Suburbs have been with us for a long time, but they have kept changing. There were residential districts of single-family houses outside major American cities in the late 1700s. However, "The suburb, as a lifestyle separating and distancing the workplace from the residence and involving a daily commute to jobs in the center, can be dated to around 1815." (Gandelsonas 1999, 31)
Streetcar and railroad suburbs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century brought new forms, and another restructuring happened with the expressways after World War II. Later the pattern of commuting to the center city for jobs began to change, as retail and industry moved out, service jobs multiplied, and finance became globalized. The suburban sprawl now contained the economic functions that the city had previously provided. A multiuse and dispersed pattern developed, dependent on the automobile, and "not organized anymore in oppositional terms such as center versus periphery . . . but as a nonhierarchical fragmented urbanized territory." (Gandelsonas 1999, 37)
(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001