Suburb

• 1. Introduction

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  Suburb, as a word, traces its roots to the Latin suburbium, built from sub meaning "under" or "below" and urbs meaning "city." But that modest etymology conceals a story about the most consequential reshaping of human settlement in modern history. Who lives in a suburb, and why? What forces push people toward the edges of cities, and what do those edges reveal about wealth, race, and belonging? The answers stretch from the villas of ancient Rome to the shopping malls of postwar America, from the garden-city idealism of Edwardian England to the sprawling apartment blocks of modern China. The first recorded use of the English term appears in a Middle English manuscript around 1350, in the Midlands Prose Psalter. By 1950, in the United States, more people lived in suburbs than anywhere else. That crossing of a threshold set the stage for everything that followed.

• 2. Roots and Etymology

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  Cicero, the Roman statesman, was the first known writer to use the word suburbani, applying it to the large villas and estates that wealthy patricians of Rome built on the city's outskirts. That original meaning carries a sharp class inflection: the suburb as retreat for the privileged, not refuge for the poor. The pattern was nearly reversed in early modern Europe. As populations swelled during that period, the peripheral areas on the outskirts of growing cities were generally inhabited by the very poorest. In China, toward the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty and until 190 AD, when Dong Zhuo razed the capital Luoyang, the city's people mostly lived in small cities right outside its walls. Those settlements were suburbs in all but name, long before the word existed in English. The Latin suburbium passed into Old French as subburbe before crossing into English. Today the word's meaning varies sharply by country: in Australian and South African English, suburb has become largely synonymous with what Americans call a neighborhood, referring to any defined residential district rather than the outer ring of a city.

• 3. The Metropolitan Railway Dream

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  The opening of the Metropolitan Railway in the 1860s was a major catalyst for suburban growth around London. The line eventually linked the capital's financial heart in the City to what would become the suburbs of Middlesex, reaching Harrow in 1880. Unlike other railway companies, which were legally required to dispose of surplus land, London's Metropolitan Railway was allowed to retain land it believed necessary for future railway use. That exception proved enormously consequential. The surplus land was initially managed by a Land Committee, and from the 1880s onward it was developed and sold to domestic buyers in places like Willesden Park Estate, Cecil Park near Pinner, and Wembley Park. In 1912, it was proposed that a specially formed company take over development of suburban estates near the railway. World War I delayed those plans, but in 1919, with the expectation of a postwar housing boom, Metropolitan Railway Country Estates Limited was formed. The company went on to develop estates at Kingsbury Garden Village near Neasden, Wembley Park, Cecil Park, Grange Estate at Pinner, and the Cedars Estate at Rickmansworth. The Met's marketing department coined the term Metro-land in 1915, when the Guide to the Extension Line became the Metro-land guide, priced at one penny. Published annually until 1932, the guide promoted country living with a fast railway-service to central London, invoking "the good air of the Chilterns" and rhapsodizing over beech woods that were "tremulous green loveliness in Spring and russet and gold in October." By 1915, people from across London had moved to the new suburban dream in large newly built areas across north-west London.

• 4. Garden Suburbs and State Housing

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  Suburbanization in the interwar period was heavily shaped by the garden city movement of Ebenezer Howard. Social reformer Henrietta Barnett and her husband established trusts in 1904, buying 243 acres of land along the newly opened Northern line extension to Golders Green. Their aim was partly to protect part of Hampstead Heath from development. The result was the Hampstead Garden Suburb, which attracted architects including Raymond Unwin and Sir Edwin Lutyens and ultimately grew to encompass over 800 acres. The Tudor Walters Committee, commissioned during World War I to make recommendations for postwar housebuilding, grounded its case in public health. The shocking lack of physical fitness among many military recruits was attributed to poor living conditions, summed up in a housing poster of the period: "you cannot expect to get an A1 population out of C3 homes" - a reference to military fitness classifications. The committee's 1917 report led directly to the Housing, Town Planning, &c. Act 1919, known as the Addison Act after Christopher Addison, the then Minister for Housing. It allowed for the building of large new housing estates in the suburbs and marked the start of a long tradition of state-owned housing that would later evolve into council estates. The interwar decades produced staggering numbers. Harrow Weald grew from just 1,500 residents to over 10,000, while Pinner jumped from 3,000 to over 20,000. During the 1930s alone, over 4 million new suburban houses were built. The semi-detached house, first designed by the Shaws - a father and son architectural partnership - in the 19th century, proliferated as a suburban icon during that boom, with designs drawing on Art Deco, Tudor Revival, chalet style, and even ship design.

• 5. Postwar America's Suburban Explosion

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  In 1947 alone, 540,000 veterans bought homes, at an average price of $7,300. That figure captures the scale of what the G.I. Bill made possible: low-cost loans, very low down payments, and low interest rates for 16 million eligible veterans. Very little housing had been built during the Great Depression and World War II, so a pent-up demand met a construction industry that kept prices down through standardization. Standardizing sizes for kitchen cabinets, refrigerators, and stoves allowed for mass production of kitchen furnishings. Where an average of 316,000 new non-farm housing units were built from the 1930s through 1945, that number rose to 1,450,000 annually from 1946 through 1955. The most famous development was Levittown on Long Island, just east of New York City. It offered a new house for $1,000 down and $70 a month, with three bedrooms, a fireplace, a gas range, a gas furnace, and a landscaped lot of 75 by 100 feet, for a total price of $10,000. The Highway Act of 1956 funded the building of 64,000 kilometers of road across the nation with $26 billion on hand, linking suburban residents to the shopping centers that were multiplying to serve them. In 1957, 940 shopping centers were built; by 1960 that number had more than doubled. By 1950, the United States had crossed a threshold it had never crossed before: more people lived in suburbs than anywhere else in the country.

• 6. Race, Redlining, and White Flight

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  Federal housing policy in postwar America was not racially neutral. Redlining and other discriminatory measures built into that policy furthered racial segregation by refusing to insure mortgages in and near African-American neighborhoods. The government's efforts were primarily designed to provide housing to white middle-class and lower-middle-class families. At the same time, African Americans were rapidly moving north and west for better jobs and educational opportunities than were available in the segregated South. Their arrival in northern and western cities, along with race riots in several large cities including Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, and Washington D.C., further stimulated white suburban migration. The phenomenon became known as white flight. Some suburbs instituted what the source describes as "explicitly racist" policies to deter people deemed as "other," a practice most common in the United States. The growth of zoning laws reinforced this separation: residential zones were created where only residential buildings were permitted, and subdivisions were often segregated by minute differences in home value, creating communities where family incomes and demographics were almost completely homogeneous. Mary Corbin Sies argues that the image of early-20th-century suburbs as enclaves for middle-class whites, while culturally powerful, is actually stereotypical. Some suburbs were and are based on working-class and minority residents, many of whom wanted to own their own homes. By 2010, suburbs increasingly gained people in racial minority groups, as many members of minority groups sought more favorable living conditions. Black suburbanization had already grown between 1970 and 1980 by 2.6%, as African Americans moved into older neighborhoods vacated by whites.

• 7. Suburbs Around the World

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  Middle-class suburbs in Africa have boomed since the beginning of the 1990s, particularly in cities such as Cairo, Nairobi, Johannesburg, and Lagos, following the growth of the middle class through industrialization. South Africa's Soweto offers a striking range: many houses are American in appearance but smaller, while east of the FNB Stadium and south of the city, areas like Eikenhof contain the "Eye of Africa" planned community, nearly indistinguishable from resort-style American suburbs in Florida, Arizona, and California, complete with a golf course, resort pool, equestrian facility, and BMX track. In Cape Town, European influence dating to the Dutch settlement of the mid-1600s produced a distinct architectural style called Cape Dutch Houses, found today in the affluent suburbs of Constantia and Bishopscourt. In Rome during the 1920s and 1930s, suburbs were intentionally created from scratch to house lower classes arriving from other parts of Italy; critics at the time saw in this pattern a strategy for keeping the poorest populations away from the city center. Brazilian affluent suburbs are denser, more vertical, and more mixed in use than their American counterparts, while the outer rail suburbs of Rio de Janeiro - the North Zone, the Baixada Fluminense, and the West Zone along the Ramal de Santa Cruz - are described as remote, with saturated mass transit and inadequate infrastructure. In Bangladesh, suburbs in Dhaka are filled with high-rise buildings, paddy fields, and farms, designed more like rural villages than the car-dependent suburbs of the West. China's suburbs mostly consist of rows of apartment blocks and condos that end abruptly into the countryside, though single-family homes outside Beijing and Shanghai sometimes mimic Spanish and Italian architecture.

• 8. Suburbs in Culture and Criticism

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  Criticism of suburbia dates back to the 1950s boom and has never really stopped. Leonard Bernstein's 1952 one-act opera Trouble in Tahiti takes direct aim at American suburbia, portraying it as a producer of misery rather than happiness. French songs engaged the suburbs of Paris explicitly from the 1930s onward: La Zone by Fréhel in 1933, Aux quatre coins de la banlieue by Damia in 1936, and Banlieue by Robert Lamoureux in 1953 gave the outer city a festive, almost bucolic image. By the 1950s and 1960s, singer-songwriter Léo Ferré was using the popular suburbs of Paris to critique the bourgeois conservatism of the city itself. Malvina Reynolds's 1962 song "Little Boxes" lampoons suburban conformity, while Rush's 1982 song Subdivisions and Ben Folds's Rockin' the Suburbs continue that thread. The Grammy-winning 2010 album The Suburbs by Arcade Fire, a Canadian-based indie rock band, addressed aimlessness, apathy, and monotony. Bill Owens, the American photojournalist, documented the culture of suburbia in the 1970s in his book Suburbia. French cinema took its own angle: Mon oncle by Jacques Tati in 1958, L'Amour existe by Maurice Pialat in 1961, and Two or Three Things I Know About Her by Jean-Luc Godard in 1967 all engaged with suburban urban change. British television series like The Good Life, Butterflies, and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin depicted suburbia as well-manicured and relentlessly boring, while American shows like Desperate Housewives and Weeds framed the suburbs as concealing darker secrets behind façades of manicured lawns. The syndicated comic strip Over the Hedge, written and drawn by Michael Fry and T. Lewis, follows animals coming to terms with their woodlands being taken over by suburbia; a film adaptation appeared in 2006.