Suburbanization
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Suburbanization or suburbanisation is a term used to describe the process of population movement from within towns and cities to the rural-urban fringe. It is one of the many causes of the increase in urban sprawl. Many residents of metropolitan areas no longer live and work within the central urban area, choosing instead to live in satellite communities called suburbs and commute to work via automobile or mass transit. Others have taken advantage of technological advances to work from their homes, and chose to do so in an environment they consider more pleasant than the city. These processes often occur in more economically developed countries, especially in the United States, which is believed to be the first country in which the majority of the population lives in the suburbs, rather than in the cities or in rural areas. Proponents of containing urban sprawl argue that sprawl leads to urban decay and a concentration of lower income residents in the inner city. [1]
[edit] Causes and effects
Suburbanization can be linked to a number of different push and pull factors. Push factors include the congestion and population density of the cities, pollution caused by industry and high levels of traffic and a general perception of a lower quality of life in inner city areas. Pull factors include more open spaces and a perception of being closer to "nature", lower suburban house prices in comparison to the city, and the increasing number of job opportunities in the suburban areas.
Improvements in transportion infrastructure encourage suburbanization, as people become increasingly able to live in a suburb and commute in to the nearby town or city to work. Developments in railways, bus routes and roads are the main improvements that make suburbanization more practical. The increase in the number and size of highways is a particuarly significant part of this effect.
Government policies can have a significant effect on the process. In the United States, for instance, policies of the Federal government in the post-World War II era, such as the building of an efficient network of roads, highways and superhighways, and the underwriting of mortgages for suburban one-family homes, had an enormous influence on the pace of suburbanization in that country. In effect, the government was encouraging the transfer of the middle-class population out of the inner cities and into the suburbs, sometimes with devastating effects on the viability of the city centers.
Race also played a role in American suburbanization. During World War I, the massive migration of African Americans from the South resulted in an even greater residential shift toward suburban areas. The cities became seen as dangerous, crime-infested areas, while the suburbs were seen as safe places to live and raise a family, leading to a social trend known in some parts of the world as white flight. This view runs counter to much of the rest of the world, where slums mostly exist outside the city, rather than within them. With the increasing population of the older, more established suburban areas, many of the problems which were once seen as purely urban ones have manifested themselves there as well.
Recent developments in communication technology, such as the spread of broadband services, the growth of e-mail and the advent of practical home video conferencing, has enabled more people to work from home rather than commuting. Although this can occur either in the city or in the suburbs, the effect is generally decentralizing, which works against the largest advantage of the center city, which is easier access to information and supplies due to centralization. Similarly, the rise of efficient package express delivery systems, such as (in the United States) Federal Express and UPS, which take advantage of computerization and the availabilty of an efficient air transportation system, also eliminates some of the advantages that were once to be had from having a business located in the city. The overall effect of these developments is that businesses as well, and not just individuals, now see an advantage to locating in the suburbs, where the cost of buying land, renting space, and running their operations, is cheaper than in the city.
This has led to another recent phenomenon in American suburbs, the advent of edge cities in suburban areas, arising out of clusters of office buildings built around commercial strips and shopping malls. With more and more jobs for suburbanites being located in these areas rather than in the main city core that the suburbs grew out of, traffic patterns, which for decades centered on people commuting into the center city to work in the morning and then returning home in the evening, have become more complex, with the volume of intra-suburban traffic increasing tremendously.
By 1990, it was estimated that more than 45% of the US population lived in suburban areas. This massive shift from urban to suburban living has made the United States the world's first and only suburban nation.
