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Exurbs

Exurbs are a particular kind of pseudo-urban settlement—disjointed fragments of urban form surrounded by countryside but not really belonging to it, noncontiguous residential, or other functional dependencies of a town or city.

An exurb is situated at some distance from the recognizable urban or metropolitan fringe, usually consisting of one or more housing tracts surrounded by open land still rural in character, as well as scattered employment and commercial sites, but few (if any) social services. Exurbs house urbanites who mostly commute to jobs in outer metropolitan suburbs or other exurban areas, sometimes over considerable distances. These residents depend on the service infrastructure provided by communities closer to or on the metropolitan fringe (to which the exurbanites likely contribute no direct taxes) and increasingly on Internet purchases brought to their home or office doors by parcel delivery services. Exurbs represent the leading edge of modern urban sprawl, driven by prolonged metropolitan decentralization, and may in time become outer suburbs of an expanding metropolitan built-up area.

Origin and Enlargement of the Concept

The preconditions for exurbs have existed since automobiles became widespread, particularly in regions without complicated rural land tenure patterns, where urban market pressures could easily convert land to urban use. Introduced in 1955 by Auguste Spectorsky, the term exurb gained broader currency in the United States during the 1970s, when isolated but rapidly developed tract housing and custom home subdivisions began appearing in large numbers well beyond the existing metropolitan fringe, thanks to intercity superhighway construction and state and local road upgrading in the rural hinterlands. The concept was expanded to accommodate the increasing diversity of land use patterns and community types found beyond the fringe of many metropolitan areas during the 20th century. Occasionally, it is misapplied to locales better described by other terms such as outer suburbs, satellite towns, and edge cities.

Exurbs are found in some form in many regions of the world, but especially in highly urbanized countries with permissive land use regulations. They are most common in the United States, where abundant land, a highly mobile population, and fragmented governmental jurisdictions encourage their proliferation.

Measurement

Exurban zones typically stretch 30 miles beyond the suburban edges of towns of at least 50,000 residents and up to 70 miles beyond the fringes of cities of at least 500,000 residents. Exurban communities as a whole contain a mixture of established and more recent residents, with the latter commuting at least a half hour to work. In the United States, they are generally measured as aggregations reported at the county level because their geographic scatter has become so vast that it spreads over many counties surrounding even single metropolitan centers. Above all, the measures rely on population density but can also include employment data and occasionally physical attributes. The average population density of American exurban zones is 93 persons per square mile, in contrast to rural and urban densities of 4 and 1,149 persons per square mile, respectively. Whereas fully urban development has placed fully 55% of the U.S. population on less than 2% of the country's land area, exurban settlement has appropriated more than 14% of the total land area for only 37% of the national population.

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