The most radical invention of modernity is despatialized place, or the creation of non-places. Think: the shopping mall or the suburban subdivision: simply locations where individuals inhabit; not places where neighbors dwell. This creates, in turn, new forms of consciousness.

Most radically, by dislodging human beings from places, the invention of non-place allows for a reshaping of human sociability: namely, you get to choose your associations, rather than be forced to associate with those you share a place.

In small towns and in some city neighborhoods, older forms of sociability remain. You meet and depend upon your neighbors; you give cookies, you share eggs, you check in on them. Sometimes.

But those are things that need to be *practiced*; in no-places, those practices fall away

Most importantly: neighborliness is grounded on the basis of proximity as the only requisite. I might be politically or spiritually or culturally distant from neighbors, but we live *near each other* and so we share a common interest in each other.

But in the No-Places (eg the suburbs, the hyper-metropolis, etc), your well-being is not tied up with that of your neighbors. You are unhitched from them, allowing you to rehitch to opt-in communities: your church, your social groups, your work...

... but these opt-ins predetermine a set of characters for your interaction. They aren’t all the same, of course, but no ones that *wildly* different. Needless to say, *class* is a major factor here.

The new consciousness that emerges is that this is a *normal* form of sociability. That it is *natural* to only interact within one’s “class” (here construed broadly, and multivalently), and thus that one’s *interests* are shaped solely by that class.

And that leads to a *political* problem. Instead of interests being what’s best for the whole of societies (eg for our town, for our block, for our neighborhood), they become for these compartments (eg for me and my church-friends, who all happen to be white & middle class! Etc)

Which isn’t to say that class-politics aren’t always a part of politics anyways, or that housing enclaves don’t have a long history, but that modern society fails to curate and protect the commons that allow for discourse across classes...

... and that that, in the long run, is unsustainable, for precisely the reasons we see today.

TLDR: The suburbs are a manifestation of modernity’s drive to destroy places; we need places to create a legitimately just, free, and democratic society; and if we don’t act, future generations will not remember what places are, to our inevitable political destruction.