The urban/suburban divide is made and remade 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.
I describe several ways of defining Richmond’s urban and suburban space and map each below. The definitions were taken from elsewhere in the academic literature, and they include the political units of Richmond, the age and density of housing construction, the distance from the center of the city, homeownership rates, the density of the population, and travel to work patterns. I sourced data from the decennial census and ACS and mapped the settings in RStudio.
Political boundaries of Richmond
Urban: Central and independent cities in the Richmond metropolitan statistical area
Suburban: Peripheral counties of the region
(Allard, 2018; Maginn & Anacker, 2022)
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
(Pfeiffer, 2016)
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
(Cooke & Marchant, 2006; Vicino, 2008)
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
(Zhang & Pryce, 2020)
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
(Moos & Mendez, 2015)
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
(Hanberry, 2022)
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: Tracts where car is the dominant mode of transportation
Exurb: Less than 58 persons per square mile
(Gordon & Janzan, 2013)
1990 2020
References:
- Allard, S. W. (2018). Places in Need: The Changing Geography of Poverty. Russell Sage Foundation.
- 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
- Maginn, P. J., & Anacker, K. B. (2022). Suburbia in the 21st Century: From Dreamscape to Nightmare? (1st ed.). Routledge.
- Moos, M., & Mendez, P. (2015). Suburban ways of living and the geography of income: How homeownership, single-family dwellings and automobile use define the metropolitan social space. Urban Studies, 52(10), 1864–1882. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098014538679
- 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
- Vicino, T. J. (2008). Th Political History of a Postwar Suburban Society Revisited. History Compass, 6(1), 364–388. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00498.x
- Zhang, M. L., & Pryce, G. (2020). The dynamics of poverty, employment and access to amenities in polycentric cities: Measuring the decentralisation of poverty and its impacts in England and Wales. Urban Studies, 57(10), 2015–2030. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098019860776
