Suburbs and Suburbanization

Major Stages of Suburbanization

It is possible to identify four broad stages of suburbanization, led by the United States, but with later parallels in the other developed countries. The first stage occurred in the mid 19th century, when new passenger train services allowed the creation of residential suburbs for the wealthy, who could afford daily rail travel to the high-density, compact central city. These early railway suburbs were often beautifully designed experiments in gracious countryside living, in exclusive planned residential estates such as Llewellyn Park in New Jersey, the Main Line communities outside Philadelphia, or Riverside outside Chicago. Described as “bourgeois utopias” by Robert Fishman, these were successful in generating a model of low-density, purely residential suburbs as the ideal in family housing and presented a stark contrast to the gritty and polluted industrial cities of the day. The vast majority of jobs, shops, and housing continued to be located in mixed-use areas in city centers.

Second is the period from the 1860s to the 1930s, when the introduction and rapid spread of horse-drawn trams and then electric streetcars allowed an accelerating expansion of suburban development for the middle and upper classes, creating what are now known as streetcar suburbs. Since the area from which inexpensive daily travel to central-city employment and retail areas expanded exponentially, suburban land was cheap, and single-family detached housing became affordable to a much larger share of the population. The house-building industry expanded and began to create a more differentiated range of products for different classes, from self-built prefabricated kits for the lower middle class to the [Page 2717]rather substantial dwellings for the upper middle class. Some daily retail uses located in strips along major streets carrying streetcar tracks, with residential areas of detached houses on grids of streets up to about a 10-minute walk from the streetcar lines. Most retail and employment remained in the center, except for the growing numbers of suburban factories along the railway lines leading out of the city.

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