Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
When a municipality suddenly expands to cover its own suburbs (in all senses of the word), it would be odd to suddenly not call yesterday's suburbs suburbs anymore, even if a centralized government manages public safety and so on.
When a municipality suddenly expands to cover its own suburbs (in all senses of the word), it would be odd to suddenly not call yesterday's suburbs suburbs anymore, even if a centralized government manages public safety and so on.
I agree with that sentiment, I guess I'm over thinking it. It's more about the wording. For instance, if I lived out in Franklin or Decatur township, I wouldn't say I live in "a suburb", which sounds specific, but rather "I live out in the burbs", or a "suburban area of Indy or Jak" as a general description of the area.
Type 3: Postwar suburbs which have developed dense mixed-use downtown areas over the last few decades. Arlington, VA and Bellvue, WA are probably the best (only?) examples of this typology in the U.S.
Bellevue is particularly interesting because the urban downtown did not replace but instead arose next to the old small-town Main Street - which in its case is also called (East) Main Street.
If you mean neighborhoods that are suburban in physical form but part of the core city, again, I refer you to my post above yours. We do use phrases like "suburb in the city" to describe these, much as I refer to Northeast Philadephia as "our vast in-city suburb".
If you mean municipalities that are surrounded by the core city, as with Piedmont, Calif., inside Oakland, Hamtramck, Mich., inside Detroit or Gladstone, Mo., inside Kansas City, those are still "suburbs."
i mean referring to places like cambridge/somerville, miami beach, inglewood, ... as suburbs is stupid because they are among the most urban cities in the country.
in certain cities, annexation is mostly illegal so places once part of the city secede. other cities annex like crazy so that rural forested areas are now part of inner-city jacksonville. basing definitions on an imaginary arbitrary line is stupid.
The interesting thing is that the most commonly understood definition, which has been longer established, is the political one; the definition relating to built form is a postwar invention used mostly in academic circles and among urban nerds like us.
the u.s. census bureau doesnt have a definition for suburban. hud covers all urban counties (and in the case of new england - nectas) that are not defined to be rural.
Last edited by stanley-88888888; 10-21-2018 at 07:55 AM..
in certain cities, annexation is mostly illegal so places once part of the city secede. other cities annex like crazy so that rural forested areas are now part of inner-city jacksonville. basing definitions on an imaginary arbitrary line is stupid.
In a very real sense, you're right.
My hometown of Kansas City annexed more than 200 square miles of corn and soybeans between 1944 (when it annexed the one-square-mile city of Marlborough on its southern border) and the early 1980s (when it added some land around Belton in Cass County, the fourth county to contain a portion of the city).
A good chunk of that land now sprouts crops of houses. In physical form, they are suburbs, plain and simple. Politically, they are part of the core city.
No one ever said usage makes perfect sense, in either American or British English.
But if you doubt the primacy of the political over the physical-form definition, consider the title of former Albuquerque Mayor David Rusk's best-selling book arguing that cities should annex their future growth:
The interesting thing is that the most commonly understood definition, which has been longer established, is the political one; the definition relating to built form is a postwar invention used mostly in academic circles and among urban nerds like us.
Even more interesting is the academic use is likely the definition that causes the most disagreement. Calling a place outside the main city a “suburb” without having to consider the built form or the way that the place functions doesn’t take much thought. Deciding which places inside and outside a city are suburban or a suburb based on the characteristics of that place is much more complicated. And in my opinion it’s beyond what I would ever need to consider. I know before hand that there will be little agreement so what would even be the point of trying to categorize places in this way?
Could you explain this a little more? It's your second post about it. I know this gets a lot of talk in Pittsburgh; my parents used to bring it up back in the 1980s. They were surprised to hear that in 1974 Colorado voters voted in an amendment to the Colorado constitution that makes it very difficult for Denver to annex land. Think of Freda Poundstone every time you cross Denver's borders Eastern cities like Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Boston, etc did their annexing a half century or so earlier. No city sprung up out of the ground fully developed with the same boundaries now as the day it was founded.
It has a lot to do with when the areas where developed. those developed prior to WWII tend to be a lot more dense, what many people think of as typical urban. Areas developed in the 1950s or later were usually a lot less dense and more suburban. So if a city annexed an area that was already old and urban, it didn't really change the character or density of it (as in Pittsburgh annexing Allegheny city over a century ago).
Newer annexations and city/county mergers often involve a lot larger areas of land than in the past, and almost always include areas that were developed as suburbs. and even rural areas. See Jacksonville, Indianapolis, etc.
The interesting thing is that the most commonly understood definition, which has been longer established, is the political one; the definition relating to built form is a postwar invention used mostly in academic circles and among urban nerds like us.
Yes, you guys seem to define everything built after WW II as "suburban". So newer cities, or cities in the sunbelt that greatly increased in population after the war are considered "suburban". No matter that the population had more than doubled since then, and household size decreased. Plus, buildings are much "greener" now, but you guys don't seem to care about that.
I personally consider urbanized suburbs as suburbs that have similar density of urbanized cities. Walkability is a must along with LRT or rapid rail service to the central city. I don't think it has as much to do with age of infrastructure as it does with type of built environment.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
