Something strange is happening in the suburbs. Perhaps it’s all that privacy, repression and dark, locked garages and garden sheds behind the hedges and fences. But it isn’t really that kind of strange.

The suburbs are becoming younger. They are becoming more ethnically diverse than city centres. Is it possible those London suburbs that were once synonymous with the surrender to conformity and commuting might become cool?

Cities across the world are changing. Once-deprived downtowns have been claimed by corporate chains and Airbnb landlords. The gentrifiers have money and they’re getting older, pushing the young further out. Those who haven’t succumbed to the country or the coasts find the suburbs a fair compromise. We might want to live in the centre, where it all happens, but we might also do well to remember the surprisingly radical roots of suburbia.

London’s first suburbs, for instance, the 19th-century settlements of Hampstead, Holland Park and Bedford Park “Garden Suburb”, were artsy enclaves, bohemian escapes from city centres that stood for stifling class hierarchies. In the US, the suburbs represented the residues of the settler spirit, pushing out into the frontier beyond the safety of the cities.

Rather than ask how we’ll ever afford a city-centre flat, perhaps we should wonder how can we make the suburbs better?

You might argue that contemporary culture is, in fact, suburban. The majority of us in the UK, US, Australia and New Zealand live there. From the music and literature of the second half of the 20th century (everything from Jagger to The Jam to The Buddha Of Suburbia), the suburbs have spawned the most intriguing stories. The IT revolution, the fruits of which prescribe our everyday existence was born in the unremarkable suburban garages of California and New Mexico.

Rather than ask how we’ll ever afford a city-centre flat, perhaps we should wonder how can we make the suburbs (where we are almost inevitably going to be living) better?

There are opportunities. In the US, strip malls and out-of-town stores are dying; the edges of freeways are littered with vacant big-box buildings. Could these be repurposed? Isn’t this exactly the kind of cheap, flexible space we once looked to inner-city warehouses for? The scraggier bits of the suburbs could become a lot denser and the neighbourhoods that become most successful could be intensified into mini city centres (as they used to be) with the kinds of high streets or main streets that were once sources of pride. Less regulated and with fewer historic structures, they can be flexible and adaptable as preciously preserved city centres can never now be.

Transport is changing too. Uber has made distance cheaper and self-driving cars represent a radical change. Getting back from town after a few drinks will be easy. Amazon means we no longer need to trek to out-of-town stores for bulky goods, but can have them dropped on our doorsteps. And drone deliveries will shake things up even more, satisfying almost instant gratification.

Where space is cheap and available, it can be reimagined

Failing malls and retailers could be given over to smaller units, becoming more like the markets that have become so popular in cities, with small traders given opportunities they lack elsewhere, giving young entrepreneurs and new immigrants a chance to get going with new businesses and without the prohibitive rents of city centres. As city centres are given over to coffee shops and boutique businesses, the makers and the traders need to find new venues. As they are being priced out of even the shabbiest city-centre railway arches, these new spots will almost certainly be suburban.

Where space is cheap and available, it can be reimagined. Big-box stores could become arts centres, small-run factories, startup hubs, coworking spaces or wholesale markets. Their architecture needs to be deregulated so they can adapt to new ideas and changes in technology. Communal space – the one-time car parks, verges, streets and pavements – need to be reimagined, repopulated and made properly public. It’s worth noting that the coolest houses of the 20th century were suburban, from the domestic masterpieces of Frank Lloyd Wright in suburban Chicago to the mid-century modern villas of LA and Frank Gehry’s deconstructed, ad hoc houses in Santa Monica. It was the suburbs that gave architects their greatest opportunities for experimentation and young architects still almost invariably get their first commissions in the suburbs – so why not let them experiment even more?

There are already articles about “Hipsturbia” in the US press and there are ongoing studies in the densification and intensification of suburban centres in the UK. Perhaps the zombie movies had it wrong. The undead might be sipping flat whites outside city-centre cafés in perfectly preserved pedestrianised tourist reservations. The malls that once formed the backdrop to zombie flicks and the suburban ennui and isolation that provided the paranoia to every slasher movie and teen-prom-love coming-of-age story, might, after all, be where the real action happens.

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