The urban/suburban divide reshapes over time. As cities expand outwards, new suburban spaces emerge, while changes to extant suburbs call into question whether a space remains suburban or is now urban. My work here considers the difficulties of accurately bounding urban and suburban space by asking how other scholars have defined each landscape and then plotting each definition onto the Richmond region.
Political Boundaries and Administrative Units
Urban: Central and independent cities
Suburban: Peripheral counties
1990 2020
Age of Building Construction
Urban: Central and independent cities
Pre-Civil Rights suburb: Older suburbs, with 75% or more of the housing built before 1969
Post-Civil Rights suburb: Newer suburbs, with 75% or more of the housing built after 1969
1990 2020
Building Density
Urban: Census tracts with more than 400 pre-1950 housing units per square mile
Inner suburb: Census tracts with more than 400 1950-1970 housing units per square mile
Outer suburb: The remaining census tracts
1990 2020
Distance from Downtown
Urban core: The closest quartile of census tracts
Inner-urban: The second closest quartile
Inner-suburban: The third quartile of tracts
Outer-suburban: The most distant census tracts
1990 2020
Homeownership Trends
More urban: Census tracts with homeownership rates lower than the metropolitan average
More suburban: Tracts with homeownership rates higher than the metropolitan average
1990 2020
Population Density
High-density urban: More than 4500 persons per square mile
Low-density urban: More than 1900 persons per square mile
High-density suburban : More than 1000 persons per square mile
Mid-density suburban : More than 800 persons per square mile
Low-density suburban: More than 550 persons per square mile
Exurban: The remaining census tracts
1990 2020
Travel Behaviors
Active core: Census tracts where walking and cycling is 50% greater than the metropolitan average
Transit suburb: Census tracts where public transit is 50% greater than the metropolitan average
Auto suburb: Census tracts where car is the dominant mode of transportation
Exurb: Less than 58 persons per square mile
1990 2020
References:
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- Cooke, T., & Marchant, S. (2006). The Changing Intrametropolitan Location of High-poverty Neighbourhoods in the US, 1990-2000. Urban Studies, 43(11), 1971–1989. https://doi.org/10.1080/00420980600897818
- Gordon, D. L. A., & Janzan, M. (2013). Suburban Nation? Estimating the size of Canada’s Suburban Population. Journal of Architectural and Planning Research, 30(3), 197–220.
- Hanberry, B. B. (2022). Imposing consistent global definitions of urban populations with gridded population density models: Irreconcilable differences at the national scale. Landscape and Urban Planning, 226, 104493. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2022.104493
- Leigh, N. G., & Lee, S. (2005). Philadelphia’s Space In Between: Opolis, 1(1), 13–32. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/16t4c093
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- Pfeiffer, D. (2016). Racial equity in the post-civil rights suburbs? Evidence from US regions 2000–2012. Urban Studies, 53(4), 799–817. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098014563652
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