What are "the suburbs?"

Factual Questions
1

The Bryn Mawr thread brought this to mind (also the NY Times maagzine section this past week). What’s the difference between “suburban” and “small-town?”

I’m a suburban gal born and bred. Lovely area: nice landscaping, mixture of old and new homes, shopping areas within easy driving, and the city (Phila.) within an easy train ride. Couldn’t have grown up in a nicer place.

Now I live in a “small town.” But I’m the same distance from a city (NY) that my old neighborhood was. The term “suburban” has come to mean plastic, culture-free; while “small-town” can either indicate quaintness or small-mindedness, depending on your slant.

So, what are the requirements: when does a small town become a suburb, and vice versa?

2

generally I would say there is no clear cut distinction but a small town is more slef contained and isolated while a suburb depends more on the main city to which it is adjacent

3

I’m guessing that the difference is not so much a matter of distance than a matter of continuity.

A city can have suburbs sprawling continuously for a fifty mile radius. But a similar city that has continuous suburbs for a twenty-mile radius, then rural areas, then a sizable town forty miles from the city, that town wouldn’t be called a “suburb” even if it does have all the characteristics of the first town.

Chaim Mattis Keller
ckeller@kozmo.com

“Sherlock Holmes once said that once you have eliminated the
impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be
the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible.
The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it that the merely improbable lacks.”
– Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective

4

I would define a suburb (such as where I live) by the fact that there is no cultural or economic center to your city, and for entertainment and work most people venture to the larger city that is the nucleus for those activities.

5

The history of the location should have something to do with it. For example, a small town might have been around almost as long as the city it’s near. A suburb, though, is created from the city’s growth, even if it grows farther from the center of the city than the small town is.

6

A suburb can be of any size, but is, by definition, in close proximity to a larger municipality, (typically a city).

A small town is just a small town…relative in comparison to other towns. A small town does not have to be in proximity to anything.

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7

Due to sprawl, an erstwhile “small town” can become a suburb.

I grew up in a “small town” about five miles south of Lake Erie; when it started out, in the early 1800s, the city of Cleveland was pretty well clustered up at the lakefront.

By the 1960s the town had already assumed some of the attributes of suburbia, although it still had its own shopping, movie theaters, etc. When I go back there now (as infrequently as possible), it’s ALL suburb.

Uke

8

I think a suburb is a city or town or incorporated area that is within in easy driving distance to the big city but not included in the boundaries of the big city. But who am I to make up definitions?

9

To put things in proper perspective:

The suburbs are just past the outskirts, but not as far as the styx.

10

Unbless you mean “the sticks,” dear, you’re right. Very few suburbs are as far out of the city as “the styx!”

11

It helps to remember that the term is “sub-urban”, i.e. literally “less urban”, or less city-like. The industrial revolution helped to create large industrialized cities. But with the limited transportation available until about 1890, most people had to live within walking distance of their jobs, so the cities tended to be compact and have a high population density. Then, subways and trolley lines allowed the middle classes to move away from the city into the countryside. At least in the beginning, the suburbs were “bedroom communities”, with few local jobs. With continued transporation improvements (aka the private automobile) and population growth, the suburbs moved farther out, and some originally independent towns (e.g. Herndon in the Washington, DC area) became drawn into the influence of the central city.

But over the last couple of decades, the idea of central-cities-and-their-suburbs has grown fuzzier. Many jobs have moved out of the central cities into the former “bedroom communities”, and many outlying communities have grown large enough to be generally economically independent.

And a lot of the more recent development is broadly scattered. The commuting patterns and economic development where I live are so complex that its hard to talk about suburbs at all. Raleigh, Durham, Cary and Chapel Hill all have mixed residential and commerical areas, and in the morning, instead of everyone “heading downtown”, people drive off in all directions. The main employment center, the Research Triangle Park, is an unincorporated section approximately in the center of the four main cities. So, many of the outlying commuters drive from, or even around, the major cities to get to work.

12

I lived out in the “styx”, once, but damned if I didn’t keep forgetting my address.

13

It might also have to do with where the money goes. I don’t know much about suburbs, but I’m guessing for the most part, they get their services, like water, sewer, etc. from the city and the city can tax them for it. A small town would have to provide its own services and tax and collect accordingly.

For instance, where I live, we have a town within a town. The second town lies on the outskirts of the first and is considered part of the first for things like the zip code and phone numbers. But this little town does not have city sewers (it’s all septic systems) and they pay a much lower property tax. Currently there’s a movement within this little community to bring in city services - perhaps if this happens they’ll officially become a suburb.

14

One key distinction is that small towns typically have, or at least had until recently, some reason to exist other than to provide housing and the necessities of life for those who work in the city. A physical manifestation of this is the presence or absence of a downtown area, however attenuated. Small towns have them, suburbs that used to be small towns used to have them, suburbs that have always been suburbs usually don’t.

Taking examples from the Atlanta area, with which I’m most familiar, Stone Mountain, Tucker, Norcross, Lilburn, Chamblee, Roswell, Douglasville, College Park, East Point, and Hapeville all were at one time small towns distinct from Atlanta, though to greater or lesser degrees connected with it economically and socially. Most had their own train stations, their own industries, their own identities. Today, most if not all of them are merely suburbs of Atlanta, sprawl and improved transportation and communication having whirled nearly the whole northwest quadrant of Georgia into an amorphous mass with the partially dissolved City of Atlanta at its center. As distinct entities, they remain identifiable, but not viable.

Decatur, Marietta, and Lawrenceville, on the other hand, while subject to the same forces as the others, have at least to some degree retained their status as distinct entities, aided no doubt by being county seats and thus retaining the need for their courthouses, government entities, etc., which could not be easily picked up and relocated five or ten miles away. They retain, as I suggested initially, some reason to exist independent of Atlanta. Their downtown areas remain intact and remain alive; they are places one may have reason to make one’s destination, and for which no alternate will readily answer. Despite being closer (particularly in the case of Decatur) to Atlanta than many other places I’d consider suburbs, they are not entirely assimilated, nor will they be in the foreseeable future.

Druid Hills, Brookhaven, Morningside, Candler Park, Inman Park, Virginia-Highlands, Ansley Park, Garden Hills, and similar areas, though now mostly considered part of Atlanta proper, were initially suburbs and never more than that. While each has reasonably well-defined geographic limits and is of long standing (at least 40+ years, which is ancient by Atlanta standards, and 100 years for Druid Hills and Inman Park), none ever had its own government, its own industries, or indeed anything peculiar to it alone. Avondale Estates never aspired to be more than a suburb of Decatur, a modest ambition even by surburban standards.

15

Now THAT’S the funniest thing I’ve read all day!

16

For an interesting discussion of this try “How To Define a Suburb”. This post and its’ replies gives you a good idea of how some of the experts are trying to define and categorize suburbs.

17

A new term is also developing in suburban areas. In Chicago cities like Joliet, Kankakee, Elgin, Hammond Gary, Waukegon, Kenosha, and Aurora are being defined as satellite cities. That is there dependence is based both on the central city (Chicago) and they are economic in their own right.

18

I have a novel thought. Let’s try answering a question here with facts before generating opinion. :wink: I know, party pooper…

From WWWebster Dictionary at WWWebster Dictionary

The thing I thought interesting here was that the term is WAY old, from the 1300’s in England. Obviously, modern usage can deviate (though let’s not discuss whether a democracy requires everyone to vote on everything!), but it does provide a good starting point for understanding what a suburb is, and how suburbia became defined.
Of course, if you want, just visit the L.A. basin… (ick)

19

Thanks for Charon.

20

whitetho is quite right: “suburb” is already a somewhat outdated term. A typical suburb was mostly or purely a bedroom community; it provided a place for middle-class (or more affluent) people to live that a) had grass and detached, individual houses and also b) was close enough to the big city (site of just about all jobs) for a daily commute.

I live in North Jersey, part of one of the biggest, most stereotypical “suburbs.” But most of the economic life of the region is no longer centered on New York City (and even less so on the old, decaying smaller cities of the region). Most people that I know commute from one “suburb” to another “suburb” to work; I’m one of the relatively few to do the old-fashioned thing and go into NYC every day. They shop in suburbia; they get married in suburbia; they go to church in suburbia; they mostly go to sporting and cultural events in suburbia.

The suburbs are no longer (at least around here) a region that relates to the central city, but a more-or-less self-sufficient area.

I’d say that the thing that makes “suburbs” different from “small towns,” these days, is that suburbs all bump into each other, and no one town (municpality, township, whatever) has all that much of a separate identity. Jersey has, I believe, several hundred towns (I’ve read that we have more local government than any other state, per capita), but they’re not terribly differentiated one from the next. When you need signs on the street to tell you where the town borders are, there’s not much of a distinction. A small town, by contrast, is something you see across the wheat fields as you drive up to it. That’s the difference I see.

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