Life of North American Suburbs

"This volume, by a group of recognized urban specialists, investigates the nature of suburbs and suburbanization in present-day North America. Common perception holds that the stereotypical notion of the suburb that emerged in the 1950s has been diverging from metropolitan realities. The early postwar 'sitcom suburb,' singularly dominated by white, middle-class families in spacious and green environs with single-family homes, was short-lived and soon evolved into diversified forms in expanding and increasingly complex metropolitan configurations. We also know that many metropolitan areas have continued to expand outwards while amalgamating with cities in the region and the notion of the polycentric urban region has become widely accepted among scholars and policy makers. The concepts of edge cities and edgeless cities have been added to the lexicon. Still, the terms suburb, suburbia, suburbanism, and suburbanization have stuck, in the scholarly and professional jargon as well as in colloquial discourse - as terms they are increasingly difficult to define but the labels persist. The chapters in this book seek to clarify the meaning of suburbanization today in sixteen North American metropolitan areas, from relatively small cities to large conurbations and in different regions across the continent, including Mexico."--