Growth of Suburbia

11 Key excerpts on "Growth of Suburbia"

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  Urban Geography

  An Introductory Analysis

  • James H. Johnson, W. B. Fisher(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Pergamon

    (Publisher)

  As a result, a real and growing demand has been created for low-density housing, which has at least been* partially satisfied by countless acres of suburban building, often architecturally undistinguished. * See Chapter 2, p. 36 19Q 130 Urban Geography T H E G R O W T H O F L O N D O N 5 0 10 2 5 miles i i i i i I . . . i : FIG. 37. The growth of London. In the pre-railway era the built-up area of London remained compact. Expansion in the second half of the nineteenth century was more rapid, with tram and steam-railway services encouraging longer journeys to work. In the twentieth century, the extension of the underground to outer London, the electrification of surface railways, the growing importance of travel by bus and motor-car, and the development of suburban industry all led to an un-precedented expansion of the built-up area. Residential Suburbs 131 The United States provides the classic case of a nation in which the extent of suburbs has exploded during the twentieth century. Although statistics are a notoriously unreliable indicator of detailed changes around the fringes of cities, the official census returns record some 30 million suburban dwellers in the U.S.A. for 1950, a figure which gives some hint of the relative importance of this growth. Not only does this represent a substantial proportion of a total population of 150 mil-lions, but the rate of change is also increasing its momentum. Between 1947 and 1955, for example, 9 million people in the U.S.A. moved into suburban homes. Although not always so dramatic, the history of suburban growth around all Western cities (or indeed around cities of other cultures which have been adopting Westernized economies) is basically similar. In detail, however, the generic resemblance varies from place to place, as a result of differences in the timing of suburban growth and in the speed of building, related in turn to local technological and economic developments.

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  Shaping Suburbia

  How Political Institutions Organize Urban Development

  • Paul G. Lewis, Paul Lewis(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • University of Pittsburgh Press

    (Publisher)

  Each of these terms has a different range of meaning but each emphasizes the continuing dispersal of population and business to suburbia, and (some- times) its reconcentration there into multiple nodes. In particular, an explo- sion of economic activity has reordered the appearance, lifestyle, and market- place of what were once clearly subordinate urban places, or suburbs. Early in the 197os, central cities were overtaken by their suburban rings in one key SHAPING SUBURBIA measure of economic livelihood: the number of jobs. This suburban domi- nance took on even greater proportions during the rapid-fire growth of the 1980s. During this period, the formerly peripheral areas increasingly took on a different appearance. In many locations, clusters of office buildings, often high-rises, sprouted among shopping centers and a variety of types of hous- ing, redefining the suburban skyline. To many, suburbia's image may remain one of sleepy residential neighbor- hoods dotted with crabgrass. But a large and growing cohort of professionals and service or office workers know suburbia as something else: a focus of employment and commercial activity. Following economist Thomas Stanback (1991), I refer to the burgeoning economic development of formerly periph- eral areas as "the new suburbanization" and call areas developed since 1970 "the new suburbia." The new suburbia is distinguishable from earlier periods of suburban development, which were more residential in character and less purely automobile oriented. In this book, I ask why some suburban regions are developing differently from others, and argue that a fundamental political logic underlies the pat- terns taken by this new growth.

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  Research in Urban Sociology

  • Mark Clapson, Ray Hutchison, Ray Hutchison(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Emerald Group Publishing Limited

    (Publisher)

  As Richard Harris argues in the first and in many ways defining chapter of this volume, almost all development beyond the city centre might well be incorporated within the broad umbrella term of ‘suburbanization’. Metropolitan regions have expanded as a consequence of continuing population growth, particularly in the large developing economies of Brazil, China and India, and in the emerging, if smaller, post-colonial countries in Africa and Latin America. Suburban sprawl and edge cities – an important area of research in the EU as well as the United States ( Garreau, 1991 ; Lang, 2003 ; Phelps, Parsons, & Ballas, 2008 ) – have collided with an increasingly fragile notion of traditional urbanism, based on the high-density walking city, rich in historical architecture and cultural and economic resources, and producing, in theory at least, a high level of civic pride and engagement. However, in Chapter 6, the traditional urbanity of Italian cities is attacked as a valid mode of assessing the ‘urban’ qualities of new suburbs in the Italian capital city. Urban sociology began with the study of the impact of the socio-economic changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution, and for most of the past century it has remained embedded in the city, with a focus on urban lifestyles and urban problems of the central city, even while people and employment moved to the suburbs. If the majority of persons live, and most development occurs, in areas beyond the central city, suburban studies might well deserve to become the new scholastic shorthand for the increasingly diverse field of academic endeavour seeking to make sense of the myriad social, cultural, economic and political processes that are inextricably intertwined with suburbanization in a global society. It is time for urban sociology to move out of the city and explore the new suburban world of the twenty-first century.

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  Working-Class Suburb

  A Study of Auto Workers in Suburbia

  • Bennett M. Berger(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  Chapter I The Myth of Suburbia In recent years a myth of suburbia has developed in the United States. In saying this, I refer not to the physical facts of the move- ment to the suburbs; this is an ecological tendency to which all recent statistics on population mobility bear eloquent testimony. 1 I refer instead to the social and cultural ramifications that are perceived to have been inherent in the suburban exodus. Brunner and Hallenbeck, for example, call the rise of suburbia "one of the major social changes of the twentieth century," 2 and the popular literature especially is full of characterizations of suburbia as "a new way of life." The significance of the past decade cannot be overestimated since it is only in this period that suburbia has become a mass phenomenon and hence prone to the manufacture of modern myth. Suburbanization, however, goes back as far as the latter part 1 In 1953, for example, Fortune reported that suburban population had increased by 75 per cent over 1934, although total population was increasing by only 25 per cent; between 1947 and 1953 the increase was 43 per cent. See HThe New Suburban Market," Fortune (November, 1953), p. 234. That this trend is con- tinuing is indicated by a recent Census Bureau report showing that between 1950 and 1956 the population of suburbs increased by 29.3 per cent, although their central cities gained by only 4.7 per cent. For a full discussion of this whole tendency, see Donald Bogue, Population Growth in Standard Metropolitan Areas, 1900-1950, especially pp. 18-19, tables 13 and 14, p. 30, and table 19, p. 34. 'Edmund aeS. Brunner and Wilbur C. Hallenbeck, American Society: Urban and Rural Patterns, p. 253. 2 THE MYTH OF SUBURBIA of the nineteenth century, when the very wealthy began to build country estates along the way of suburban railroad stations.

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  Handbook of Urban Studies

  • Ronan Paddison(Author)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  The remainder of this chapter draws on the literature that addresses these ques-tions most directly and attempts to assess the extent to which consensus has been reached and what this means for the way in which urban areas in advanced economies are considered likely to develop in the future. SUBURBANIZATION Suburbanization is by no means a new phenom-enon, with its origins traceable in the building of large homes by more successful entrepreneurs on the outskirts of the burgeoning centres of industry and commerce over a century and a half ago. It became significant as an urban feature during the latter half of the nineteenth century as cheap forms of mass transit loosened the ties between home and workplace for those with secure jobs and relatively ‘social’ hours of work. Subsequently, it accelerated as a result of further changes in transport and personal wealth, surging ahead especially strongly around mid century, to the extent that in the ‘stages of urban develop-ment’ model it is seen to have become the domi-nant element of urban change in the 1960s not only in the Anglo-American world but widely across Western Europe. Since then, however, the suburbs have, in one sense, been eclipsed by other developments, and at the same time have begun to undergo a revolution which appears to render the original terminology obsolete. The term ‘suburb’ carries connotations of being something less than urbs , the city: ‘usually residential or dormitory in character, being dependent on the city for occupational, shopping and recreational facilities’ (Johnston, 1981: 331). The process has been very largely powered by the negative aspects of city cost, congestion, grime and squalor. Originally, it was dominated by the housing needs and aspirations of the family, with the emphasis very much on the male breadwinner and on healthy space in which the mother could devote her time to bringing up her children and providing for her husband.

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  The Dependent City Revisited

  The Political Economy Of Urban Development And Social Policy

  • Paul Kantor(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  As suggested earlier, the nation's postindustrial economy caused people and jobs to abandon traditional central cities in a pattern of inexorable dispersal during the decades following World War II. This massive movement was reinforced by federal policies that promoted suburban homeownership, highway construction, and new business. The suburbanization of America was unstoppable; previously isolated hamlets and unincorporated areas near central cities witnessed tremendous development pressures that continue even today (Tucker, 1984). The race to suburbia ignited a boom in suburban land values and the production of unprecedented numbers of new homes in the outer rings of most heartland cities.

  If left to itself, however, the market governing this process would very likely have extended many of the familiar mixed patterns of residential development found in the central city. The huge demand for new suburban housing and the demands of business for cheaper land and more space place unprecedented pressure on suburban land development. Greater profits could be made by suburban landowners, real estate interests, and the construction industry by intensely developing suburban tracts for large numbers of housing units (rather than building fewer homes at greater density). In many older suburbs located at the fringes of larger cities, this pattern was already evident during the 1940s. In short, the economic forces impacting the development of suburbia were poised to accommodate nearly everybody—except perhaps those with very low incomes who could not afford new housing of any kind—who might choose to move there.

  Federalism and Exclusion

  That the history of suburbanization did not follow the logic of the market was a result of intergovernmental arrangements that permitted suburban local governments to regulate the development of their communities. State policies in respect to the governance of land use were most crucial. State governments ultimately retain authority to control land use through zoning, planning, and regulating standards of building construction. But it has been a time-honored state practice to delegate these responsibilities, together with extensive powers to tax, borrow, and provide most essential public services, to incorporated local governments (Babcock, 1980; Zimmer, 1976; Danielson, 1976:Ch. 2), such as the county, city, village, town, or other state-chartered corporations that state constitutions and laws designate as local government units having specific kinds of authority. Except for certain regional planning responsibilities in coastal zones, flood plains, and the like, state governments have generally delegated nearly complete authority to control land use to the lowest incorporated governmental units. In unincorporated areas, the county usually exercises planning authority; county government's role in the planning of land use in incorporated areas is usually quite limited and often only advisory.

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  Urban Politics

  Cities and Suburbs in a Global Age

  • Myron A. Levine, Myron Levine(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  multicentered metropolis became the new urban reality. The old central city and its downtown business district no longer dominated the urban region.

  In the 1950s and 1960s, when the movement of America to the suburbs was still in its relative infancy, suburbia was stereotyped as a land of tranquil bedroom communities from where husbands commuted to the central city for work. Industrial and factory suburbs also existed, but did little to mar the overall portrayal of suburbia as a series of serene, middle- and upper-class, and predominantly white communities.

  Over the decades that followed, suburbia would evolve and mature. Today, suburbia is much more diverse and dynamic than the early stereotype. Suburbs are now the sites of high-tech industry, office campuses, entertainment venues, cultural centers, universities, and fine dining. For the residents of suburbia, their communities do not at all seem “sub” to central cities.

  The population of contemporary suburbia has also become increasingly diverse. The all-white suburb, a community which had no African-American residents, has largely disappeared from the urban landscape. Nor is contemporary suburbia uniformly white and affluent. A diverse racial and ethnic population, immigrants, and families in poverty are increasingly found in the suburbs.10 Conditions in the most nation’s troubled inner-ring suburbs, including East Cleveland, Trenton (New Jersey, just across the river from Philadelphia), East St. Louis (Illinois), and East Palo Alto (California), are in many ways indistinguishable from those of the urban core.

  NATURAL FACTORS AND THE SHIFT TO THE SUNBELT

  Suburbanization is not the only population and economic shift to reshape urban America. The latter half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century saw a major demographic shift, the movement of population and economic activity from the older Frostbelt cities and suburbs of the Northeast and the Midwest to the growing Sunbelt communities of the South and West. The nation’s most dynamically growing areas are in the Sunbelt, while communities in the Northeast and North Central regions continue to lose population. As census data from 2016 reveals, all of the nation’s 25 fastest-growing metropolitan areas (including metropolitan Las Vegas, Austin, Raleigh, Sarasota-Bradenton, and Orlando) are to be found in the Sunbelt!11 The nation’s top ten counties in terms of population increase likewise were in the South and the West (see Table 2.1 ). Two southwestern communities—Maricopa County (Phoenix) and Harris County (Houston)—had the greatest population gains, followed closely by Las Vegas. In contrast, the counties in 2016 that suffered the most severe population loss— including Cook County (Chicago), Wayne County (Detroit), Baltimore, and Cuyahoga (Cleveland)—were almost all in the Frostbelt, that is, in the Northeast and the Midwest (see Table 2.2

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  Government Intervention and Suburban Sprawl

  The Case for Market Urbanism

  • Michael Lewyn(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 2 Sprawl As Where We Grow: Or, How Government Spreads Suburbia Abstract Defenders of suburbanization argues that it is a result of consumer choice, and that what the market has put together, government should not tear asunder. But in fact, sprawl is a result of a variety of government policies, such as highway spending that facilitated suburban commuting, school residency requirements that force city residents into poverty-packed public schools while creating homogenously affluent suburban schools, and federal housing policies that favored suburbanites over city residents. This chapter also suggests a variety of market-oriented, anti-sprawl reforms, such as reducing government highway spending and allowing urban parents to opt out of urban public schools. Keywords Highways Á School Desegregation Á Vouchers Á Public Housing Between 1900 and 1950, every American city with over 500,000 people gained population. 1 But in the late twentieth century, the rise of sprawl transformed American cities. Of the 18 American cities that had over 1 See SARAH JANSSEN, ED., THE WORLD ALMANAC AND BOOK OF FACTS 2016, at 614 (1950 data), 623–45 (2010 data) (2016). © The Author(s) 2017 M. Lewyn, Government Intervention and Suburban Sprawl, DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-95149-9_2 25 500,000 people in 1950, all but four lost population between 1950 and 2010. 2 St. Louis has lost nearly two-thirds of its 1950 population, and Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo lost more than half. 3 Even among cities that have gained population, some have done so only by annexing newly developed areas that would be considered suburbs in other cities. 4 As cities became smaller, they became poorer. In 1950, most cities had about the same median income as their suburbs. 5 By contrast, by 2010 the urban poverty rate was twice that of suburbia, 6 and even fast-growing cities like Houston have more poverty than their suburbs.

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  International Perspectives on Suburbanization

  A Post-Suburban World?

  • N. Phelps, F. Wu, N. Phelps, F. Wu(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Footloose humanity travelling to a multitude of destinations within the metropolitan agglomeration made the concept of core and periphery increasingly obsolete. Suburbia segued into post-suburbia and fashioned a new metropolitan world. 34 Suburbia and Post-suburbia: A Brief History 35 3 The Restless Landscape of Metroburbia Elisabeth Chaves, Paul Knox and David Bieri 3.1 Introduction The metropolitan form in the United States (US), a product of egalitar- ian liberalism, the New Deal, the collapse of the welfare state, and then the rise of neoliberalism, is a landscape of political and economic change that manifests itself in physical and social landscapes. In turn, these landscapes naturalize these political-economic structures. The chal- lenges of characterizing this changing metropolitan form have prompted a great number of neologisms, including exurbia, edge city, edgeless city, exopolis, boomburb, cosmoburb, nerdistan, technoburb, generica, satel- lite sprawl, mallcondoville, as well as post-suburbia and metroburbia. The term ‘metroburbia’ emerged in Internet and media usage around 2005 to capture an important dimension of the New Metropolis: the intermixing of office employment and high-end retailing, with residential settings in suburban and exurban areas, along with established dormitory towns and small cities within a metropolitan area that has acquired many of the amenities of a large city. In short, it represents a fragmented and multi- nodal mixture of employment and residential settings, with a fusion of suburban, exurban, and central-city characteristics. Post-suburbia and metroburbia can be used almost interchangeably to describe these evolving landscapes, although the latter may better emphasize the blending or blurring of the traditional urban and suburban settings within the US.

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  Readings in Urban Sociology

  Readings in Sociology

  • R. E. Pahl(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Pergamon

    (Publisher)

  12 In fact, American cities have sometimes been described as collections of small towns. 18 There is some truth to this description, especially if the city is compared to the actual small town, rather than to the romantic construct of anti-urban critics [33]. Postwar suburbia represents the most contemporary version of the quasi-primary way of life. Owing to increases in real income and the encouragement of home ownership provided by the FHA, families in the lower-middle class and upper working class can now live in modern single-family homes in low-density sub-divisions, an opportunity previously available only to the upper and upper-middle classes [34], The popular literature describes the new suburbs as com-munities in which conformity, homogeneity, and other-direction are unusually rampant [4, 32]. The implication is that the move from city to suburb initiates a new way of life which causes con-siderable behavior and personality change in previous urbanites. A preliminary analysis of data which I am now collecting in Levittown, New Jersey, suggests, however, that the move from the city to this predominantly lower-middle-class suburb does not result in any major behavioral changes for most people. Moreover, the changes which do occur reflect the move from the social isolation of a transient city or suburban apartment building to the quasi-primary life of a neighborhood of single-family homes. Also, many of the people whose life has changed reported that the changes were intended. They existed as aspirations before the move, or as reasons for it. In other words, the suburb itself creates few changes in ways of life. Similar conclusions have been reported 12 These neighborhoods cannot, however, be considered as urban folk societies. People go out of the area for many of their friendships, and their allegiance to neighborhood is neither intense nor all-encompassing.

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  Sprawl

  A Compact History

  • Robert Bruegmann(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  Although the word “gentrification” has often been used in a polemical way, to suggest the problems associated with the involuntary displacement of poor residents, and it has been applied primarily to developments since World War II, I will use it in this book as a neutral term indicating simply a change, a shift upward of any given neighborhood in socioeconomic status. Used in this way, the term can refer to a process that, like growth itself, is probably as old as cities. 7 In Second Empire Paris, for example, as the boulevards sliced through con-gested old quarters, the poor were pushed out and the new apartment blocks were marketed to the expanding middle and upper-middle class. The displaced population, for its part, tended to move outward to industrial neighborhoods farther out in the city or to the inner suburbs. By the twentieth century, many of these inner suburbs, with their industrial facilities and cheaply built apartment buildings, had become a “red belt,” a set of working-class neighborhoods that regularly voted for the Communist and other leftist political parties. Outside the Red Belt, especially during the 1920s, many suburbs saw an explosion of single-family houses for more prosperous working-class families and those of a burgeoning middle class, all happy to trade the noise and congestion of the city for the relative calm of the suburbs. 8 In North American urban areas the movement outward in the 1920s was even more of a mass movement than in Europe. The expansion and intensifi-cation of retail and office uses in the old downtowns led to a sharp decrease in the number of people who lived at the center of cities. In this trend, American C H A P T E R 3 3 6 cities followed the process long visible in the city of London in which the down-towns came to be intensely crowded during the workday and relatively deserted at night and weekends.

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