Exurbia

Exurbia is the semiurban, semirural landscape between suburbs and the rural hinterland. It comprises many landscapes including farms, forests, isolated suburban subdivisions, small towns, acreage tract subdivisions, and estates. The process of exurbanization leads to a debate on the effects and inefficiencies associated with urban sprawl and the role of planning policy to manage it.

Exurbia is the product of four dynamics. The first is decentralizing employment opportunities and improving accessibility. The outward shift of jobs to the “suburban employment ring” of metropolitan areas combined with extensive highway networks brings formerly rural areas into commuting range of those jobs located in accessible places in which to live. There are many reasons for this shift, including lower land cost and development expense, greater volumes of land for firms to acquire and use or bank, aggressive suburban communities willing to subsidize many public services in order to compete with central cities, modern and high-capacity highway facilities encircling central cities and radiating outward, and attractive supplies of labor—people who initially moved out of the central city in pursuit of space, privacy, and amenities.

The second is American cultural antiurbanism and the preference for rural lifestyles. While moving away from urban externalities is one cause of residential relocation, it is perhaps the Jeffersonian agrarian ideology that influences exurban location decisions.

Exurban development would not be possible were it not for improving infrastructure technology. This is the third driver. Until recent years, households wishing the splendid isolation of the rural countryside but within commuting range of urban jobs had to accept a rustic lifestyle. That lifestyle often meant inadequate wastewater and domestic water treatment. The situation is different today as the urban umbilical cord has been severed. Households no longer equate distance from urban areas with reduction in the quality of residential property services, such as sewage treatment and disposal, water, electricity, communications, and shopping.

Also, public policy facilitates exurban development. Federal, state, and local highways carry commuters to many more locations more efficiently than other modes. Federal home mortgage programs and tax subsidies make housing purchase affordable. Federal and state clean water programs subsidize the provision of water and sewer services to many parts of exurbia. Numerous economic development policies favor new “greenfield” development over infill and redevelopment. Indeed, one could argue that the implicit urban policy of the states and local governments of the United States favors new construction over rehabilitation or reuse of buildings, highways over public transit, conversion of undeveloped land to urban uses, construction of single-family (owner-occupied) over multiple-family (renter) housing, growing areas over depressed ones, and new locations over old ones.

There is no clear research on how many people live in exurbia, principally because of differing methods to measure it. The range is between about 30 million and 90 million people, or 10% to 30% [Page 202]of the population. To some, the presence and extent of exurbia require a reassessment of the standard theories of urban form and household location behavior. Indeed, some descriptive literature goes so far as to conclude that exurbanites are different from other households in their preference for quasi-rural attributes and willingness to trade off longer commutes and accessibility to fewer services. However, rigorous statistical research actually finds that exurbanites have the same location demand functions as suburbanites and that, in effect, the exurbs are merely suburbs of the suburbs.

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