Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Roman statesman Cicero coined the term suburbani in the first century to describe the large villas and estates built by wealthy patricians on the outskirts of Rome. These early settlements functioned as symbiotic relationships where smaller villages grew up around large walled towns to serve as market hubs for the urban core.
The modern suburb emerged on a large scale in the 19th century, driven by the rapid migration of the rural poor to industrializing cities and the subsequent desire of the newly rich middle class to escape squalid conditions. In London, the opening of the Metropolitan Railway in the 1860s became a major catalyst for suburban growth, allowing residents to commute to the financial heart of the City from areas like Harrow, which the line reached by 1880.
Levittown in Long Island became the major prototype of mass-produced housing, offering a new house for $1000 down and $70 a month, featuring three bedrooms, a fireplace, and a gas range. The G.I. Bill guaranteed low-cost loans for veterans, with 540,000 veterans buying a house in 1947 alone, at an average price of $7300.
The growth of the suburbs was facilitated by the development of zoning laws, redlining, and numerous innovations in transport, which furthered the racial segregation of postwar America. This government effort was primarily designed to provide housing to White middle-class and lower-middle-class families, leaving African Americans and other people of color concentrated within decaying cores of urban poverty.
In Russia, the term suburb refers to high-rise residential apartments which usually consist of two bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen, and a living room. These structures differ from the sprawling low-density models found in other countries and reflect a distinct approach to suburban living.
Suburbs typically have longer travel times to work than traditional neighborhoods, due to almost-mandatory automobile ownership, longer travel distances, and the hierarchy system, which is less efficient at distributing traffic than the traditional grid of streets. In the suburban system, most trips from one component to another component requires that cars enter a collector road, no matter how short or long the distance is, and because all traffic is forced onto these roads, they are often heavy with traffic all day.