Outside the Outside

Outside the Outside is a creative approach to questioning harmful and incorrect tropes about the suburbs and understanding them on their own terms, not as leftovers or outcasts of the central city. -- Lisa Berglund * Journal of the American Planning Association *
Outside the Outside offers a radical reconsideration of the suburbs, of their potential for living otherwise. Yet, this is not a romantic recasting of the burbs -- of was once imagined as staid, fixed, and always "peripheral to" -- Hern takes up questions local activists, scholars, planners and critics to ask how the suburb got to be, the logics of dispossession and urbanization, of capital accumulation, and so called flight, of racial, and colonial push-out and the refashionings of place and space that have come to make the periphery its own center. Hern moves through cities and burbs in an analysis of those logics to ask beyond the pushout and into the radical possibility of place, mobility, politics and life beyond the centers. -- Audra Simpson, Columbia University
Focusing on the notion of 'movement', Matt Hern's brilliant and captivating Outside the Outside presents an urgently needed, theoretically sophisticated street-level perspective on some of the most pertinent ongoing critical debates about life and politics in our decentered sub-urban world. -- Roger Keil, author of Suburban Planet
Hern's extraordinary book depicts the peripheral areas of contemporary metropolises beyond an ordinary picture of suburbia. His investigation reveals their peripheralization into substandard urban forms. Outside the Outside insists on seeing urbanism in its political-economic totality and demands a new language to transform politics and territory. This insightful book greatly advances our understanding of the increasingly complex and destabilized urban periphery -- Fulong Wu Bartlett Professor of Planning, University College London; author of Creating Chinese Urbanism.