Lone Star Suburbs

In a timely book about the planning and politics of suburbs, editors Paul J. P. Sandul and Scott Sosebee provide a history about the spatial transformation of Texas. Lone Star Suburbs: Life on the Texas Metropolitan Frontier confronts the “Texas myth” of invented memory and traditions of Texas as a vast open range of cowboy cultural and rural spaces (p. 4). A discussion of suburbs—the history, demographics, and politics—is an important subject in 2020, especially as current political parties court their residents. Sandul introduces the book’s thesis in his chapter “Texas Suburbia Rising.” Texas transformed into a suburban landscape carefully crafted through planning and politics, where more than half the population lives today. He examines how popular culture and popular historians perpetuated the “Texas myth” of the Lone Star State as a rural and rugged region. Sandul illustrates how “structures and relation of power establishes so-called truth and disseminates it” (p. 5). Subsequent essays provide the historical context for how city planners and politicians organized the spaces around Texas’s largest cities. The authors also explore city planning, infrastructure, municipal politics, population density, and religion to show how the myth of the open range and cowboys does not hold up to scrutiny. Three chapters explore race and suburbs and how politics affected the growth and development of Black and Asian communities outside the city center.

Archaeology · Context (archaeology) · Frontier · Geography · Metropolitan area · Mythology · Political science · Politics · Population · Sociology · State (computer science) · American History and Culture · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Demography · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies