This article is part of Ireland’s Changing Suburbs, an Irish Times series exploring our fast-growing new towns, changing older neighbourhoods, and shrinking rural landscapes.

In James Joyce’s early short story A Painful Case, the rather haughty Mr Duffy chooses to reside in Chapelizod because “he wished to live as far as possible from the city of which he was a citizen and because he found all the other suburbs of Dublin mean, modern and pretentious.” Joyce captures in a single sentence two of the profound ambiguities of suburban life.

One is that the sense of distance from the urban centre is not fixed but ever-changing: Chapelizod, 6km from O’Connell Bridge, would now be considered, not far away from, but conveniently close to, “the city”. The other is that every suburb except one’s own is always mean, modern and pretentious. Where I live is a buoyant community – where you live is a soulless wasteland.

As far back as the 1940s, the brilliant music hall comedian Jimmy O’Dea satirised this attitude: “There are some quite decent suburbs, I am sure./ O Rathmines is not so bad or Terenure./O we’ve heard of spots like Inchicore,/ But really don’t know where they are;/For, thank heavens, we are living in Rathgar.”

The conceptual problem of suburbs is that they have always been defined by what they are not. They are not part of the urban core of a historic city. And they are not out in “the country”.

In our own culture, the classic locations for representations of Irish life have been what we might call in shorthand the Synge/O’Casey duopoly: remote West of Ireland villages or the teeming tenements of a crumbling Georgian Dublin.

The only cities that really matter to John Synge’s people are those of North America.