If you care about materialist development of the American suburbs, have a go at reading Lewis Mumford and Kenneth Jackson. They both cover pre-car suburbs, why they developed, and their positives and exploitations. Jackson is more up to date but Mumford is more fun to read and was at one point a communist. I mean listen to this sass
In the mass movement into the suburban areas a new kind of community was produced, which caricatured both the historic city and the archetypal suburban refuge: a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold, manufactured in the central metropolis. Thus the ultimate effect of the suburban escape in our time is, ironically, a low-grade uniform environment from which escape is impossible.