Technoburbs

Historical Evolution

One of the most important features of urban development in the global North in the period following World War II has been the rise of urban sprawl and expanding suburbanization leading to the extension of urban regions. While traditional central business districts retain high-level command-and-control service functions, the city has experienced the decentralization of residential, industrial, commercial, and specialized service functions to its suburbs and beyond. The subsequent shift of these functions to an urban periphery has led not just to suburbanization but to the creation of new peripheral cities without the traditional traits of cityness. Within these cities, residents increasingly look to their immediate surroundings rather than the city for their employment needs.

For example, beyond the boundary of the traditional urban core, shopping malls, industrial parks, business estates, university campuses, corporate office complexes, back-office centers, and logistics hubs are interspersed with residential areas and open green spaces, forming new decentered spatial units where conventional notions of city and suburb blur into one another. As a consequence, notions of the city based on an established geometry of bounded sectors and zones has become obsolete.

[Page 796]The urban historian Robert Fishman coined the term technoburb to describe the breakaway of the urban periphery from a city it no longer needs and the emergence of specific types of decentered urban forms that retain the economic and technological dynamism associated with the city. As a consequence, these peripheral zones have emerged as viable socioeconomic units. Other terms for similar phenomena include edge cities, outer city, satellite city, posturban city, centerless city, exopolis, and exurbia.

Urban scholars have often looked to North American case studies to examine the emergence of a polycentric metropolis that defies a traditional urban geography classification of core versus periphery. Los Angeles has frequently been cited as the paradigmatic exemplar of “a city turned inside out” with central functions of the central business district dispersed to its surrounding hinterland. Any universal claims drawing on specific urban case studies interpreted as offering lessons for all other urban areas is problematic.

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