"American suburbs are not the homogeneous places we sometimes take them for. Today's suburbs are racially, ethnically, and economically diverse with as many Democratic as Republican voters, a growing population of renters, and rising poverty. The cliché of white picket fences is well past its expiration date. The history of suburbia is equally surprising: American suburbs were once fertile ground for utopian planning, communal living, socially-conscious...

"This is a work of American history and cultural studies in which the author examines how Americans imagined and regulated suburban space in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Beginning in the 1970s, rising crime, environmental threats, and conflicts over the use of public space made suburbanites feel threatened. And the technologies of cable television, VCRs, and video games brought representations of these threats into suburban homes. The...