In this paper I start delineating theSuburbanisation of the Mind Hypothesis where I argue that the globalspread of American suburbia has a strong imaginary component fuelledby, what I call, the Hollywood urban imaginarium {or representations ofthe American city in image-based entertainment media}. I show evidencethat the image of American suburbia in Hollywood entertainment mediacan be as far reaching as to influence the shape of new residentialdevelopments in a developing country. In-depth interviews in threeColombian cities with 103 people {including landowners, developers,urban designers, city planners, and homebuyers} directly and indirectlyrelated to the development of American-type suburbs yielded that theirdecisions to propose, finance, design, and build American-typelow-rise, low-density, detached single-family-home residentialneighbourhoods, strikingly similar to American middle-class suburbs,were in part influenced by the rich imagery of American suburbia inHollywood movies and TV series. I argue that the flows of such imagesare a major factor in the spread of American-type suburbs in developingcountries, and that American suburbia is becoming a de-facto new urbanlandscape of globalisation. Although the effects of entertainment mediain shaping personal cultural practices {hairdos, garments, consumergadgetry, eating habits, ways of talking, etc.} are well established inthe literature on mass media, much less studied are the effects of suchimagery in shaping the form of cities. Further, I claim that the flowof urban images in American entertainment media is now anotherimportant factor {in addition to the classical political, economic, andsocio-cultural factors} in the production of urban space worldwide. Thepaper also shows that in Colombia the influence of American culturaland political ideology and the long standing relationship of economicdependency with the U.S. reinforce the influence of media in the appealfor American mainstream urbanism.
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