Suburbanization

Suburbanization, the diffusion of urban life (people, commerce, and industry) from the center of a city to the periphery, also connotes lifestyle differences between those who reside in the suburbs and those who live in cities. Historically, suburbanization has been propelled by technological developments as well as by cultural values that underscore an American penchant for semirural living. Beginning as a distinct movement in the nineteenth century, suburbanization continued throughout the twentieth, making the United States one of the world's most decentralized industrial societies.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, urban life was shaped by the characteristics of the walking city. Residential and commercial space lay within close proximity and, since movement depended on the distance one could comfortably travel by foot, individuals from multiple ethnic and income groups concentrated in the centralized downtown areas. In 1850, Boston was typical: Its residents lived within two miles of the center of town. The introduction of public transportation, first the omnibus (1830) and eventually the railway, gradually influenced this basic structure and allowed well‐to‐do residents to move to the city's periphery or beyond. These mid‐nineteenth‐century suburbs primarily comprised white‐collar male workers who commuted to the city, their families, and working‐class residents restricted to service employment within the suburbs because of the high cost of rail transportation. Such communities (for example Llewellyn Park, New Jersey, or Riverside, Illinois) expressed ideals popularized through the Romantic movement, which accentuated the curative powers of nature and stressed the need to preserve preindustrial values threatened by modernization. Homes in these communities were generally situated on large plots of land (up to twenty acres) and connected through curvilinear roads, which, in stark contrast to the gridiron pattern of the city, followed the natural contours of the land.

The expansion of the trolley car in the 1880s ended this era of “romantic” suburbs and ushered in a new period of peripheral growth. Trolleys offered affordable cross‐town transportation, allowing middle‐class Americans to live on the suburban fringe while continuing to work in the city center. Although plots were smaller and conditions more crowded than in the earlier suburbs, these new communities retained the romantic ideal of semirural living and provided a sense of refuge from a downtown increasingly associated with danger. Labor radicalism, immigrant slums, industrial pollution, black migration, and machine politics associated with the city contrasted sharply with an emerging suburban ideal that emphasized the patriotism of property ownership, the link between democracy and rural life, the sanctity of the family, and, most importantly, the belief that the home should provide a haven from the harshness of the industrial city. By the turn of the century, the suburban, single‐family, detached dwelling lay at the heart of the American dream. While this dream was theoretically open to all, in practice the rise of the trolley suburb resulted in a divided city. Between the 1870s and 1900, the middle class increasingly migrated to the suburban residential fringe while immigrants and the working poor stayed behind in the city center. The working class found it economically unfeasible to live in an outlying area of the city and commute to the downtown where most of the commercial and industrial jobs remained.

The automobile had a profound effect on suburbanization. First, it facilitated movement between suburbs and cities to such a degree that, as early as the 1920s, the suburbs grew at a faster rate than the city core. Second, automobiles dramatically changed the nature of retailing. The central business districts had survived the initial waves of suburbanization, but with the automobile, businesses found it necessary and profitable to move to the periphery. Walking cities were not designed to accommodate automobile traffic, nor did they possess adequate parking. Retailers addressed the problem of congestion by moving department stores and other businesses to fringe areas with more open land. Consequently, suburbs experienced commercial diversification and economic growth as downtown areas declined.

The Depression of the 1930s and World War II effectively brought the suburbanization process to a halt. It revived dramatically after the war, however, and by 1970 more Americans lived in suburbs than in any other form of community. This process was stimulated by the availability of cheap land, new building techniques, a severe housing shortage, the baby boom, and a continuing cultural predilection for low‐density housing. Postwar suburbanization also received an impetus from governmental policies that favored growth in the suburbs over growth in the city. Some have argued that underlying racial prejudice also encouraged white Americans to flee urban centers that were increasingly populated by minorities. Postwar suburbs were typified by communities like Levittown, New York, composed of hundreds of nearly identical tract homes assembled virtually overnight. According to the conventional view, reinforced by 1950s television comedies and cultural critics, the residents were typically young, white, middle‐class men who commuted to the city; wives who were committed to domesticity; and young children. Such a view defined the suburb as an economically dependent, homogeneous, racially exclusive, manicured bedroom community focused on the family.

This image of suburbia survived into the late twentieth century, even as the relationship between cities and their suburbs underwent tremendous change, and the dependent, commuting, homogeneous residential suburb had all but disappeared. Fringe communities engaged in a variety of industrial and commercial activities. Suburbs could now be characterized variously as working class, Latino, Asian, African American, upper middle class, exclusive, or nonexclusive. To be sure, the poor, racial minorities, and immigrants continued to be concentrated in city centers. Owing to the suburbs' increased diversity, however, historians disagreed over whether they should be considered independent cities in their own right or specialized areas within larger metropolitan wholes—areas that would never replace the traditional city's complexity and cultural diversity.
See also Automotive Industry; Fifties, The; Immigration; Mobility; Motor Vehicles; Racism; Shopping Centers and Malls; Social Class; Urbanization.

Bibliography

Sam Bass Warner Jr. , Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870–1900, 1962.
Kenneth T. Jackson , Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, 1985.
Robert Fishman , Bourgeois Utopias, 1987.
Margaret Marsh , Suburban Lives, 1990.
Joel Garreau , Edge City: Life on the New Frontier, 1991.
William Sharpe and and Leonard Wallock , Bold New City or Built up Burb?: Redefining Contemporary Suburbia, in The Making of Urban America, ed. Raymond A. Mohl, 1997, pp. 309–331.

Jennifer L. Kalish