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Creativity from Suburban Nowheres
Rethinking Cultural and Creative Practices
Ilja Van Damme (Edited by), Ruth McManus (Edited by), Michiel Dehaene (Edited by)
9781487508296
Hardback, published 25 July 2023
390 pages, 24 b&w illustrations, 9 b&w maps, 5 b&w figures, and 2 b&w tables
23.5 x 15.6 x 2.5 cm, 0.62 kg
Looking at suburbs as places of creativity gives rise to novel and thought-provoking narratives that typically run counter to the idea that suburbs are sites of "ordinary," "mundane," and "everyday" practices. Far from being geographies of "nowhere" – dull, materialistic, and monotone – suburbs are unpacked as being heterogeneous and historically layered places of living, work, and creation. Situating creativity in place and time, Creativity from Suburban Nowheres displaces mainstream understandings of creativity and widespread stereotypes commonly associated with the suburbs. Contributors explore the particular forms of creativity that suburbs elicit both in the process of their making, materialization, and community construction, and in the myriad ways in which suburbs are inhabited and experienced. They highlight accounts of suburbs as places that give people the space and latitude to shape individual and collective identities through creative practices at odds with mainstream culture, and often remote from the classic agglomeration "assets" associated with inner cities. Anchored in historical and geographical research, this volume highlights how and in what forms creativity should be understood in the suburbs, why and when creativity can be found, and how the notion of suburban creativity overthrows ingrained and dominant normative viewpoints. Rather than seeing creativity arise despite its suburban location, Creativity from Suburban Nowheres illuminates the emancipatory potential of suburbs for creativity.
List of Illustrations and Tables Part I: Openings 1. Rethinking Creative and Cultural Practices from the Outside in – An Interdisciplinary Exploration 2. The Uncool Hunt: Searching for the Creative Suburb Part II: The Suburban Home as Locus of Creativity 3. "Pictures, Plants, and Ornaments": Jane Ellen Panton and Creative Practice in the British Victorian Suburbs 4. Battlegrounds of Taste and Distinction: Art and Antique Collectors in the Suburban Hinterland of Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Belgium 5. The Art of Living in the Australian Suburb: Creative and Cultural Production at Home in Suburban Melbourne, 1910s–1960s 6. Ideal Homes and Haunted Houses: Twenty-First-Century Irish Suburban Art and Writing Part III: The Suburban Creative Milieu 7. Halfway between Nature and Culture: Uccle Centre d’Art, a Colony of Artists in Brussels’s Suburbs in the Interwar Period 8. Exploring Creativity in Dublin’s Suburbs, 1900–2000: Insider, Outsider, Bourgeois, or Bohemian? 9. Recreating Locality: Community and Identity in Budapest Suburbs, 1995–2020 10. Creativity in Contemporary Housing Estate Neighbourhoods: The Case of Kontula, Helsinki 11. The Fung Bros Rep the Ethnoburb 12. Grounding Suburban LGBTQ+ Vernacular Creativities in the Toronto City-Region Part IV: Creating Suburbia 13. From Artistry to Agency? Transactional Architecture for the Creative Fashioning of the Antwerp Suburbs in the Early Twentieth Century 14. Creating Suburbs in North America: A Mutual Blind Spot
Preface
Contributors
Ilja Van Damme, Ruth McManus, and Michiel Dehaene
David Gilbert
Sarah Bilston
Ulrike Müller and Ilja Van Damme
Susan Reidy
Simon Workman
Tatiana Debroux
Ruth McManus
János B. Kocsis
Johanna Lilius
Margaret Crawford
Alison L. Bain
Tom Broes and Michiel Dehaene
Richard Harris