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( Suburb)
Suburbs are commonly defined as residential areas on the outskirts of a city or large town. Most suburbs in the United States are commuter towns with a prevalence of detached[1] single-family homes.[2] Many suburbs have some degree of political autonomy, and most have lower population density than inner city neighborhoods. Mechanical transport, including automobiles and high speed trains, enabled the 20th century growth of suburbs, which tend to proliferate near cities with an abundance of adjacent flat land.[3] For more than half a century, America's leading urbanists, planners, and architects have rallied against the growth of suburbia. Variously, the suburbs have been labeled as racist, ugly, wasteful, or boring. Despite such criticism, Americans have continued to move to the suburbs and exurbs. These Americans now include not only whites, but also a growing proportion of recent immigrants, Asians, Latinos, and African Americans. Suburbia is also grabbing the bulk of new economic growth and jobs.[4] The 'action' in America's development is likely to remain heavily concentrated in the suburbs and exurbs. Most projections show that the continued increase in the U.S. population and the projected 50 percent increase in space devoted to the built environment by 2030 will largely take place in the sprawling cities of the South and West, areas dominatedby low-density, automobile dependent development of residential, commercial, and industrial space. [5] For developers, builders, planners, and public officials, the key challenge will be to accommodate this growth in a way that both preserves the advantages of relatively low-density suburban living and addresses legitimate concerns about the environment and about family, and cultural life. The word is derived from the Old French subburbe and ultimately from the Latin suburbium, formed from sub, meaning "under", and urbs, meaning "city". In Rome, important people tended to live within the city wall on one of the seven roman hills, while the lower classes often lived outside of the walls and at the foot of the hills. "Under" in later usage sometimes referred variously to lesser wealth, political power, population, or population density. The first recorded usage, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, comes from Wycliffe in 1380, where the form subarbis is used.
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