Wanted: A Language to Reflect the Diversity of Suburbia

If you’re trying to gauge the character of a place—if you’re trying, as a New Urbanist might, to come up with a straightforward way to identify which communities have developed to be diverse in uses and more liveable, and which haven’t—these simple distinctions are less than helpful. It’s true that the places we might call “urban” tendto be more dense, more walkable, more diverse in their housing options, and have all the other attributes New Urbanists esteem, and that “suburban” places tend to be less so. But those tendencies are riddled with exceptions, so much so that they can sometimes be useless as rules of thumb.

Weiss points to examples of these exceptions in an around Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and New York City. And Weiss notes that while urban areas have a number of words to describe the character of what makes cities unique, like density, walkability, and mixed use, discourse on the subject of suburbs tends to trade in generalizations and blanket criticisms.

Weiss's article includes one more nuanced schema for the suburbs, created by Addison Del Maestro, as a potential starting point for a more diverse language for suburbia.