The Irvine New Town, Orange County, and the transformation of suburban political culture

This dissertation uses the construction and development of the Irvine New Town as a means of examining the transformation of the American metropolis over the course of the latter part of the 20th century. It does so by closely examining processes of urban planning and municipal politics to argue how a generalized shift towards a broadly defined "postmodern," "post-industrial," and "post-material" sensibility has transformed suburban political culture in surprising and underappreciated ways.;With few exceptions, most histories about American suburbia have stressed its connection to racism and privatism. Yet, as this dissertation argues, Irvine's story suggests that the history of American suburbia is not adequately explained by its historiography. In fact, what Irvine's story seems ultimately to suggest is that suburbanization has no necessary link to racial exclusion and political conservatism. While it was not immediately manifest (although important indicators were always present), Irvine's specific character---its connection to a University and a burgeoning "knowledge economy," the continued importance of its "reformist," "new town" narrative, its increasingly multicultural demographic make up---seems to suggest just the opposite. That is to say, at least in particular circumstances, suburban spaces can work against the kind of "regressive" traits historians and other observers attach to them almost as a matter of course.;As a self-consciously planned community, Irvine's example amplifies trends that appear in a more diffuse form in similar areas elsewhere in the country: Fairfax County, Virginia; DuPage County, Illinois; Seattle's Eastside suburbs; the North Carolina "Research Triangle"; and Silicon Valley. In this role, Irvine's story helps us to understand the political transformation of a society whose geographic and sociocultural center of gravity has come to be located in the office parks, strip malls, and subdivisions of a metropolitan field that can no longer be described as either "urban" or "suburban.".