What will the tens of millions of those raised in the American suburbs remember about those places? Here is one example:

I haven’t lived in Ypsilanti since I was 17, decamping first to a college campus north of Chicago, then to Chicago proper, then to Washington, D.C., where I’ve lived for more than 10 years. Yet at the risk of being one of the “apologists for the ubiquitous highway crud” whom Kunstler derides in his book, I must say that even after all this time, I feel at home in a strip mall. It is familiar; it is my heritage. At least once a year, the winds blow in from the Midwest, and I cannot rest until I make a pilgrimage to an Olive Garden. If home is “nowhere,” and nowhere has spread almost everywhere, then many places can remind you of home…

Of course, people do crave specificity in the places they’re from, even in suburbia. I think the particular passion people have for those slightly more regional chains—Californians and In-N-Out Burger, southerners and Waffle House—is evidence of that. No one wants to feel like they’re from nowhere. But life happens where you are, and if where you are is a strip mall by a highway on-ramp, well, you work with what you’ve got…

Is Taco Bell a gaudy restaurant that serves cheap sodium bombs that all taste basically the same and bear only a passing resemblance to actual Mexican cuisine? Definitely. But I’ll always love it, not just because I think it’s delicious but because that’s where my high-school friends and I would go to pick up sacks of 99-cent bean burritos to bring back for dinner when drama rehearsal was scheduled to run late. So Taco Bell bean burritos, to me, taste like staying at school until 9 p.m. and trying to do homework on the side of the stage between scenes, like the intense friendships of a ragtag group of teens figuring out who they are by pretending to be other people…

The feeling that your past is coherently tied to your present and your future is called “self-continuity,” and Routledge’s research shows that nostalgia facilitates it. So feeling nostalgic for the landscapes of suburbia doesn’t necessarily mean I think that’s the best way to design a community—it’s just part of my story. My soft spot for Olive Garden’s huge portions of mediocre fettuccine alfredo is just the vessel for the things I actually value: the feeling of belonging to a place and its people, the comforts of accumulated memories that adhere to spaces.

The memories referenced here primarily deal with common experiences and corporate chains. The suburbs do have plenty of these.

But, I also assume plenty of suburbanites would remember other things that are a little more place specific. Their home and possibly a yard. A specific school. A park. Perhaps also a McDonald’s or an Olive Garden or a TJ Maxx but a specific one or two they went to regularly. The same relationships that overlapped with chains also operated in specific places.

On one hand, the suburbs share common features. Structured around single-family homes and driving, the suburban lifestyle is a particular one. On the other hand, cities and rural areas also share common characteristics. Whether the suburbs are more conformist, patterned, dull, wasteful, and/or nowhere places compared to other places is up for interpretation and debate. James Howard Kunstler has argued this for years as have many other critics of the suburbs. Yet, plenty of Americans claim to like suburbs and the lifestyle there. (And policies and ideologies have supported suburban life for decades.)

What is more clear that at least a few generations of Americans have now been shaped by growing up in the suburbs. As adults, they have choices about whether to stay in suburbs or what kind of suburbs they might want to live in. Some have chosen other settings and many have continued to live in suburbs. How they remember these choices and experiences can differ.