"Suburbs" vs. "Exurbs"

What's the difference? Is the distinction useful? Relevant? Particularly in terms of site plan/urban form/architecure etc etc?

My suspicion is the answer is "No" but I am curious to hear others' reactions.

There is an unconvincing entry on exurbs at Wikipedia; it is justly in dispute at Wikipedia itself.

The issue arises because of David Brooks' recent sales piece (for his book) titled Take a Ride to Exurbia in which he sets the stage:

People in established suburbs are moving out to vast sprawling exurbs that have broken free of the gravitational pull of the cities and now exist in their own world far beyond.

Ninety percent of the office space built in America in the 1990's was built in suburbia, usually in low office parks along the interstates. Now you have a tribe of people who not only don't work in cities, they don't commute to cities or go to the movies in cities or have any contact with urban life. You have these huge, sprawling communities with no center. Mesa, Ariz., for example, has more people than St. Louis or Minneapolis.

That may very well be true and of significance socially and politically. But from my observation, these exurbs have the same spatial form as do suburbs i.e. go look at where they park the car ib both suburbs and exurbs and they are the same. Now it's possible (and perhaps politically significant) that exurbanites have even less sense of what a pedestrian-oriented city is like than do suburbanites. But I don't think it would be by much.

Brooks, btw, doesn't use the word exurb in its original meaning in which it was simply a "region lying beyond the suburbs of a city, especially one inhabited principally by wealthy people." (American Heritage Dictionary) I first heard it in the 1950s (when it was invented by A.C. Spectorsky for his book The Exurbanites) to describe the wealthy areas of northern Westchester, Putnam and even Dutchess counties. These areas did indeed contain (and of course there wasn't much else then) traditional "main street" towns. Lovely towns, in fact. So it's a slightly annoying surprise for me to hear the term contorted. But I guess that is the way language evolves.

Comments

[MLE]

Around the established cities of the eastern seaboard, where I live and where Brooks is from, this is a distinction with a difference: older, first-tier suburbs are not generally distinct from the cities they ring. It's easy to pass out of, say Northwest Philadelphia into Montgomery County without noticing any jarring changes. However, as one travels further out, into what used to be farmland, the differences are stark. Exurbs here are typically areas that were undeveloped 10-20 years ago, which are now positively booming.

Other than proximity to the city, there are other differences. Older suburbs, like older urban neighborhoods, tend to have centers: mini-versions of "downtown" with shops, movie theaters, restaurants, etc. Instead of these, exurbs have shopping centers -- typically massive and extending for miles along major corridors. Suburbs are usually served by public transportation, especially commuter trains; exurbs have little or no public transportation. Housing in suburbs tends to be of a piece with housing within the immediate city limits -- the differences in size, lot type, and density are not great. Housing in the exurbs looks wholly different.

Brooks, of course, has been flogging this particular meme for years, and shows little sign of letting up (his recent books all appear to be expansions of his infamous "Patio Man" article). There's not too much point in debating the political implications of the exurbs' rise -- they've been throroughly dissected elsewhere -- but from my perspective, there are real, ontological differences between these areas and the traditional suburbs.

[David Sucher]

"...ontological differences..."?

[MLE]

Meaning that the motives behind the design of those suburbs were not significantly different from those of the cities they surround: first-tier suburbanites wanted the same kind of experiences that living within city limits would provide, but they wanted them without the downsides of high taxes, crime, poor schools, etc. -- all of which, of course, would ultimately be made far worse by the success of those suburbs.

Exurbanites, on the other hand, appear to have a completely different set of expectations, and the design of these areas (I hesistate to call them "communities") reflects those motives.

[David Sucher]

"Exurbanites, on the other hand, appear to have a completely different set of expectations"

Now that is a very interesting point, MLE.

Do you have any way to document that? And maybe we should talk about specific exurbs, so that this doesn't become too vague & abstract.

Would Orlando FL qualify under the rubric of "exurb?"

(Btw, I have been trying to figure out if we have any exurbs in the Puget Sound region or PNW more generally so I can relate the term back to something I have actually experienced. But nothing pops to mind. Any suggestions?)

[clew]

the Issaquah plateau developments, surely? the ones built right before horrible traffic problems created some support for dense centers and town planning?

[David Sucher]

No I wouldn't agree that Issaquah Highlands even remotely qualifies as an exurban development. It's definitely part of the Seattle metro area -- only 15 miles/20 minutes to the CBD -- and partakes in every way in the basic life of not only the metro area but to Seattle itself via major league sports etc.

[MLE]

To some extent, it's self-documenting: for example, urbanites and first-tier suburbanites expect to be able to walk to at least some amenities and to be within close driving distance of others. Exurbanites apparently don't share this preference, given that those areas are being developed in ways in that are wholly dependent on cars. So a mile clearly means one thing in the suburbs, something different in the exurbs. Also, the older suburbs I'm talking about are pretty much fully developed. Hot-button issues tend to revolve around the preservation of limited remaining open space and the redevelopment of existing properties. The exurbs, on the other hand, are being created more or less ex nihilo, and the focus and priorities, not surprisingly, are very different.

Given the distances involved, it shouldn't come as a huge shock that many exurbanites rarely, if ever, go into the city. They don't have significant economic or cultural ties to the urban center. This tends to be less true of suburbanites, many of whom live where they do precisely because those areas offer easy commuting into downtown. Such people pay city wage taxes and make use of the city's restaurants, shopping, cultural venues, etc. Even those that don't work in the city feel directly affected, for good or ill, by events there: they are, in this sense, invested in a way that exurbanities aren't and presumably don't want to be.

I don't want to go too far down the road into generalization and Brooksian psychobabble about the philosophical differences between the two types of areas. I will say simply that at least in the Northeast -- which is the only region I can discuss from experience -- those differences are both obvious and profound.

[David Sucher]

MLE, Still could you possibly offer an example of a specific exurb in the East? So that I can triangulate and get a better understanding of what you mean? For example, wuld you think that Paramus NJ is an exurb? Tyson's Corner near Washington DC?

[Joe Erb]

Increasingly, some people in the exurbs seem to be discovering the joys of urban living, or at least of urban nightlife, and are actually making the long and dangerous trip into the city more than they had in the recent past. Indeed, I know of a surprising number of exiles to the suburbs and even the exurbs who are actually retiring back into the center city they or their parents left oh so long ago. This is certainly true of Philadelphia, where MLE and I all too often spend the day a few doors down from one another, not free to enjoy the city. It also seems to extend to many of the smaller cities and towns surrounding Philadelphia as well. I assume this is true of the rest of the East Coast, at least to some extent. I attribute it to a slowly dawning realization that these exurban meccas are not in fact communities, and that it really is nice to be able to walk somewhere other than just to the mailbox.

[MLE]

Tyson's corner, I believe, is one of the places Brooks talks about, either in this book or in his earlier pieces. I don't know that area well enough to comment on it, though I do have relatives there who tell me they're desperate to leave because of the traffic brought on by rampant development.

I'm thinking about places like the boom areas outside of Philadelphia -- areas like King of Prussia, or parts of Bucks County in Pennsylvania or Hunterdon County in New Jersey -- that were either relatively small towns or rural areas twenty-five years ago and that are now under development, both residential and commercial, at a furious pace.

To get back to your original point -- asking about differences in site planning, form, architecture, etc. between suburbs and exurbs -- I would argue that these exurban areas are fundamentally different from the suburbs they fringe, for all the reasons I've talked about above. New development in suburbia, where it occurs, tends to look exurban -- big-box stores, multiplexes, huge parking lots -- but drive a little way off the main strip, and you could be in any of the leafy neighborhoods inside the city limits. That's not true of the exurbs, where pretty much generally everything is new and everything is being designed and built with that same big-box aesthetic.

So yes, the differences are obvious -- in terms of building density, the presense or lack of multi-use zoning or pedestrian-scaled development, adequate or no public space or public transportation, etc, etc. Perhaps the confusion arises because of the definition of "suburban," which to me (and apparently to Brooks and others) simply means "not within city limits," but apparently means something specific and different to you.

[Joe Erb]

Since MLE isn't piping up, I would consider King of Prussia the classic Philadelphia exurb. It's a place where the dot on the map really doesn't demarcate anything in particular except for maybe the geographical center of a big blob. The current "center" is a mammoth shopping mall which started out as a strip mall when I was a kid. The original center was a tavern called the King of Prussia Inn, which was moved a few years back because it inconveniently impeded the highway. As with most exurbs, King of Prussia was farmland up until the 60s, and its growth was based on proximity to the highway.
Distance from the city is not a determining factor - Wayne is a nearby suburb, not as old as some of the inner ring burbs, but there's a definite town center and a community to go with it. The primary difference is public transit - Wayne has a train station, around which a town developed. The bulk of the community necessarily remaining within walking distance of the train or subway station, since that's how people travelled to work in the city every day.
My understanding is that those progressive Northwestern states have zoning in place to prevent or at least hinder that sort of thing. Pennsylvania is more a large series of fiefdoms with little control over sprawl, worse than our northern neighbors but moderately better than our southern neighbors.

[David Sucher]

So MLE, you are saying that the suburbs and the exurbs are the same in their commercial areas but not in the residential areas? Do I have that correct?

[Luke Francl]

I think "exurbs" as currently used simply means "suburbs that are further out" than the inner-ring suburbs. It'd say it's roughly synonymous with "second tier" or "outer ring" suburbs.

One potential difference is that the residents of the original, inner-ring suburbs mostly worked downtown, in the inner city. Residents of the exurbs _may_ commute downtown, but ususually commute to another suburb or exurb.

There are exceptions, of course. I live in Minneapolis and commute to what I would consider a south-west exurb (though there are now suburbs far beyond it), Eden Prairie (a more soulless place you never will find). Some people I work with commute from exurbs _north_ of Minneapolis, for a truly hellish daily journey.

[Nicholas Weininger]

I was just going to nominate the whole area SW of Minneapolis for exurb status. Not just Eden Prairie but Chanhassen, Shakopee, etc.

Actually, the Twin Cities area is replete with this sort of development all around the urban core. When I lived there I recall "Woodbury" being used as a byword for characterless, lobotomized-feeling subdivision-land. The thing is, though, it doesn't stop Mpls and St. Paul being great urban places in themselves; those who want the urban thing gravitate to it, and those who want the giant box made out of ticky-tacky get that instead, and neither interferes too much with the other's satisfaction.

[clew]

The Issaquah Highlands is later than what I'm thinking about. I don't know the names of any of the places I remember, but they were hacked into the forests through the '90s for the successive waves of mostly-Microsoft money, and successively bigger versions were built until the traffic was so *unbelieveably awful* that something townlike, e.g. the Issaquah Highlands, had to be built.

I wish I could remember better, but I was generally going off to a manager's barbecue and the memories are fuzzy. One house had a fake keystone visibly epoxied to the molded fieldstone of its two-story entrance arch, I remember that...

Besides, isn't most of the into-the-city action of the Issaquah Highlands into Bellevue, which is a suburb, making the IH an exurb? Are there really any exurbs with their own major-league sports teams?

[David Sucher]

Oh I see, Clew, you are talking about the Sammamish Plateau in general.

Well I still don't see why that would be called "exurban" as opposed to "suburban." And actually, when you get down to it, the vast majority of Seattle -- within the City limits -- is "suburban" in the sense that it consists of detached single-family houses.

I am certainly so far still convinced that there is no _spatial_ distinction, no morphological difference, between the two.

[Bruce Baugh]

I grew up in Southern California, though I've lived in the Pacific Northwest since college, and when I read about exurbs, I think about some parts of Orange County and places up the coast from LA like Santa Barbara.

I agree, I think, that there's no sharp boundary between suburb and exurb, but it feels to me like there are useful distinctions to be made in degree. I suppose, for instance, that where I am now (Ballard just west of the Phinney Ridge) is suburban by at least some standards. But I deal with the city in ways distinctly unlike my friends in Kirkland or Renton, and in turn they deal with it differently than the folks way out on the eastern edge of Redmond or Kent.

[MLE]

David, to answer your question, commercial development in suburban areas is much the same as in exurban ones, not because of a lack of morphological distinction between them, but because commercial development is the same pretty much everywhere. In many inner cities, for example, whole blocks are being levelled to make way for big-box style development. And as far as I know, there's little community objection to the design of these shopping centers, because they are seen as replacing blight, providing needed services, offering precious off-street parking, improving neighborhood security, etc.

The chief difference between suburban and exurban commercial development, from my perspective at least, is the issue of context: the exurbs have none, because most development is happening on parcels that were formerly farmland or light industry. The first-tier suburbs, however, are already mostly saturated, and so design issues often come to the fore as communities try to wrest concessions from developers in an effort to mantain the essential suburban character of these areas, i.e. to keep them from looking too exurban (and yes, there is a certain blue-state/red-state tension to this).

Part of the confusion, I expect, comes from the different ways in which the word "exurb" is employed. Brooks, for example, often uses the term "sprinkler cities" to describe the places he's talking about -- fast-growing suburbs, primarily in the South and West: places like Douglas County, Colorado; Henderson, Nevada; Loudoun County, Virginia; Scottsdale and Gilbert, Arizona; Union County, North Carolina. Again, though, I don't know enough about those areas to comment in much depth. (As an aside, in coining these neologisms, Brooks displays an unerring instinct for le mot juste: he always manages to miss it by a mile. He's not very good at getting his facts right, either.)

For what it's worth, the others who've left comments seem to have no trouble grasping the essential difference I'm talking about. Perhaps, like pornography, people simply know it when they see it.

[Bruce Baugh]

MLE: I think I grasp it, but I also think I could be wrong. :) Our host has put more brane time into this than I have, and I know from my own professional studies that many things that seem obvious turn out not to be.

I'm really having fun with this kind of thing. Much food for pondering.

[Joe O]

Some of what Brooks is trying to do is create an opposition between elite suburbs like Bethesda and the new suburbs like those created from the farmlands of Northern Virginia. There are just more people who live in the new suburbs and he thinks this will show how out of touch the democratic party is. He is ignoring the classic fifties suburbs to highten the distinction between old and new suburbs.

[Michael Meckler]

I think a more reasonable question is whether we should start talking about "inner-ring" or "first" or "older" suburbs as URBAN. That is to say, instead of viewing urban/suburban primarily in terms of type of governance (is it the city with 500,000 residents or the city with 25,000 residents?) that it may be far more useful to examine the geographic features of a neighborhood (street layout, lot size, population density, type and density of commercial space, proximity to major transportation arteries, etc.) to determine its "urban-ness."

I grew up and currently live in an "inner-ring suburb" of Columbus, Ohio. In fact, this "suburb" is an enclave entirely surrounded by the political entity that is the City of Columbus. While there certainly are socio-economic differences between the "suburb" and its surrounding "urban" neighborhoods, from a planning point of view the differences are negligible. In fact, many folks move into this "suburb" to send children to the public schools, then move into less-expensive and lower-taxed homes nearby in the City of Columbus when the kids have grown.

So is there really a difference between this "inner-ring suburb" and the "city"? Shouldn't we call both "urban"?

[MLE]

I think Joe O is correct in his analysis of Brooks' political argument, which depends on this distinction -- or perhaps conflict is the better word -- between residents of traditional suburbs and the exurban pioneers. The explosive growth of places like Bethesda and Bucks County is only a small part of the picture Brooks seeks to paint: most of his focus on those "new" areas of the South and West whose size and pace of development dwarfs that of the coastal states.

So whether it's easy to grasp the differences between suburban and exurban from, say, a land-use perspective is perhaps debatable, but from the perspective of a political pollster, these differences are quite vital.

[Bruce Baugh]

Michael, I think our host is on rock-solid ground in talking about the urban/suburban division in terms of design. But there may be urban design/urban culture, suburban design/urban culture, and suburban design/suburban culture. Or something like that.

[Luke Francl]

David raises an interesting point about suburban versus city when he notes that much of Seattle is suburban in character, with detached single family homes. Most of Minneapolis/St. Paul is also like this, and so are earlier inner-ring suburbs like Edina. Edina, however, also contains the characteristics we think of as suburban, i.e., faceless strip malls and huge connector arteries; whereas Minneapolis is primarily what the New Urbanists would call Traditional Neighborhood Design.

Maybe the difference is that Edina abuts Minneapolis and connects with its street grid, at least on the edge. Edina was a street car suburb, back when we had those things. As you get further from the city, Edina moves more into the auto-suburb model of cul-de-sacs and unwalkable spaces.

Morphologically, we could draw a distinction between suburbs with elements of TND and those which are entirely auto-dependent, which could be either "suburbs" or "exurbs" depending on when they were built.

[clew]

I agree with Francl, etc.; 'urban' is anyplace where you really don't need a car*. Any Seattle neighborhood built before WWII, and many of those built during, qualify now. (Except maybe South Park might not, if you work north of it.)

But I had coworkers who lived in Redmond apartments right near work and ruefully bought cars anyway, because things were so far apart - dentists, social life - and so car-dependent; furniture stores w/o delivery services (?? still surprising).

*better, anywhere you can support yourself in wage work w/o a car.

[Petey]

Dunno if anyone is still reading, but places like King of Prussia and Tyson's Corner are NOT exurbs.

The Philadelphia exurbs are in places like Bucks and Chester County. Parts of Delaware are now Philly exurbs.

The NYC exurbs are in places like Northern Pennsylvania.

---

The Bos/Wash corridor is so densely settled, with such high land values and such heavy traffic as to make exurbs much less compelling than they are in places like Ohio and Minnesota.

To live in the exurbs in the Bos/Wash corridor, you start facing Japanese style commute times.

[SAJ Matus]

I think most of the "exurbs" that many are talking about may just be a little farther from suburbs that surround the initial city. I live in an unincorporated area of Castle Rock Colorado that there is more livestock than people. (Cattle, horses, goats, pigs). I still have a 30 minute commute to south Denver commerce. Which is just fine with me, it allows me to plan my day. The nearest business storefront from my home is 9 miles. It will be a good 15 to 20 years before the high density communities approach my property. The area is populated by 35 plus acre ranchettes. We keep agricultural tax status and pay only $45 year for taxes. I am outside of any taxing authority for mass transit and prefer it to stay that way. I DO NOT use mass transit. Maybe I'm part of a new classification other than exurbanites. How about "Isolationist".

[Ryan]

I think a better way of looking at suburb v. exurb is to place them on a continuum. Exurbs are not so much a departure from suburbs as they are a distillation of the suburban essence. They're suburbs purged of any lingering, nostalgic notions of urban traditions.

The logic of suburbia - low density development, single use buildings in single use zones, commuting to destinations (rather than having destinations at close proximity) - is applied more fully during each suburban iteration, largely in response to the problems of the previous iteration.

The suburb built 20 years ago is mired in traffic, so the new suburb needs even wider streets with dividers, more lanes, turn lanes, and other items of transport infrastructure that serve cars at the expense of pedestrians (try crossing a six- or eight-lane street).

The commercial buildings are even bigger (reflecting the logistics trend away from stores and toward retail warehouses), so they need bigger parking lots, which further separates them from each other and from anything else.

Since the shopping centres are so ugly and hostile, they need to be separated further from residential areas, via walls, embankments, berms, arterial roads, and so on.

One more thing: all human developments change over time. Suburbs gradually complexify via infill development, steadily growing trees, the idiosyncratic modifications of individual property owners, and so on. Early suburbs are gradually woven into the urban fabric.

For example, I live in a neighbourhood built nearly 100 years ago. It fits the description of a suburb (and was on the fringe of the city when it was built), but it's now considered part of the inner city, and I'm a ten minute walk from the downtown core.

Some of the differences we observe between suburbs and exurbs are the result of comparing two places at different stages of development.

So: will exurbs ever become part of the city? I highly, highly doubt it.

I don't think the exurbs will have a chance to urbanize the way the older suburbs did. Because they've pushed the logic of sprawl to its conclusions, the exurbs are a lot more energy intensive than even suburbs, which are, in turn, a lot more energy intensive than cities. The world is entering a period of declining energy production, and I just don't think exurbia will be sustainble over the long term.

I expect much of exurbia will eventually be reclaimed by wilderness and/or rural (agricultural) development, even as the nearer and denser suburbs of earlier iterations are drawn into the city proper.

[the misfit]

I realize this is not the topic, so perhaps that's why it has not been discussed at all. But sometimes I get the feeling in discussions of this type (I have read several on houzz, for example) that everyone involved sees cities as the defining feature of human existence, and all other modes as therefore derivative of cities. It's at that point that I want to stress that the defining mode of human communities is really agricultural, that rural communities ought to be the benchmark, and that cities are the more-or-less contemporary aberration. The shortsighted view is that the outlying areas are dependent on the city (for jobs), but at bottom in fact the city is dependent on the outlying area (for FOOD). For the record, I grew up in a self-contained small town of 10,000 with a defined center AND a large swathe of strip-malls which employed most of its own residents; and I now live downtown in a historic northern suburb of Washington, DC, walking distance from light rail to DC (where I work) that is old enough - and far enough from the city - to have started as a self-contained community (it has a defined historic downtown AND a swathe of strip malls, the latter of more recent origin). I'm further out than Bethesda, if that helps, and of course my town is less wealthy but we like it just fine :).

My point here is to posit that new residents of the "exurbs" may not be looking to inhabit a modified version of the city (or the older suburbs) as this discussion seems to suppose. They may rather want to live in the country but need to be close to work; and thus they either purchase a farmhouse in what they perceive to be more or less a rural area (that happens to be within a 90-minute drive of the office), or they build a modern approximation of the farmhouse that they were looking for and didn't find. Building oneself a house is no sin, even if a lot of other people then do the same - although I personally bought a historic home and will never buy (or build) a modern one.

But, since I'm ten years after this discussion seems to have ended, I'm not sure how helpful my comment will be!

[the misfit]

I realize this is not the topic, so perhaps that's why it has not been discussed at all. But sometimes I get the feeling in discussions of this type (I have read several on houzz, for example) that everyone involved sees cities as the defining feature of human existence, and all other modes as therefore derivative of cities. It's at that point that I want to stress that the defining mode of human communities is really agricultural, that rural communities ought to be the benchmark, and that cities are the more-or-less contemporary aberration. The shortsighted view is that the outlying areas are dependent on the city (for jobs), but at bottom in fact the city is dependent on the outlying area (for FOOD). For the record, I grew up in a self-contained small town of 10,000 with a defined center AND a large swathe of strip-malls which employed most of its own residents; and I now live downtown in a historic northern suburb of Washington, DC, walking distance from light rail to DC (where I work) that is old enough - and far enough from the city - to have started as a self-contained community (it has a defined historic downtown AND a swathe of strip malls, the latter of more recent origin). I'm further out than Bethesda, if that helps, and of course my town is less wealthy but we like it just fine :).

My point here is to posit that new residents of the "exurbs" may not be looking to inhabit a modified version of the city (or the older suburbs) as this discussion seems to suppose. They may rather want to live in the country but need to be close to work; and thus they either purchase a farmhouse in what they perceive to be more or less a rural area (that happens to be within a 90-minute drive of the office), or they build a modern approximation of the farmhouse that they were looking for and didn't find. Building oneself a house is no sin, even if a lot of other people then do the same - although I personally bought a historic home and will never buy (or build) a modern one.

But, since I'm ten years after this discussion seems to have ended, I'm not sure how helpful my comment will be!

[LK]

Very helpful.

[Cathy Ziegler]

If "urban" means a place where you don't need a car, then what do you call "suburbs" that refuse to have bus service... such as Mesquite, Texas? Mesquite has its own downtown area.

Neighboring Sunnyvale, Texas is almost 100% residential and also has no bus service. Most homes are on 5+ acre plots (mostly 80-100 acre lots) and there is no downtown, or uptown for that matter, but I'd hardly call it agricultural... there are a few cows, but mostly it's just homes of rich people who drive to Dallas for work.