Suburbanisation

Suburbanisation means that the urban ring grows at the cost of the urban core. The cities are growing in their surroundings, the contemporary city is surrounded by increasingly extensive residential suburbs (Bronger 2004, Pacione 2001, Renwick, Rubenstein 1995).

"People have migrated to the periphery of the cities to find more housing for less money. Until this advantage is neutralised, sprawl will remain our future." (Alex Krieger, Havard University)

The suburbanisation process began on a significant scale in the 1920s and accelerated after the Second World War, especially in North America. The USA is the world's first predominantly suburban nation. The suburban expansion was driven by the following factors:

  • Suburbs meet both the cost of new housing and the associated transport costs regarding the rapid growth of the urban population and rising disposable incomes
  • Widespread diffusion of the automobile enhanced individual mobility
  • Suburbs provide the particular living environment which the inhabitants desired and could pay for, escaping from narrow and increasingly dangerous inner cities and living in green field sites
  • Huge demand for housing at the end of World War II in the United States
  • The need to generate employment after the war
  • Loan programmes encouraged the development of single-family, detached houses in the suburbs
  • The guaranteed fixed-interest mortgage made it cheaper in many cases to buy a house than to rent an apartment
  • The goals were promoted by public policies that favoured highway construction over mass transit (Lichtenberger 2002, Mitchell 2007, Pacione 2001).
Canadian suburb
Canadian Suburb.
Source: Wikipedia

Alternative interpretations of the suburbanisation process

As long as the demand for separate single-family homes remains high, land on the fringe of urbanised areas will be converted from open space to residential land use, but this has not been done systematically. "The rural-urban fringe in U.S. cities therefore looks like Swiss cheese, with pockets of development and gaps of open space" (Renwick, Rubenstein 1995).

In Europe, the land supply along urban peripheries is more strictly regulated and therefore such large suburban areas are not widespread.

Other forms of urban processes

Counterurbanisation, exurbanisation, reurbanisation

Quotes:

"The American Dream has long promised life, liberty, and the pursuit of a spacious, single-family home in the suburbs (with a pool, even). The dream has been displaced by all too familiar worlds - places plagued by traffic jams, high taxes, and pollution: the irony of urban sprawl." (Mitchell 2007)

"End? Why there's no end in sight, the way it's going. We just keep moving farther and farther out until one of these days we'll all be rubbing elbows. All the way across America." (Mitchell 2007)

Task: Is suburbanisation likely to continue? What might halt this spread?