Hasta La Gadget!

Photographer Martin Adolfsson’s book Suburbia Gone Wild, published earlier this year, documents the weird and expanding mirage of seemingly endless copies and duplicate environments called suburbia, like some poorly diagnosed spatial syndrome taking over the landscapes of the world from Mexico to Egypt, Thailand to India, to here in the United States.

The rooms are like dispersed pods from an unacknowledged global hotel chain, different only in their tiniest details. Is that image, above, from a house in Los Angeles, on the outskirts of Raleigh, or—as it happens—a suburb in Cairo, Egypt? Is this next photograph from Florida, Thailand, or—in reality—Moscow, Russia? How on earth can you tell?

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Shows like Million Dollar Listings are fun and all—but, like, who can relate? The new Discovery Health show Urban Suburban might represent a more realistic real estate conundrum for most Americans: a real-life version of the Town Mouse and the Country Mouse, where homebuyers have to decide between settling down in suburbia or the big city.

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The real estate listing for 3970 Spencer St. shows a foreclosed two-bedroom on a suburban street east of the Las Vegas Strip. That’s nothing remarkable in Vegas, which has one of the highest foreclosure rates in the country, but this house is special: It’s 25 feet underground. A high-end fallout shelter built in secret, it’s a small monument to the Cold War—as well as the dream of post-War suburbia in the American west.

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