Suburbs

Researchers look at the largely suburban South Bay area of Los Angeles to offer ways to retrofit auto-oriented suburbs for more pedestrian travel.

Jason Griffiths and Alex Gino set out in 2002 to document the unremarkable character of the American suburbs. 22,382 miles and 2,593 photographs later, they concluded that suburbia "is difficult to define."

Greg Hanscom at Grist asks, if, as polls say, so many Millennials want to live in the city, why is the downtown resurgence a trickle rather than a flood?

Galina Tachieva's new Sprawl Repair Manual creates a narrative and visual process for making suburbs more sustainable. The book's first chapter is available now online.

The current observation is that the urban poor are moving to the suburbs. Alon Levy says that this is nothing new, and the current effects of such movement is in fact just the "tipping point" of what's been happening for the last 50 years.

Kaid Benfield argues that if people are going to embrace mixed-use, denser living styles, architects and designers need to "embrace the familiar."

More and more businesses in suburban Detroit are packing up an moving into the center of the city.

As aid programs continue to focus on battling poverty in cities, suburban areas are becoming the new front lines.

Suburban growth has coincided with the increase in immigrant population. Yet, while immigrants account for 30 percent suburban population growth, they account for only a fifth of the increase in the poor population, a recent Brookings study showed.

Metropolitan poverty spreads from cities to the suburbs. This post from Metro Trends explains.

Jenny Sullivan of Builder Magazine spots a trend for slightly increased densities in suburban towns, creating urban-lite communities that are attracting city dwellers who would never have dreamed of living in the burbs.

The youth of America will ditch its cities in favor of the suburbs, according to this op-ed from Joel Kotkin.

Companies are moving back to the city in response to a new generation of workers who prefer the urban environment over suburban office parks.

Shanghai in its 12th Five-Year Plan is modeling seven new satellite cities as suburbs to alleviate the density in the city center, reports Yu Ran, China Daily.

A new finding by Univ. of Wisconsin Population Health Institute reveals that when the health variable is isolated, suburban living beats living in the city and in rural areas.

As the downturn in the market physically reshapes the metropolitan regions of the United States, the shifting populations and economies of its cities and suburban areas are becoming increasingly intertwined.

A Brookings Institute report shows that the difference between crime in the suburbs and cities has drastically decreased, and argues that the current drop in crime rates weakens the correlation between ethnic groups and crime.

The 2010 Census showed that the baby-boom generation led to the growth of older populations settling in suburbs, which is causing local governments to rethink whom their services should cater to.

The federal rental assistance vouchers known as Section 8 are increasingly putting low-income families into empty homes in the suburbs.

Nicholas Lehmann wrote a review earlier this week wrapping up all of the latest planning books like Ed Glaeser's Triumph of the City into one hodgepodge critique that boiled down to a defense of the suburbs.