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A suburb (more broadly suburban area) is an area within a metropolitan area. They are oftentimes where most of a metropolitan area's jobs are located, although some suburbs are predominantly residential.Garreau, J., Edge City: Life on the New Frontier, Knopf Doubleday, 1992, p149 They can either be denser or less densely populated than the city and can have a higher or lower rate of detached single family homes than the city as well. Suburbs can have their own political or legal jurisdictions, especially in the United States, but this is not always the case, especially in the United Kingdom, where most suburbs are located within the administrative boundaries of cities. In most English-speaking countries, suburban areas are defined in contrast to core city or inner city areas, but in Australian English and South African English, suburb has become largely synonymous with what is called a "neighborhood" in the U.S. Due in part to historical trends such as white flight, some suburbs in the United States have a higher population and higher incomes than their nearby inner cities. In some countries, including India, China, Argentina, Brazil, New Zealand, Canada, the United Kingdom, and parts of the United States, new suburbs are routinely annexed by adjacent cities due to urban sprawl. In others, such as Morocco, France, and much of the United States, many suburbs remain separate municipalities or are local government as part of a larger metropolitan area such as a county, district or borough. In the United States, regions beyond the suburbs are known as "exurban areas" or ; exurbs have less population density than suburbs, but still more than rural areas. Suburbs and exurbs are sometimes linked to the nearby city economically, particularly by commuters.
Suburbs first emerged on a large scale in the 19th and 20th centuries, as a result of improved rail and road transport, which led to an increase in commuting. Most suburbs are less dense than inner city neighborhoods within the same metropolitan area, and residents routinely commute to other suburbs and city centers or business districts via private vehicles or public transit; including industrial suburbs, planned communities, and satellite cities. Suburbs tend to proliferate around cities that have an abundance of adjacent flat land. The Fractured Metropolis: Improving the New City, Restoring the Old City, Reshaping the Region by Jonathan Barnett, via Google Books.
Although a majority of Americans regard themselves as residents of suburban communities, the federal government of the United States has no formal definition for what constitutes a suburb in the United States, leaving its precise meaning disputed.
In Canada, the term may also be used in the British sense, especially as cities annex formerly outlying areas.
Towards the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, until 190 AD, when Dong Zhuo razed the city, the capital Luoyang was mainly occupied by the emperor and important officials; the city's people mostly lived in small cities right outside Luoyang, which were suburbs in all but name.
As populations grew during the Early Modern Period in Europe, towns swelled with a steady influx of people from the countryside. In some places, nearby settlements were swallowed up as the main city expanded. The peripheral areas on the outskirts of the city were generally inhabited by the very poorest.
Toward the end of the century, with the development of public Public transport systems such as the Rapid transit, trams and buses, it became possible for the majority of a city's population to reside outside the city and to commute into the center for work.
By the mid-19th century, the first major suburban areas were springing up around London as the city (then the largest in the world) became more overcrowded and unsanitary. A major catalyst for suburban growth was the opening of the Metropolitan Railway in the 1860s. The line later joined the capital's financial heart in the City to what were to become the suburbs of Middlesex. (1988). 9781870630115, Bloomsbury. ISBN 9781870630115 The line reached Harrow in 1880.
Unlike other railway companies, which were required to dispose of surplus land, London's Met was allowed to retain such land that it believed was necessary for future railway use. Initially, the surplus land was managed by the Land Committee, and, from the 1880s, the land was developed and sold to domestic buyers in places like Willesden Park Estate, Cecil Park, near Pinner and at Wembley Park.
In 1912 it was suggested that a specially formed company should take over from the Surplus Lands Committee and develop suburban estates near the railway. However, World War I (1914–1918) delayed these plans until 1919, when, with the expectation of a postwar housing-boom, Metropolitan Railway Country Estates Limited (MRCE) formed. MRCE went on to develop estates at Kingsbury Garden Village near Neasden, Wembley Park, Cecil Park and Grange Estate at Pinner and the Cedars Estate at Rickmansworth and to found places such as Harrow Garden Village.
The Met's marketing department coined the term Metro-land in 1915 when the Guide to the Extension Line became the Metro-land guide, priced at 1d. This promoted the land served by the Met for the walker, visitor and later the house-hunter. Published annually until 1932 (the last full year of independence for the Met), the guide extolled the benefits of "The good air of the Chilterns", using language such as "Each lover of Metroland may well have his own favorite wood beech and coppice — all tremulous green loveliness in Spring and russet and gold in October". The dream as promoted involved a modern home in beautiful countryside with a fast railway-service to central London. By 1915 people from across London had flocked to live the new suburban dream in large newly built areas across north-west London.
During World War I, the Tudor Walters Committee was commissioned to make recommendations for the post war reconstruction and housebuilding. In part, this was a response to the shocking lack of fitness amongst many recruits during World War One, attributed to poor living conditions; a belief summed up in a housing poster of the period "you cannot expect to get an A1 population out of C3 homes" – referring to military fitness classifications of the period.
The committee's report of 1917 was taken up by the government, which passed the Housing, Town Planning, &c. Act 1919, also known as the Addison Act after Christopher Addison, the then Minister for Housing. The Act allowed for the building of large new housing estates in the suburbs after the First World War, and marked the start of a long 20th century tradition of state-owned housing, which would later evolve into .
The Report also legislated on the required, minimum standards necessary for further suburban construction; this included regulation on the maximum housing density and their arrangement, and it even made recommendations on the ideal number of bedrooms and other rooms per house. Although the semi-detached house was first designed by the Shaws (a father and son architectural partnership) in the 19th century, it was during the suburban housing boom of the interwar period that the design first proliferated as a suburban icon, being preferred by middle-class home owners to the smaller . The design of many of these houses, highly characteristic of the era, was heavily influenced by the Art Deco movement, taking influence from Tudor Revival, chalet style, and even ship design.
Within just a decade suburbs dramatically increased in size. Harrow Weald went from just 1,500 to over 10,000 while Pinner jumped from 3,000 to over 20,000. During the 1930s, over 4 million new suburban houses were built, the 'suburban revolution' had made England the most heavily suburbanized country in the world, by a considerable margin.
With 16 million eligible veterans, the opportunity to buy a house was suddenly at hand. In 1947 alone, 540,000 veterans bought one; their average price was $7300. The construction industry kept prices low by standardization—for example, standardizing sizes for kitchen cabinets, refrigerators and stoves allowed for mass production of kitchen furnishings. Developers purchased empty land just outside the city, installed tract houses based on a handful of designs, and provided streets and utilities, while local public officials raced to build schools.Joseph Goulden, The Best Years, 1945–1950 (1976) pp 135–39. The most famous development was Levittown, in Long Island just east of New York City. It offered a new house for $1000 down and $70 a month; it featured three bedrooms, a fireplace, a gas range and gas furnace, and a landscaped lot of 75 by 100 feet, all for a total price of $10,000. Veterans could get one with a much lower down payment.Barbara Mae Kelly, Expanding the American Dream: Building and Rebuilding Levittown (SUNY Press, 1993).
At the same time, African Americans were rapidly moving north and west for better jobs and educational opportunities than were available to them in the segregated South. Their arrival in Northern and Western cities en masse, in addition to being followed by race riots in several large cities such as Philadelphia, Watts riots, Detroit, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., further stimulated white suburban migration. The growth of the suburbs was facilitated by the development of zoning laws, redlining and numerous innovations in transport. Redlining and other discriminatory measures built into federal housing policy furthered the racial segregation of postwar America–for example, by refusing to insure mortgages in and near African-American neighborhoods. The government's efforts were primarily designed to provide housing to White middle-class and lower-middle-class families. African Americans and other people of color largely remained concentrated within decaying cores of urban poverty creating a phenomenon known as white flight.Rothstein, Richard: The Color of Law. A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Liveright, 2017.
After World War II, the availability of stimulated a housing boom in American suburbs. In the older cities of the northeast U.S., originally developed along train or tram lines that could shuttle workers into and out of city centers where the jobs were located. This practice gave rise to the term "commuter town", 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.
Economic growth in the United States encouraged the suburbanization of American cities that required massive investments for the new infrastructure and homes. Consumer patterns were also shifting at this time, as purchasing power was becoming stronger and more accessible to a wider range of families. Suburban houses also brought about needs for products that were not needed in urban neighborhoods, such as lawnmowers and automobiles. During this time commercial shopping malls were being developed near suburbs to satisfy consumers' needs and their car–dependent lifestyle.Beauregard, Robert A. When America Became Suburban. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
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 central city. For example, the lot size for a residence in Chicago is usually deep, while the width can vary from wide for a row house to wide for a large stand–alone house. In the suburbs, where stand–alone houses are the rule, lots may be wide by deep, as in the Chicago suburb of Naperville. Manufacturing and commercial buildings were segregated in other areas of the city.
Alongside suburbanization, many companies began locating their offices and other facilities in the outer areas of the cities, which resulted in the increased density of older suburbs and 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 around cities. Some social reformers attempted to combine the best of both concepts in the garden city movement. Garden Cities of To-Morrow. Library.cornell.edu. Retrieved on 22 November 2011.
In the U.S., 1950 was the first year that more people lived in suburbs than elsewhere.England, Robert E. and David R. Morgan. Managing Urban America, 1979. In the U.S., 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 center.
In an illustrative case of South Africa, RDP housing has been built. In much of Soweto, many houses are American in appearance, but are smaller, and often consist of a kitchen and living room, two or three bedrooms, and a bathroom. However, there are more affluent neighborhoods, more comparable to American suburbs, particularly east of the FNB Stadium and south of the city in areas like Eikenhof, where the "Eye of Africa" planned community exists. This master-planned community is nearly indistinguishable from the most amenity-rich resort-style American suburbs in Florida, Arizona, and California, complete with a golf course, resort pool, equestrian facility, 24-hour staffed gates, gym, and BMX track, as well as several tennis, basketball, and volleyball courts.
In Cape Town, there is a distinct European style originating from European influence during the mid-1600s when the Dutch settled the Cape. Houses like these are called Cape Dutch Houses and can be found in the affluent suburbs of Constantia and Bishopscourt.
Large cities in Canada acquired streetcar suburbs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Modern Canadian suburbs tend to be less automobile-centric than those in the United States, and public transit use is encouraged but can be notably unused. Throughout Canada, there are comprehensive plans in place to curb sprawl.
Population and income growth in Canadian suburbs had tended to outpace growth in core urban or rural areas, but in many areas, this trend has now reversed. The suburban population increased by 87% between 1981 and 2001, well ahead of urban growth. The Wealthy Suburbs of Canada. Planetizen. Retrieved on 22 November 2011. The majority of recent population growth in Canada's three largest metropolitan areas (Greater Toronto, Greater Montréal, and Greater Vancouver) has occurred in non-core municipalities. This trend is also beginning to take effect in Vancouver, and to a lesser extent, Montréal. In certain cities, particularly Edmonton and Calgary, suburban growth takes place within the city boundaries as opposed to in bedroom communities. This is due to annexation and a large geographic footprint within the city borders.
Calgary is unusual among Canadian cities because it has developed as a unicity – it has annexed most of its surrounding towns and large amounts of undeveloped land around the city. As a result, most of the communities that Calgarians refer to as "suburbs" are actually inside the city limits. In the 2016 census, the City of Calgary had a population of 1,239,220, whereas the Calgary Metropolitan Area had a population of 1,392,609, indicating the vast majority of people in the Calgary CMA lived within the city limits. The perceived low population density of Calgary largely results from its many internal suburbs and the large amount of undeveloped land within the city. The city actually has a policy of densifying its new developments.
Brazilian affluent suburbs are generally denser, more vertical and mixed in use . They concentrate infrastructure, investment and attention from the municipal seat and the best offer of mass transit. True sprawling towards neighboring municipalities is typically empoverished – periferia ( the periphery, in the sense of it dealing with Spatial planning Social exclusion) –, with a very noticeable example being the rail suburbs of Rio de Janeiro – the North Zone, the Baixada Fluminense, the part of the West Zone associated with SuperVia's Ramal de Santa Cruz. These, in comparison with the inner suburbs, often prove to be remote, violent with inadequate sewer structure coverage, saturated mass transit, more precarious running water, electricity and communication services, and lack of urban planning and landscaping, while also not necessarily qualifying as actual favelas or slums. They often are former agricultural land or wild areas settled through squatting; suburbs grew and expanded due to the mass rural exodus during the years of the military dictatorship. This is particularly true of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Brasília, which grew with migration from more distant and impoverished parts of the country and deal with overpopulation as a result.
In the 19th century, horse-drawn and later electric trolleys enabled the creation of streetcar suburbs, which expanded the area in which city commuters could live. These are typically medium-density neighborhoods contiguous with the core urban area, built for pedestrian access to the streetcar lines.
With widespread adoption of the automobile progressing from the 1920s to the 1950s, and especially with the introduction of the Interstate Highway System, new suburbs were designed around car transport instead of pedestrians. Over time, many suburban areas, especially those not within the political boundaries of the city containing the central business area, 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 who could not afford the added suburban property maintenance costs not needed in city living. Federal subsidies for suburban development accelerated this process as did the practice of redlining by banks and other lending institutions. Comeback Cities: A Blueprint for Urban Neighborhood Revival By Paul S. Grogan, Tony Proscio. . Published 2002. Page 142. "Perhaps suburbanization was a 'natural' phenomenon—rising incomes allowing formerly huddled masses in city neighborhoods to breathe free on green lawn and leafy culs-de-sac. But, we will never know how natural it was, because of the massive federal subsidy that eased and accelerated it, in the form of tax, transportation and housing policies." In some cities such as Miami, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., the main city is much smaller than the surrounding suburban areas, leaving the city proper with a small portion of the metro area's population and land area.
Mesa, Arizona, and Virginia Beach, Virginia, the two most populous suburbs in the U.S., are actually more populous than many core cities, including Miami, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Cleveland, Tampa, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and others. Virginia Beach is now the most populous city in Virginia, having long since exceeded the population of its neighboring primary city, Norfolk. While Virginia Beach has slowly been taking on the characteristics of an urban city, it will not likely achieve the population density and urban characteristics of Norfolk. A second suburban city in Virginia, Chesapeake, has also exceeded the population of adjacent Norfolk. With only a few large commercial areas and no definitive downtown area, Chesapeake is primarily residential in nature with vast rural areas remaining within the city limits.
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 Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Dallas, Denver, Houston, New York City, San Francisco, Sacramento, Atlanta, Miami, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Norfolk, St. Louis, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, and Washington, D.C..
Suburbs in the United States have a prevalence of usually Detached house Land Development Calculations 2001 Walter Martin Hosack. "single-family detached housing" = "suburb houses" p133 single-family homes. "Housing Unit Characteristics by Type of Housing Unit, 2005" Energy Information Association
They are characterized by:
By 2010, suburbs increasingly gained people in racial minority groups, as many members of minority groups gained better access to education and sought more favorable living conditions compared to inner city areas.
Conversely, many white Americans also moved back to city centers. Nearly all major city downtowns (such as Downtown Miami, Downtown Detroit, Downtown Philadelphia, Downtown Roanoke, or Downtown Los Angeles) are experiencing a renewal, with large population growth, residential apartment construction, and increased social, cultural, and infrastructural investments, as have suburban neighborhoods close to city centers. Better public transit, proximity to work and cultural attractions, and frustration with suburban life and gridlock have attracted young Americans to the city centers.Yen, Hope. " White flight? Suburbs lose young whites to cities." Associated Press at Yahoo! News. Sunday 9 May 2010. Retrieved on 10 May 2010.
The Hispanic and Asian Americans population is increasing in the suburbs. Minority Suburbanization
In the suburban system, most trips from one component to another component requires that cars enter a collector road, no matter how short or long the distance is. This is compounded by the hierarchy of streets, where entire neighborhoods and subdivisions are dependent on one or two collector roads. Because all traffic is forced onto these roads, they are often heavy with traffic all day. If a traffic crash occurs on a collector road, or if road construction inhibits the flow, then the entire road system may be rendered useless until the blockage is cleared. The traditional "grown" grid, in turn, allows for a larger number of choices and alternate routes.
Suburban systems of the sprawl type are also quite inefficient for cyclists or pedestrians, as the direct route is usually not available for them either. This encourages car trips even for distances as low as several hundreds of yards or meters (which may have become up to several miles or kilometers due to the road network). Improved sprawl systems, though retaining the car , possess and footpaths connecting across the arms of the suburban sprawl system, allowing a more direct route while still keeping the cars out of the residential and side streets.
More commonly, central cities seek ways to tax nonresidents working downtown – known as commuter taxes – as property tax bases dwindle. Taken together, these two groups of taxpayers represent a largely untapped source of potential revenue that cities may begin to target more aggressively, particularly if they're struggling. According to struggling cities, this will help bring in a substantial revenue for the city which is a great way to tax the people who make the most use of the highways and repairs.
Today more companies settle down in suburbs because of low property costs.
French songs like La Zone by Fréhel (1933), Aux quatre coins de la banlieue by Damia (1936), Ma banlieue by Reda Caire (1937), or Banlieue by Robert Lamoureux (1953), evoke the suburbs of Paris explicitly since the 1930s. Those singers give a sunny festive, almost bucolic, image of the suburbs, yet still few urbanized. During the fifties and the sixties, French singer-songwriter Léo Ferré evokes in his songs popular and proletarian suburbs of Paris, to oppose them to the city, considered by comparison as a bourgeois and conservative place.
French cinema was although soon interested in urban changes in the suburbs, with such movies as Mon oncle by Jacques Tati (1958), L'Amour existe by Maurice Pialat (1961) or Two or Three Things I Know About Her by Jean-Luc Godard (1967).
In his one-act opera Trouble in Tahiti (1952), Leonard Bernstein skewers American suburbia, which produces misery instead of happiness.
The American photojournalist Bill Owens documented the culture of suburbia in the 1970s, most notably in his book Suburbia. The 1962 song "Little Boxes" by Malvina Reynolds lampoons the development of suburbia and its perceived bourgeois and Conformity values, while the 1982 song Subdivisions by the Canadian band Rush also discusses suburbia, as does Rockin' the Suburbs by Ben Folds. The 2010 album The Suburbs by the Canadian-based alternative band Arcade Fire dealt with aspects of growing up in suburbia, suggesting aimlessness, apathy and endless rushing are ingrained into the suburban culture and mentality. Suburb The Musical, was written by Robert S. Cohen and David Javerbaum. Over the Hedge is a syndicated comic strip written and drawn by Michael Fry and T. Lewis. It tells the story of a raccoon, turtle, a squirrel, and their friends who come to terms with their woodlands being taken over by suburbia, trying to survive the increasing flow of humanity and technology while becoming enticed by it at the same time. A film adaptation of Over the Hedge was produced in 2006.
British television series such as The Good Life, Butterflies and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin have depicted suburbia as well-manicured but relentlessly boring, and its residents as either overly conforming or prone to going stir crazy. In contrast, U.S. shows such as Knots Landing, Desperate Housewives and Weeds portray the suburbs as concealing darker secrets behind a façade of manicured lawns, friendly people, and beautifully kept houses. Films such as The 'Burbs and Disturbia have brought this theme to the cinema.
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