A suburb is an area within a metropolitan area which has a higher or lower population density and sometimes less detached housing. In many metropolitan areas suburbs rise in population during the day and are where most jobs are located; being major commercial and job hubs, many suburbs also exist as separate residential communities within commuting distance of a larger city. Suburbs can have their own political or legal jurisdiction, especially in the United States, but this is not always the case, especially in the United Kingdom, where most suburbs are located within the administrative boundaries of cities. In most English-speaking countries, suburban areas are defined in contrast to central city or inner city areas, but in Australian English and South African English, suburb has become largely synonymous with what is called a "neighborhood" in the U.S., but it is used in contrast with inner city areas.
Urban sociology is the sociological study of cities and urban life. One of the field’s oldest sub-disciplines, urban sociology studies and examines the social, historical, political, cultural, economic, and environmental forces that have shaped urban environments. Like most areas of sociology, urban sociologists use statistical analysis, observation, archival research, U.S. census data, social theory, interviews, and other methods to study a range of topics, including poverty, racial residential segregation, economic development, migration and demographic trends, gentrification, homelessness, blight and crime, urban decline, and neighborhood changes and revitalization. Urban sociological analysis provides critical insights that shape and guide urban planning and policy-making.
White flight or white exodus is the sudden or gradual large-scale migration of white people from areas becoming more racially or ethnoculturally diverse. Starting in the 1950s and 1960s, the terms became popular in the United States. They referred to the large-scale migration of people of various European ancestries from racially mixed urban regions to more racially homogeneous suburban or exurban regions. The term has more recently been applied to other migrations by whites, from older, inner suburbs to rural areas, as well as from the U.S. Northeast and Midwest to the milder climate in the Southeast and Southwest. The term 'white flight' has also been used for large-scale post-colonial emigration of whites from Africa, or parts of that continent, driven by levels of violent crime and anti-colonial or anti-white state policies.
The City Beautiful movement was a reform philosophy of North American architecture and urban planning that flourished during the 1890s and 1900s with the intent of introducing beautification and monumental grandeur in cities. It was a part of the progressive social reform movement in North America under the leadership of the upper-middle class, which was concerned with poor living conditions in all major cities. The movement, which was originally associated mainly with Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Kansas City and Washington, D.C., promoted beauty not only for its own sake, but also to create moral and civic virtue among urban populations.
Urban sprawl is defined as "the spreading of urban developments on undeveloped land near a more or less densely populated city". Urban sprawl has been described as the unrestricted growth in many urban areas of housing, commercial development, and roads over large expanses of land, with little concern for very dense urban planning. Sometimes the urban areas described as the most "sprawling" are the most densely populated. In addition to describing a special form of urbanization, the term also relates to the social and environmental consequences associated with this development. In modern times some suburban areas described as "sprawl" have less detached housing and higher density than the nearby core city. Medieval suburbs suffered from the loss of protection of city walls, before the advent of industrial warfare. Modern disadvantages and costs include increased travel time, transport costs, pollution, and destruction of the countryside. The revenue for building and maintaining urban infrastructure in these areas are gained mostly through property and sales taxes. As most jobs in the US are now located in suburbs generating much of the revenue, although a lack of growth will require higher tax rates.
A streetcar suburb is a residential community whose growth and development was strongly shaped by the use of streetcar lines as a primary means of transportation. Such suburbs developed in the United States in the years before the automobile, when the introduction of the electric trolley or streetcar allowed the nation’s burgeoning middle class to move beyond the central city’s borders. Early suburbs were served by horsecars, but by the late 19th century cable cars and electric streetcars, or trams, were used, allowing residences to be built farther away from the urban core of a city. Streetcar suburbs, usually called additions or extensions at the time, were the forerunner of today's suburbs in the United States and Canada. San Francisco's Western Addition is one of the best examples of streetcar suburbs before westward and southward expansion occurred.
Suburbanization (AE), or suburbanisation (BE), is a population shift from historic core cities or rural areas into suburbs, resulting in the formation of (sub)urban sprawl. As a consequence of the movement of households and businesses away from city centers, low-density, peripheral urban areas grow.
Urban decay is the sociological process by which a previously functioning city, or part of a city, falls into disrepair and decrepitude. There is no single process that leads to urban decay.
The garden city movement was a 20th century urban planning movement promoting satellite communities surrounding the central city and separated with greenbelts. These Garden Cities would contain proportionate areas of residences, industry, and agriculture. Ebenezer Howard first posited the idea in 1898 as a way to capture the primary benefits of the countryside and the city while avoiding the disadvantages presented by both. In the early 20th century, Letchworth, Brentham Garden Suburb, and Welwyn Garden City were built in or near London according to Howard's concept and many other garden cities inspired by his model have since been built all over the world.
Paul Davidoff was an American planner, planning educator, and planning theoretician who conceptualized "advocacy planning" with his wife, Linda Stone Davidoff. In legal scholarship, he is known as the primary litigant in the Mount Laurel decision, which established a state-constitutional basis for inclusionary zoning in New Jersey, a doctrine which has been accepted in other United States jurisdictions. Davidoff founded the Suburban Action Institute and the urban planning department at Hunter College, and also taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University during his career.
The Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award, established in 1949, by the Society of Architectural Historians, annually recognizes "the most distinguished work of scholarship in the history of architecture published by a North American scholar." The oldest of the six different publication awards given annually by the Society, it is named after the mother of architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock.
Urban history is a field of history that examines the historical nature of cities and towns, and the process of urbanization. The approach is often multidisciplinary, crossing boundaries into fields like social history, architectural history, urban sociology, urban geography, business history, and archaeology. Urbanization and industrialization were popular themes for 20th-century historians, often tied to an implicit model of modernization, or the transformation of rural traditional societies.
Thomas J. Sugrue is an American historian of the 20th-century United States currently serving as a professor at New York University. From 1991 to 2015, he was the David Boies Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and founding director of the Penn Social Science and Policy Forum. His areas of expertise include American urban history, American political history, housing and the history of race relations. He has published extensively on the history of liberalism and conservatism, on housing and real estate, on poverty and public policy, on civil rights, and on the history of affirmative action.
Keller Easterling is an American architect, urbanist, writer, and professor. She is Enid Storm Dwyer Professor and Director of the MED Program at Yale University.
Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States is a book written by historian Kenneth T. Jackson and published in 1985. Extensively researched and referenced, the book takes into account factors that promoted the suburbanization of the United States, such as the availability of cheap land, construction methods, and transportation, as well as federal subsidies for highways and suburban housing.
Criticism of suburbia dates back to the boom of suburban development in the 1950s and critiques a culture of aspirational homeownership. In the English-speaking world, this discourse is particularly prominent in the United States and Australia being prevalent both in popular culture and academia.
Peter Calthorpe is a San Francisco–based architect, urban designer and urban planner. He is a founding member of the Congress for New Urbanism, a Chicago-based advocacy group formed in 1992 that promotes sustainable building practices. For his works on redefining the models of urban and suburban growth in America Calthorpe has been named one of twenty-five ‘innovators on the cutting edge’ by Newsweek magazine.
Peter Bacon Hales was an American historian, photographer, author and musician specializing in American spaces and landscapes, the history of photography and contemporary art.
D. J. Waldie is an American essayist, memoirist, translator, and editor who also is the former Deputy City Manager of Lakewood, California.
John Rennie Short is professor emeritus of geography and public policy in the School of Public Policy at University of Maryland, Baltimore County.