Suburbs and Suburbanization

Suburbs usually are defined as politically independent jurisdictions located outside of a larger central city but still sharing social or economic ties with the city. Suburbs, together with the central city, comprise the larger metropolitan area.

Suburbs have existed in some form since antiquity, but during ancient times only the less well-off tended to live outside of the city walls. Later, in Europe, the wealthy developed country estates outside of the city's boundaries. Prior to the mid-19th century, the growth and size of cities were constrained by the lack of rapid mass-transportation networks. This meant that workers and owners lived in close proximity both to each other and to their places of employment. The result was compact cities whose size was determined by the ability of people to walk between various parts of the city (the pedestrian city). During the 19th century, industrialization together with waves of migration and immigration into British and U.S. cities made the central city a less desirable location for the affluent. From the 1840s onward, the development of new public transit systems, such as horse cars, streetcars, trains, and subway systems, enabled the affluent in British cities, and later in American cities, to begin moving out of the central city and into the open spaces on the city's outskirts. This enabled greater locational separation between both different classes in society and different types of land use and, thus, also between residence and employment. This process was rooted in the particular social and cultural norms of British bourgeois society, whose members desired a clear class separation from the working class for their nuclear families. The design of private detached housing away from the central city fulfilled this need.

Although the roots of the modern suburb are English, the greatest expression of the modern suburb is found in the United States (together with countries such as Canada and Australia). The development of the Anglo-American suburb always has had two important components: a desire for homogeneity (e.g., class, race, ethnicity) and a desire to control one's revenues (through local government). An additional crucial element for the development of suburbs was the availability of cheap land on the outskirts of cities and property speculators willing to buy and develop this land for profit. Thus, Anglo-American suburban development cannot be separated from a speculative private property– driven land market. As transportation moved from fixed lines to the flexible routes made possible by the automobile, the suburbs spread farther from the central city and suburban infill occurred between the tracks. This resulted in the vast low-density sprawl characteristic of modern American cities (Los Angeles is the paramount example). The cheap availability of the automobile, and then the wider availability of mortgages (through the[Page 470] establishment of the Federal Housing Authority in 1934), made suburbanization more accessible and affordable to the middle class. This process accelerated rapidly after World War II with the mass production of new suburban tract housing. These new suburban developments (e.g., Levittown, Pennsylvania) were marketed as places where young families could enjoy relatively low-cost homeownership, have ample space, have access to new amenities and appliances, have a say in controlling their taxes and schools, and (importantly) leave the problems and ethnic diversity of the cities behind.

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