suburban pacific

There's a line in the Shawshank Redemption about how the Pacific Ocean "has no memory". So I am wondering if the suburbs are like the Pacific? There is a vastness, a blankness, that makes the landscape interchangeable, to the point where one restaurant can turn into another overnight and you cannot remember what was there the previous day. Where Ventures turn into Circuit City, and soon to something else. I'm not saying that suburbs have zero character, or that the cityscape cannot be wiped clean and rebuilt into something unrecognizable. Just that some of the qualities that may draw us to a suburban environment, the openness, the blank slate quality, can also render it more generic, more transient.