Suburbanization

A Modern Phenomenon

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed something of an explosion of suburbanization, but suburbs existed since the first urban civilization. Excavations of Minoan settlements in ancient Crete, built some 4,000 years ago, appear to provide evidence of an urban civilization of unwalled cities, with a distinctive urban core of a palace, temple, marketplace, and town houses. Beyond the core, a merging of town with countryside, or of urban with rural characteristics, was evident in miniature in Minoan Crete. In subsequent centuries, in Europe, Asia and the Americas, walled cities tended to be more self-contained than those which were more open. The latter exhibited evidence of decentralization from a higher-density urban core to lower-density settlements in the hinterlands. To greater or lesser degrees, those hinterlands were economically and politically dependent upon the city proper.

However, among the fastest-growing and most expansive suburbanizations were those accompanying the rise of the urban-industrial towns and cities after 1850. For example, London, England, between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries grew at a massive rate, increasing in population from 3 million to more than 8 million between 1850 and 1939. Its spatial growth was also enormous; for example, the capital more than quadrupled in size during this time. Other major industrial cities in Britain rapidly suburbanized, notably Manchester, in the heartland of the British Industrial Revolution. In The Condition of the English Working Classes (1844), Friedrich Engels emphasized the sharply different environment of the inner girdle of insanitary, overcrowded accommodation of the industrial proletariat and the expanding suburbs built alongside the thoroughfares and railways lines spreading outward from Manchester. The middle classes had moved away from the center: In the modest but clean town houses of the inner suburbs lived the middle bourgeoisie, while the upper bourgeoisie inhabited remoter villas, replete with large gardens, where the city met the countryside.

Engels's analysis is significant in at least three ways. First, he linked social conditions with spatial separation based upon class, subsequently a key tool in Marxist analyses of urbanization and inequality. Second, along with other contemporaries, Engels was fully aware of the fact that public transport drove urban expansion. Third, implicit within his analysis is an unwitting rehearsal of the social and spatial model of suburbanization devised by the Chicago School of Sociology between the wars. It consisted of the inner ring of workmen's houses and the impoverished intermediate zones in transition between the inner ring and the further-flung suburbs of commuters. In the zones in transition, the middle classes tended to move out to the suburbs as poorer groups moved into the intermediate zone. This framework for understanding the social and spatial dimensions of suburbanization has been applied to many industrial cities.

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