At Wesleyan and Beyond, Suburbs Produce Harmful Ideologies of Space

A model home is set against the side of the hill. Surrounding it, there is a perfect patch of sod which stops abruptly, a hard line against the naked dirt which bleeds over the rest of the hillside. In the background there is empty, untouched space and patchy developments. They are houses which look exactly like or adjacent to the model in their half-constructed form. Cranes and machinery reach up and pierce an otherwise uninterrupted skyline. Inevitably, the camera person scans this landscape and mumbles something about the beautiful scenery and the rolling hills while they are in the process of being desiccated. They will perhaps, also, show a highway cutting through—take note of a short commute time. 

This is a standard opening for a suburban real estate video on YouTube, a genre which I’ve only recently discovered but which has rapidly become a fixation. Real estate is one of the biggest genres on YouTube for its potential for advertising and for the simple fact that where there is land, there is also money. The most viewed videos will be ones directed only at the super rich and those who aspire to be them: $23 million sprawling mansions, loft apartments which sit just on the edge of Central Park, 100-acre ranches in Texas. But I am more interested in the type which sits squarely on the boundary between luxury and mass production: McMansions or, as I like to call them, fiberboard homes. The homes have all the architectural appeal and coherence of a Cheesecake Factory, placing turrets and gingerbreading alongside shiplap and subway tile with seemingly no interest in situating the house within a time, space, or aesthetic movement. From a distance, they look large, expensive. But zoom in on any one detail and it will be rough around the edges, corners cut. This is why I call them fiberboard homes, the same term my mom used to refer to the cheap furniture we bought for our first house. 

I understand that my critique of the McMansion is neither unique nor devoid of classist snobbery. I bring them under fire, like most do, because they attempt at mimicking wealth and fail. They want to convey taste and luxury while picking up on all the wrong signifiers for it, revealing themselves as anything but what they are trying to be. In her video essay “Opulence,” Natalie Wynn describes this phenomenon exactly: 

“Northern Virginia is McMansion country. And while my family lived in a more modest ‘colonial,’ I remember riding around in the backseat of the minivan, looking at some stylistically jumbled monstrosities. And I would get excited by some little detail, like say, a circle of fake battlements atop a misplaced tower. But then my mom would say, ‘look at this ostentatious trash!’ So you learn. You learn taste according to the social class of your upbringing. And with taste comes all this adult baggage: snobbery and pretense and conceit.”

Snobbery, pretense, and conceit toward the McMansion is a luxury afforded to those who can afford them, or those who afford to not want to live in them. But it is not the only reason for hating them. I want to argue that the form of fiberboard suburban spaces itself produces a disordered ideology of space and the individual’s relationship to it. This distortion can have real consequences when the suburban dweller steps into a new space and attempts to carry that ideology with them, consequences which I have seen played out on Wesleyan’s campus.

When I was a child in the backseat of my mom’s Honda Accord, we would go trolling for “ostentatious trash,” driving through neighborhoods of sameness while she carefully delineated between which variant of the prefab house she liked and which she didn’t. We were a class aspirational family, still living in our little converted military bunker, my parents in their 20s and hungering for mid-life, middle management, mid-career luxuries like a lawn and faux molding. I remember, distinctly, thinking that one day we would move into one of these homes and all would be well and right with the world. Then I went to Tulsa, Oklahoma and entered a McMansion three times the size of the comparatively modest homes we had been looking at. It belonged to an oil family. The house itself made me feel so inferior that I decided that the construction itself was evil, and my disdain for those places has persisted ever since.

Part of this disdain stems from their imposition on the space around them. In every fiberboard community I’ve been to, I’ve almost gotten lost on the winding streets, turned around and disoriented by lack of significant landmarks. The discomfort of the suburbs is not only in their failed attempts at socially signifying wealth, but also in the ideology produced out of the shape of the space they create and the types of movement they encourage. While living in the suburbs, space loses its force as a usable object, something which must be shared among and between many or else converted into something productive.

I will try to explain it this way. When I lived in the country, where my parents’ new and admittedly fiberboard-looking house now sits, there was a constant reminder of land’s productive value. Most of the people living around us had a garden or some amount of livestock. We had both: a garden and chickens. Stretching behind us, to the left of us, and all along the road to town were cattle fields, occasionally interrupted by a few goats or horses. In the country, there isn’t much infrastructure. You need a car to get around in the same way that one might if they lived in the suburbs. But the experience of land as a commodity is ever present. Land and space is prolific, but it is also functional. Land and space produces, or it is considered waste. In the grocery store of a small town, no one touches you. They have a certain respect for the area around your body as a precious resource.

Now that I live in Seattle, almost in the middle of it, space takes on even more weight. The simple fact of being housed while others are unhoused, the feeling of verticality, the very small gaps of alleyways between buildings, and the sparse trees sticking gangly out of the sidewalks as though placed as an afterthought all adds to the feeling of space encroaching around me, the sense that it is limited. If you get in someone’s way in a city they will brush past you for the simple reason that there is no other way to move. 

It has thus always confounded me that I have to argue with other Wesleyan students about the fact that space is a commodity. Space is, in essence, the only commodity. The economic system which we operate on is founded on a system of land ownership. But there is a disjunction between how I conceive of space and how other students have conceived of it. During my first semester on campus, I found myself one day sitting on the floor of Usdan eating my lunch. All around me there were tables of people who had already finished eating, who were sitting around and chatting with one another. I suggested to my significant other, Josh, that he should make something for Soggy Wes Memes about the incident. The idea had been mine, but he took the hit for it. The meme blew up into one of the biggest Soggy Wes dramas that I remember since starting at Wesleyan. People argued that he should just get to the dining hall in a timely manner, that it was the institution’s responsibility to rebuild a better dining hall and provide more space, and that it was the only shared space on campus where people could socialize.

The conversation shifted to the politics of space as a function of class. Josh argued that people possibly couldn’t see the issue because they had never been forced to view space as a limited commodity, citing his time living unhoused and then in his friend’s shitty trailer home as an example of how poverty makes one more aware of their space. The response to this assertion was far more aggressive than the first. I remember walking into The Argus newsroom and suggesting that we cover the story. Another editor turned around and grinned at me, “you gotta admit, the argument is pretty ridiculous.” I remembered another time, too, when an editor suggested we run a hot opinion piece on why all the chairs at Wesleyan are so uncomfortable and why they ought to be replaced. 

If you were to ask any one student where the money for endeavors such as rebuilding Usdan to seat the entire student body at once, or replacing all the chairs in the University should come from, they would say “from my expensive tuition” (this was the argument on Soggy Wes Memes). But they might not consider that the money could also be used to educate a few more low income students, or provide meals over breaks for students who need to stay on campus, or otherwise go toward solving more complex or pressing issues. It does not occur to them that the simplest solution to the problem of seeing others eat on the floor is that if you are done eating you should get up and allow someone else to eat. That since this is a shared space for the basic bodily function of eating, rather than fulfilling higher order social needs, it should be respected as such.

My whole point is to insinuate that some Wesleyan students are suburbanites and, as a result of their suburban relationship to space, fundamentally misunderstand space. They view suburban spaces—which are detached from the burden of production and the pressure of competition—as neutral rather than aspirational. The irony to this, of course, is that such “neutral” spaces are offered up as commodities. It is only once you’re in these supposedly “neutral” spaces that you don’t have to think of them in terms of relations of production and consumption. You are detached from land as a mode of production and also detached from hordes of people scrambling for the space which you occupy. You may thus reasonably come to think that occupying space is neutral and deserved, rather than a privilege which must be carefully considered, balanced with the spatial needs of others. 

I am arguing that there is more than a surface level aesthetic reason for hating the suburbs and ultimately striving to avoid them, aside from the simple fact that they are “ostentatious trash.” I am arguing that they produce a bad ideology of space, where the individual is fragmented both from the land as such and from the pervasive and encroaching needs of others. Think of the winding roads of sameness, the broad expanses of laminate flooring, the lack of aesthetic spatial and temporal coherence, the absence of any distinctive landmarks. These all produce a fake space, a no-space which can not conceptualize space in relation to human processes of production and consumption. Such spaces can only consume: water to maintain the seeded lawn, energy to heat and cool a behemoth of a house, diesel to move its occupants from one point to another, natural resources stripped away for development, energy-expensive materials for the efficient production of more homes. But because the homes exist in a suspended state, in which they consume but do not have to share among or produce, their inhabitants can not even conceptualize their own consumption, because it is not situated in relation to production. Thus consumption becomes neutralized and stands alone, no longer figured as part of an ongoing and dynamic relationship with production.

In a suburban way of thinking, mutuality is not only unnecessary, but absurd. And so the form of the suburban buildings, though ugly, produces something worse than a tasteless eyesore. They produce a way of thinking that neutralizes ownership of space, such that it is only right that you keep sitting at the table even while your peer eats on the floor.