Much attention has been given to increasing dominance of the post-war suburbs, and the concomitant rise of ‘suburbanism’ in ways of life in the ‘post-metropolis’. However, the meaning of suburbanism is rarely specified and there have been insufficient attempts to theorise its relationship to the urban. Drawing on the dialectical analyses of Henri Lefebvre, this article presents a theory of suburbanism as a subset of urbanism, with which it is in constant productive tension. Six distinct dimensions of the urbanism–suburbanism dialectic are identified, derived from extrapolating Lefebvre’s urban theory into second- and third-order analyses. These aspects of suburbanism are conceptualised not as static characteristics but as qualities that dynamically flow through, rather than define, particular places. Suburbanism is thus conceptualised separately from those places often termed suburbs, opening up the potential for interaction between these dimensions and the lived realities of everyday urban life and politics.
