# Suburban characteristics



## city_life (Apr 4, 2007)

United States/Canada/Australia/New Zealand all seem to have a similar suburban areas where each house is detatched and has more land, whereas cities in Europe are more residential and many people live in apartments. The suburban areas are quite dense.Example; london all the houses are build attached togeather (town houses or terraced house). what do you think/know about these types of neighbourhoods? Why are they like that?

Share the characteristics of your suburb and others from aroud the globe.

If you have any Photos for this threat, please add them.


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## monkeyronin (May 18, 2006)

Typical contemporary Toronto suburb.









Most cities will also have more established urban suburbs. This is Mississauga, outside Toronto, pop. 700,000.


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## Xelebes (Apr 1, 2007)

Europe built their cities under these conditions:

Right after devastating fires (e.g. London)

Built after devastating sieges (e.g. Kiev, Dresden, Vienna)

Built to ward off devastating sieges

And the sort.



For the most part, New World houses didn't have these problems, except fires which ravaged New York, Chicago, Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco (earthquake), Halifax). There has only been a handful of cities that have been initially designed to fend off sieges (Halifax, Quebec City, Edmonton, New York, Fort Worth). Beyond that, you had had massive land leases granted to immigrants who settled on farms in the Great Plains where htey each had a barn and a farmhouse. Once the Great Depression came, people left the Great Plains to seek work on the Eastern Seaboard and California. WWII hit and a new generation was born with returning soldiers, each of them dreaming of having homes to raise their children. They realised that farming was no longer viable but there was massive reconstruction going on so they chose to live in the cities near where their farms used to be.


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## Johnnydemattos (May 3, 2007)

TEST


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## Kane007 (May 30, 2006)

Xelebes said:


> Europe built their cities under these conditions:
> 
> Right after devastating fires (e.g. London)
> 
> ...


^^ Simplistic but basically you've hit the nail on the head! 

I know that Post WWII the New Zealand government decided that every vet would be entitled to their own parcel of land. At about the same time the BABY BOOM was getting underway and the personnel motor car was getting, well, personnel.

Voila the birth of "_*SUBURBIA*_" and the FREEWAY, and the convenience store, and the supermarket, and the...

Note: this was the period that these really got going. We all know the Germans invented freeways back in the 1930's.


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## ranny fash (Apr 24, 2005)

the uk has a lot of sprawling suburbs.


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## kurakura (Apr 11, 2007)

Suburban characteristics:

1) bad public transport or worse still, nonehno: 

2) void of skyscrapers (except in crowded countries, eg HK, Singapore, Seoul etc)

3) boring and depressing


This is an example of suburban housing in Singapore. 90 percent of the Singapore's population live in these.


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## ilcapo (Jan 5, 2007)

The suburbs in sweden are a mix of typical suburban rowhouses/villas, regular apartments in suburban-style (not very dense), and alot of "commieblocks" between 3-8 stories high.. these were built in the 70's during the "million programme" when they built around a million apartments in mainly stockholm, gothenburg and malmo.


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## zachus22 (Dec 4, 2006)

Thanks for posting that Mississauga picture, it's actually somewhat nauseating how many houses developers can fit into such a small area.

Can someone post a bird's-eye view of an American suburb? I'd like to see some super dense American burbs.


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## city_life (Apr 4, 2007)

Some Pics i snipped on live maps

Chicago









Cleveland ( very low density)









Cleveland 









Las Vegas


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## city_life (Apr 4, 2007)

London suburbs


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## Xusein (Sep 27, 2005)

Some typical Hartford-area sprawl...this area is pretty new. And it's near the mall, it's sure to boom.

This picture is in South Windsor, which is pretty much an exurb of Hartford. Where the cul-de-sacs meet the farms.

About 15km northeast of Downtown Hartford.










There are a few "dense" areas...the majority of the houses here are three floors, and there are a few apartment towers lying around. Even a few "commieblocks". This is New Britain, which is an industrial city of 70,000.

Also 15km from Downtown Hartford, but southwest. 










But typically, low-density is the norm here.


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## city_life (Apr 4, 2007)

In the UK, the government is seeking to impose minimum densities on newly approved housing schemes in parts of southeast England. The new catchphrase is 'building sustainable communities' rather than housing estates. However, commercial concerns tend to retard the opening of services until a large number of residents have occupied the new neighbourhood.


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## globill (Dec 4, 2005)

It's really hard to make generalizations about American suburbs, particularly those in the Northeast and Midwest that grew up with a strong commuter rail system. In Chicagoland, for example, there are almost 400 suburbs, most of which have varying degrees of density depending on the distance from their commuter rail stations. In the last ten years, the "suburban downtowns" (areas closest to the train stations) have become a very hot area for development.

This is just a sampling of the "new suburbia" being built in Chicago suburbs. There are literally hundreds of such projects either completed/u/c, or proposed. 

Note, none of these developments are in Chicago (or Evanston Oak Park). If you want to see more check the following thread http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=221173


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## zachus22 (Dec 4, 2006)

I just find there's a quality about American suburbs that Toronto's just don't have. It seems to me like less planning goes into suburbs here, as developers are happy just to make literally a grid of 3000 square foot homes. In the States, it seems like builders pay more attention to neighbourhood landscaping and don't mind giving a house more property even if it does mean a lot more land used.


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## globill (Dec 4, 2005)

I think it's impossible to compare Toronto suburbs and American suburbs.


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## zachus22 (Dec 4, 2006)

globill said:


> I suppose you totally ignored my thread about the densification of Chicago's suburbs. This trend is happening all over the country, even in places like Ogden Utah.
> 
> And why compare Toronto's suburbs to America's????
> 
> ...


Well you basically forwarded my point. The shot of Mississauga shows how dense Toronto suburbs are made to be. Tell me Globill, if Toronto's metro population is just so damn small, why are its suburbs so damn dense? My grandma lives in Schaumburg - a suburb of Chicago - and I can tell you they don't make em that close there.

And we are comparing suburbs, are we not?


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## globill (Dec 4, 2005)

Schaumburg lags way behind the following suburbs in terms of walkability, urban living....

Evanston, Oak Park, Cicero, Highland Park, Park Ridge, Glenview, Des Plaines, Niles, Waukegan, Joliet, Elgin, Aurora, Naperville, Highland Park, Mundelien, Lake Forest, Elmhurst, Hinsdale, Berwyn, Forest Park, Deerfield, Glenview, Skokie, Lincolnwood, Mount Prospect, and probably another 15 or so suburbs where they are building up their downtowns. 

Schaumburg is to most native Chicagoans, the poster child for poor suburban planning. It does not define the metro.


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## globill (Dec 4, 2005)

and if your opinion of American suburbs is based on your time at your grandma's in Schaumburg....an awful lot begins to make sense.

I'm pretty sure that NONE OF THE PROJECTS I posted above are being built in Schaumburg.


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## LtBk (Jul 27, 2004)

I wish Baltimore suburbs(except for Towson) had urban style developments for their suburbs.


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## zachus22 (Dec 4, 2006)

Schaumburg not walkable or liveable? I have lived in Naperville, Des Plaines, and Niles, and can tell you that Schaumburg is more liveable than the aforementioned three. Schaumburg has a hefty number of corporate headquarters which are complimented by chique plazas lined with cafés and neat boutiques. The city's downtown is quiet, but it too has a handful of nice restaurants and cafés. I'd like to know which native Chicagoans are telling you that Schaumburg is the epitome of poor suburban planning. 

I don't want to argue with you because I don't know if you've lived in both Canada and the States like I have. I've been to suburbs of Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and Detroit, and have lived in suburbs of Charlotte, Chicago, Calgary, and Ottawa, and can tell you that more care is put into making these suburbs the nicest they can be. That's just how I feel.

Find me a city with about the same urban population as Toronto and we can make a fair comparison.


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## PresidentBjork (Apr 29, 2007)

Well, there a couple reasons for American cities tendency towards suburbs.

For a start though, the first large east coast cities, like New York, Boston etc, had super high density, over crowded city blocks just like European cities in the first century of industrialization. 

However, when America entered into it's role as the most powerful and wealthy country, thus stimulating new construction, new technologies where more available to urban planners, and individuals themselves to move around. Examples would be electric subways and automobiles. Of course the same thing happened in London as well with the creation of 'metroland.' 

American style suburbia with it's copious space, occurred after WW2 when the economy was once again booming. There was the money for urban planners to build huge new transport systems, specifically freeways, to tie in with the new interstate network. And uniquely to America at first, was the fact freeway spurs were built directly through neighborhoods to combine outskirts to downtowns. This often ruined already drab inner city districts and caused people to want to leave to new more open homes, i.e. 'the white flight,' but connected in a way that made their place of work still within a drivable distance.

Interestingly, speed didn't mean lessened journey times, people on average in America and Europe spend the same amount of time commuting to work now as they did in 1850, just over an hour. But with that extra speed provided by the first freeways they could traverse more distance, and suburbs got pushed further and further out. This was far rarer in Europe, as it was feared building limited access roadways would pull apart neighborhoods and that public transport could do the job instead. In America, with a greater predominance of cars this was seen as less of a problem. 

Also, greenbelt policies were implemented across Europe to combat problems of rapidly decreasing space. As such suburb growth was somewhat constricted. In America space was seen as far less of a problem.

However, this may be an excessive polarization. In Europe too, a post war car orientated transport system influenced urban planning to a similar extent, but with less space and more developed mass transit it was somewhat curtailed. 

Perhaps the whole difference between the Chicago/Toronto suburb thing is that Toronto wants to save some money.
Interestingly, sprawling suburb construction is not actually profitable for a city. Initial investors construct and sell on houses built on zoned land. They make their initial costs back through this. However, to build infrastructure to supply suburbs that are more distant to the actually city rapidly increases the costs for the city. These external costs have to paid through increased taxes. 
In addition, tax income for the cities tend to be reduced when suburbs pull large shops and businesses out from urban areas to allow access a lot of cars coming of the freeways. 

I believe Toronto and Chicago along with many other cities has recently become more reluctant to subsidies such public amenities if they are excessively costly to build, forcing the constructors to decide whether the cost of building these utilities can be recouped - they often cannot.


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## Manila-X (Jul 28, 2005)

Don't we have a thread on suburbs already?

Anyway in HK, we call our suburbs New Towns. Most New Towns in HK are a combination of private flats (low to high-rise), commercial centres and to some extent, public housing estates.


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## hkskyline (Sep 13, 2002)

WANCH said:


> Don't we have a thread on suburbs already?
> 
> Anyway in HK, we call our suburbs New Towns. Most New Towns in HK are a combination of private flats (low to high-rise), commercial centres and to some extent, public housing estates.


New towns in Hong Kong were *specifically designed* as public housing alternatives - to fulfill the mass housing needs. Private developers don't have the right to build a whole city from scratch. The government is the biggest landlord in Hong Kong and plans these new towns for their purposes first, then auctions off parcels of it to private developers and earn a lot of cash in the process. They are, *to a large extent*, public housing-driven.


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## Estopa (Jul 18, 2006)

that Toronto picture left me speechless. :uh:


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## TalB (Jun 8, 2005)

For the most part Pleasantville, NY is very walkable. Unfortunately, this is if you live in its CBD, which I don't. Nevertheless, it is very popular for its area considering that Hawthorne and Thornwood don't have a distinct CBD of their own.


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## Taylorhoge (Feb 5, 2006)

Talb is right for the most part westchester is becoing more and more urbanized while Long Island is more of the typical suburban area and New Jersy parts of it are urbanized the closer you get to New York the more urbanized it gets.


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## Trainman Dave (Mar 30, 2007)

PresidentBjork said:


> Interestingly, sprawling suburb construction is not actually profitable for a city. Initial investors construct and sell on houses built on zoned land. They make their initial costs back through this. However, to build infrastructure to supply suburbs that are more distant to the actually city rapidly increases the costs for the city. These external costs have to paid through increased taxes.
> In addition, tax income for the cities tend to be reduced when suburbs pull large shops and businesses out from urban areas to allow access a lot of cars coming of the freeways.


In Florida new homes in the most rapidly developing communities will carry development impact fees usually assessed to cover the cost of new schools and roads.


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## TalB (Jun 8, 2005)

Taylorhoge said:


> Talb is right for the most part westchester is becoing more and more urbanized while Long Island is more of the typical suburban area and New Jersy parts of it are urbanized the closer you get to New York the more urbanized it gets.


I can actually see the new buildings of both White Plains and New Rochelle from the Whitestone Br.


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## Paddington (Mar 30, 2006)

Trainman Dave said:


> In Florida new homes in the most rapidly developing communities will carry development impact fees usually assessed to cover the cost of new schools and roads.


No kidding. Here in Ohio, suburban developers have even built hundred million dollar+ expressway interchanges and given it back to the state DOT for free, just because they're developing land near it.


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## PresidentBjork (Apr 29, 2007)

- That's the ticket!.


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## PresidentBjork (Apr 29, 2007)

- it has to be done nowadays


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## Justme (Sep 11, 2002)

PresidentBjork said:


> Well, there a couple reasons for American cities tendency towards suburbs.
> 
> For a start though, the first large east coast cities, like New York, Boston etc, had super high density, over crowded city blocks just like European cities in the first century of industrialization.
> 
> ...



Very interesting post.

It's also worth pointing out that the greenbelts that sprung up around Europe, including that of London, may have given us a "breathing" space of nice green grass and rolling hills, but it has in many ways increased sprawl as people are forced to live on the otherside of the greenbelt to find cheaper or larger properties. This increases transport distances and in many ways contributes more to pollution and carbon emissions. Many think that instead of a defined "greenbelt", policies should have been put in place for sustainable medium density housing spreading out from the city core. In other words, keep building out, but control the density.


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## Chicagoago (Dec 2, 2005)

zachus22 said:


> Schaumburg not walkable or liveable? I have lived in Naperville, Des Plaines, and Niles, and can tell you that Schaumburg is more liveable than the aforementioned three. Schaumburg has a hefty number of corporate headquarters which are complimented by chique plazas lined with cafés and neat boutiques. The city's downtown is quiet, but it too has a handful of nice restaurants and cafés. I'd like to know which native Chicagoans are telling you that Schaumburg is the epitome of poor suburban planning.
> 
> I don't want to argue with you because I don't know if you've lived in both Canada and the States like I have. I've been to suburbs of Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and Detroit, and have lived in suburbs of Charlotte, Chicago, Calgary, and Ottawa, and can tell you that more care is put into making these suburbs the nicest they can be. That's just how I feel.
> 
> Find me a city with about the same urban population as Toronto and we can make a fair comparison.


I moved here about 6 years ago ( to Chicago) without knowing a single thing about any suburbs (or the city really). From day one, when people said sarcastic remarks about suburbs, or commented on how sprawling and bland many of them were - Schaumburg was for some reason THE suburb that was ALWAYS mentioned. I've heard Naperville rambled off every once in awhile, but from my unbiased point of view, Schaumburg is the one place that embodies any of Chicagoans distain for suburbs. I never understood it really, since it's a city of 75,000 people out of a suburban population in Chicago that is nearing 7,000,000 people. I mean that's only 1%.

I think it's because the city has expressways running on the north, south and east side, it has the big office parks, sprawling residential areas, large roads with annoying traffic, and a huge mall/Ikea splattered in the middle.

stuff like "oh right, then maybe I'll get married, have 2 kids and move to fucking schaumburg" or when someone lives in the burbs and wants people to come out to a party, no matter what burb "I don't know, she wants us to drive out to fucking shaumburg or something for some party"

I think a large part of it is because everyone in the city and metro area, even if they haven't been there or have any feeling about the place, KNOWS Schaumburg. Woodfield Mall and Ikea are there, which has at least put it on everyones radar screen.


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## PresidentBjork (Apr 29, 2007)

Justme said:


> Very interesting post.
> 
> It's also worth pointing out that the greenbelts that sprung up around Europe, including that of London, may have given us a "breathing" space of nice green grass and rolling hills, but it has in many ways increased sprawl as people are forced to live on the otherside of the greenbelt to find cheaper or larger properties. This increases transport distances and in many ways contributes more to pollution and carbon emissions. Many think that instead of a defined "greenbelt", policies should have been put in place for sustainable medium density housing spreading out from the city core. In other words, keep building out, but control the density.


It's important to remember when greenbelts were first proposed (in Britain first 1955) much of the inner city population had already spilled out into the huge suburbs. People wanted to preserve what was left.

Unfortunately markets have never been to good at creating viable growth in the past. With the extension of railways and motorways it was all to easy for private investors to buy up huge chunks of land at rock bottom prices. Then the countryside is turned into endless suburbs, or if that land is not built up, and because it is privately owned, lack of public use or any use will make it overgrown or covered in rubbish. Then the likelihood is that it gets turned into industry or car lots all of which needn't be far away from urban centers since it only increases journey times and CO2 emissions.

In Britain only 13% of land is greenbelt, which leaves plenty room for development, however, by their very existence greenbelts attract people to go live in rural idylls among them. Allowing for increased encroachment on green belt to ameliorate this only exccerbates the problem. 
Excessive housing development in the country needs to be curtailed an the focus should be diverted to reinvigorating brown fill sites.


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## globill (Dec 4, 2005)

Chicagoago-

There's more to it than that. Compare Schaumburg to its neighbor, Arlington Heights. Same population, BUT Arlington Heights has many thousands of downtown residents, dozens of new condo developments, and an admirably walkable, subURBAN core...whereas Schaumburg doesn't.


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## carlisle (Nov 10, 2005)

Firstly... European suburbs and those 'row houses' you referred you. In the UK these are called terraced houses and are not considered to be suburbs. They came about through the 1919 housing act and the bye-laws which determined a quality of housing for the poor.

Before then speculative developers had built attractive townhouses for the rich such as the Georgian houses you can see in Kensington (London), Liverpool and Bath but the poor had lived in tenements and other hastily knocked up dwellings in back alleys close to the factories where they worked. Housing reform led to local governments building street houses which were more similar to the houses the rich lived in in that they had street frontage, running water, sanitation etc. bye-laws on such things as the amount of street frontage and space between houses naturally led to the areas filled with these houses to be very regular. This type of housing is associated with the working class, and in the North, even the wealthy townhouses were subdivided to become housing for the poor. Now the trend is reversing and in some places, terraced housing has become fashionable (pricing out the local residents in some cases I might add).

What we call suburbs, and what isn't that different to the American suburbs are the post-war responses to the still-poor conditions in working class housing. The countryside seemed to represent all that was good, with the wealthy abandoning most cities altogether and moving there, so when reconsidering the solution to working class living conditions it was natural to create what were supposed to be semi-rural 'villages' but due to a lack of imagination were little more than estates on the edge of towns.

At this point the wealthy still lived or aspired to live right out of the big cities altogether, in villages, farmhouses, small market towns and small historic cities. So initially the suburbs were for the poor, and many of the poor didn't like them as they had been moved out of long established communities and were now a long way from the city centre. Still many revelled in the space they now had, there are positives as well as negatives.

In the latter half of the twentieth century suburbs are also places for the wealthy, as they have returned to cities to work and socialise but are reluctant to go the whole way and live in the inner area. So they try to find the best of both worlds in the suburbs. They are much lower density places than the terraced housing areas but those pictures of low density suburbs posted by citylife were much much lower than has ever existed in the UK.

The main reasons we built at higher densities in the UK (and the rest of Europe) were that 1) we didn't have as much land, 2) we were more used to living at high densities before the war 3) we were poorer and even many well off people still had no car

Then suburban sprawl was seen as a negative thing and policies such as the greenbelts were created to stop it. A note on greenbelts though, they are not a place of 'nice green grass and rolling hills' as one poster said, but the worst bits of the countryside, full of roads and railways, pylons, intensive agriculture and what has been termed 'horsiculture'. There are moves afoot to reconsider their use. That they could be greener and more attractive, ironically if more development was allowed on them. However this will be a slow process as most British people seem to hold the 'greenbelt' as dear and sacred as they hold the NHS.


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