What Constitutes A "Suburb"

In My Humble Opinion
1

Most of the time it’s easy to define, but I was reading and I see some conflicts.

For instance I have read Mesa, a suburb of Pheonix is the largest city in the USA that is a suburb of another city. Of course that is if one does not consider Long Beach to be a suburb of Los Angeles.

And what about cases like Virginia City and Cape Coral, Florida. Virginia City was a suburb of Norfolk, but now has more people. Cape Coral was a suburb of Fort Myers, Florida, but now Cape Coral is twice a big populaton wise.

So would the former suburbs now be considered the main city?

I mean I never consider St Paul to be a suburb of Minneapolis or Oakland to be a suburb of San Francisco just because they are smaller in population.

So is there any standard that makes a suburb a suburb?

Is it population, commuters, distance?

2

I think it all depends on definitions. I don’t think there is a formal definition of suburb. I think I’ve seen a definition (US Dept of Statistics?) of something like “Metropolitan area”. A metro area usually has the same name as one of the cities in it, probably the oldest but not necessarily the biggest.

The city of Mesa is obviously not part of the city of Phoenix. When someone calls Mesa a “suburb” of Phoenix, they mean that it’s a city within the greater metro area called Phoenix. If the city of Mesa became bigger than the city of Phoenix then the metro area would probably still be called Phoenix.

3

The biggest city (both in population and area) in the San Francisco Bay Area is San Jose. Yet I suspect most people – particularly those not living in San Jose – would consider San Jose a suburb of San Francisco.

I would say that the urban center is the generally the most well known city and any other cities in the vicinity are suburbs. The size of the cities seems to have little relationship to which is which.

4

Kenosha, WI weirds me out that way. Is it a suburb of Milwaukee, or Chicago?

One could make an argument for one or both. Or really neither.

Is a suburb merely a bedroom community? Is it a suburb if it’s older than the city it’s a suburb of? What if it’s surrounded by the city on all sides? Does city, town, or village status make a difference?

I think that what makes a suburb a 'burb is who you tell people out of town where you’re from. A man traveling from Burr Ridge, IL tells people in Orlando that he’s from Chicago.

5

I think you hit the nail on the ehad here. Suburbia is defined as being from a nearby municipality that is NOT considered the culturally defining city. San Fran and San Jose are the classic examples.

I live near one of the biggest incorporated suburbs in the world, Mississauga, Ontario. It’s got a population of 725,000 or so… much larger than Mesa, AZ, and in fact almost as big as San Francisco. Just going by the city limits it is a larger city than Cleveland, Milwaukee, Oakland, or Seattle. It’s bigger than Portland, Memphis, or Washington, D.C. But you’d likely never hear of this huge city unless you (a) lived in the area or (b) had some specific reason to have heard of it. Its identity is completely overwhelmed by Toronto. Toronto has the fame, the newspapers, the TV stations, the sports teams, the art galleries, so Mississauga will always be a suburb of Toronto (much as the city council hate it.) And cities close to Mississauga, like Brampton or Oakville, are still considered suburbs of Toronto, not Mississauga.

However, Hamilton… which is smaller than Mississauga and,m while further, still part of an unbroken mass of urban development - is NOT widely considered a suburb of Toronto; it’s usually considered a center unto itself, with its own suburbs. Why? Because it established itself as an urban center in Canadian thought and memory before the urban agglomeration grew between the two; it was a major city since long before anyone alive today was born, and so it earned a place as a City, not a Suburb. So the City of Hamilton is a City, but the City of Mississauga is a Suburb. It’s wholly subjective.

6

Strictly speaking, there’s no official definition of a suburb. The U.S. Census Bureau tries to explain it this way:

[QUOTE=Fuzzy Bureaucrat-speak]
The general concept of a metropolitan area (MA) is one of a large population nucleus, together with adjacent communities that have a high degree of economic and social integration with that nucleus. Some MA’s are defined around two or more nuclei.

The MA classification is a statistical standard, developed for use by Federal agencies in the production, analysis, and publication of data on MA’s. The MA’s are designated and defined by the Federal Office of Management and Budget, following a set of official published standards. These standards were developed by the interagency Federal Executive Committee on Metropolitan Areas, with the aim of producing definitions that are as consistent as possible for all MA’s nationwide.

Each MA must contain either a place with a minimum population of 50,000 or a Census Bureau-defined urbanized area and a total MA population of at least 100,000 (75,000 in New England). An MA is comprised of one or more central counties, and an MA may also include one or more outlying counties that have closed economic and social relationships with the central county. An outlying county must have a specified level of commuting to the central counties and also must meet certain standards regarding metropolitan character, such as population density, urban population, and population growth. In New England, MA’s are composed of cities and towns rather than whole counties.

The territory, population, and housing units in MA’s are referred to as “metropolitan.” The metropolitan category is subdivided into “inside central city” and “outside central city.” The territory, population, and housing units located outside MA’s are referred to as “nonmetropolitan.”
[/QUOTE]

From this, one may infer that a suburb is “adjacent communities that have a high degree of economic and social integration with that nucleus.”

And, specifically to previous posters, what we call Phoenix, the Census Bureau refers to as Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale; San Fransisco is San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont; San Jose is considered a separate metropolitan area; and Kenosha is consolidated with Chicago but Racine is consolidated with Milwaukee.

7

San Jose as a suburb of San Francisco? It’s not even really near San Francisco! Who the heck thinks that it’s a suburb? Does this mean Sacramento is also a suburb of SF?

A suburb generally does not have it’s own “downtown.” They may have shopping districts, but they probably will not have a dense mix-use walkable urban core like a city does.

And self-identification is another major sign. When I lived in a Sacramento suburb, I identified myself as from Sacramento. My suburb was culturally a part of Sacramento, and did not have it’s own history outside of Sacramento’s. And when we went for a “night on the town” we headed out to downtown Sacto.

When I lived in Oakland, I would never say I was from San Francisco. It wouldn’t make sense. The places don’t share a history and culture. And we never went to San Francisco unless we were “going to San Francisco.”

8

That’s an “exurb”.
Suburbs are typically residential communities that are economically dependent on an urban center. People also use the term “suburban” to describe neighborhoods consisting primarily of single-family houses.

American cities typically consist of a central business district of office towers surrounded by neighborhoods of appartment buildings and comercial services. As highway and rail transportation services spread outward, small independent towns and villages may grow and become suburbs dependent on the urban center they support. Sometimes they may grow into sattelite cities with their own downtown central business district. Quincy, MA for example. It is basically a city 15 minutes south of Boston, but it is completely integrated into Boston’s metropolitan area.

9

It’s the dual definitions that make it hard to conceptualize. Take my state for example: by the first definition, there are almost no suburban areas, because there are so few cities of any size. By the second, most of the state fits the definition.

10

Which is then further complicated when suburbs above a certain size/density and with enough businesses become a “self-sufficient suburb”. Basically, anytime a suburb offers enough stuff to do or places to go that people could just travel within the suburb and acquire everything they need to live.

11

You would probably be considered “rural” then if there are no urban centers. Bedroom communities typically imply that the people who live there commute to some major city.

My area is the opposite. The New York City metropolitan area consists of essentially unbroken urban development from Morristown, NJ up to Hartford, CT. People live in Stamford, CT (a city in it’s own right) and take the train to Manhattan. So it’s a little hard to define what is a suburb of which city and so on.

12

Furthermore, consider this: Brampton, immediately north of Mississauga, was a self-sufficient town–its own train station, downtown, etc–in the nineteenth century, long before Mississauga existed. (The same goes for Hamilton, which has some beautiful early-twentieth-century small-skyscraper-style buildings.)

The city of Mississauga was created during the late 1960s and early 1970s from an assortment of towns–Port Credit, Streetsville, Cooksville, Clarkson, Malton–and the intervening farmland. This farmland was rapidly covered by houses and industries, and the city is centred on a large mall, Square One. There is no real downtown yet, though skyscrapers are now rising around Square One, and there are plans to develop the parking lots of the mall and build a more urban streetscape.

But people don’t say, “I’m going to downtown Mississauga.” They do say, “I’m going to downtown Brampton” or “I’m going to downtown Hamilton.” And if they say, “I’m going downtown”, with no other qualification, they mean downtown Toronto.

So Mississauga is a set of suburbs trying to create a downtown, while Hamilton and Brampton are historic downtowns that accreted suburbs.

13

San Jose shares a TV market with San Francisco, so there is some overlap.

Oddly enough Kenosha, which IS defined by the US Census as part of the Consolidated Chicago Metro Area, is in the Milwaukee TV market.

San Jose is unusual as in 1950 it had about 95,000 and today it has 950,000 people.

Like I’m from Chicago and I consider, Aurora, Joliet, Elgin and Waukegan to be suburbs but now I see some claiming that they are really cities in their own right. On the other hand I would consider Kankakee, Kenosha and Michigan City as part of the Chicago Area but not suburbs.

14

That’s an intersting point. And Brampton today is as big as Mesa, Arizona.

Defining cities by municipal boundaries and populations really starts to break down into nonsense as cities get big and flow into each other. Mississauga is the perfect example of a “City” with a gigantic population that really isn’t a city at all.

15

Others have answered this, and it’s a challenging task; as revious posts have noed, there’s no official definition in the United States.

In older cities where there is a geographic constraint on expansion, I’ve found that people use the term “suburb” to mean any area outside of the incorporated central city, regardless of when it was built. For instance, an area on the West Side of Cleveland that was developed after World War II that otherwise feels “suburban” may be considered “city”, while the City of Cleveland Heights, most of which was developed before World War II and has a very high population density, is considered a “suburb”.

In cities that have few geographic constraints on expansion, residents generally use the term “suburb” to refer to areas that were developed largely before World War II, when the contemporary car-centric built environment began to take shape, even if those areas are in the city limits.

In many older metropolitan areas, there’s the industrial satellite city, which is neither “city” nor “suburb”. Few really call places like Joliet, Illinois; Lockport, New York; Lorain, Ohio or Troy, New York “suburbs”.

16

I live in Bergen County, New Jersey, which is either a bunch of little suburbs of New York City or a huge city masquarading as a bunch of little suburbs of New York City.

17

I live in Palm Bay FL which is a bit south of Melbourne Fl. Palm Bay has as many or more residents than Melbourne, but I consider it to be a suburb of Melbourne because Melbourne has a downtown area and Palm Bay doesn’t. It’s only a few blocks to a side but there you go.

18

I think of a suburb as:

  • A significant portion of people living in the town work in another town. Even if that town is another ‘suburb’ of the metro area.

  • When someone wants to see a play, opera anything ‘artsy’ they tend to go to another city.

  • When traveling far away and someone asks where you from…a significant portion will say another city (Not Eden Prairie but Minneapolis)

19

But that’s a result of geography, not any particular economic or social connection between the two cities. My old stomping grounds of Paducah, Kentucky shares a television market with Cape Girardeau, MO and Harrisburg, Illinois – but they don’t form a cohesive economic or social unit.

20

An Australian example is the cities of Newcastle and Lake Macquarie, which are next to each other and form a single metropolitan area. The populations are about 140,000 and 190,000, respectively, but Newcastle is seen as the centre of the metro area. A person from Lake Macquarie visiting Britain or the US might easily say “I’m from Newcastle”, but a person from Newcastle would never say they were from Lake Macquarie. So the parts of Lake Macquarie are suburbs of Newcastle, and not the other way round.