Suburb
Suburbia redirects here. Please see Suburbia (disambiguation).Suburban redirects here. Please see Suburban (disambiguation).Suburbs are inhabited districts located either inside a town or
city's outer rim or just outside its
official limits (the term varies from country to country), or the outer elements of a
conurbation.
The presence of certain elements (whose definition varies amongst
urbanists, but usually refers to some basic services and to the territorial contiguity) identifies a suburb as a peripheral populated area with a certain autonomy, where the density of habitation is usually lower than in an inner city area, though state or municipal house building will often cause departures from that organic gradation. Suburbs have typically grown in areas with an abundance of flat land near a large urban zone, usually with minimal traditions of citizens clustering together for
defence behind fortified city walls, and with transport systems that allow
commuting into more densely populated areas with higher levels of commerce.
The word "suburb" is derived from the
Old French "sub(b)urbe" and ultimately from the
Latin "suburbium," formed from "sub," meaning "under," and "urbs," meaning "city." The first recorded usage, according to the
Oxford English Dictionary, comes from Wyclife in 1380, where the form "subarbis" is used.
In the United States, Canada and most of Western Europe the word "suburb" usually refers to a separate
municipality,
borough or
unincorporated area outside a central town or city. This definition is evident, for example, in the title of
David Rusk's book
Cities Without Suburbs (ISBN 0943875730), which promotes
metropolitan government; in the UK, much of this pattern dates to
Margaret Thatcher's reforms of 1985. US colloquial usage sometimes shortens the term to "'burb" (with or without the apostrophe), and "The Burbs" first appeared as a term for the suburbs of
Chicagoland.
This division is not as prevalent in
Ireland, where "suburb" refers to residential neighbourhoods outside of the city centre.
In the United States, the word "suburb" is often used to refer to a "
bedroom community" where most of the residents do not work in their own town, i.e. they commute to a nearby city for work.
In
Australia and
New Zealand, "suburbs" are official postal and addressing subdivisions of a city. The term can refer to "
inner suburbs" such as
Te Aro in
Wellington or
Ultimo in
Sydney.
Outer suburbs are the postal divisions found in the outer rings of the metropolitan areas, and usually lie within the boundaries of a separate municipality, such as the
City of Fairfield. In Australia, the key commercial element - commuting to work - was not present in the initial rise of suburbs, although it would appear during the 20th century. The term "suburb" as used in Australia reflects this, and thus has an ambiguous meaning to non-Australians.
Inhabitants of these areas generally identify with the central city, and often consider themselves to be inhabitants of the central city. Indeed, neighbourhoods within a city proper that share physical and social characteristics with the suburbs as already described are also often called suburbs.
Many sociologists see suburbs as a post-urban area which develops in response to worsening conditions within a city with a communication and transport system which allows citizens to live outside the city while doing business inside.
The suburbs and more distinct settlements around a town or city may look towards the urban area for goods, services and employment opportunities. That wider area may be called the
hinterland of the town or a "city region". In the era before motorised travel, the radius of the hinterland roughly coincided with the distance that livestock could be herded to and from a market during daylight hours. In lowland areas, without severe geographic barriers to movement, a spacing of towns between 15 and 20 miles (24 and 32 km) is therefore quite common. Suburbs with a healthier environment are often found upwind of those parts of a town or city where heavy industry was first established. Naturally, the suburbs suffering air pollution tended to be cheaper and hence tend to be occupied by those with lower incomes.
The growth of suburbs was initially facilitated by the development of
zoning laws and more effective and accessible means of
transport. In the older cities of the northeast U.S., suburbs originally developed along
train or
trolley lines that could shuttle workers into and out of city centers where the jobs were located. This practice gave rise to the term
bedroom community or dormitory, meaning that most daytime
business activity took place in the city, with the working population leaving the city at night for the purpose of going home to sleep.
The growth in the use of trains, and later automobiles and highways, increased the ease with which workers could have a job in the city while
commuting in from the suburbs. In the United Kingdom,
railways stimulated the first mass exodus to the suburbs. The Metropolitan Railway, for example, was active in building and promoting its own housing estates in the north-west of London - consisting mostly of detached houses on large plots - which it then marketed as "Metroland". As car ownership rose and wider roads were built, the commuting trend accelerated as in North America. This trend towards living away from towns and cities has been termed the
urban exodus.
Zoning laws also contributed to the location of residential areas outside of the city center by creating wide areas or "zones" where only residential buildings were permitted. These suburban residences are built on larger lots of land than in the urban city. For example, the lot size for a residence in
Chicago is usually 125 feet (38 m) deep, while the width can vary from 14 feet (4 m) wide for a row house to 45 feet (14 m) wide for a large standalone house. In the suburbs, where standalone houses are the rule, lots may be 85 feet (26 m) wide by 115 feet (35 m) deep, as in the Chicago suburb of
Naperville. Manufacturing and commercial buildings were segregated in other areas of the city.
Increasingly, due to the congestion and
pollution experienced in many city centers (accentuated by the commuters' vehicles), more people moved out to the suburbs. Moving along with the population, many companies also located their offices and other facilities in the outer areas of the cities. This has resulted in increased density in older suburbs and, often, the growth of lower density suburbs even further from city centers. An alternative strategy is the deliberate design of "new towns" and the protection of
green belts around cities. Some social reformers attempted to combine the best of both concepts in the
Garden City movement.
In the United States, urban areas have often grown faster than city boundaries since the 18th century. Until the 1900s, new neighborhoods usually sought or accepted
annexation to the central city to obtain city services. In the 20th century, however, many suburban areas began to see independence from the central city as an asset. In some cases, suburbanites saw self-government as a means to keep out people they considered undesirable, such as
immigrants and
African Americans.
Cleveland, Ohio is typical of many American central cities; its municipal borders have changed little since 1922, even though the Cleveland urbanized area has grown many times over. Several layers of suburban municipalities now surround cities like Cleveland, Chicago and
Philadelphia.
While suburbs had originated far earlier, the suburban population in North America exploded after
World War II. Returning veterans wishing to start a settled life moved
en masse to the suburbs. Between
1950 and
1956 the resident population of all US suburbs increased by 46%. During the same period of time, African-Americans were rapidly moving north for better jobs and educational opportunities than they could get in the segregated South, and their arrival in Northern cities
en masse further stimulated white suburban migration, a phenomenon known as
white flight.
Many people equate suburbs with early planned cities such as
Levittown, New York and
Rohnert Park, California. Rohnert Park, a suburb of
Santa Rosa, California and
San Francisco was originally marketed in the late 50's as "A Country Club for the middle class."
In the U.S.,
1970 was the first year that more people lived in suburbs than elsewhere.
(1)The development of the skyscraper and the sharp inflation of downtown real estate prices also led to downtowns being more fully dedicated to businesses, thus pushing residents outside the city centre. By 1980 this was often perceived as undesirable, extending travel times and adding to people's sense of isolation and fear in central areas outside trading hours.
United States
Typically, many post-
World War II American suburbs have been characterized by:
* Lower densities than central cities, with single-family homes predominating.
* Zoning patterns that separate residential and commercial development as well as different intensities and densities of development.
*
Shopping malls and strip shopping centers instead of a
downtown shopping district.
* Streets lined by off-street car parking or vegetation instead of buildings.
* A predominantly white or middle- or upper-class population, with notable exceptions in various older cities (e.g.,
Ford Heights, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago and a municipality with one of the lowest per capita incomes in the U.S).
* A street network designed to conform to a
hierarchy, including residential streets that curve and often end in
cul-de-sacs, in place of the grid pattern common to most central cities and pre-
World War II suburbs.
* Ready access to
freeways.
* Limited access to
public transit, often requiring a long walk, several transfers, and generally poor and infrequent service.
* The importance of public space reduced in favor of private property.
* Low crime-rate.
* Low traffic-rate & low pollution.
However, suburbs come in many types. Some, such as
Compton, California, are predominantly non-white. As metropolitan areas grow, high-density development can, but often does not spread outside of the central city into nearby suburbs.
Some suburban areas have developed their own large clusters of office and retail buildings. These areas, such as
Tysons Corner, Virginia and
Parsippany, New Jersey, are sometimes referred to as "
edge cities", a term invented by journalist
Joel Garreau. Edge cities differ from traditional downtowns in that they are automobile-centric rather than reliant on
public transportation.
Controversy
Suburbs became popular as an opportunity for families to seek an alternative to crowding of central cities. Few families could attain the ideal known as the "
American Dream," frequently associated with homeownership, if all metropolitan residents were confined to central-city boundaries. Development activity outside central cities was enabled by innovations in transportation as well as public subsidies that bore the cost of infrastructure such as roads, water, and electricity. The trend toward deconcentrated urban form was further advanced by the advent of automobile culture and the availability of unprecedented amounts of energy in the form of carbon fuels.
But the trend toward suburban living is not without a large group of detractors. In recent years, suburban "
sprawl", a derisive term for poorly planned suburban growth, has become an increasingly hot-button issue in American politics.
Critics of suburbanization say suburban growth will:
* Lead to the decay of central cities and their downtowns, which are left without a base of nearby middle-class residents.
* Quickly destroy cropland, displace nature, and consume attractive countryside.
* Increases traffic at the central area.
* Cause a decline in the public's health, since buildings in suburbs are often so far apart that driving is the only way to get from one place to another.
* Costly, due to the new infrastructure required for development, paid by the existing urban area.
* Provide a limited set of housing choices.
* Building more soulless places with no distinct identity or feeling of
community.
In response to these concerns, a socio-political movement called "
New Urbanism" or "
Smart Growth" is currently in vogue in the U.S. This movement among some city
planners, builders, and architects holds that denser, more city-like communities with zoning laws designed to encourage mixed-use buildings are desirable and may foster a better sense of community among residents. Some of these communities seek to reduce car-dependency (and thus the use of personal automobiles) wherever possible, since residents ideally would not need to commute as far, or at least not need perform every errand by car. This movement has resulted in both the construction of new developments that embody these principles, and renovation of areas in existing city centers for new residential and commercial activities.
However, automobile-dependent suburbs remain the norm. Indeed, many of the fastest-growing communities in the U.S. are
exurbsâ€"communities even farther away and lower-density than suburbs.
Some people have criticized not only the character of suburbs but the framework of
local government and state and federal laws that encourage them to proliferate.
Metropolitanism is the idea that entire metro areas should work together, instead of being divided into many competing municipalities. One American metro area often cited as an example of metropolitanism at work is
Portland, Oregon, which has the country's
only directly elected metropolitan government. Some other cities, notably
Indianapolis, Indiana and
Jacksonville, Florida, have merged with some of their suburbs to form
consolidated local governments.
Canada
Urban development in Canada has largely paralleled development in the United States. After World War II, large bedroom communities of single-family homes and shopping centers sprouted on the outskirts of Canadian cities.
However, Canada has far fewer suburban municipalities than the U.S. does. Many large cities, such as
Winnipeg,
Calgary and
Ottawa, extend all the way to the countryside. Canadian provincial governments often take the question of municipal boundaries into their own hands and impose city-suburb mergers. The
Toronto,
Montreal and
Vancouver areas still have suburban municipalities, although their suburban areas are generally grouped into fewer cities than is typical in the U.S. Ontario created a "metropolitan" government for the Toronto area in 1954, but the urbanized area has since grown well beyond it. Today, Toronto has some of the largest suburban municipalities in North America, with close to three quarters of a million people living in
Mississauga alone.
Other countries
In many parts of the globe, however, suburbs are economically poor areas, inhabited by people sometimes in real misery, keeping them at the limit of the city borders for economic or social reasons like the impossibility of affording the (usually higher) costs of life in the town. An example in the developed world would be the
banlieues of
France, which are comparable to the
inner cities of the US.
In the UK, the government is seeking to impose minimum densities on newly approved housing schemes in parts of southeast England. The new catchphrase is 'building sustainable communities' rather than housing estates. However, commercial concerns tend to retard the opening of services until a large number of residents have occupied the new neighbourhood.
In the
Third World, such
slum areas are often irregularly built or managed, with individualistic, unregulated building and other forms of social or legal disorder. It has been said that this would be sometimes a case of spontaneous or psychological
apartheid. In some cases inhabitants just live off the waste materials produced by the city (like, increasingly, around new African towns) and usually in such situations suburbs and houses are roughly built, often not even in the traditional building materials, as seen for example in the
bidonvilles. Often
nomads settle their camps in suburbs. The occupiers of more industrialised or longer-lasting homes may refer to such suburbs as "
shanty towns". The
favelas of
Rio de Janeiro may also be considered an example of this type of suburb.
In the illustrative case of
Rome,
Italy, in the
1920s and
1930s, suburbs were intentionally created
ex novo in order to give lower classes a destination, in consideration of the actual and foreseen massive arrival of poor people from other areas of the country. Many critics have seen in this development pattern (that was circularly distributed in every direction) also a quick solution to a problem of
public order (keeping the unwelcome poorest classes - together with criminals, in this way better controlled - comfortably remote from the elegant "official" town). On the other hand, the expected huge expansion of the town soon effectively covered the distance from the central town, and now those suburbs are completely engulfed by the main territory of the town, and other newer suburbs were created at a further distance from them.
Many suburbs have become famous in their own right, often due to the wealth and prestige associated with them. Perhaps the best-known American suburb is
Beverly Hills, California, a wealthy suburb of
Los Angeles (Though today this is not as evident as that its population swells four times over during working hours). Other well-known suburbs include
Shaker Heights, near
Cleveland, which was one of the first planned garden communities in the U.S.;
Grosse Pointe, Michigan, near
Detroit; the
Main Line suburbs of
Philadelphia; affluent
Long Island, New York, most of which are suburbs of
New York City; much of Northern
New Jersey which is all a suburb of also New York City;
Redmond, Washington, home of
Microsoft Corp., near
Seattle; and
Norman, Oklahoma, home of the
University of Oklahoma and center of the nation's meterological research interests.
Because of different local government patterns, suburbs of one city may be bigger than a central city in another area. The most-populous suburb in the United States is
Mesa, Arizona near Phoenix, with an estimated population of 442,780 in 2005 -- more than
Atlanta,
Cincinnati, or
Pittsburgh.
Virginia Beach, with a population of around 450,000 is the largest city in the state of
Virginia; some would consider it a suburb of
Norfolk. Canada's, as well as North America's, largest suburb,
Mississauga, Ontario, has nearly 700,000 people, greater than
Vancouver,
Boston, Massachusetts, and
Washington, D.C..
Some suburbs swell so fast that they take over the politics of the counties they are built in. This happened in the 1990s to three suburbs in
Florida:
The Villages,
Palm Bay and
Deltona.
The Burbs, a
comedy film starring
Tom Hanks deals with life in a surburban neighbourhood.
Neighbours has been on television in
Australia since
1985 and the
United Kingdom from the following year. It is set in Ramsay Street in the fictional suburb Erinsborough.
Knots Landing was a long-running show depicting suburban life. It was set in the fictional town of Knots Landing, California, and followed the lives of several families who lived on the suburban cul-de-sac Seaview Circle.
*The
Australian Broadcasting Corporation television comedy
Kath & Kim pillories the nouveau
white trash of
subdivisions with exaggerated provincial accents and below-average intelligence. It is set in the fictional suburb of Fountain Lakes.
*Suburban life through the eyes of stay-at-home wives and mothers is portrayed in the
ABC television
soap opera Desperate Housewives.
*Many U.S.
sit-coms are set in the suburbs, including the animated
Family Guy and
The Simpsons.
*The U.S. sitcom
Roseanne is set in the fictional town of Lanford, a suburb of
Chicago, Illinois.
*Both tv shows set in the
Buffyverse,
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and
Angel show a link between suburbs and hell.
Sunnydale is built over the
Hellmouth, while on
Angel, the evil Senior Partners mantain hell dimension in which prisoners are trapped in an idyllic-looking suburban town filled with identical houses.
*The suburb of
Mount Prospect, IL was featured in the
The Blues Brothers film: Elwood bought his car from the Mount Prospect Police Auction.
*The
comic strip Over the Hedge (and its
Dreamworks SKG movie adaption) parodies American suburban life from the perspective of animals.
*
The Sims and
The Sims 2 computer games are set in fictional suburbs.
*The classic
Tim Burton film
Edward Scissorhands makes commentary on American suburbia through the use of exaggerated
cliches.
*Disney Channel movie
Stuck in the SuburbsThe term
suburbia is frequently used to encapsulate the concept of
suburbs as oddly picturesque slices of
tract-home nuclear family.
Given the
de facto segregation of the American
housing marketplace in the
1950s through
1970s, 'suburbia' also includes the notion of a 'white' area, inaccessible to members of other ethnicities and races, particularly
Blacks.
After the rise of
"Levittowns" across the
United States in the
1960s and 1970s, many American teens born during those decades began to describe the inherently sanitized and disspiriting nature of American suburbs.
The popular TV show The Wonder Years, which was set in the late 1960's and early 1970's took place in an undisclosed suburb. In the very first episode, the show's narrator comments on the seeming sameness of suburbia, in the ending narration noting that despite the rows of identical houses and carports, within each one are people with stories and individual lives.
The concept of 'suburbia' came to envelop this and other, sometimes endearing, idiosyncrasies of suburban life -- for example,
4th of July backyard
barbecues.
Popular culture largely recognized this concept during the
1980s and early
1990s. In Britain, television series such as
The Good Life,
Butterflies, and
The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin depicted suburbia as well-manicured but relentlessly boring, and its residents as either conforming their behaviour to this situation or going
stir crazy through its regimented blandness. In America, similar but more violent themes could be found in the works of
David Lynch.
In 1994, playwright
Eric Bogosian wrote and directed the play
subUrbia, which focused on suburban twentysomethings with no real life goals or direction reacting to the return of a high school friend who had become famous. The play was made into a low-budget, independent film in
1997, with
Richard Linklater at the directorial helm and featured up-and-coming actors
Steve Zahn,
Parker Posey,
Ajay Naidu, and
Giovanni Ribisi in lead roles.
Etymology: According to dialogue in the
1984 movie
Suburbia (no relation to the Bogosian version) [
1] , suburbia is a neologism made by combinining suburb and utopia.
The 1984
cult classic "
Repo Man," starring actor
Emilio Estevez, is based in a southern California suburb. Estevez plays Otto, a young punk who finds himself repossesing cars. A group of three punks run rampant doing 'crimes' like robbing liquor stores and eating sushi and then not paying for it. Estevez's famous line from the movie occurs when one of these punks is shot to death during an attempted robbery. As Otto holds his friends head up, he states that he blames society for his life of crime, and Otto responds, "that's bullshit; you're a white suburban punk . . . just like me."
* "Official Suburban Superman" by Suzi Quatro
* "
Suburbia" by the
Pet Shop Boys* "
Subdivisions" by
Rush* "Pleasant Valley Sunday" by
The Monkees* "
Jesus of Suburbia" by
Green Day* "
Rockin' the Suburbs" by
Ben Folds* "Jesusland" by
Ben Folds* "Little Boxes" by
Malvina Reynolds* "Buddha of Suburbia" by
David Bowie* "
Cherry Bomb" by
John Mellencamp* "Greater Omaha" by
Desaparecidos* "Suburban Home" by
The Descendents* "Sound of the Suburbs" by
The Members* "Hey Suburbia" by
Screeching Weasel* "Suburbia Streets" by
Fast Crew* "Suburban Life" by
Kottonmouth Kings* "Suburban Relapse" by
Siouxsie and the Banshees* "Dinner at Eight in the Suburbs" by
All-Time Quarterback* "Good job nice clothes" by
Corrupted Suburbs* "Suburbia" by
Schleprock* "My Pink Half of the Drainpipe" by the
Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band* "Christmas in Suburbia" by
Martin Newell* "Barons of Suburbia" by
Tori Amos*
Songs from Suburbia album by
Spring Heeled Jack* "Suburbia" by
Matthew Good Band* "Semi-Detached Suburban Mr. James" by
Manfred Mann* "Your Little Suburbia Is In Ruins" by
August Burns RedFear also makes a reference to Suburbia on
Record", in the song
Let's Have a War, which says "It's already started in the city, Suburbia will be easy." On the same album, in the song "I Love Living in the City," Lee Ving sings "The suburban scumbags, they don't care, they just get fat and dye their hair."
* Lewis, Robert (2001) "Manufacturing Montreal: The Making of an Industrial Landscape, 1850 to 1930" Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press
* Rybczynski, Witold (Nov. 7, 2005).
"Suburban Despair".
Slate.
* Smith, Albert C. & Schank, Kendra (1999). "A Grotesque Measure for Marietta".
Journal of Urban Design 4 (3).
*
demographic history of the United States*
edge city*
exurbia*
middle class*
Garden real estate*
streetcar suburb*
Town centreCrabgrass Frontier by
Kenneth T. Jackson 1985Managing Urban America by
Robert E. England and
David R. Morgan 1979Sprawl by
Robert Bruegmann 2005*http://www.ideal-homes.org.uk/why-suburbs-happen-01.htm on the suburban growth of London, England.
*http://www.hgs.org.uk/mystreet/index.html provides images of a mature north London suburb illustrating a wide range of domestic architecture.
*
The End of Suburbia, documentary film (see also,
Peak oil)
*http://fass.kingston.ac.uk/research/centres/suburban_studies/ for Europe's first interdisciplinary research centre for the study of suburbs, based at
Kingston University.
*
"Boomburbs": The Emergence of Large, Fast-Growing Suburban Cities in the United States, from
Fannie Mae.
*
Sierra Club Stopping Sprawl Main Page*
CBC Digital Archives - So long city. Hello suburbs!
