Thirty kilometres south of central Chennai, just out of earshot of the honking, hand-painted lorries roaring up Old Mahabalipuram Road, you seem to have reached rural India. The earth road buckles and heaves. Farmers dressed in Madras-checked dhotis rest outside huts roofed with palm leaves. Goats wander about. Then you turn a corner, go through a gate, and arrive in California.
Lakewood Enclave is a new development of 28 large two-storey houses, wedged tightly together. The houses are advertised as "Balinese-style", although in truth they are hard to tell apart from any number of suburban homes around the world. Outside, the houses are painted a pale pinkish-brown; inside, the walls are white, the floors are stone and the design is open-plan. They each have three bedrooms (middle-class Tamil families are small these days) and a covered driveway to protect a car from the melting sun. Just one detail makes them distinctively Indian: a cupboard near the door for Hindu gods.
A quarter of a century ago your correspondent taught in a school not far from these houses. It was a rural area; bonnet macaques would sometimes invade his shower. Now farmers are selling their small parcels of land to house builders for sums beyond previous imagining. Commuters are rushing in so that, every morning, they can rush out again. Chengalpattu, the district where Lakewood lies (see map where the new development is also pictured), now contains more than half a million people. Lakewood looks likely to be the rule, not the exception. "The force of human nature means it will happen," says Balaji Narasimhan of SSPDL, its developer. "You can't stop it."
The shift in population from countryside to cities across the world is often called the "great urbanisation". It is a misleading term. The movement is certainly great: the United Nations reckons that the total urban population in developing countries will double between 2010 and 2050, to 5.2 billion, while the rural population will shrink slightly. But it is nothing like as obviously urban.
People may be moving towards cities, but most will not end up in their centres. Few cities are getting more crowded downtown; between 2001 and 2011 Chennai added just 7% more people while Chengalpattu swelled by 39%. In developed and developing worlds, outskirts are growing faster than cores. This is not the great urbanisation. It is the great suburbanisation.
Suburbs are curious places, neither here nor there. They have been around since ancient Rome (which gave the world the word), but it was not until the 19th and 20th centuries that first the train and then the bus and car brought them truly into their own--the first places in human history where many people lived but far fewer worked. The idea of places with little purpose other than providing space for domestic life struck those from city and country alike as peculiar and diminished.
In 1904 the Times worried that London would be surrounded by "a district of appalling monotony, ugliness and dullness". That dullness was said to seep out of the suburbs' tidily planned streets and into the minds of their inhabitants, giving rise to a condition known as suburban neurosis. To Lewis Mumford, an American urbanist writing in 1961, suburbia was:
a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mould.
To observers like Mumford, suburbs were not just unfortunate urban appendages; they were anti-urban. They enabled a woman to opt out of the vibrant, sociable city, where she at least knew her local butcher and grocer, and live what he called "an encapsulated life" apart from others. Suburbs were machineries of isolation.
The financial crisis of 2008 turned bien-pensant concern and disdain into a new doom-mongering. The crisis hit the suburbs exceptionally hard: many, especially newer ones, became blighted by foreclosure; their economies, which rested on building and selling houses, collapsed.
In 2012 Stockton, a previously fast-growing burgh in the suburban sprawl of the San Francisco Bay Area, became the biggest city in American history to file for bankruptcy. San Bernardino, another essentially suburban city, soon followed. In parts of California an uptick in cases of West Nile virus was blamed on the many abandoned swimming pools. At this point the argument against suburbia changed. It was no longer regrettable but inevitable. It was dead.
Leigh Gallagher's book "The End of the Suburbs", published in 2013, is not so much an attack on suburbia as a post-mortem assessment of its pathologies. Americans--especially young Americans--have turned against the car-oriented, low-rise life, she explains.
They are flocking to city centres, where they live in rented apartments, take trams or walk to work, and hang out in coffee shops.
The suburbs are left ever poorer and more criminal. In more subtle pieces of high-density triumphalism like "The Triumph of the City" by Edward Glaeser and "The Great Inversion" by Alan Ehrenhalt, suburbs are no longer a threat to successful cities. Instead, successful cities threaten them.
American suburbs undoubtedly have their problems, as this year's riots and protests after the shooting of a teenager in Ferguson, a suburb of St Louis, show. Many suburbs are poorer than once they were, and a lot of city centres are much more attractive places to live than they used to be. Still, more than half of Americans now live in suburbs, and many of them do so by choice.
The world as a whole is quickly following suit. In the 1950s Taiwanese planners toured Britain's garden cities and returned to build some of their own. Orange County, north of Beijing, is a clone of the California suburb it is named after, even down to the kidney-shaped swimming pools. In much of the world people born in cities, or who came to cities young, are moving out, and incomers from the country do not manage, or aspire, to live right in the centre of their chosen city. Even as their populations grow, the density of metropolitan areas is dropping all around the developing world.
Those who argue that suburbia is dying are wrong on the facts; those who say it is doomed by the superiority of higher-density life make a far from convincing case. Cities that have sought to stop the sprawl--London is the most striking example--have achieved dubious benefits at great cost.
In one sense the critics are right: suburbs are a place apart. People who live close to the heart of buzzing cities can feel themselves part of a great project. Suburbanites have relinquished that, or forgone it. What they have gained in its stead is surprisingly consistent from city to city and from country to country. Suburbs are about family, ease and quietness.
Searingly ambitious people find them dull, and some become alienated in them. But many others experience a humble liberation. D.J. Waldie, then an official in the southern California city of, as it happens, Lakewood, described his suburb as "adequate to the demands of my desire". And to a great many other people's desires, it turns out.
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