Riismandel, Kyle. Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture 1975-2001. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020.

Reviewed by Davy Knittle

In July of 1981, six-year-old Adam Walsh was kidnapped while his mother shopped at the Hollywood Mall in Hollywood, Florida. Adam’s remains were found two weeks later in a canal just over 130 miles from the site of his abduction. Even though Adam’s kidnapping occurred amid the Atlanta child murders, in which twenty-nine Black children and teenagers were killed, Adam’s case, the case of a young white boy, received unparalleled federal resources, news coverage, and cultural response. The treatment of Adam’s murder was indicative of a growing sense of suspicion among white suburban residents in the final decades of the twentieth century, which Kyle Riismandel refers to as constituting the “neighborhood of fear.”

Riismandel’s Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture 1975-2001 engages a sweeping archive of film, television, popular books, board games, music and album covers, journalism, and government documents. The onset of collective fear that Riismandel describes was upsetting to white suburban residents because it ruptured the idea that the successful performance of normativity would be rewarded with “the privilege not to see, worry about, or confront local dangers.” The three forms of fear that Riismandel tracks are the environmental threat of toxic exposure, the security threat of home invasion and kidnapping, and the cultural threat of media that might entice young people into non-normative behaviors. Riismandel argues that suburban residents addressed these concerns with local, rather than policy, solutions, “acting to protect themselves and their neighborhoods.” And yet, the new protections, for which white suburbanites lobbied further, undermined the sense of local safety that they believed was their right.

The book persuasively describes how white, cis-heterosexual, middle-class fear contributed both to the normalization of an anti-Black culture of neighborhood control and to the diminished potential of effective policy responses. As Riismandel argues, “suburban actions also furthered the neoliberal project that continues to undermine the efficacy of the state, weaken non-suburban communities, and marginalize viable explanations for and solutions to visible social problems.” To this end, some of the book’s most compelling analysis is in the third chapter on the rise of home security systems and the normalization of a culture of private, local surveillance. Such a surveillance culture takes urbanist Jane Jacobs’s early 1960s recommendation for “eyes on the street” as a means of producing a collective sense of safety and turns those eyes into self-appointed emissaries of the carceral state. The goal of watching the street is no longer to support the hum of public activity but instead to use an anti-Black lens to identify suspicious behavior and enlist the aid of both state and private security forces.

The surveillance culture that Riismandel describes includes not only home security systems but also a broad range of other approaches to local control. This control extended at once to the management of suburban space and to the behavior of young people socialized in the suburbs. In Riismandel’s explanation, neighborhood groups and concerned parents banned heavy metal and forced malls to surveil teenagers using mall video arcades to push the boundaries of suburban behavior norms for the same reason that suburban communities installed security cameras, bought houses in gated developments, and lobbied against nuclear power plants destined for their towns. Riismandel also convincingly argues that the defensive organization of suburban life against a sense of pervasive and multi-sited threat has subsequently had significant economic, political, and cultural implications. Neighborhood of Fear follows the rise of legislation like the Castle Doctrine and Stand Your Ground laws, which distribute the power of racialized spatial control to property-owning residents. He also documents the normalization of a culture of consumption that made shopping into both a stress management technique and performance of national belonging and constituted the dominant response to household problems, from unruly teenagers to toxic drinking water.

Riismandel’s archive of suburban places spans a range of locations across the United States. In this respect, Neighborhood of Fear differs from other recent suburban and regional histories including Clayton Howard’s The Closet and the Cul-de-Sac (which focuses on the San Francisco Bay area), and Paige Glotzer’s How the Suburbs Were Segregated (which focuses on one development company that built a white enclave in Baltimore). This range of examples suggests that “suburb” in Riismandel’s analysis is more of an ideology than a geographic category. His analysis draws from examples that include rural Middletown, PA (the site of the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster), and the Mall of America in Minneapolis, as well as many national initiatives that targeted people more by what they believed than by where they lived.

One of Riismandel’s key terms is “productive victimization,” which he uses to describe how suburbanites responded to perceived threat by “leveraging their endangerment.” An example that Riismandel offers is a group of Long Island residents who successfully lobbied against a nuclear power plant proposed for their town without connecting their cause to anti-nuclear activism or arguing against the broader risks of nuclear power. Throughout the book, Riismandel’s analysis clearly argues that initiatives that produced beneficial spatial, policy, or economic change for some white, cis-heterosexual suburban residents were actively destructive for people marginalized by norms of racialized gender and sexuality. And yet, the term “productive victimization” occludes the larger impact caused by local approaches to systemic problems, as it leaves opaque what this victimization produced and for whom. A term like “racial victimization” might have put more emphasis on the racial privilege bolstered by the anti-Black culture of suspicion Riismandel describes. Alternatively, a term like “consumptive victimization” might have emphasized that the subjects of Riismandel’s analysis contributed to the development of a consumer culture designed to address their sense of threat.

One other area where Riismandel’s astute critique of a culture of suspicion could have benefitted from greater specificity is in his discussion of what he terms the “carceral suburb.” He explains in the book’s third chapter that the carceral suburb describes the context in which “homeowners functioned as both warden and inmate in a jail of their own design.” Unlike most of Riismandel’s analysis, the frame of the carceral suburb conflates an anti-Black carceral state with the self-regulation of white suburban neighborhoods. Riismandel argues that a culture of privatized surveillance harms both those directing the gaze of control and those on which it falls. And yet, as Riismandel expresses elsewhere in the book, these forms of harm are significantly uneven and organized around histories of systemic anti-Blackness in ways that the term “carceral suburb” elides.

Riismandel’s archive includes not only a late twentieth-century history of the suburb, but also an account of the spatial and social policies that produced contemporary conservative ideology. Riismandel’s archive of localized approaches to securitization serves to historicize US conservatism’s twin emphases on individual control and the performance of a patriarchal flavor of white cis-heteronormativity that dictates contemporary debates about issues including gun rights and access to reproductive care. Riismandel argues that white suburban spatial control justified conservative policy as “pragmatic and nonideological,” even as it intervened in highly politicized ideas about the production and maintenance of safety. And Riismandel importantly demonstrates that many people who did not identify as political conservatives were still interpellated in a cultural context in which performing their white, middle-class, suburban status encouraged them to adopt local orientations and behaviors that were aslant to their political beliefs regarding state and national issues. Neighborhood of Fear serves as an elucidating reminder of the obstacles to narrating local instances of social and cultural problems in structural terms. As the book makes evident, present and future attempts to take issues like environmental toxicity or gun violence as systemic problems must go against the precedent set by decades of initiatives motivated by the “neighborhood of fear” and its privatizing and localizing orientation to public life.

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Davy Knittle (he/they) is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Delaware. In 2022, he was HMEI/Princeton Mellon Fellow in Architecture, Urbanism, and Environment at Princeton University. He works at the intersection of urban studies, the environmental humanities, and queer and trans studies. His scholarship has been published or is forthcoming in Planning Perspectives, Feminist Formations, Perspecta, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment.

Featured image (at top): As Riismandel explains, “the need for neighborhood watch and the widespread installation of alarm systems symbolized the loss of what the suburb had once meant—the privilege of not thinking about safety” (82). Ellin Beltz, “Neighborhood Watch Sign” (2015), Wikimedia Commons.