What is a suburb?

B. Kneebone, Elizabeth, and Alan Berube. 2013. Confronting Suburban Poverty in America. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.

E. Moos, Markus, and Pablo Mendez. 2015. “Suburban Ways of Living and the Geography of Income: How Homeownership, Single-Family Dwellings and Automobile Use Define the Metropolitan Social Space.” Urban Studies 52, no. 10: 1864-82.

Produced by Dave Amos in sunny Sacramento, California.
Edited by Eric Schneider in cloudy Cleveland, Ohio.

[Occupant]

There's a formula for figuring out if something is a suburb. It's Applebees over skate parks squared.

[archirug]

Lived in Phoenix all my life. The whole city is just one big, neverending suburb

[lambda]

In Germany there are only a few city districts that are built from scratch. It is more common that villages close to a bigger city start growing. They spread an start to connect to the main city. They are called "Vorort" and although they are mainly residential, they have a denser historic core an often develop local shops. Bakerys, barbers, supermarkets - they exist in a typical Vorort. Edge cities are not really a thing here, but there are examples of towns that grew into bigger cities but retained their influence for work and shopping. A good example is Berlin. Spandau was its own city with walls and medieval core but it was integrated into greater Berlin. To this day Spandau still is its own center with a distinct seperation. All roads around it lead to the core and business is still in great shape.

[saarangsahasrabudhe]

Platonic Suburbs: There are true cities in world of registers, and then there are lesser shadows of them called Suburbs.

Aristotlean Suburb: Land with too much density is a city. Land with too little is rural. Land with density that is not too much nor too little is a Golden Suburb.

Humean Suburb: Words like "cities" and "suburbs" are arbitrary broad generalisations. It's really more of a spectrum or a continuum.

[AverytheCubanAmerican]

City Beautiful: What’s a suburb
Me: (looks outside) that’s it, that’s a suburb

[funplussmart]

the other problem is that this use of “suburb” is north american centric. in many other places a “suburb” is often indistinguishable from the major city, such as the outskirts of many cities in asia.

[nihaokellar]

I think Americans have skewed views. Phoenix is just a large suburb and tbh, urbanhell.

[GeographyWorld]

In Ireland, suburbs are really just seen as mostly low-density residential areas part of a built up town or city outside of the CBD. Most of the time they were smaller villages swallowed by urban sprawl. Ireland only has two cities with over 100, 000 inhabitants (Dublin and Cork) so its probably easier to come up with a definition here.

[iammrbeat]

4:27 hold up...parts of Los Angeles were considered "suburban?" Woah.

[pmason]

In Australia, a suburb is formally defined as a type of postal district. Specifically, the post office divides the country up into states (the top tier), divides the states up into post code districts (the second tier) and divides post code districts up into suburbs or towns (the third tier). Counter intuitively, the name suburb is applied to a third tier postal district that only covers part of a larger conurbation (even if the part it covers is the centre), while town is applied to third tier postal districts that either cover an entire small conurbation or contain no conurbation at all. Which means that suburbs are more urban than towns.


This means that even the downtown area of the primary centre of a major city is a suburb. So a person staying in the Sydney Harbour Marriott, overlooking the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House is staying the SUBURB of Sydney City (post code district 2000, state of NSW). Incidentally though, a truck driver spending the night in the highway rest area 50km west of Cobar (in the middle of nowhere and practically uninhabited) is technically in the TOWN of Cubba (post code district 2835, state of NSW).

[waywardwillard]

I'd also love if you did an episode re "cities" like Arlington, Virginia, which are actually gigantic counties without any incorporated towns/cities. It's difficult to explain to people who don't live here, and I think it would be a fascinating concept to explore in one of your videos.

[k]

In Australia, we call everything a suburb, doesn’t matter what it’s use - residential, office, industrial, farms, etc. Each city also generally has many different suburbs in it.

[Zylork]

When I was in landscape architecture school, an instructor asked the class where Chicago ends. A bunch of peers thought Chicagoland, aka: the suburbs and some others thought the city limits. My response was the Metra train. Chicago ends when you get off the train.

[SuperTobyproductions]

I'm from the Netherlands, but Tysons corner was the example used by my geography (aardrijkskunde) book back in high school to explain edge cities when we learnt about US city layouts. :)

[Araleam]

I thought Urban / Suburban / Rural always referred to the population density.

[pdroa]

it's so funny that here in brazil suburbs mean something completely different. they are usually lower income areas further from city centers often neglected by local governments

[hectorg]

I think that this was a great introduction to show how our quantitative metrics for defining cities is still very much an imperfect tool. Even in the US, it can range from monolithic metropolises like Chicago to regional metropolises like San Francisco/the Bay. I hope you're able to get to discussing the qualitative metrics at some point. I'm also interested in how this definition works for regions with much older cities, like Europe or Asia.

[bertoberr]

4:22
Pacific Ocean: exists
Atlantic Ocean: water

[iammrbeat]

I hate the suburbs, but I can't escape them.

[Volksgeist]

Your videos are always so great. I love them.