Imagine a city council meeting filled with engaged residents. Following a discussion of school sports leagues and property taxes, it’s decided that the body will “pursue ceaselessly the task of education and combat to substitute for false bourgeois democracy the true democracy of the people against its profiteers.”

It’s difficult to envision this taking place in any US city. It’s even harder to see it happening in the suburbs. Yet these words were spoken eighty years ago in Bobigny, a small town on the outskirts of Paris. Is that kind of working-class consciousness possible in US suburbia?

Cities have always been hubs of worker organizing in the United States. The class geography of US cities has traditionally been the inverse of European ones. In the US, the rich took to the suburbs, leaving workers to occupy urban centers. There, many found easier access to social services, job opportunities, and cheap housing. The social connection that density offered helped workers build strong movements, from the sweatshop laborers of turn-of-the-century New York City to the cultural frontists of the 1930s and the civil rights leaders of the 1960s.