If you read suburban political economy, they talk about third stream of investment
capital, which is flowing around and plugging in and making money
•One stream of where invested capital goes is in real estate
•A lot of this investment was directed into suburban buildings and suburban growth, as a
result a lot of millionaires were created by building suburbs
•But by mid 1970s, the money that you can make out of investing in suburbs began to
decline in return
•The suburbs isn’t as good as an investment anymore
•There are a couple of reasons for this:
oOne reason is that the amount of land that is available for building is shrinking
Initially, there were all kinds of land around the city and was relatively
cheap, so real estate developers bought huge portions of land and sat on it for
20 years and then built on it
That’s true in Toronto as much as in US, real estate who bought huge tracts
of land in Mississauga and began to build Erin Mills and things like that
oBank money is beginning to run out
oMunicipal governments are beginning to regulate, you no longer have a free hand to
build, you have restricted by laws and zoning regulations, level of permits,
developers are beginning to complain it takes too long to approve to build
suburban areas
They can no longer make the high rates of return
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