The Parable of Mahagonny: Urban Deserts and the Creation of Suburbia

Abstract

It has become natural to buy: the shift between classical production-based capitalism to postmodern consumer-based capitalism specifically examining its effects on the city and its role in the creation of suburbia. Taking Brecht and Weill’s opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny to reflect this shift and using Detroit as the prime example, this paper examines how consumer capitalism created a desert urban wasteland in what was once the booming industrial city. Geographically, capitalism has shifted from the agrarian rural to the industrialized urban, to the consumptive suburban. Primarily using Marx/Engels, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Jameson, the exodus from the city to suburbia is explained in cultural terms. The suburban is an ideological framework more than a geographic location. This idea, along with an of examination of the megapoleis of Asia compared to the U.S. Eastern seaboard, I contend that late capitalism created a suburbia which gave postmodernism an ideological space. Ultimately, the paper leaves reader with two questions: will Asian industrialization and its decline mirror that of the United States and what space and mode, geographic and discursive, will capitalism take next?