@@mr51406 The Canadian equivalent is: the number of Tim Hortons with drivethroughs in your area, divided by the number of Tim Hortons without drivethroughs in your area. In Edmonton, if you're downtown, at the University of Alberta or another post-secondary institute with tens of thousands of students (NAIT, Grant Macewan), or on trendy Whyte Ave, then you're quite urban with many Tim Hortons lacking drive-throughs. Outside of those areas, most of the city is suburbia and nearly every Tim Hortons has a drive-through.
I moved to Phoenix from Chicago about twenty years ago. It was a HUGE adjustment for me. When I moved here, I picked a cheap downtown apartment and quickly realized how quiet downtown was in the 2000s. With the expansion of the light rail, things have changed quickly and now I am more north central and LOVE living on the light rail line. I found a community that fits my love for walking to the market, bookstore or transit perfectly. But many of my friends with families have moved WAY out and driving to visit them just always has me laughing, it is a never ending suburb!
SynchroSk8 Maybe because they want to own a home? Not everyone likes to live in apartments with neighbors knocking on your door threatening to kick you out because you’re “noisy”. I’m GLAD my family and i move out. I don’t have to deal with anyone’s BS. I can live freely. I can raise my voice freely. I understand apartments exist as every 18+ starts living by themselves and have to earn money by themselves. I did that too. I am retired from the military. The money I made, I invest all of it. Get a job, the money I get, I invest $100 per month until I hit 66. That’s where I can take 5% as my retirement fund. The rest of it (7%) keeps growing and hope that my future kid can follow my lead. I also spend $100 per month on MONTHLY grocery shopping. Why? Because of MONTHLY meal plans. I eat healthy while saving money.
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.
Good one. I vote for a simplification of the Aristotelian suburb definition. Instead of going to all the trouble of surveying each neighborhood to find out what the residents think they live in, simply go by population or housing density. Anything between 100 and 2000 housing units per square mile is suburban. Translate to population density by assuming average household size of 2.6 people unless you have better data for a specific region (260 and 5,200 residents per square mile). Everything below that is rural, everything above that is urban. This definition has the advantage of fitting in with everyday people's definitions as proven by survey, but it doesn't require the inconvenience of a survey to apply to a given metropolitan area. You definitely don't want to go by city boundaries like the census-convenient definition does, because as noted major areas within the boundaries of large cities are actually suburban. And you definitely don't want to give up and resort to a spectrum that nobody outside of a policy wonk will ever bother to understand and use. You want an easily applied definition that corresponds to everyday usage and understanding of what a suburb is.
Wittgensteinian Suburb: a suburb is what it is in the context of a particular communcation game. Meaning can only be defined in the context of a use case.
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.
That also means that cities cannot collapse from shrinking like Detroit. In Germany these villages can slowly be separated again and continue on their own if a city is shrinking.
The same is true in the US and lots of other places. In English, when two settlements combine into one, the former components are often called "boroughs". New York City was originally just the area we now call Downtown, Wall Street is the location of the original city wall, and it grew to encompass five whole counties, including the former towns and villages New Harlem, Yonkers, Kingsbridge, Morrisania, West Warms, Easchester, Wakefield, Pelham, Westchester, Williamsbridge, Brooklyn, Bushwick, Flatbush, Flatlands, Gravesend, New Lots, New Utrecht, Williamsburgh, Flushing, College Point, Whitestone, Hempstead, Rockaway Beach, Jamaica, Richmond Hill, Long Island City, Newtown, Castleton, New Brighton, Northfield, Port Richmond, Middletown, Edgewater, Southfield, Richmond, Westfield, and Totenville. These all used to be fully independent towns and villages, now incorporated into New York City.
Most places in the mainland North American anglosphere (US and English speaking Canada) are cities in name only. Just because someplace is an incorporated entity with a municipal government and a large number of people living within its border doesn't make it "urban", at least in the traditional sense.
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.
It's crazy comparing the satellite maps of US/Canada to the rest of the worth. The rest of the world has clumps of people and then empty land. US/CA has endless stretches of suburbia. Like little sustenance farmers, except nobody grows crops besides grass
This can even happen in American cities. I live in a suburban neighborhood in Austin, Texas. At the end of my street is a fence, and the houses on the other side of that fence are in a suburb called Round Rock. So I am much closer to a suburb than any major city area, but still within what would be called a city
Suburbs don't exist here in Asia, or in my country at least. The idea of having 1 to 3 big Cities be the center of commerce and development and the outlying Cities be Suburbs or purely just for residential is non-existant. Residential, Industrial, and Commercial zones are all located within each and every City. This is mainly due to the fact that cars aren't as common and cheap as in America so traveling from a suburb to a city would be hell. That's why everything's mixed together within one area.
@@thefrub What a strange thought. So, if you actually look outside of major cities on google maps... I mean, I literally live in a tiny neighborhood surrounded on three sides by a field(with another field across the road; both were planted with wheat this year) 5 minutes outside of town. And this is a 20 minute drive from some growing cities, and 25-30 minutes from Columbus(Oh). When you look at how much crop the US exports to the rest of the world, or even just has to grow for livestock feed, that's just a woefully unrealistic take on the US. You know that Idaho is known for the potatoes they grow, right? You're aware of low density states like Montana?
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.
Aye, I'd say the same in Scotland. I live city centre, but I'd say where my folks live is a suburb that's part of the city. There are other suburbs which are definitely outside the city. I feel a Venn diagram would work well ;)
What makes it odder is if you include Northern Ireland, the density increases greatly with another two to three additional urban centres with 100,000 or so people, but the total population only increases by about two million As a region, the North is denser but with a lower population while the Republic sparser, yet with a greater population Weird
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).
Where I live in Perth, the word "town" or "city" is purely for the local governmnet area. For example, I live in Bassendean, a suburb of western australia which is located in the Perth Metropolitan area. Bassendean is located within the Town of Bassendean, the LGA. Within the Town of Bassendean, there are also the suburbs of Eden Hill, Ashfield, Lockridge. These suburbs are technically part of the "town", but "town" refers purely to the LGA. This is the same everywhere. The suburb of Perth is located within the City of Perth. Other suburbs in the city of perth include west perth, northbridge etc.
Precisely. This video is (knowingly or unknowingly) US centric. Also, Australia and other places don't rely on something being a suburb or not to allocate funding. Also, a suburb here in Australia isn't necessarily suburban ;)
@@asherjackson4504 Oh yes, I'd forgoten about this. In Queensland (where I live) the use of the word "town" for a LGA was mostly discontinued quite a few years back. However, I think QLD is an outlier in this regard. If I understand correctly, most states still use the term "town" for some LGAs. This is separate to the use of "town" by the post office and in many cases, LGA towns are divided into suburbs by Australia Post while many of what Australia Post terms "towns" are actually administered as part of a broader LGA (such as a shire or region) and have no local government of their own. Because hooray for confusing :)
@@asherjackson4504 we call suburbs wards. So in Cardiff we have the ward soft grangetown and riverside for example. Then anything outside the city boundaries even if geographically continuous is a suburb for example penarth which is part of a different county but basically everyone there works and plays and shops in Cardiff but are taxed less because their local government is conservative and not labour which it is in cardiff
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. :)
That's what the survey definition sort of landed on after asking people. There is no one agreed-upon definition for the density thresholds for urban/suburban/rural, however.
@@CityBeautiful The car usage thing only applies where public transit is not well utilised or at all. In places like Hong Kong, the public transit is so good that basically everyone uses it.
Its suppose to refer to building type and disposition. Urban is multistory mixed use with narrow roads. Suburban is single story with greenbelts and shopping strips. Rural is farmland and ranchland, anything outside the metro areas as in most of the country.
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.
Zylork0122 yes, my whole life ppl had this confused. Chicago ends at 138th (Altgeld gardens or Torrence ave) on the south, anything above Rogers park up north and anything far stretch from Austin Blvd and Ohare west (6000 and 10000w)
Perhaps not now, especially in The North and in parts of the Midlands like the Black Country (have a look at the 2 West Bromwich seats, Dudley North and 2 of the Wolverhampton seats)
Generally, take East London for example: dominately Labour. But then the outer fringes like Chingford, Woodford and Romford are conservative places but are still within Greater London. Most of Essex, which borders the East End, is then conservative.
@@robtuton4392 I lived in York, both in Central and Outer parliamentary constituencies, for three years. I can tell you that there's really no difference whatsoever in how I perceived the density between the two. To be honest, I really wouldn't have classified York as a city at all if it weren't for it's historical significance, and our stupid British rule about cities being designated as such by having a cathedral. Somewhere like Middlesbrough feels far more city like than York, yet is not designated as a city in the UK. Conversely, Ripon is a city because it has a cathedral, but really is a pretty tiny town (it only has a population of ~16000). Not sure there's much in the idea that the suburbs are where the Tory votes come from because there are plenty of non-Tory voting suburbs/towns, and some Tory voting urban areas. Plus a distinction like that is really quite a recent trend historically, and is largely to do with demographics of class and rates of home ownership.
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.
What's difficult to explain to people in Brasil is the very concept of unincorporated areas. Every piece of land here is within a municipality. We don't have counties. Just the country, states and municipalities. 3 levels of administration. And most municipalities here look more the size and shape of american counties. And 'cities' are just the urban areas of a municipality. Also, in all municipalities, states and the federal level we directly elect a chief of executive, and proportionally elect the members of each legislative power. Same rule for the entire country.
The way Arlington County is set up is definitely weird. VA is THE home of small independent cities, but somebody along the way added "county" to what was supposed to be a small city.
@@idromano No, they are part of no CITY. The specific rules, like everything in the United States, vary from state to state, but typically states are broken up into counties, and some parts of those counties are "incorporated" into a city. Areas that aren't in a city are "unincorporated", and governed only by the county (and states and Federal government); areas that are part of a city have an additional layer of government. So there's a county board of supervisors that acts like a city council, and a county sheriff that acts like a police chief. Stereotypically, unincorporated areas are rural, without enough people to justify making them a city, but this isn't always the case. Arlington, Virginia, the strip in Las Vegas, Nevada, and much of south and southeastern Los Angeles County. California are examples of dense areas that really "should" be parts of a city but aren't. On the opposite side of the spectrum, there are some incorporated cities that are very rural.
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.
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
@Revolutionary Communist favelas are slums. meaning they are originally occupied illegally and with no planning whatsoever on all sorts of 'vacant' land in and around cities. Because of that they tend not to have any sort of equipment such as paved and signed roads, sewage, garbage collection, legal and proper water and electrical services, police stations, hospitals, schools, etc. And the houses aren't properly built either, but put on with anything the residents can access. Suburbs are urban and suburban areas on the outskirts of metro areas that are poorer than the urban core and somewhat neglected by governments but they do have urban equipment and services (even if with lower quality) and they were legally established, have proper land/unit ownership, addresses and such
Although that is indeed usually the case in Brazil, in some places, especially in larger cities, the periphery can also have luxury, closed-off developments. For example Alphaville or the Alpes da Cantareira near São Paulo.
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.
Hector G I’ve traveled a lot and from my own observations and thoughts, I would say cities typically are mixed use and centralized. Suburbs tend to be primarily residential and sprawled out, while cities have a mix of residential and business and concentrate on a centralized urban core. Also, cities typically tend to offer much more in terms of culture and entertainment than suburbs. You’ll find museums, landmarks, points of interest, etc. Suburbs might have those things as well but are never nearly as centralized.
It could be argued that very few metros are monolithic anymore. Take Chicago, for example. The city proper is, by far the largest city in the metro. However, the official name for CSA also includes Naperville and Elgin. The centers of all three cities are 40 miles away from each other. Then there's Aurora. At around 200,000 people and second largest city in the state, it's actually larger than either Naperville or Elgin. It's got a downtown core with highrises and is an economic center. But it's still considered "only" a suburb. And Aurora is probably one of a dozen edge cities, like was described in the video.
No Brang parking lots are great in cities. They provide something useful for people who go downtown. Otherwise we would just have to have a bunch of fragmented skyscrapers with parking all around them randomly places in the suburbs
@@LucasFernandez-fk8se i prefer denser walk-able cities. i don't like it when cars own the roads lol. On a more serious note, I really don't like it when inner city dwellers are dictated to by outer city car-bound commuters on how to run their inner cities.
@@LucasFernandez-fk8se Parking lots can be made more compact though. Why can't Americans just build more parking garages? Or allow companies to share the same parking facility?
As a Phoenix resident, I immediately was like ‘oh dear, that is Phoenix.’ - I am located in an urban area of Phoenix, on purpose. I want to be able to walk to my market, bookstore and light rail station. I want a fast trip to get into the Phoenix city center or the Capitol, which is also in Phoenix, just west of the city center. Many of my neighbors would rather get in their car, which makes community meetings interesting. Great video. Keep up the awesome content.
@@michaelimbesi2314 Same, I'm from Miami living in California and growing up you constantly hear people talking about how they wanna live in the "city" but now that I've left I've learned I lived in the city my whole life and that most "cities" are just painfully enormous suburbs.
In Austria, suburbs are "Satellitenstädte", or satellite cities. They are considered cities though, where people live just to commute into the city. And Edge Cities would be best described as "Trabantenstadt", which is also a city, but is a regional center. The difference however is, that there is a distance between these cities and the main big city with mostly farming fields in between and a rail line and highway connecting them. Classical American suburbs are often just former villages, which have grown into and merged with the city and became more urban.
WOW, the maps in the Houston MSA section were weird. Super interesting to see the variation. Surprised anyone would consider Galveston or the core of Conroe to be suburban, and to see Sugar Land and The Woodlands listed as urban.
DC has a lot of suburbs that serve as supplementary downtowns. Tyson's Corner, Arlington County, Alexandria, Silver Spring, Bethesda, & Rockville. If you don't work in DC, there's a 50% chance that you commute to one of these suburbs every morning.
Ireland has 5 cities (plus Kilkenny which is a town that's allowed to call itself a city). Limerick and Waterford have one city and county council each while Dublin, Cork and Galway have city councils. Of these five cities, only two (Dublin and Cork) have populations over 100,000. The suburbs are really just low density residential sprawl that swallow up villages. Cork recently had a major boundary extension to coincide with its urban area growing.
I am a Traffic Engineer in CA and I love your videos. You are a gifted teacher. Please do a video about residential parking in a traditional suburb. This is a common issue that I encounter in my work and many many many people have the same misconceptions about neighborhood parking on residential streets. Somehow they believe the spot in front of their home "belongs" to them.
Labeling suburb close to the city core "poor" seems like an "America problem" here its clear the closer you get to the centre the more expensice it is.
It's expensive in downtown cores in most US cities too, but inner ring suburbs have a unique challenge. Their housing is now 50+ years old and wealthier homeowners are either buying downtown or on the fringe with newer housing. Inner ring suburbs are the new affordable housing.
@@CityBeautiful i would gentrify the crap out of an area like that but maybe in america longer transport distances are accepted. I like to be able to do my grosery shopping whitin 15-30 minutes.
@@CityBeautiful Well it depends on the place since each city is at a different point in its timeline of development. Also, most of the poorest neighborhoods are still in the inner city, so you can't really say inner ring suburbs have replaced them.
It's all relative. I'd consider some somewhat large cities suburbs because they're right next to even larger cities, but some small cities urban because they're surrounded by smaller cities. Basically, it's a suburb if it is next to or very close to a larger city.
I currently live in Downtown Indianapolis (urban) but at one time lived in Bethesda, MD. Anyone who is familiar with Bethesda knows that it is an urban area, but when I would describe it to friends/family back home in Indy, who hadn't heard of it, they were confused when I would describe it. Basically, I would say its a suburb of Washington, DC in Maryland. But its not a regular suburb like the ones found around Indianapolis. I lived in a high-rise apartment building, walked pretty much everywhere, and took transit, all things that would typically be associated with a city. I think a lot of people in the country aren't aware of Washington's suburbs being basically secondary cities that don't so much compete with Washington, but compliment it.
fairfax county resident here! the reason theres so many highrises in places like tysons is because washington dc has a highrise ban but since it is such an important city there needed to be office buildings. so they built the highrises outside of the city in virginia and maryland.
I'm constantly annoyed that there doesn't seem to be a name for these in the English language. The soul suckingness of these is because there are few services beyond a convenience store and a pub, and it's minimum of 20 minute bus ride to the city proper through areas of single family home sprawl that lies in between.
The issue with city limits is that they often have little to do with the actual city. Carlisle is the biggest city by area in the UK (not counting London as the City of London is only one square mile). But a lot of the City of Carlisle is distinctly rural (and a lot of the City of Sheffield is in the Peak DIstrict National Park).
In Singapore the outlying suburbs are often more densely populated than the inner ones as they were developed after the country's population boomed (around the 1950-1970s)
Great content as always. I've always wondered about the technical definitions for these things. I live near a "city" that only has a population of about 55,000 but it has multiple high rises at 20+ stories and most of the single family homes are densely packed together. Not sure whether it's a city or a town or something else.
I think it's relative. I live in Bowie, Maryland...a Washington DC suburb with a population of 60k. So it really depends on where you grew up and your perceptions of what a city and suburb looks like.
I find the word "suburb" funny because, in English, it has a meaning completely opposite of its Portuguese cognate "subúrbio". A "suburb" sounds like a cool place with big houses where middle and upper classes live. A "subúrbio" is basically a slum, or at least an inconvenient faraway lower middle class neighborhood.
I live in Nassau County, NY. Which is just east of New York City. And because people and officials here in Nassau over the last 75 years have been going out of their way to NOT be NYC. Traffic, roads and public transportation in Nassau suck.
@@CityBeautiful Agreed. This video should be called "what do Americans think a suburb is?". In many countries, 'suburb' refers to lines on a map and has nothing to do with urban characteristics, similar to the word subset. By that definition, Manhattan wouldn't be a suburb, but East Village or Chelsea would.
@@CityBeautiful Americans would be so confused if they ventured outside North America... My suburb consists of mostly 4-6 story apartment buildings with some rowhousing and adjacent adjacent single family housing area, it has a metro station and it's quite walkable. It's probably more "city" than many American inner cities. What makes it a suburb? Well it's outside the inner city of course, I don't know of anyone who would characterize this area as being part of the city, except for administratively.
@@timmathews9265 And here I was, thinking that suburbs refer to the low density neighbourhoods inside the city, not outside of it… (but still near the edge)… I guess I was wrong…
Before watching the rest of the video: A small named city/town near a larger city/town (examples near Portland, Oregon would be places like Lake Oswego or Gresham) without any major uninhabited land (forest, ect.) between it and the larger city. Most people from this region regularly go to the larger city and often share things like mass transit networks with it.
There are quite a few edge cities in the DC area (Tysons, Rosslyn, and Silver Spring just to name a few). Main reason is because of the DC building height limit in addition to lower taxes and building costs outside the city, which is the same as many other cities
0:11 Even as a kid, when I saw pictures of the suburbs I always thought “This is terrible! Where are the trees? Where is the corner store?” Not until getting into real estate AND finding this channel and related channels, did I see why the suburbs is like this. I hope we can change this in the future.
Funny because my English teacher said exactly today that the definition of a suburb is different between English-speaking countries and Portuguese-speaking Brazil, here, it's a total different thing, here it means outskirts, poor areas at the edge of a city with bad infrastructure and lack of services, while what English says it's a suburb we simply refer to as a residential area, no specific name.
Still odd to me, specially in DC area. On the news they called Winchester Virginia, Martinsburg West Virginia, and Hagerstown Maryland “Suburbs” of DC..LIKE WHAT
I like the spectrum idea being used to help guide public transportation routes but I also think the survey could have a psychological effect where people in "urban" areas may be more inclined to ride public transit because urban areas are associated with it but a person in the "surburbs" might drive not realize a transit stop is nearby
Yes, there is a simple answer: anything not within the city limits of the principal city is a suburb. Of course, they can vary greatly in density, land use, etc., but that is the technical definition. Just because a suburb has tall office buildings does not make it a city, it makes it a high density, inner ring suburb.
In Canada, there’s a suburb beside Toronto called Mississauga which has a population of 750,000. To put that in perspective that’s bigger than Seattle/Miami.
I had to rewind multiple portions of this to make sure I understood. My brain hurts. The presentation is great, it's the concept itself that's making my noggin throb.
Tyson’s Corner and other communities surrounding DC are a bit of an unusual case in part because DC has height limits on buildings, so that incentivizes building taller buildings outside of it.
Love your videos. I think there is a distinction between what makes a municipality a "suburb" or a "suburban area." I live in Orlando Florida, where the center of the city and a few surrounding areas feel like a city, but the rest of the city limits are low density and feel like a suburb, despite being in the city limits. Of course, there are communities like winter park that are urban but are technically "suburbs of orlando." It is rather complicated.
I find this very interesting because a statistician could _heavily_ influence the results of a survey/study just by altering their definition of what a suburb is! This has some serious power, that as the potential to influence the way our cities work!
I think suburbs are where you see the most cul-de-sacs, roads with less sidewalks, Roads that have turns in them without intersections, Houses with very few windows on the sides, Most of the traffic is on busy arterial roads rather than in neighborhoods, and no corner stores. I like the survey model, I think that one probably gets at it the best.
Ireland= City Centre is site of original viking settlement, on a river, surrounded by 1800s/1900s inner city, than suburbs are the residential lands between the outskirts and the centre. Surrounded by satellite towns.
Northern Ireland=City Centre is the site of an English Plantation fort or admin centre, often near a river but sometimes a canal, the centre being surrounded by a godawful mess, surrounded by housing estates, and then villages and disconnected developments, then farmland
I live in a village of about 530 people, we are part of a 37 sq. mi. town of about 2,600. My dad was on that town's planning board and they were considered to be a "suburban" community due to the fact that the majority of the population commuted to larger communities to work instead of being employed in local agriculture. My first reaction to hearing was asking where the local Wegman's was. Despite most the of the population commuting to larger communities, most of the land is agricultural and we have a density of 30.5 housing units per sq. mi. I would consider it to be a rural community myself.
I'd love a video on what a suburb could be. I would totally live in a suburb where there was more dense housing stock with a train line into the city and rural areas nearby for outdoor recreation. Almost a flower model, where the petals were denser suburbs and i-between the petals were rural/natural areas. The centre being a city. Why do we have such narrow ideas about suburbs. Single families are not even that common anymore!
In Australia, suburbs are subdivisions of a city, we also use them in the postal service instead of stating our city. 'Suburbs' can be low density residential areas 50km away from the City Centre in a similar style to American suburbs, or they can be 'inner city' suburbs that are very close to the City Centre with mid to high density housing. Even the CBD/City centre is considered it's own suburb
Let me give you a definition of my own: suburban is such part of a town, that is mostly residential and doesn't naturally generate enough jobs to keep it's population during the working hours. Although large shopping malls or industrial areas may be set into suburbs by choice, still there isn't that buzz of small shops and lively streets full of pedestrians that makes the town center. Large majority of citizens leave the suburbs for work during the day and for entertainment in the evening. Majority of shops and other employment generators are present by developer's choice rather than naturally.
I grew up in Laval, Quebec. Laval is a city/island adjacent to the Island of Montreal. When I was growing up, Laval was your typical suburb. Overwhelmingly single family homes, lots of cars, lots of space, lots of commuting to work. However, over the last decade the city has witnessed extensive densification, with many high rise buildings being built and a downtown area slowly forming. It even has a few metro stops. Montreal is certainly the core city. If anyone outside of Quebec asked me where I was from I'd certainly say Montreal, and pretty much everyone is Laval would consider themselves living in a suburb. That being said, Laval has close to 450,000 people. It's one of the biggest cities in the country. But oddly, just a suburb
Very interesting. In Australia, a suburb is just what we call an area within a city. It isn't defined by certain criteria. For example, I would say I live in Newcastle NSW, but when it comes to a postal address, I put my suburb of North Lambton. Newcastle City is itself a suburb (the CBD).
The 8 scale thing could be simplified, reducing the arbitrary nature as well. Make it into a 4 place scale, where you score points based on being below or above metropolitan average: 3 below average means urban(4 points), 2 below and 1 above means slightly urban (3 points), 1 below and 2 above is slightly suburban (2 point), 3 above average is suburban (1 point).
Tyson's Corner does feel suburban though. It's mostly a mall used by the DC area. You wouldn't hear anyone say "I'm from Tyson's Corner". It's built up, but it's a suburban area for sure. If you're in Old Town, Alexandra or Downtown, DC, your in a city. National Harbor, MD, suburban, same thing.
I live in a suburb with a higher population density than my country's capital, which surrounds it. Or do I? Frederiksberg (or Solbjerg as it used to be known) was a small village, and around 1700 a royal pleasure palace was built nearby as a retreat from the urban palaces in Copenhagen. And then in the late 1800s Copenhagen grew. And Copenhagen surrounded Frederiksberg, but Frederiksberg is still its own municipality - so it's not the capital, and hence you could argue that it's a provincial town. (Even if it is now often unoficially referred to at part of Greater Copenhagen and officially is part of the Capital Region.) Or a suburb, being in many ways subordinate to the main city that now surrounds it. 3.4 square miles with over 100,000 people. The population density rivals large parts of NYC. We're not a city, but are we a suburb? And if not, what on earth ARE we?
I live in a pretty nice pre-WW2 western suburb of Boston actually. It’s different from most suburbs in that instead of having a major arterial or downtown as its commercial core, it’s separated into 13 neighborhoods that all have small to mid-sized commercial centers within them, and some of them also have commuter train stations. Because of this, no matter where you live in the town, you’re almost always within walking distance of a neighborhood center. This may sound “urban”, but the density of the town isn’t particularly high and there’s generally a lot of single family zoning too. I wish more suburbs were like this, honestly. But unfortunately, sprawl happened.
You can’t really talk about virginia in the same light as other states because of the way that their independent cities work is different from the other 49. Norton, VA is classified as a city with a population less than 5,000.
I find interesting the book of Edge City, there was a situation in the Mexico City metro area back in the 80s, they built a new city, 45 minutes or so away from downtown Mexico City and it was named "Ciudad Satélite" satellite city in english, because it was that, a satellite of MXC, at first it was a bedroom community for the middle and upper class, now it's just embeded in the metro area, long gone the days when it was "a suburb"
I am from Europe and live in Europe, so concept of USA suburbs is very alien to me, especially when I visited first time it was so strange. To me suburbs, in the US style, is: 0) Lowish density of people. 1) Wide, but low intensity streets. 2) Small amount of trees around these streets. 3) A lot of cul-de-sacs. 4) Lack or very limited public transport, even bus stops nearby. 5) And lack of intermixed commercial activity. No shops, no restaurants. 6) spatial separation from the main city core (kind of, it is a bit more complex). Just a monoculture of housing, and transport by cars for extended duration to anywhere. The suburbs in other countries, including European ones, will somehow have similar characteristics, but with a lot of notable exceptions: 1) more dense housing, often 2-stories tall. 2) some minimal amount of commercial activities (grocery shop, maybe a pharmacy, a barber / hair dresser, a pub / bar). 3) It will be blending with the city smoothly - you could walk between them, you could travel on bike, you will have a lot of things in between too, including parks, or public transport. Even bigger problem is putting labels on things, and trying to find a one definition. By making it defined, you force people to think (residents, and planners) about it in only one way. And that is not a good thing.
In Germany city an official title granted to towns depending on their size and importance. Historically this meant they were allowed to have a (farmers) market. Cities usually never lose this status though, so there are a few „cities“ not really worth their name. But generally any settlement with a dense core is a city, since they usually grew around the market plaza. So that’s probably what differentiates a city from a town. Cities usually have very compact commercial cores around the market plaza, while towns usually evolved more as a bunch of farms growing together with a less visible core. Large cities will often have multiple cores, since they grew out absorbing smaller cities and towns over time.
In New Zealand I think suburbs are the different residential districts of a city and surrounding towns. Suburbs aren’t separate entities but what makes up a city. I live in a town just outside of Christchurch, New Zealand. In 2019 during the terrorist attack at the mosques all Christchurch city schools were placed into lockdown. This included the schools in my town. There are fields separating my town and the main city but we are still technically a part of Christchurch.
I live there. Its turning into an expensive city which has foreign investors turning their heads. Mississauga also atracts people that want a quiet and more dense suburb, while not including the druggies and homeless of Toronto.
There are multiple types of suburbs, there are your urban streetcar suburbs(Inner Ring Suburbs). I always thought suburb, meant below the city, sub-below, urban, meaning city.
As a non-American, I sometimes find myself being confused about the outlines Google Maps give for American cities. Like, what even is Birmingham, Alabama's? That line to the left is really dodgy. So yes, I'd love to see an explanation for this.
Incorporation and annexation laws also very from state to state in the US -- as does the culture and structure of governance -- for complicated historical reasons. Here in Minnesota, all incorporated municipalities are cities; village status was abolished around 1970 or so, with all villages becoming statutory cities instead. Civil townships exist in rural areas, but are subdivisions of counties and have much less governing power than cities -- mostly just maintaining local township roads and enforcing a few ordinances. The Twin Cities area (Minneapolis / St Paul) also has a somewhat strong regional planning authority -- the Metropolitan Council (which City Beautiful mentioned in his video about regional government). Most public services come from either city governments or the state and county governments (with school districts being the main exception), although the Met Council handles mass transit and most sewage treatment in the Twin Cities. The contiguous suburbs of the Twin Cities tend to be either a.) small inner suburbs that formed early on, b.) 6-mile-square townships farther out that chose to incorporate as cities so they could provide better provide services, or c.) former standalone small towns that became suburbs as the metro area grew out to them. These tend to have relatively clean borders. Ragged borders exist mostly at the edges of exurbs (like Buffalo or Cambridge) and growing standalone cities outstate (like Rochester or St Cloud) -- both cases where land has been annexed one neighborhood or future development at a time from the surrounding rural townships. The few exceptions are mostly where a township decided to incorporate as a city after being _partly_ annexed, thus freezing the existing border -- e.g., the border between Crystal and New Hope, or the odd appendages to Wayzata, Hopkins, and St Bonifacius.* This doesn't happen any more, since the state (and possibly the Met Council) basically refuses to let it happen.** We also have a long-standing culture of mostly-good governance. Minnesota tends to rank lower in corruption and high in civic participation, and consistently has the highest voter turnout in the US. As messed-up as things can still get sometimes, there's plenty we do better overall than _lots_ of other areas. On the other hand, the Chicago area in Illinois has lots of _very_ tangled municipal borders. Outside of Chicago itself and a few inner suburbs, it's a patchwork of cities, villages, and unincorporated areas whose borders aren't even contiguous -- and 6-mile square civil townships _overlapping_ the villages' jurisdictions. Some services come from city or village governments, some from township governments, and some from the counties and the state. I gather it's much more of a mess -- and has much more of a reputation for corruption and things going wrong. * White Bear Lake/White Bear Township is only a partial exception -- there, cities only partly annexed a township, but the situation has been pretty much frozen for several decades, even as other suburbs incorporated further out. ** E.g., For years, Hassan Township -- which surrounds Rogers in northwest Hennepin County -- wanted to incorporate much like Independence (which surrounds Loretto), Branch (which used to surround North Branch; they merged in 1994), and East Bethel (which _mostly_ surrounds Bethel) had before. But the state basically told them no, you can't hem Rogers in like that. Instead, Hassan Township was granted some extra powers as an "urban township", that let it offer more services like an incorporated city for a while. Rogers annexed bits of Hassan Township piecemeal for some years, until finally annexing _all_ of it in a 2012 merger agreement.)
I'm just seeing this video a year late but wanted to add some context for the Houston survey: Houston is divided up by freeway loops. The most central and smallest diameter loop is 610. This area is colloquially known as "in the loop" and many here consider it the "real city" and everything outside of it suburbia. Whether or not that perception is true is subjective, but it's a prevalent view.
For me a suburb is just in the periphery of a city. Normally Either outside the city limits or near the city limits. But some city's have oddly huge city limits...
Is it possible to compare it with other countries? I would love to hear what would you say about European, post-communist developing nations or Singapore suburbs. As usual it was nice to listen to you :)
After watching this video, I am quite convinced where I live is rural :( It seems pretty suburban but is not close to any major city, and we do not have our own train station.
There's a formula for figuring out if something is a suburb. It's Applebees over skate parks squared.
My city has 7 Applebee's and 11 skateparks (in a quick Google Maps search). 7/11 = 7÷11 = 0.6363 repeating. How suburban is my town? 😁
@@TheCentralTexasRailfan 40%
I was a server at an Applebee's, so I have the expertise to know that this equation is correct.
A Canadian equivalent please?
Swiss Chalet (St-Hubert BBQ in Quebec) vs hockey rinks squared? 😉⚜️🇨🇦❤️
@@mr51406 The Canadian equivalent is: the number of Tim Hortons with drivethroughs in your area, divided by the number of Tim Hortons without drivethroughs in your area.
In Edmonton, if you're downtown, at the University of Alberta or another post-secondary institute with tens of thousands of students (NAIT, Grant Macewan), or on trendy Whyte Ave, then you're quite urban with many Tim Hortons lacking drive-throughs. Outside of those areas, most of the city is suburbia and nearly every Tim Hortons has a drive-through.
Lived in Phoenix all my life. The whole city is just one big, neverending suburb
I moved to Phoenix from Chicago about twenty years ago. It was a HUGE adjustment for me. When I moved here, I picked a cheap downtown apartment and quickly realized how quiet downtown was in the 2000s. With the expansion of the light rail, things have changed quickly and now I am more north central and LOVE living on the light rail line. I found a community that fits my love for walking to the market, bookstore or transit perfectly. But many of my friends with families have moved WAY out and driving to visit them just always has me laughing, it is a never ending suburb!
I second that. Just about everything except downtown Phoenix and downtown Tempe is lowrise construction in the Phoenix metro area.
Agreed, why I left last year! Although downtown is growing!
@@lax6384 Where'd you go?
SynchroSk8
Maybe because they want to own a home?
Not everyone likes to live in apartments with neighbors knocking on your door threatening to kick you out because you’re “noisy”.
I’m GLAD my family and i move out. I don’t have to deal with anyone’s BS. I can live freely. I can raise my voice freely.
I understand apartments exist as every 18+ starts living by themselves and have to earn money by themselves. I did that too.
I am retired from the military. The money I made, I invest all of it. Get a job, the money I get, I invest $100 per month until I hit 66. That’s where I can take 5% as my retirement fund. The rest of it (7%) keeps growing and hope that my future kid can follow my lead. I also spend $100 per month on MONTHLY grocery shopping. Why? Because of MONTHLY meal plans. I eat healthy while saving money.
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.
Good one. I vote for a simplification of the Aristotelian suburb definition. Instead of going to all the trouble of surveying each neighborhood to find out what the residents think they live in, simply go by population or housing density. Anything between 100 and 2000 housing units per square mile is suburban. Translate to population density by assuming average household size of 2.6 people unless you have better data for a specific region (260 and 5,200 residents per square mile). Everything below that is rural, everything above that is urban. This definition has the advantage of fitting in with everyday people's definitions as proven by survey, but it doesn't require the inconvenience of a survey to apply to a given metropolitan area.
You definitely don't want to go by city boundaries like the census-convenient definition does, because as noted major areas within the boundaries of large cities are actually suburban. And you definitely don't want to give up and resort to a spectrum that nobody outside of a policy wonk will ever bother to understand and use. You want an easily applied definition that corresponds to everyday usage and understanding of what a suburb is.
Wittgensteinian Suburb: a suburb is what it is in the context of a particular communcation game. Meaning can only be defined in the context of a use case.
Nihilistic Suburb: it doesn't matter anyway
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.
That also means that cities cannot collapse from shrinking like Detroit. In Germany these villages can slowly be separated again and continue on their own if a city is shrinking.
Radio80 Not really. All those cities are interconnected
This is also true in Flanders, Belgium
same in the uk
The same is true in the US and lots of other places. In English, when two settlements combine into one, the former components are often called "boroughs".
New York City was originally just the area we now call Downtown, Wall Street is the location of the original city wall, and it grew to encompass five whole counties, including the former towns and villages New Harlem, Yonkers, Kingsbridge, Morrisania, West Warms, Easchester, Wakefield, Pelham, Westchester, Williamsbridge, Brooklyn, Bushwick, Flatbush, Flatlands, Gravesend, New Lots, New Utrecht, Williamsburgh, Flushing, College Point, Whitestone, Hempstead, Rockaway Beach, Jamaica, Richmond Hill, Long Island City, Newtown, Castleton, New Brighton, Northfield, Port Richmond, Middletown, Edgewater, Southfield, Richmond, Westfield, and Totenville. These all used to be fully independent towns and villages, now incorporated into New York City.
City Beautiful: What’s a suburb
Me: (looks outside) that’s it, that’s a suburb
So Definition 2
Oh my God i did the same thing 😂😂😂😂
Spotted
I think Americans have skewed views. Phoenix is just a large suburb and tbh, urbanhell.
It's horrible. The only place I couldn't wait to flee
Phoenix is just a desert with building in it.
Objection!
Most places in the mainland North American anglosphere (US and English speaking Canada) are cities in name only. Just because someplace is an incorporated entity with a municipal government and a large number of people living within its border doesn't make it "urban", at least in the traditional sense.
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.
It's crazy comparing the satellite maps of US/Canada to the rest of the worth. The rest of the world has clumps of people and then empty land. US/CA has endless stretches of suburbia. Like little sustenance farmers, except nobody grows crops besides grass
This can even happen in American cities. I live in a suburban neighborhood in Austin, Texas. At the end of my street is a fence, and the houses on the other side of that fence are in a suburb called Round Rock. So I am much closer to a suburb than any major city area, but still within what would be called a city
Suburbs don't exist here in Asia, or in my country at least. The idea of having 1 to 3 big Cities be the center of commerce and development and the outlying Cities be Suburbs or purely just for residential is non-existant. Residential, Industrial, and Commercial zones are all located within each and every City. This is mainly due to the fact that cars aren't as common and cheap as in America so traveling from a suburb to a city would be hell. That's why everything's mixed together within one area.
That's if you're only talking about east Asia, i can assure you plenty of suburbs exist here.
@@thefrub What a strange thought. So, if you actually look outside of major cities on google maps... I mean, I literally live in a tiny neighborhood surrounded on three sides by a field(with another field across the road; both were planted with wheat this year) 5 minutes outside of town. And this is a 20 minute drive from some growing cities, and 25-30 minutes from Columbus(Oh).
When you look at how much crop the US exports to the rest of the world, or even just has to grow for livestock feed, that's just a woefully unrealistic take on the US. You know that Idaho is known for the potatoes they grow, right? You're aware of low density states like Montana?
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.
Cannabidiols?
Aye, I'd say the same in Scotland. I live city centre, but I'd say where my folks live is a suburb that's part of the city. There are other suburbs which are definitely outside the city. I feel a Venn diagram would work well ;)
@@mahadaalvi Central Business District
What makes it odder is if you include Northern Ireland, the density increases greatly with another two to three additional urban centres with 100,000 or so people, but the total population only increases by about two million
As a region, the North is denser but with a lower population while the Republic sparser, yet with a greater population
Weird
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).
Where I live in Perth, the word "town" or "city" is purely for the local governmnet area. For example, I live in Bassendean, a suburb of western australia which is located in the Perth Metropolitan area. Bassendean is located within the Town of Bassendean, the LGA. Within the Town of Bassendean, there are also the suburbs of Eden Hill, Ashfield, Lockridge. These suburbs are technically part of the "town", but "town" refers purely to the LGA.
This is the same everywhere. The suburb of Perth is located within the City of Perth. Other suburbs in the city of perth include west perth, northbridge etc.
Precisely. This video is (knowingly or unknowingly) US centric. Also, Australia and other places don't rely on something being a suburb or not to allocate funding.
Also, a suburb here in Australia isn't necessarily suburban ;)
@@asherjackson4504 Oh yes, I'd forgoten about this. In Queensland (where I live) the use of the word "town" for a LGA was mostly discontinued quite a few years back. However, I think QLD is an outlier in this regard. If I understand correctly, most states still use the term "town" for some LGAs. This is separate to the use of "town" by the post office and in many cases, LGA towns are divided into suburbs by Australia Post while many of what Australia Post terms "towns" are actually administered as part of a broader LGA (such as a shire or region) and have no local government of their own.
Because hooray for confusing :)
@@asherjackson4504 we call suburbs wards. So in Cardiff we have the ward soft grangetown and riverside for example. Then anything outside the city boundaries even if geographically continuous is a suburb for example penarth which is part of a different county but basically everyone there works and plays and shops in Cardiff but are taxed less because their local government is conservative and not labour which it is in cardiff
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. :)
I thought Urban / Suburban / Rural always referred to the population density.
That's what the survey definition sort of landed on after asking people. There is no one agreed-upon definition for the density thresholds for urban/suburban/rural, however.
It refers to how soul-crushing the architecture and people of a certain neighborhood are
@@CityBeautiful
The car usage thing only applies where public transit is not well utilised or at all. In places like Hong Kong, the public transit is so good that basically everyone uses it.
Its suppose to refer to building type and disposition. Urban is multistory mixed use with narrow roads. Suburban is single story with greenbelts and shopping strips. Rural is farmland and ranchland, anything outside the metro areas as in most of the country.
@@notthatguy4703 praise the sun
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.
Zylork0122 yes, my whole life ppl had this confused. Chicago ends at 138th (Altgeld gardens or Torrence ave) on the south, anything above Rogers park up north and anything far stretch from Austin Blvd and Ohare west (6000 and 10000w)
In the uk the suburbs are where people start voting Tory.
Perhaps not now, especially in The North and in parts of the Midlands like the Black Country (have a look at the 2 West Bromwich seats, Dudley North and 2 of the Wolverhampton seats)
Central York is labor and Outer York is Tory, pretty good example.
As if non-British readers know what a local term "tory" is over there
Generally, take East London for example: dominately Labour. But then the outer fringes like Chingford, Woodford and Romford are conservative places but are still within Greater London. Most of Essex, which borders the East End, is then conservative.
@@robtuton4392 I lived in York, both in Central and Outer parliamentary constituencies, for three years. I can tell you that there's really no difference whatsoever in how I perceived the density between the two. To be honest, I really wouldn't have classified York as a city at all if it weren't for it's historical significance, and our stupid British rule about cities being designated as such by having a cathedral. Somewhere like Middlesbrough feels far more city like than York, yet is not designated as a city in the UK. Conversely, Ripon is a city because it has a cathedral, but really is a pretty tiny town (it only has a population of ~16000).
Not sure there's much in the idea that the suburbs are where the Tory votes come from because there are plenty of non-Tory voting suburbs/towns, and some Tory voting urban areas. Plus a distinction like that is really quite a recent trend historically, and is largely to do with demographics of class and rates of home ownership.
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.
Yes! Las Vegas is actually a good example of this. Most of it is in unincorporated Clark County, Nevada.
What's difficult to explain to people in Brasil is the very concept of unincorporated areas. Every piece of land here is within a municipality. We don't have counties. Just the country, states and municipalities. 3 levels of administration. And most municipalities here look more the size and shape of american counties. And 'cities' are just the urban areas of a municipality. Also, in all municipalities, states and the federal level we directly elect a chief of executive, and proportionally elect the members of each legislative power. Same rule for the entire country.
The way Arlington County is set up is definitely weird. VA is THE home of small independent cities, but somebody along the way added "county" to what was supposed to be a small city.
@@lazyboy300 Indeed, I don't get unincorporated areas. It's like they're part of no state? wtf
@@idromano No, they are part of no CITY. The specific rules, like everything in the United States, vary from state to state, but typically states are broken up into counties, and some parts of those counties are "incorporated" into a city. Areas that aren't in a city are "unincorporated", and governed only by the county (and states and Federal government); areas that are part of a city have an additional layer of government. So there's a county board of supervisors that acts like a city council, and a county sheriff that acts like a police chief.
Stereotypically, unincorporated areas are rural, without enough people to justify making them a city, but this isn't always the case. Arlington, Virginia, the strip in Las Vegas, Nevada, and much of south and southeastern Los Angeles County. California are examples of dense areas that really "should" be parts of a city but aren't. On the opposite side of the spectrum, there are some incorporated cities that are very rural.
I hate the suburbs, but I can't escape them.
Are you still circling the roundabout? Take a right!
I hate suburbs, they're rough, coarse, and irritating and get everywhere.
@@richarda.w.4562 I agree
why not? don't you live in kansas? it's not like nyc or san francisco where you can't afford to live in the city
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.
In the US, if it has a cul-de-sac within 3 miles in any direction. It's a suburb.
@@Marc-King777 From what I've read, a "suburb" in the American context is more like what we'd call a "satellite city".
Last time I was this early, black neighborhoods hadn't been bulldozed for highways yet.
same homie lmao
Good job with this comment, Bethany. I'm really proud of you.
@@iammrbeat Hey look it's Mr. Beat! You kinda look like Dave.
good one
@@iammrbeat Good job with the condescension, little buddy. I'm _really_ proud of you.
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
@Revolutionary Communist favelas are slums. meaning they are originally occupied illegally and with no planning whatsoever on all sorts of 'vacant' land in and around cities. Because of that they tend not to have any sort of equipment such as paved and signed roads, sewage, garbage collection, legal and proper water and electrical services, police stations, hospitals, schools, etc. And the houses aren't properly built either, but put on with anything the residents can access. Suburbs are urban and suburban areas on the outskirts of metro areas that are poorer than the urban core and somewhat neglected by governments but they do have urban equipment and services (even if with lower quality) and they were legally established, have proper land/unit ownership, addresses and such
Although that is indeed usually the case in Brazil, in some places, especially in larger cities, the periphery can also have luxury, closed-off developments. For example Alphaville or the Alpes da Cantareira near São Paulo.
Like Paris.
4:22
Pacific Ocean: exists
Atlantic Ocean: water
Alberto Berrizbeitia why doesnt this have more likes
@@metajaji4249 ikr
That's cause there's water in the Atlantic Ocean.
Your videos are always so great. I love them.
Same to you!
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.
Hector G I’ve traveled a lot and from my own observations and thoughts, I would say cities typically are mixed use and centralized. Suburbs tend to be primarily residential and sprawled out, while cities have a mix of residential and business and concentrate on a centralized urban core. Also, cities typically tend to offer much more in terms of culture and entertainment than suburbs. You’ll find museums, landmarks, points of interest, etc. Suburbs might have those things as well but are never nearly as centralized.
It could be argued that very few metros are monolithic anymore. Take Chicago, for example. The city proper is, by far the largest city in the metro. However, the official name for CSA also includes Naperville and Elgin. The centers of all three cities are 40 miles away from each other. Then there's Aurora. At around 200,000 people and second largest city in the state, it's actually larger than either Naperville or Elgin. It's got a downtown core with highrises and is an economic center. But it's still considered "only" a suburb. And Aurora is probably one of a dozen edge cities, like was described in the video.
The sight of parking lots hurt my eyes and gives me anxiety...
Same but only when there in city center areas, it just doesn't match
No Brang parking lots are great in cities. They provide something useful for people who go downtown. Otherwise we would just have to have a bunch of fragmented skyscrapers with parking all around them randomly places in the suburbs
@@LucasFernandez-fk8se i prefer denser walk-able cities. i don't like it when cars own the roads lol. On a more serious note, I really don't like it when inner city dwellers are dictated to by outer city car-bound commuters on how to run their inner cities.
@@LucasFernandez-fk8se Parking lots can be made more compact though. Why can't Americans just build more parking garages? Or allow companies to share the same parking facility?
Seeing the single family homes makes me sad. All of the environmental destruction.
As a Phoenix resident, I immediately was like ‘oh dear, that is Phoenix.’ - I am located in an urban area of Phoenix, on purpose. I want to be able to walk to my market, bookstore and light rail station. I want a fast trip to get into the Phoenix city center or the Capitol, which is also in Phoenix, just west of the city center. Many of my neighbors would rather get in their car, which makes community meetings interesting. Great video. Keep up the awesome content.
I get anxious whenever I see photos of Phoenix, I don't even have a driver's license
You need to tell the amazing story of Pyongyang. A city rebuilt from the ashes of the Korean War
You are later to the comment section than normal. Are you feeling well?
City Beautiful I don't think he was
RIP
Have you ever seen Bridges of Toko Ri, Kim? Great movie.
Kim Jong-un is it okay if I can call you Jim or Tim
Love this channel. It would be great if there was a series dedicated to each large metro area in the US.
Suburb: Come for the planning, stay for the philosophy lesson.
4:27 hold up...parts of Los Angeles were considered "suburban?" Woah.
The gangbanger territories are mostly like one big thing and nothing else. Inglewood, Elysian Park, El Segundo etc.
Bluenevolent pretty sure they were joking. It’s all dense single family houses. It’s very suburban
@@LucasFernandez-fk8se Yeah. I'm an east coast boy, and literally as he said "what is a suburb?" I said, out loud, "Los Angeles"
@@michaelimbesi2314 Same, I'm from Miami living in California and growing up you constantly hear people talking about how they wanna live in the "city" but now that I've left I've learned I lived in the city my whole life and that most "cities" are just painfully enormous suburbs.
Derick Marin In most of the US sure, but real urban cities do exist and are the norm in most of the world
Interesting! Never really thought about this before.
In Austria, suburbs are "Satellitenstädte", or satellite cities. They are considered cities though, where people live just to commute into the city. And Edge Cities would be best described as "Trabantenstadt", which is also a city, but is a regional center. The difference however is, that there is a distance between these cities and the main big city with mostly farming fields in between and a rail line and highway connecting them.
Classical American suburbs are often just former villages, which have grown into and merged with the city and became more urban.
This is my spirit channel. I’ve been moderately obsessed with urban planning and development since I was about 17. So glad I found it.
"Suburbs are car-dependant"
Asia would like to have a word with you
Yeah, they're motorcycle dependant
That's all of california
Southeast Asia has no problem with that statement.
oh I ride my bicycle to the station in the suburb of Tokyo
From the Philippines here and our “suburbs” (which we call subdivision) are car dependent.
Love All The Content. As an aspiring urban Planner, this is all very informative And interesting
Best of luck on your planning journey!
City Beautiful Thanks
WOW, the maps in the Houston MSA section were weird. Super interesting to see the variation.
Surprised anyone would consider Galveston or the core of Conroe to be suburban, and to see Sugar Land and The Woodlands listed as urban.
2:36 now THATS a suburb
Nicely written and structured video!
Hey thanks!
DC has a lot of suburbs that serve as supplementary downtowns. Tyson's Corner, Arlington County, Alexandria, Silver Spring, Bethesda, & Rockville. If you don't work in DC, there's a 50% chance that you commute to one of these suburbs every morning.
I’d also add Reston to that list
Ireland has 5 cities (plus Kilkenny which is a town that's allowed to call itself a city). Limerick and Waterford have one city and county council each while Dublin, Cork and Galway have city councils. Of these five cities, only two (Dublin and Cork) have populations over 100,000. The suburbs are really just low density residential sprawl that swallow up villages. Cork recently had a major boundary extension to coincide with its urban area growing.
I am a Traffic Engineer in CA and I love your videos. You are a gifted teacher. Please do a video about residential parking in a traditional suburb. This is a common issue that I encounter in my work and many many many people have the same misconceptions about neighborhood parking on residential streets. Somehow they believe the spot in front of their home "belongs" to them.
Labeling suburb close to the city core "poor" seems like an "America problem" here its clear the closer you get to the centre the more expensice it is.
It's expensive in downtown cores in most US cities too, but inner ring suburbs have a unique challenge. Their housing is now 50+ years old and wealthier homeowners are either buying downtown or on the fringe with newer housing. Inner ring suburbs are the new affordable housing.
@@CityBeautiful that would be nice. How close to the core are these areas?
Depends on the city. Where I live, they are a 15-20 minute drive to the center (without traffic).
@@CityBeautiful i would gentrify the crap out of an area like that but maybe in america longer transport distances are accepted. I like to be able to do my grosery shopping whitin 15-30 minutes.
@@CityBeautiful Well it depends on the place since each city is at a different point in its timeline of development. Also, most of the poorest neighborhoods are still in the inner city, so you can't really say inner ring suburbs have replaced them.
It's all relative. I'd consider some somewhat large cities suburbs because they're right next to even larger cities, but some small cities urban because they're surrounded by smaller cities.
Basically, it's a suburb if it is next to or very close to a larger city.
I currently live in Downtown Indianapolis (urban) but at one time lived in Bethesda, MD. Anyone who is familiar with Bethesda knows that it is an urban area, but when I would describe it to friends/family back home in Indy, who hadn't heard of it, they were confused when I would describe it. Basically, I would say its a suburb of Washington, DC in Maryland. But its not a regular suburb like the ones found around Indianapolis. I lived in a high-rise apartment building, walked pretty much everywhere, and took transit, all things that would typically be associated with a city. I think a lot of people in the country aren't aware of Washington's suburbs being basically secondary cities that don't so much compete with Washington, but compliment it.
fairfax county resident here! the reason theres so many highrises in places like tysons is because washington dc has a highrise ban but since it is such an important city there needed to be office buildings. so they built the highrises outside of the city in virginia and maryland.
In Europe a suburb can also be a soul-sucking high-crime cluster of concrete high-rises.
I'm constantly annoyed that there doesn't seem to be a name for these in the English language.
The soul suckingness of these is because there are few services beyond a convenience store and a pub, and it's minimum of 20 minute bus ride to the city proper through areas of single family home sprawl that lies in between.
Prior to 1975 the city of Hermitage Pa was a town ship. It was renamed a city. It still has farmland and wooded areas with deer.
The issue with city limits is that they often have little to do with the actual city. Carlisle is the biggest city by area in the UK (not counting London as the City of London is only one square mile). But a lot of the City of Carlisle is distinctly rural (and a lot of the City of Sheffield is in the Peak DIstrict National Park).
In Singapore the outlying suburbs are often more densely populated than the inner ones as they were developed after the country's population boomed (around the 1950-1970s)
What is a suburb?
A place where hopes and dreams go to die.
Great content as always. I've always wondered about the technical definitions for these things. I live near a "city" that only has a population of about 55,000 but it has multiple high rises at 20+ stories and most of the single family homes are densely packed together. Not sure whether it's a city or a town or something else.
City or town would be defined by statute. Care to share the name of this place?
I would say urban
I think it's relative. I live in Bowie, Maryland...a Washington DC suburb with a population of 60k. So it really depends on where you grew up and your perceptions of what a city and suburb looks like.
I find the word "suburb" funny because, in English, it has a meaning completely opposite of its Portuguese cognate "subúrbio".
A "suburb" sounds like a cool place with big houses where middle and upper classes live.
A "subúrbio" is basically a slum, or at least an inconvenient faraway lower middle class neighborhood.
I live in Nassau County, NY. Which is just east of New York City. And because people and officials here in Nassau over the last 75 years have been going out of their way to NOT be NYC. Traffic, roads and public transportation in Nassau suck.
Maybe you could talk about the definitions of suburbs in different countries around the world and how they differ from each other.
Yep, that would be a good idea for a followup someday!
@@CityBeautiful Agreed. This video should be called "what do Americans think a suburb is?". In many countries, 'suburb' refers to lines on a map and has nothing to do with urban characteristics, similar to the word subset. By that definition, Manhattan wouldn't be a suburb, but East Village or Chelsea would.
@@CityBeautiful Americans would be so confused if they ventured outside North America... My suburb consists of mostly 4-6 story apartment buildings with some rowhousing and adjacent adjacent single family housing area, it has a metro station and it's quite walkable. It's probably more "city" than many American inner cities. What makes it a suburb? Well it's outside the inner city of course, I don't know of anyone who would characterize this area as being part of the city, except for administratively.
@@timmathews9265 And here I was, thinking that suburbs refer to the low density neighbourhoods inside the city, not outside of it… (but still near the edge)… I guess I was wrong…
Before watching the rest of the video:
A small named city/town near a larger city/town (examples near Portland, Oregon would be places like Lake Oswego or Gresham) without any major uninhabited land (forest, ect.) between it and the larger city. Most people from this region regularly go to the larger city and often share things like mass transit networks with it.
There are quite a few edge cities in the DC area (Tysons, Rosslyn, and Silver Spring just to name a few). Main reason is because of the DC building height limit in addition to lower taxes and building costs outside the city, which is the same as many other cities
Bethesda, ballston, pentagon/crystal city
0:11
Even as a kid, when I saw pictures of the suburbs I always thought “This is terrible! Where are the trees? Where is the corner store?”
Not until getting into real estate AND finding this channel and related channels, did I see why the suburbs is like this. I hope we can change this in the future.
Funny because my English teacher said exactly today that the definition of a suburb is different between English-speaking countries and Portuguese-speaking Brazil, here, it's a total different thing, here it means outskirts, poor areas at the edge of a city with bad infrastructure and lack of services, while what English says it's a suburb we simply refer to as a residential area, no specific name.
Still odd to me, specially in DC area. On the news they called Winchester Virginia, Martinsburg West Virginia, and Hagerstown Maryland “Suburbs” of DC..LIKE WHAT
I like the spectrum idea being used to help guide public transportation routes but I also think the survey could have a psychological effect where people in "urban" areas may be more inclined to ride public transit because urban areas are associated with it but a person in the "surburbs" might drive not realize a transit stop is nearby
really cool to see my area (tysons) used as an example in one of these videos!
Yes, there is a simple answer: anything not within the city limits of the principal city is a suburb. Of course, they can vary greatly in density, land use, etc., but that is the technical definition. Just because a suburb has tall office buildings does not make it a city, it makes it a high density, inner ring suburb.
In Canada, there’s a suburb beside Toronto called Mississauga which has a population of 750,000. To put that in perspective that’s bigger than Seattle/Miami.
I had to rewind multiple portions of this to make sure I understood. My brain hurts. The presentation is great, it's the concept itself that's making my noggin throb.
Tyson’s Corner and other communities surrounding DC are a bit of an unusual case in part because DC has height limits on buildings, so that incentivizes building taller buildings outside of it.
Love your videos. I think there is a distinction between what makes a municipality a "suburb" or a "suburban area." I live in Orlando Florida, where the center of the city and a few surrounding areas feel like a city, but the rest of the city limits are low density and feel like a suburb, despite being in the city limits. Of course, there are communities like winter park that are urban but are technically "suburbs of orlando." It is rather complicated.
My God, he actually mentioned Houston in a video, and of course it was to illustrate his point. Will still be waiting on that Houston video though.
I find this very interesting because a statistician could _heavily_ influence the results of a survey/study just by altering their definition of what a suburb is! This has some serious power, that as the potential to influence the way our cities work!
I think suburbs are where you see the most cul-de-sacs, roads with less sidewalks, Roads that have turns in them without intersections, Houses with very few windows on the sides, Most of the traffic is on busy arterial roads rather than in neighborhoods, and no corner stores.
I like the survey model, I think that one probably gets at it the best.
Ireland= City Centre is site of original viking settlement, on a river, surrounded by 1800s/1900s inner city, than suburbs are the residential lands between the outskirts and the centre. Surrounded by satellite towns.
Exactly. With car dependence. Dublin has the 17th worst traffic of any city in the world.
@@GeographyWorld Dublin is thicc
Northern Ireland=City Centre is the site of an English Plantation fort or admin centre, often near a river but sometimes a canal, the centre being surrounded by a godawful mess, surrounded by housing estates, and then villages and disconnected developments, then farmland
I live in a village of about 530 people, we are part of a 37 sq. mi. town of about 2,600. My dad was on that town's planning board and they were considered to be a "suburban" community due to the fact that the majority of the population commuted to larger communities to work instead of being employed in local agriculture. My first reaction to hearing was asking where the local Wegman's was. Despite most the of the population commuting to larger communities, most of the land is agricultural and we have a density of 30.5 housing units per sq. mi. I would consider it to be a rural community myself.
I'd love a video on what a suburb could be. I would totally live in a suburb where there was more dense housing stock with a train line into the city and rural areas nearby for outdoor recreation. Almost a flower model, where the petals were denser suburbs and i-between the petals were rural/natural areas. The centre being a city. Why do we have such narrow ideas about suburbs. Single families are not even that common anymore!
In Australia, suburbs are subdivisions of a city, we also use them in the postal service instead of stating our city. 'Suburbs' can be low density residential areas 50km away from the City Centre in a similar style to American suburbs, or they can be 'inner city' suburbs that are very close to the City Centre with mid to high density housing. Even the CBD/City centre is considered it's own suburb
Let me give you a definition of my own: suburban is such part of a town, that is mostly residential and doesn't naturally generate enough jobs to keep it's population during the working hours. Although large shopping malls or industrial areas may be set into suburbs by choice, still there isn't that buzz of small shops and lively streets full of pedestrians that makes the town center. Large majority of citizens leave the suburbs for work during the day and for entertainment in the evening. Majority of shops and other employment generators are present by developer's choice rather than naturally.
I grew up in Laval, Quebec. Laval is a city/island adjacent to the Island of Montreal.
When I was growing up, Laval was your typical suburb. Overwhelmingly single family homes, lots of cars, lots of space, lots of commuting to work.
However, over the last decade the city has witnessed extensive densification, with many high rise buildings being built and a downtown area slowly forming. It even has a few metro stops.
Montreal is certainly the core city. If anyone outside of Quebec asked me where I was from I'd certainly say Montreal, and pretty much everyone is Laval would consider themselves living in a suburb.
That being said, Laval has close to 450,000 people. It's one of the biggest cities in the country. But oddly, just a suburb
Very interesting. In Australia, a suburb is just what we call an area within a city. It isn't defined by certain criteria. For example, I would say I live in Newcastle NSW, but when it comes to a postal address, I put my suburb of North Lambton. Newcastle City is itself a suburb (the CBD).
The 8 scale thing could be simplified, reducing the arbitrary nature as well.
Make it into a 4 place scale, where you score points based on being below or above metropolitan average:
3 below average means urban(4 points),
2 below and 1 above means slightly urban (3 points),
1 below and 2 above is slightly suburban (2 point),
3 above average is suburban (1 point).
It's kind of blowing my mind that ALL of the examples you listed have an extreme personal importance to me...
Tyson's Corner does feel suburban though. It's mostly a mall used by the DC area. You wouldn't hear anyone say "I'm from Tyson's Corner". It's built up, but it's a suburban area for sure. If you're in Old Town, Alexandra or Downtown, DC, your in a city. National Harbor, MD, suburban, same thing.
I live in a suburb with a higher population density than my country's capital, which surrounds it.
Or do I?
Frederiksberg (or Solbjerg as it used to be known) was a small village, and around 1700 a royal pleasure palace was built nearby as a retreat from the urban palaces in Copenhagen. And then in the late 1800s Copenhagen grew. And Copenhagen surrounded Frederiksberg, but Frederiksberg is still its own municipality - so it's not the capital, and hence you could argue that it's a provincial town. (Even if it is now often unoficially referred to at part of Greater Copenhagen and officially is part of the Capital Region.) Or a suburb, being in many ways subordinate to the main city that now surrounds it.
3.4 square miles with over 100,000 people. The population density rivals large parts of NYC. We're not a city, but are we a suburb? And if not, what on earth ARE we?
It’s like Jamaica estates in NYC with homes and no buildings, and Hempstead on Long Island with tall buildings and a large population
I live in a pretty nice pre-WW2 western suburb of Boston actually. It’s different from most suburbs in that instead of having a major arterial or downtown as its commercial core, it’s separated into 13 neighborhoods that all have small to mid-sized commercial centers within them, and some of them also have commuter train stations. Because of this, no matter where you live in the town, you’re almost always within walking distance of a neighborhood center. This may sound “urban”, but the density of the town isn’t particularly high and there’s generally a lot of single family zoning too. I wish more suburbs were like this, honestly. But unfortunately, sprawl happened.
Love your city planning knowledge
Really been obsessed with the (American) suburbs lately. Partially because of your previous videos.
You can’t really talk about virginia in the same light as other states because of the way that their independent cities work is different from the other 49. Norton, VA is classified as a city with a population less than 5,000.
I've heard the term inner suburb too
It's cool seeing where you live appear in a City Beautiful video. :) I recognized Tyson's immediately.
I find interesting the book of Edge City, there was a situation in the Mexico City metro area back in the 80s, they built a new city, 45 minutes or so away from downtown Mexico City and it was named "Ciudad Satélite" satellite city in english, because it was that, a satellite of MXC, at first it was a bedroom community for the middle and upper class, now it's just embeded in the metro area, long gone the days when it was "a suburb"
México very poor country
Mississauga, ON used to be a suburb. Now i would def classify it as an edge city
I am from Europe and live in Europe, so concept of USA suburbs is very alien to me, especially when I visited first time it was so strange. To me suburbs, in the US style, is: 0) Lowish density of people. 1) Wide, but low intensity streets. 2) Small amount of trees around these streets. 3) A lot of cul-de-sacs. 4) Lack or very limited public transport, even bus stops nearby. 5) And lack of intermixed commercial activity. No shops, no restaurants. 6) spatial separation from the main city core (kind of, it is a bit more complex). Just a monoculture of housing, and transport by cars for extended duration to anywhere. The suburbs in other countries, including European ones, will somehow have similar characteristics, but with a lot of notable exceptions: 1) more dense housing, often 2-stories tall. 2) some minimal amount of commercial activities (grocery shop, maybe a pharmacy, a barber / hair dresser, a pub / bar). 3) It will be blending with the city smoothly - you could walk between them, you could travel on bike, you will have a lot of things in between too, including parks, or public transport.
Even bigger problem is putting labels on things, and trying to find a one definition. By making it defined, you force people to think (residents, and planners) about it in only one way. And that is not a good thing.
In Germany city an official title granted to towns depending on their size and importance. Historically this meant they were allowed to have a (farmers) market. Cities usually never lose this status though, so there are a few „cities“ not really worth their name. But generally any settlement with a dense core is a city, since they usually grew around the market plaza. So that’s probably what differentiates a city from a town. Cities usually have very compact commercial cores around the market plaza, while towns usually evolved more as a bunch of farms growing together with a less visible core. Large cities will often have multiple cores, since they grew out absorbing smaller cities and towns over time.
In New Zealand I think suburbs are the different residential districts of a city and surrounding towns. Suburbs aren’t separate entities but what makes up a city. I live in a town just outside of Christchurch, New Zealand. In 2019 during the terrorist attack at the mosques all Christchurch city schools were placed into lockdown. This included the schools in my town. There are fields separating my town and the main city but we are still technically a part of Christchurch.
You should look into Mississauga, Ontario, Canada!
Mississauga: The Toronto suburb that turned into one of the larger Canadian cities.
I live there. Its turning into an expensive city which has foreign investors turning their heads. Mississauga also atracts people that want a quiet and more dense suburb, while not including the druggies and homeless of Toronto.
The urban-suburban suburb-city
I’m born and raised in DC Tysons corner just got that metro station. It’s still the suburbs 😊
There are multiple types of suburbs, there are your urban streetcar suburbs(Inner Ring Suburbs). I always thought suburb, meant below the city, sub-below, urban, meaning city.
I would love a video on why so many official city boundaries are "messy" Some of the ones here in Metro Atlanta are downright comical.
Just look at Fort Worth's boundaries
As a non-American, I sometimes find myself being confused about the outlines Google Maps give for American cities. Like, what even is Birmingham, Alabama's? That line to the left is really dodgy.
So yes, I'd love to see an explanation for this.
I'm gonna pin it on taxes, some areas wanting to be unincorporated or in some other county so they avoid some regulation or whatnot?
Having grown up in DC, I get anxiety every time I see the official boundaries of different American cities. Especially those in the South and West.
Incorporation and annexation laws also very from state to state in the US -- as does the culture and structure of governance -- for complicated historical reasons.
Here in Minnesota, all incorporated municipalities are cities; village status was abolished around 1970 or so, with all villages becoming statutory cities instead. Civil townships exist in rural areas, but are subdivisions of counties and have much less governing power than cities -- mostly just maintaining local township roads and enforcing a few ordinances. The Twin Cities area (Minneapolis / St Paul) also has a somewhat strong regional planning authority -- the Metropolitan Council (which City Beautiful mentioned in his video about regional government). Most public services come from either city governments or the state and county governments (with school districts being the main exception), although the Met Council handles mass transit and most sewage treatment in the Twin Cities.
The contiguous suburbs of the Twin Cities tend to be either a.) small inner suburbs that formed early on, b.) 6-mile-square townships farther out that chose to incorporate as cities so they could provide better provide services, or c.) former standalone small towns that became suburbs as the metro area grew out to them. These tend to have relatively clean borders.
Ragged borders exist mostly at the edges of exurbs (like Buffalo or Cambridge) and growing standalone cities outstate (like Rochester or St Cloud) -- both cases where land has been annexed one neighborhood or future development at a time from the surrounding rural townships. The few exceptions are mostly where a township decided to incorporate as a city after being _partly_ annexed, thus freezing the existing border -- e.g., the border between Crystal and New Hope, or the odd appendages to Wayzata, Hopkins, and St Bonifacius.* This doesn't happen any more, since the state (and possibly the Met Council) basically refuses to let it happen.**
We also have a long-standing culture of mostly-good governance. Minnesota tends to rank lower in corruption and high in civic participation, and consistently has the highest voter turnout in the US. As messed-up as things can still get sometimes, there's plenty we do better overall than _lots_ of other areas.
On the other hand, the Chicago area in Illinois has lots of _very_ tangled municipal borders. Outside of Chicago itself and a few inner suburbs, it's a patchwork of cities, villages, and unincorporated areas whose borders aren't even contiguous -- and 6-mile square civil townships _overlapping_ the villages' jurisdictions. Some services come from city or village governments, some from township governments, and some from the counties and the state. I gather it's much more of a mess -- and has much more of a reputation for corruption and things going wrong.
* White Bear Lake/White Bear Township is only a partial exception -- there, cities only partly annexed a township, but the situation has been pretty much frozen for several decades, even as other suburbs incorporated further out.
** E.g., For years, Hassan Township -- which surrounds Rogers in northwest Hennepin County -- wanted to incorporate much like Independence (which surrounds Loretto), Branch (which used to surround North Branch; they merged in 1994), and East Bethel (which _mostly_ surrounds Bethel) had before. But the state basically told them no, you can't hem Rogers in like that. Instead, Hassan Township was granted some extra powers as an "urban township", that let it offer more services like an incorporated city for a while. Rogers annexed bits of Hassan Township piecemeal for some years, until finally annexing _all_ of it in a 2012 merger agreement.)
I'm just seeing this video a year late but wanted to add some context for the Houston survey: Houston is divided up by freeway loops. The most central and smallest diameter loop is 610. This area is colloquially known as "in the loop" and many here consider it the "real city" and everything outside of it suburbia. Whether or not that perception is true is subjective, but it's a prevalent view.
For me a suburb is just in the periphery of a city. Normally Either outside the city limits or near the city limits. But some city's have oddly huge city limits...
What's Blvd,freeway, highway, road, street, alleyways, lane, drive and similar driveways? I hope in the future you will do a video on those
Vox did a video on this a few years ago, I thought it was well illustrated. ua-cam.com/video/yqmso0c9CBs/v-deo.html
Hi, I'm from flint MI I love your content. Any advice on how someone could improve their city?
Less cars. Always less cars.
Beyond that, check out StrongTowns.org. They specialize in how to improve American cities.
Form a community watch.
@@NotJustBikes thank you! I've actually read the book strong towns ill definitely look into the website
Is it possible to compare it with other countries? I would love to hear what would you say about European, post-communist developing nations or Singapore suburbs.
As usual it was nice to listen to you :)
After watching this video, I am quite convinced where I live is rural :(
It seems pretty suburban but is not close to any major city, and we do not have our own train station.
Q: What is a suburb?
A: Suburb.
This is the best answer
A suburb is a place where office workers procreate.