Queer Suburbia: Out of Silicon Valley

"Instead, these “little boxes” should remind scholars of the built environment that we need to understand meaning as well as form, carefully monitor change over time, attend to everyday habitation, and, perhaps most importantly, defer judgment."

- Margaret Crawford, Little Boxes

Crawford suggests that all of the characteristics (banality, sameness, low-density, etc) that make it an easy target for cultural criticism may allow for unexpected growth and diverse habitation that suburbia seems to lack on the surface. In comparing it to the growth of Silicon Valley, she invokes a common refrain (especially prevalent during COVID lockdowns), that density is not necessary to foster diversity.

Diversity, sure. But does it allow for community? Or does suburbia reinforce the hyper-individualism that seems to be antithetical to its regularity? 

Inside those little boxes, the individual can form relations between a unique identity and the outside world. The interior is privileged, and its tension with the conformed facade allows for disparate identities to occupy the same frame.

So it is with queerness (anti-normativity) in suburbia. Of course it exists, and of course it has always existed. But can it make a life there? The cell phone is in the bedroom. But so then is the arena, the concert hall, the stranger’s bedroom, the classroom. This phenomenon is not unique to queerness, but the flow of identity and communication through these channels suggests a distinct orientation toward digital space that disrupts the understanding of public and private within suburbia. Technology gets behind the facade.

Previously, reactions against suburbia took place in the city. Because these fellow anti-suburbanites had to go there to find each other. But now it can change from within. Digital spatial infrastructures enable the concurrent juxtaposition of more divergent identities than ever before - maybe this reflection of contemporary suburbia can take shape physically, too.