Suburbanization

Suburbanization is the process that produces suburbs. Suburban growth is as old as cities themselves, but it is only in the past 150 years that it has become a central aspect of urban development in the United States. The scholarly study of suburbanization is of an even more recent vintage. Although some monographs on suburban growth were written in the years immediately preceding and following World War II, the vast bulk of academic work is less than 30 years old. In this period, however, suburbanization, and with it, the suburbs, has become an important part of urban historical research.

America is a suburban society. Since the end of World War II, the number of Americans living in the suburbs has increased dramatically. Between 1950 and 2000, the number of people living in metropolitan areas of more than 1 million grew by more than 117 million, accounting for 90 percent of the total growth of the United States population. Most of this growth was concentrated in the suburbs. In 1990, for example, 192 million of America's 248 million people resided in metropolitan areas. Of these, only 78 million lived in the central cities. The remaining 114 million lived in the unincorporated areas and more than 6,700 incorporated urban places surrounding the central cities. In sharp contrast, 40 years ago, only 34 million of the country's 149 million lived in the suburbs, while 49 million were to be found in the central cities. In other words, during the second half of the 20th century, the share of America's population living in the suburbs increased from less than a quarter to almost a half, while the number of central city residents remained stable at about a third of the U.S. population.

The fact that America has become a suburban society is rarely questioned. However, there is debate about the rate of prewar suburbanization. To some extent, these disagreements have to do with how the suburb is defined. The typical view is that the suburb is a politically independent jurisdiction lying outside the city's boundaries. For some, however, a suburb also could include new developments within the central city. For example, new middle-class residential or factory districts could as easily be built on greenfield space outside the city's built-up area but within the political boundaries of the city itself as it could in the independent areas outside the city proper.

One reason for the disagreement over what constitutes a suburb stems from a confusion over the role that annexation has played in the making of the central city. The annexation of suburban land, people, and businesses by cities such as Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York between 1850 and World War I greatly contributed to the residential and economic base of [Page 777]the central city. But were the newly annexed suburban areas transformed overnight into nonsuburbs? Did the assumption of political control by central cities mean that suburbs were now city places? In other words, the definition of what is suburban and what is not becomes complicated once the incorporation of previously suburban space as city space is acknowledged.

...