Suburb

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Housing subdivision near Union, Kentucky, a suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio.

Suburbs are inhabited districts located either inside a town or city's limits 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 dispersed, less focused or nonexistent city center^[1] and with transport technology that allows commuting into more densely populated areas with higher levels of commerce.

[edit] Etymology

The word "suburb" is derived from the Old French "subb urbe" and ultimately from the Latin "suburbium," formed from "sub," meaning "under," and "urbis," meaning "wall" or "walled city." The first recorded usage, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, comes from Wycliffe 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 0-943875-73-0 ), 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 and the United Kingdom, 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, the term "suburb" can be used in two different ways:

• Officially, a suburb is an address subdivision, used by the postal service as well as less formally. Note that while the suburb boundaries are often aligned with local government boundaries, this is not necessarily the case, and there are cases where a single suburb is divided between two or more local government regions. Under this definition, the city CBD is itself considered a "suburb".

• Less formally, the suburbs is used to refer only to the sprawling, lower-density outer areas of a city. While these areas are usually within municipalities other than the primary city (such as the City of Melville, Western Australia), inhabitants of these areas generally identify with the central city, and often consider themselves to be inhabitants of the central city.

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 can have an ambiguous meaning to non-Australians.

The terms inner suburb and outer suburb are used to differentiate between the higher-density suburbs with close proximity to the CBD, and the lower-density suburbs on the outskirts of the urban area. Inner suburbs, such as Te Aro in Wellington, Prahran in Melbourne and Ultimo in Sydney, are usually characterised by higher density apartment housing and greater integration between commercial and residential areas. Also, because of the natural metropolitan outward growth, the inner suburbs are generally older than the outer suburbs. Outer suburbs are generally structured with large areas of low density housing interspersed with monolithic shopping centres.

[edit] Components

Suburban development can be classified into 5 simple components, each separated from one another and homogenous in nature.^{[citation needed]}

A group of subdivisions in Plano, TX

• Housing Subdivisions, also known as clusters or pods. These are areas that are exclusively devoted to residences. They usually consist of single family homes placed on small plots of land, or large compounds of apartment buildings with residual parking lots in between them. Many subdivisions are surrounded by walls on all sides, creating barriers from other subdivisions and from retail or offices. Some contain their own security forces and gatehouses to prevent non-residents from accessing the community.

A Wal-Mart in Virginia, a typical a big-box retail strip.

• Strip Malls, also known as shopping centers or big-box retail. These areas are exclusively for retail space and automobile parking. They usually consist of clusters of boxy, unadorned buildings of various sizes that are pulled back far from the street, sometimes over 100 feet, behind a large asphalt parking lot. Because of the large setbacks, signs that identify the stores in the strip are usually very large plastic signs with lighting that line the road.

An office park in Broomfield, Colorado, USA

• Office Parks, also known as business parks or corporate campuses. These areas contain only workspaces. Derived from the modernist architectural vision of the building standing free in a parklike setting, they usually consist of 4-12-storey buildings surrounded by parking lots or parking structures. Office parks are usually located near off ramps of major freeways.

A typical suburban school in Littleton, Colorado

• Civic Institutions. These are the public buildings where citizens gather for civic functions: town halls, churches, schools, etc. In suburban areas, these buildings generally look very similar to strip centers: large, undecorated boxes sitting in the center of very large parking lots. This is in stark contrast to traditional towns, where civic buildings are placed in prominent, central locations and are highly decorated, serving as neighborhood focal points.

Subdivision in Calgary, Alberta, surrounded by large collector roads.

• Roadways. This consists of the miles of pavement that are necessary to connect all of the aforementioned components together. Since a single piece of suburbia only serves one type of activity, roadways are very important, as they are the only way of getting to the various things a person needs in a given day. Suburban roadways are typically much wider than in towns, with multiple lanes and few, if any, sidewalks. Roads in this type of environment are usually designed to serve only automobiles, not pedestrians or cyclists.

[edit] History

As long as there have been cities, there have been suburbs.^{[citation needed]} Some urban activities have always been located outside the city. Even in ancient Mesopotamia, such activities as slaughterhouses, furnaces, and other undesirable enterprises were located outside the defensive walls, away from the masses of citizens. The ancient Romans called these areas suburbium, or “under or outside the wall.” A common form of suburb found near the ancient or classical city was the port or dockyard. These communities were often located away from the central walled city, yet totally dependent on that city. Ancient Athens had Piraeus while ancient Rome had Ostia, and similar examples are found in classical China. Another classical example of a suburb was Rome’s suburb of Tivoli, a sort of classical version of the Hamptons or Westchester County outside New York City. In Tivoli, many of Rome’s wealthy elite owned large estates where they would escape the urban crowds. Residents would sacrifice the safety of the citywalls in favor of peace, quiet and space. A permanent population developed to support these estates, yet Tivoli was completely dependent on Rome and many wealthy elite commuted to Rome for business or politics.^{[citation needed]}

Throughout the classical, medieval, and Renaissance worlds, whenever a suburb would grow sufficiently dense and populated, new walls were built around the area, an old-fashioned version of annexation. A common practice found in 16th to 19th century Europe was for a wealthy suburb of large mansions to develop on one side of the central city, while an industrial, working-class suburb would develop on the other side. An example of this would be London, where the wealthy Westminster was to the west of the City of London while the working-class suburbs and docklands were on the east. London is also illustrative of how suburban, over time, becomes urban. No one would now call Westminster, home to the Houses of Parliament, Piccadilly Circus, and the West End Theater district, a suburb; yet that is precisely what it was in the 18th century.^{[citation needed]}

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.^{[citation needed]} 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 further facilitated by the development of zoning laws, redlining and various innovations in transport. In the older cities of the northeast U.S., streetcar 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".^{[citation needed]} 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.^{[citation needed]} 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.^{[citation needed]} 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.^{[citation needed]} 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.^{[citation needed]}

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. Federal subsidies for suburban development accelerated this process as did the practice of redlining by banks and other lending institutions.^[2] 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.^{[citation needed]} 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%.^{[citation needed]} Levittown developed as a major prototype of mass-produced housing. 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.^{[citation needed]}

In the U.S., 1950 was the first year that more people lived in suburbs than elsewhere. (1) 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 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.(before roughly 7AM and after roughly 6PM.)^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Suburbs today

[edit] United States

Typically, many post-World War II American suburbs have been characterized by:

• Lower densities than central cities, dominated by single family homes on small plots of land, surrounded at close quarters by very similar dwellings.
• Zoning patterns that separate residential and commercial development, as well as different intensities and densities of development. Daily needs are not within walking distance of most homes.
• Subdivisions carved from previously rural land into multiple-home developments built by a single real estate company. These subdivisions are often segregated by minute differences in home value, creating entire communities where family incomes and demographics are almost completely homogenous.
• Shopping malls and strip malls behind large parking lots instead of a classic downtown shopping district.
• Streets lined by off-street car parking lots, engineered drainage ditches and/or light vegetation instead of building fronts, porches or trees.
• A predominantly white or middle- or upper-class population, with a few exceptions (e.g., Ford Heights, Illinois, a predominantly black working-class suburb of Chicago, and Inglewood, California, also a predominately black and latino suburb of Los Angeles).
• A road network designed to conform to a hierarchy, including culs-de-sac leading to larger residential streets, in turn leading to large collector roads, in place of the grid pattern common to most central cities and pre-World War II suburbs.
• Ready access to large, multi-lane freeways or tollways
• Limited or no access to public transit
• The importance of public space reduced in favor of private property
• Sometimes a lower crime rate than a comparable urban neighborhood
• Schools considered "better" than inner-city schools^{[citation needed]}
• A lack of arts, cultural, and community institutions
• Governance split between local town governments and homeowners associations (especially in newer developments)
• A lifestyle where most or all transportation revolves around the automobile, with little or no options to walk or ride a bike.
• More wildlife habitat than is found in the city, and more areas set aside as nature preserves. However the suburbs, have less wildlife habitat than rural areas.
• All or most homes in the suburbs are built to reduce costs; homes can be be built from homogenous, pre-determined plans, or entire neighborhoods can be color-coordinated if desired.
• Retail and office buildings designed as minimalist "big box" structures, with little or no exterior decoration and few (if any) windows

A suburban development in San Jose, California.

Some suburban areas have developed their own large clusters of office and retail buildings, usually in a business park setting. These areas, such as Tysons Corner, Virginia, Parsippany, New Jersey & Pontiac, MI, are sometimes referred to as "edge cities", a term invented by journalist Joel Garreau. Edge cities differ from traditional downtowns in that they are completely automobile-centric rather than providing options for walking, bicycles, or public transportation.

[edit] Controversy

An example of a non-suburban, traditional-style neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Suburbs were an opportunity for families who sought an alternative to the crowding and the recently racially integrated schools found in American inner cities.^[3] Development activity in suburbs was enabled by innovations in transportation as well as public subsidies that bore the cost of infrastructure such as freeways, water and electricity. The trend toward suburban sprawl advanced through the advent of mass-produced inexpensive automobiles and the availability of unprecedented amounts of energy in the form of carbon fuels. Significant amounts of zoning regulations (many of which remain on the books), such as mandatory set-back laws, forced developers into building suburban developments as a solution to the the design restrictions these regulations imposed. Suburban growth was encouraged through lending practices that made buying suburban homes less expensive, such as the government-sponsored low interest-rate mortgages available only in suburbs.^[4] Development was further aided by redlining^[5][6] and mortgage discrimination by banks which prevented significant investment in inner cities during the suburban boom.

In recent years, suburban "sprawl", a term for poorly planned suburban growth, has become an increasingly important issue in American politics.

Critics of suburbanization say suburban growth may:

• 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.
• Create large areas of paved surface that cause rainfall to runoff into sewers and rivers, depleting groundwater sources and straining the water supply.
• Increase traffic in all areas of the metropolis.
• 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.
• Be costly, due to the new infrastructure required for development, paid by the existing urban area.
• Provide a limited set of housing choices.
• Build more soul-less places with no distinct identity or feeling of community.
• Increase ethnic violence in the inner-city.^[7]

In response to these concerns, a socio-political movement called "New Urbanism" or "Smart Growth" is currently has risen to prominence in the U.S. This movement among city planners, builders, and architects holds that denser, more traditional town-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 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 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. Many libertarians and free-market conservatives complain that suburban zoning codes inhibit the marketplace of ideas and force towns to build only a certain type of development, regardless of what the demand of the citizenry is. 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.

[edit] Traffic Patterns

A traditional street grid shown at bottom, with a sprawl street system at the top. Note that in the sprawl model, any trip from one component to another component requires that cars enter the collector road in the center, no matter how short or long the distance is. The traditional grid allows for a larger number of choices and alternate routes.

Contrary to popular belief, suburbs typically have more traffic congestion and longer travel times than traditional neighborhoods.[1] This is due to three factors: mandatory automobile ownership, longer travel distances and the hierarchy system, which is less efficient at distributing traffic than the traditional grid of streets.

Because the daily needs of life in a suburb can not usually be reached on foot or by bike, there are far more cars being used for each and every task of the day. Therefore, despite lower densities, the average suburban day generates many more car trips per capita than the average day in a traditional neighborhood. This is compounded by the hierarchy of streets, in which many small neighborhood streets are dead ends or circular, serving no connective function. Often entire neighborhoods and subdivisions are dependent on one or two large roads for traffic, called collector roads. Because all traffic is forced onto these roads, they are often clogged with traffic all day. If an accident occurs on a collector road, or if construction inhibits the flow, then the entire road system is rendered useless until it is cleared.

[edit] Suburbs in Canada

Suburban housing developments near Markham, Ontario.

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.^{[citation needed]}

Today, Toronto has some of the largest suburban municipalities in North America, with more than three quarters of a million people living in Mississauga alone. Many Toronto suburbs have significantly improved on the suburban philosophy, adding a downtown to many suburban centres (Markham, Brampton, Scarborough, North York etc.) Canadian suburbs are generally more ethnically diverse than American suburbs, adding more uniqueness to each sub-city.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Suburbs in Other countries

The working class suburb Tensta north of Stockholm, Sweden.

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, or the concrete suburbs of Sweden, 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".

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.

[edit] Notable suburbs

The examples and perspective in this article or section may not represent a worldwide view of the subject. Please improve this article or discuss the issue on the talk page.

Many suburbs have become famous in their own right. This can be either due to the wealth and prestige associated with the suburb, or because of an event occurring in, or a person or group originating from, the suburb.

[edit] North America

Perhaps the best-known American suburb is Beverly Hills, California, a wealthy suburb of Los Angeles. Other well-known suburbs include Shaker Heights, near Cleveland, which was one of the first planned garden communities in the U.S.; the North Shore area in Chicagoland; the Grosse Pointe region of Michigan, near Detroit; the Main Line suburbs of Philadelphia; affluent Long Island, New York, Westchester County, New York, and Fairfield County, Connecticut, where most towns are suburbs of New York City (much of the lower Hudson River Valley in New York is also a suburb of New York City); much of Northern New Jersey, with New York City and cities in North Jersey serving as employment centers; Redmond, Washington, home of Microsoft and Nintendo's American division, near Seattle; and Arlington, Virginia outside Washington, DC, where The Pentagon and Arlington National Cemetery are located.

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 because the urban core of its region is in Norfolk. Canada'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.

[edit] Australia

In Australia, many of the most famous suburbs are associated with sport, however the majority of these suburbs are unknown outside of Australia, unlike U.S. suburbs such as Beverly Hills.

The popularity of Australian Rules Football, and the tradition of naming the club after the suburb or city in which it is based, has led to several inner suburbs of Melbourne becoming well-known throughout the country. These clubs include St. Kilda, Collingwood, Carlton, Essendon, Richmond and Hawthorn. Most of these areas have other attractions, but none, with the possible exception of St. Kilda, would be a household name without the football club.

In the north-eastern states of New South Wales and Queensland, the homes of National Rugby League teams play a similar role.

The Brisbane suburb of Woolloongabba is famous as the location of the city's cricket ground, known colloquially as The Gabba.

The Sydney suburbs of Bondi and Manly, and the beaches of the same names, are known as the origin of surf lifesaving.

In Melbourne, Albert Park is known as the home of the Melbourne Grand Prix Circuit.

[edit] Largest suburbs worldwide

The following is a table of the largest incorporated suburbs worldwide, with over 800 thousand people. Only census data is listed. (Except cities that require exact records of birth/death/move registration such in Japan, and Brazil which estimates all its cities annually)

Indonesia and India census populations are from citypopulation.de

Census data is self-evident as it is published extensively, census dates for all nations are available here and national statistical agencies here.

[edit] "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 Blacks. Even when Blacks and other minorities have managed to move to suburban neighborhoods, they have been welcomed with hostility by Whites and have been considered to be race traitors by their own ethnic group for moving to a 'white' area.^{[citation needed]}

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 1960s and early 1970s 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 unique 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) [11] ,'subtopia' is a neologism made by combining 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."

[edit] References

1. ^ The Fractured Metropolis: Improving the New City, Restoring the Old City, Reshaping the Region By Jonathan Barnett
2. ^ Comeback Cities: A Blueprint for Urban Neighborhood Revival By Paul S. Grogan, Tony Proscio. ISBN 0813339529. 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."

3. ^ Public School Segregation and Integration in the North: Analysis and Proposals By National Association of Intergroup Relations Officials. Commission on School Integration
4. ^ A Plague on Your Houses: How New York Was Burned Down and National Public Health Crumbled By Deborah Wallace, Rodrick Wallace. ISBN 1859842534.
5. ^ Sprawl City: Race, Politics, and Planning in Atlanta By Robert D. Bullard, Glenn S. Johnson, Angel O. Torres. ISBN 1559637900 Page 101.

   "Studies over the past three decades have clearly documented the relationship between redlining and disinvestment decisions and neighborhood decline. Redlining exists when a mortgage application with a given set of applicant, property, and loan characteristics is more likely to be denied in a minority neighborhood than in a white neighborhood."

6. ^ Bum Rap on America's Cities: The Real Causes of Urban Decay By Dick Morris, Richard S. Morris
7. ^ White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism

• Fogelson, Robert M. Bourgeois Nightmares: Suburbia, 1870-1930. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.
• Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
• Baxandall, Rosalyn and Elizabeth Ewen. Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened. New York: Basic Books, 2000.
• Fishman, Robert. Bourgeois Utopia: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia. New York: Basic Books, 1987.
• Bruegmann, Robert. Sprawl: A Compact History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
• Kruse, Kevin M, and Thomas J. Sugrue, editors. The New Suburban History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
• 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).
• Kelly, Barbara. Expanding the American Dream: Building and Rebuilding Levittown. Albany, NY: State University of Albany Press, 1993.
• England, Robert E. and David R. Morgan. Managing Urban America, 1979.
• Warner, Sam Bass. Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870-1890. Cambridge. Mass., 1962.
• Winkler, Robert. Going Wild: Adventures with Birds in the rural Wilderness. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2003.

[edit] See also

[edit] External Web Sites

• http://www.SuburbX.co.za/ Experience suburb life in South Africa.
• 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!
• Article about the changing suburban culture in Ireland