PG: what does suburbia mean to you? You paint it in an extremely negative light, and so I'd just like some more detail of how you define that term. I know it means different things to different people.
To me, suburbia is that neighborhood with the tree-related name that offers four different house models and three different colors of paint. All the lots are roughly the same size, all the people are roughly the same, and the streets don't particularly go anywhere. When viewed from an airplane it looks like a giant millipede wrapped in on itself (driveways). You have to drive everywhere, and the only non-house structures within 20 miles are schools and chain restaurants.
Honestly I think suburbia works well for what it is designed for, which is raising families in a safe environment with a yard and lots of other kids to play with. I view it negatively now only because I'm in my mid-20s, without kids, and it's boring to me. I could take issue with suburbia's wasteful land/energy use, but I won't bother. My view is entirely personal preference.
I think what bothers me is that a lot of people don't realize there is any other way of life out there. Frankly, your opportunities in suburbia are mostly limited to working a 9-5 job and raising a family, so a lot of people I knew in high school just automatically went into that mode after graduating. If they went to college at all, they only did it because all their friends did, but they didn't have any goal for their degree. I think in the backs of their minds they knew that graduating from college meant getting married, moving to the suburbs, and having kids. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with marriage or kids, but why rush it? It just makes me wonder what those people might accomplish or see if that wasn't the automatic life plan.
(BTW, suburb's etymology is not tree-related.)
(I said tree related because every suburban neighborhood I can think of has a tree related name... "Willow Springs" "Lone Elm Estates" "Pine Ridge" etc.)
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/suburb
Those names sound like housing projects, not cities or towns.
Boston has a lot of suburbs accessibly by public transportation that have walkable city centers.
Well that is good for Boston, but my experiences in the midwest and south are that suburbs = tract housing and schools.
And yeah, the names were definitely of housing projects... in my original post I was referring to "neighborhoods with tree-related names" ... I simply misspoke in my second post (hope you don't mind but I'm going to correct that).
(In the US, practically all the less densely settled area on the perimeters of cities are neighborhoods built by developers, but in Europe there are older cities where this isn't true.)
So now they are literally cookie cutter neighbourhoods.
1) Is any "development" part of suburbia?
2) What if there were multiple developers building the houses?
3) What if it is x miles from a town center?
4) What if the owners built their own houses in the development?
Let's get specific using the Boston area as an example.
5) Do you think any parts of Cambridge count as suburbia?
6) Do you think any of the following areas/towns count as suburbia: Revere, Brookline, Newton, Framingham, Wellsley, Waltham, Lexington?
And finally 7) if an area is just less densely settled does that make it just as unappealing as suburbia in your view?
If you'd seen Paul's west coast home, you'd know the answer to that :-)
The essay spends a few paragraphs on it, hence its relevance. That is certainly the same level of relevance of some of the other upvoted comments on this thread.
The usefulness is two-fold: 1) I think the essay suggests a very black and white picture of what is suburbia and what is not, yet does not define it at all. I am trying to get to the core of that definition (if there really is one). Pg responded to my question, but didn't make it that much clearer, hence the follow-up questions. And 2) if you believe the essay, you presumably want to avoid suburbia, so it would be useful to know what it is!
The essay suggests that the only reason people move to suburbia is to have kids. I'm totally unsure whether pg or anyone else would say I live in suburbia (I would guess so though), and yet I don't have kids nor moved here to have kids. And I don't think where I live is suffocatingly fake either.
The truth is there are many, many types of different living environments in the US and other countries, and not all places near but not in city limits are unappealing. The questions attempt to start to delineate which parts in particular are being attacked. Is this really an attack on geography or housing style or is it an attack on the average person who lives outside the city?
You do, as a kid, see a lot that needs explaining. Some days, as we drove home from school, my brother saw a long line of men lining up outside the "nob hill male". They must, he concluded, be the dancers rather than the audience. Snort.
I actually think that cities are a pretty good place for kids to grow up, largely because it cushions the impact of growing out of the lies PG has mentioned. At age 15 in SF, I found a release in coffee shops in the haight, north beach, and the mission - and I could easily get to them without a car. Sure, I did plenty of the things that parents worry about, but in the end, there were interesting and exciting ways to get away from childhood that involved expanding my mind rather than looking for trouble. When I look at the ennui of the kids growing up in the exurbs, sometimes I think that maybe the lure of drunk street racing is greater, because there's less to do.