I'm not PG (obviously), but I also see suburbia pretty negatively and want to chime in.

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.

I think "sprawl" might be a more descriptive term for what you're reacting negatively to. Boston has lots of suburbs that don't fit your description.

(BTW, suburb's etymology is not tree-related.)

Yeah to me suburb means tract housing. Does Boston have suburbs that aren't tract housing?

(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.)

A more general version of this I once heard (mostly in jest) was that "suburban neighborhoods are named after the part of nature that was destroyed to make the neighborhood." Mostly this includes various flora, although geographical descriptors such as "silver creek", "meadowmont", etc., are also used.

Suburb means a city or town near a large city.

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.

> accessible 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).

Yes - most of the "suburbs" in Boston are smaller towns that have grown and run into each other.

I mean post-war neighborhoods of tract houses build on spec by developers. I don't mean places that are merely geographically suburban, in the sense that they're less densely settled areas on the perimeters of cities.

(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.)

A friend of mine works building these suburbs; they actually now use a portable factory to build a completely finished house (even painted, all fixtures installed, etc). They roll it down the street and drop it on the foundations, connect the plumbing and electrical and it is ready to be moved into.

So now they are literally cookie cutter neighbourhoods.

> 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 :-)

Where is it?

On a winding mountain road six miles from the nearest cross street.

Why am I getting voted down for this--are these not legitimate questions? I am just trying to understand the definition of suburbia in this context.

Because understanding the notion of suburbia at that level of detail can't possibly be useful or relevant.

I wouldn't have posted it if I didn't think it was useful and relevant :)

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?

I grew up in SF in what a lot of people call "residential neighborhoods" rather than "suburbs". There are houses, with small yards, and sometimes the houses don't even border each other. It's very different from palo alto (which is generally regarded as a suburb), and utterly different from, say antioch (whis is part of what people often call the exurbs).

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.

I don't think pg has painted it in a negative light. He says it is useful at certain stages in a child's development but not all stages.