Suburban Land Use

The Three Waves of Suburbanization

Intraregional suburbanization, that is, the outward shift of development from high-density urban centers to low-density outlying areas, occurred via three distinct waves over the course of the past century or so. The first wave, from the mid to late 1800s through the 1930s, gave rise to the so-called streetcar suburbs and was purely residential in nature. It resulted in a distinct pattern of land use—today called transit-oriented development and the cornerstone of the New Urbanism movement—wherein single-family homes were developed in a grid on small lots within easy walking distance of train stations or other public transport hubs.

The second wave, which began in the late 1940s and was both residential and commercial in nature, was fueled by the post–World War II housing boom and expansion of the interstate highway system. It produced an automobile-oriented pattern of land use, wherein homes were developed in various configurations on large lots far from attendant retail and service centers.

The third wave, which began in the 1960s and 1970s and was also both residential and commercial in nature, cemented a radical and more or less permanent transformation of regional structure from a monocentric to a polycentric pattern of spatial organization. Compared with earlier waves of suburbanization, which were essentially population shifts, it involved substantial employment shifts as well. For the first time ever, firms in all sectors of the economy, from manufacturing to high-order services, moved in mass to outlying areas, often clustering in entirely new “edge cities.” The resulting development was just as complex as in built-up urban areas but typically much lower in density and more spatially expansive. Today, most metropolitan areas exhibit a patchwork pattern of suburban land use made up of all three waves of decentralization.

From The Rust Belt to The Sunbelt

At the same time as these intraregional shifts were occurring, an equally important interregional shift also occurred. Specifically, the same personal preferences, advances in communications technology, and expansion of transport networks that led to intraregional suburbanization drew the population to less developed areas in the Sunbelt and elsewhere. Relatively small regions such as Atlanta, Georgia, now one of the nation's 10 largest metropolitan areas, grew at an unprecedented rate after 1950 and, so, were developed [Page 2714][Page 2715]almost entirely in a suburban fashion. That is, they were built in a manner corresponding to the second and third waves of suburbanization and have only limited—or no—high-density urban development. This growth process can be thought of as interregional suburbanization, or the shift of development from older, built-up regions of the country in the Northeast to newer, low-density and automobile-oriented regions in the South and West.

...