Conclusion: ‘All Stories are Spatial Stories’

Abstract

’suburbia’, as Roger Webster tell us ‘has no history’. The suburb has been, until recently, little examined and is rarely the focus of sustained cultural work. Furthermore, the archive of fictional works treating the suburb and suburban experience seriously is very small. In fact Webster is quietly optimistic and sees an opportunity here: where the suburbs lack anything like ‘cultural signifying status’, he argues, this doesn’t mean that suburbs are inherently incapable of signifying anything, are spatio-cultural event horizons beyond which it is impossible to peer. Rather, he implies, we can also deal with this lack in a more liberating sense and argue that, for the suburbs, signification and meanings have, in fact, to be continually created and renewed. Lack of history here can also be an opportunity to view the suburbs in different ways.