Suburb
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Image:Cincinnati-suburbs-tract-housing.jpg
Suburbs are inhabited districts located either on the outer rim of a city or outside the official limits of a city (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 continuity) 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 which allow commuting into more densely populated areas with higher levels of commerce.
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Semantics
Image:BroomfieldColorado.jpg 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 American English, the word "suburb" usually refers to a separate municipality or an unincorporated area outside of a central city. This definition is evident, for example, in the title of David Rusk's book Cities Without Suburbs, which promotes metropolitan government. 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.
In Britain, Ireland and New Zealand, "suburbs" are merely residential neighbourhoods outside of the city centre. For example, Wimbledon is considered a suburb of London, England. In New Zealand suburbs can also be inner city areas, such as Te Aro in Wellington.
Many characteristics of suburbia were found in Australia as early as the 19th century. With huge expanses of land needing to be populated, lack of need for defence as well as the popularity of railroads (which grew at a swift rate) contributed to sprawling urbanism somewhat resembling suburbia. However, the key commercial element - commuting to work - was not really there, 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. Suburbs there are official postal and addressing subdivisions of a city. Inner suburbs are subdivisions within the denser urban areas of the cities, and correspond to what would be called neigbourhoods in North American cities. For instance, Carlton, postcode 3053, is an inner suburb of Melbourne, even though it lies within the boundaries of the City of Melbourne. Locals will refer to Carlton as a suburb even though it is a densely urban neighbourhood. 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 Greater Dandenong.
History
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 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, which were described as "Metroland" around London, and were mostly characterised by semi-detached houses. 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, Illinois is usually 125 feet deep, while the width can vary from 14 feet wide for a row house to 45 feet wide for a large standalone house. In the suburbs, where standalone houses are the rule, lots may be 85 feet wide by 115 feet deep, as in the Chicago suburb of Naperville, Illinois. 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.
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, California was originally marketed in the late 50's as "A Country Club for the middle class."
In the US, 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.
American suburbs today
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Traditionally, many American suburbs have been characterized by:
- Lower densities than central cities, with single-family homes predominating.
- Zoning patterns that separate residential and commercial development.
- Shopping malls and strip shopping centers instead of a downtown shopping district.
- A predominantly white and middle- or upper-class population.
- Residential streets that curve and often end in cul-de-sacs, in place of the grid pattern common to most central cities.
- Ready access to freeways.
- Low crime-rates.
However, suburbs come in many types. Some, such as Compton, California, are predominantly non-white. As metropolitan areas grow, high-density development can spread outside of the central city into nearby suburbs. For example, Nassau County, New York on Long Island, adjacent to New York City, has a population density comparable to parts of the central city. Suburbs can also have their own apartment buildings and townhouses as well as office complexes and factories.
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 escape the crowding of central cities. Few families could attain the American Dream of their own house if all metropolitan residents were confined to central-city boundaries. This was enabled by a public susbsidy developers received that bore the cost of infrastructure such as roads, water and electriciy. The trend was further enabled by the advent of the hyper-motive 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 eat up attractive countryside, displacing nature and destroying cropland.
- Increase traffic.
- Be unhealthy, since buildings in suburbs are often so far apart that driving is the only way to get from one place to another.
- Be costly, due to the new infrastructure required for development, paid by the existing urban area.
- Be 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 city planners, builders, and architects holds that denser, more city-like communities with zoning laws designed to encourage mixed-use buildings are desirable. Such communities ease traffic, since people do not need to commute as far, 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. 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 exurbs -- 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.
Suburbs elsewhere
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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.
United Kingdom
In the UK, the government is seeking to impose minimum densities on newly approved housing schemes in parts of southeast England. Whether any society succeeds in reducing the average distance travelled by each citizen by means of such planning strategies remains to be seen. The new catchphrase is 'building sustainable communities' rather than housing estates. In England this is displacing the now discredited notion of 'urban villages', but the credibility of both ideas is challenged by the increasing involvement of commercial interests in developing new hospitals, secondary schools and public transport services. Commercial concerns tend to retard the opening of services until a large number of residents have occupied the new neighbourhood.
Other countries
In many parts of the globe, however, suburbs are economically poor areas, inhabited by people sometimes in real misery, that keep 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 UK and US.
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.
Notable suburbs
Image:NewportCoastCalifornia.jpg 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. Other well-known suburbs include Grosse Pointe, Michigan, near Detroit; the Main Line suburbs of Philadelphia; Cambridge, Massachusetts, home of Harvard University, near Boston; Berkeley, California in the San Francisco Bay Area, home to the University of California, Berkeley; and Redmond, Washington, home of Microsoft Corp., near Seattle.
Because of different local-government patterns in different parts of North America, suburbs of one city may be bigger than a central city in a different part of the country. The most-populous suburb in the United States is Long Beach, California near Los Angeles, with an estimated 2004 population of 476,564 in 2004 -- more than Atlanta, Boston or Pittsburgh. Virginia Beach, with a population of around 450,000 is the largest city in the state of Virginia even though it is a suburb of Norfolk, Virginia. Canada's largest suburb, Mississauga, Ontario, has nearly 700,000 people, outranking Vancouver and Washington, D.C.
Suburbs in pop culture
Suburbs on TV
Neighbours has been on television in Australia since 1985 and the United Kingdom from the following year. It is set in Ramsay Street in suburban 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 show Kath & Kim pillories the nouveau white trash of subdivisions with exaggerated provincial accents and below-average intelligence.
Suburban life through the eyes of stay-at-home wives and mothers is portrayed in the ABC television series Desperate Housewives.
Many U.S. sit-coms are set in the suburbs, including the animated Family Guy and The Simpsons.
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.
"Suburbia"
The 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 African-Americans.
After the rise of "Levittowns" across the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, many American teens born during those decades began to understand the inherently sanitized and disspiriting nature of American suburbs.
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 Mexico Suburbia is the name of a department stores founded in 1970 in Mexico City with nationwide stores.[1]
Musicians, too, picked up on the idea of suburbia for subject matter, with songs such as:
- Pleasant Valley Sunday by The Monkees
- My Pink Half of the Drainpipe by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band
- Suburbia by the Pet Shop Boys
- Subdivisions by Rush
- Christmas in Suburbia by Martin Newell
- Rockin' The Suburbs by Ben Folds
- Jesus of Suburbia by Green Day
- Hey Suburbia by Screeching Weasel
- Suburban Home by The Descendents
- Barons of Suburbia by Tori Amos
- Songs From Suburbia album by Spring Heeled Jack
Fear also makes a reference to Suburbia on "The Record", in the song Let's Have a War which says "It's already started in the city, Suburbia will be easy.".
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) [2] , suburbia is a neologism made by combinining suburb and utopia.
Suburbs in pop songs
- "Suburbia" by the Pet Shop Boys
- "Subdivisions" by Rush
- "Pleasant Valley Sunday" by The Monkees
- "Jesus of Suburbia" by Green Day
- "Rocking The Suburbs" by Ben Folds
- "Little Boxes" by Malvina Reynolds
- "Buddha of Suburbia" by David Bowie
- "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
- "Dinner at Eight in the Suburbs" by All-Time Quarterback
- "Good job nice clothes" by Corrupted Suburbs
References
- 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).
"Suburbia" Matthew Good Band
See also
External links and references
- Managing Urban America by Robert E. England and David R. Morgan 1979
- 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 Pageang:Underburg
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