Suburbanization
growth of suburbs and its areas on the fringes of cities
Suburbanization (American English), also spelled suburbanisation (British English), is a population shift from historic core cities or rural areas into suburbs. Most suburbs are built in a formation of (sub)urban sprawl. As a consequence of the movement of households and businesses away from city centers, low-density, peripheral urban areas grow. Proponents of curbing suburbanization argue that sprawl leads to urban decay and a concentration of lower-income residents in the inner city, in addition to environmental harm.
Suburbanization can be a progressive process in which growing populations, technological innovations, and economic changes drive settlement outward, following the concentric zone model. Suburban growth takes many forms globally including planned satellite towns in Europe, rail-oriented suburbs in East Asia, Canadian high-rises, and the expansion of informal peri-urban areas in the Global South. Patterns of global suburban sprawl have emerged from a combination of demographic trends and economic development and have produced diverse social, economic, and environmental outcomes.
History
United States
Post–World War II economic expansion in the United States included a sudden boom in housing construction as developers raced to address housing shortages across the country. As veterans returned from war, their GI Bill benefits made it especially easy to buy homes in these new, cost-efficient neighborhoods, populating them quickly with young couples and new families. These new neighborhoods were outside the inner city suburbs.
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This entry incorporates text from “Suburbanization” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.