How Should We Define the Suburbs?

Urbanists like to extoll the virtues of cities and urban living. But America remains a suburban nation, with the lion’s share of its residents residing in suburbs. Research shows that suburbanites are happier, reporting higher levels of subjective well-being than their urban counterparts. And as my CityLab colleague Amanda Kolson Hurley argues in her new book, U.S. suburbs defy Truman Show or Desperate Housewives stereotypes, and in fact come from a more diverse set of experiments than we give them credit for.

Given how many Americans live in suburbs and the importance of these communities to the mythology of the American Dream, it is amazing that we lack serious data-driven assessment of their types, dimensions, and characteristics. Most urban research focuses on cities and metropolitan areas; suburbia is a leftover category, or just a foil for cities.