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"Suburbia" redirects here. For other uses, see Suburbia (disambiguation).
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A suburban development in San Jose, California.
Suburbs are commonly as residential areas on the outskirts of a city or large town. Most modern suburbs are commuter towns with many single-family homes. Many suburbs have some degree of political autonomy and most have lower population density than inner city neighborhoods. Mechanical transport, including automobiles and high speed trains, enabled the 20th century growth of suburbs, which tend to proliferate near cities with an abundance of adjacent flat land.The Fractured Metropolis: Improving the New City, Restoring the Old City, Reshaping the Region by Jonathan Barnett Most new modern suburbs are also referred to as suburbia, or the burbs.
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The word is derived from the Old French "subb urbe" and ultimately from the Latin "suburbium", formed from "sub", meaning "under", and "urbs", meaning "city", therefore suburbis would mean under the city. Important people tended to live on hills near centers of commercial and political activity, while the lower classes often lived in marginal areas. "Under" in later usage sometimes referred variously to lesser wealth, political power, population, or population density. 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 Chicago.
This division is not as prevalent in Ireland, United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, where "suburb" merely refers to residential neighbourhoods outside of the city centre whether they lie in a separate municipality or not. In Australia and New Zealand, suburbs have become formalised as geographic subdivisions of a city and are used by postal services in addressing. In rural areas of Australia their equivalent are called localities (see suburbs and localities). In Australia, the terms inner suburb and outer suburb are used to differentiate between the higher-density suburbs with close proximity to the city center, 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.
A Wal-Mart in Virginia, a typical big-box retail strip.
An office park in Broomfield, Colorado, USA
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This section does not cite any references or sources. (November 2007) Please improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed. |
In modern suburban development, the planning, design, and landscape architecture are divided into four sectors:
Prior to the 19th century, "suburb" often correlated with the outlying areas of cities where work was most inaccessible; implicitly, where the poorest people had to live. Charles Dickens used the word this way, albeit not exclusively, in his descriptions of contemporary London. Our modern usage of the term came about during the course of the 19th century, as improvements in transportation and sanitation made it possible for wealthy developments to exist on the outskirts of cities.
The growth of suburbs was facilitated by the development of zoning laws, redlining and various innovations in transport. After World War II availability of FHA loans stimulated a housing boom in American suburbs. 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 "Metro-land".LONDON`S 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 centre 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, more people moved out to the suburbs, known as suburbanisation. 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.Garden Cities of To-Morrow
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, White 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.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."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. Their arrival in Northern cities en masse (in addition to race riots in several large cities such as Detroit, Chicago, and Philadelphia), further stimulated white suburban migration, with Black suburbans migration.
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 7 a.m. and after roughly 6 p.m.)[citation needed]
Suburban development in Maple, 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, and even include the countryside. However, the fact that literal boundaries of suburbs are not present in Canada does not in any way eliminate suburbs per se. The boundaries of Canadian cities are under the jurisdiction of the Provinces and the Provinces have imposed city-suburb mergers. The Vancouver, Montreal and Calgary areas still have suburban municipalities, although their suburban areas are generally grouped into fewer cities than is typical in the United States.British Columbia created a "metropolitan" government for the Vancouver 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, and the two largest suburbs in Canada are in this metro area. Mississauga (668,549) and Brampton, Ontario (433,806) have 1.1 million people together, which beats Calgary\'s population, and would be the third largest city in Canada if merged. Many Toronto suburbs have significantly improved on the suburban philosophy, adding a downtown to many suburban centers, notably Mississauga, Brampton, Vaughan and Markham. In 1998 the governmental structure was reorganized to include many of these formerly independent suburbs into the Greater Toronto Area (see Greater Toronto Area).
Vancouver, on the other hand, has several large suburbs, with more than three quarters of a million people living in Surrey, British Columbia (the third largest suburb in Canada), Richmond, British Columbia, and Burnaby altogether. Montreal has its two largest suburbs, Laval, Quebec and Longueuil, Quebec.
Typically, many post-World War II American suburbs have been characterized by:
The 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 catch phrase 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 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.
In China, the term Suburb is new. The chinese suburbs are very similar to that of the United States, in that many of it\'s inhabitants are mainly Upper-Class, and Middle-Class people. Many of the new homes, being built with pools, two car garages and extra rooms are replicas of the U.S. However, most of it\'s suburbs are fenced in, and generally guarded because of the extrodinary crime rate.
Contrary to popular belief, suburbs typically have more traffic congestion and longer travel times than traditional neighborhoods.http://bicycleuniverse.info/transpo/roadbuilding-futility.html Only the traffic within the short streets themselves is less. This is due to three factors: almost-mandatory automobile ownership due to poor suburban bus systems, longer travel distances and the hierarchy system, which is less efficient at distributing traffic than the traditional grid of streets.
In the suburban system (sometimes also called a "sprawl network"[citation needed]), 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 accident 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 meters (which may have become up to several kilometres due to the road network). Improved sprawl systems, though retaining the car detours, possess cycle paths and foot path connecting across the arms of the sprawl system, allowing a more direct route while still keeping the cars out of the residential and side streets.
Canadian suburban sprawl in Markham, Ontario, north of Toronto
The early 1960s TV hit The Dick Van Dyke Show starring Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore was set in New Rochelle, New York, an affluent Westchester County suburb of New York City. New Rochelle is a first-suburb and one of the original \'bedroom communities\'.
The term suburbia is frequently used to encapsulate the concept of suburbs as slices of tract-home nuclear family.
Little Boxes is a song written by Malvina Reynolds in 1962 that lampoons the development of suburbia and what many consider its bourgeois conformist values. It is best known through Pete Seeger\'s performance of the song. A book about a Daly City, California, suburb Little Boxes: The Architecture of a Classic Midcentury Suburb, is named for the song.Little Boxes: The Architecture of a Classic Midcentury Suburb by Rob Keil, Daly City, CA: Advection Media, 2006. ISBN 0977923649.
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, backyard barbecues on Independence Day and neighborhood trick or treating on Halloween.
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, most notably Blue Velvet, which establishes a view of idealistic suburbia and then showcases a dark, depraved underworld. A distinctive depiction of American suburbs is Joe Dante\'s comedy film The \'Burbs from 1989, starring Tom Hanks and Carrie Fisher, in which the people living in the suburbs are portrayed as paranoiacs looking for adventure, which ends up in the explosion of one of their neighbors\' houses in which they presume a huge number of dead bodies. The Oscar winning 1999 film American Beauty centers the life of two suburban families and their eventual downfalls. The recent film Little Children (Directed by Todd Field) portrays the suburbs as a place full of paranoid and sometimes hypocritcal and judgemental security moms and dads, and bored and unhappy wives and husbands driven to adultery.
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 directing and featuring actors Steve Zahn, Parker Posey, Ajay Naidu, and Giovanni Ribisi in lead roles.
Etymology: According to dialogue in the 1984 movie Suburbiahttp://imdb.com/title/tt0086589/maindetails (no relation to the Bogosian version), "subtopia" is a neologism made by combining suburb and utopia.
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The references in this article would be clearer with a different or consistent style of citation, footnoting, or external linking. |
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It has been suggested that Suburbanization be merged into this article or section. (Discuss) |
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