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A stray comment on the culture-war thread from two weeks ago reminds me that, IMO, people on this website have been talking very loosely when they compare "urban", "suburban", and "rural" living.
The definitions endorsed by the United Nations are roughly as follows.
Urban: ≥ 1500 people per km2 (6.1 people per acre)
Suburban: ≥ 300 people per km2 (1.2 people per acre)
Rural: < 300 people per km2 (1.2 people per acre)
However, six people per acre actually isn't that dense. The US's IZC (International Zoning Code) is not necessarily authoritative, but in its single-family and two-family residential zones it permits density of up to six dwelling units per acre, implying 15 people per acre at 2.5 people per household.⁎
Likewise, a representative comment describes suburbs as follows:
Yet, if you look at a random US "city" in Google Maps, you will see lots of single-family houses with their own backyards and limited access to mass transit.
So, what do you actually mean when you say "urban", "suburban", and "rural" living? Maybe it's something like this.
Urban living: Row houses and apartment buildings, with incidental retail
Suburban living: Single-family and two-family houses, and nothing else
Rural living: Incidental single-family houses in land that is largely agricultural or undeveloped
⁎With tongue significantly less than halfway in cheek, I previously suggested that the threshold for a fourth "mega-city" category in the UN's framework might be set at 7500 people per km2 (30 people per acre). This matches the IZC's upper bound for multifamily residential zones (12 dwelling units per acre), past which commercial/residential zones with unlimited dwelling-unit density must be used instead.
Rural - you know all the people by name that you meet outside of your job in a day.
Suburban - you know half of the people you meet in any given day outside of your job.
Urban - you know minority of the people you meet in a day, most of them are your direct neighbors.
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Funny, I personallyhave a closer definition to this, than any actual density measures, but I realize that I also incorporate an element of culture into it as well.
I can explain thusly:
Urban: People get around by foot or bike or public transport.
Suburban: Mostly cars, interspersed with bikes.
Rural: Trucks, horses, or occasional farm equipment.
Likewise, 'how far' do you have to travel to get to the nearest live theater? If you live in an area that is technically sparsely populated but you can drive <20 minutes and see a live production, that's gotta be suburban. If you can walk to see one, OBVIOUSLY Urban.
All of these are correlates with density, so it really just helps sort out the gray areas of the spectrum, I guess. I know of areas that are sparsely populated but wealthy with plenty of amenities in driving range so they're 'suburban' for most pursuits and purposes, even if the locals keep and ride horses. The workers may come in from the nearest metro area, which adds to that point.
Likewise, areas composed of single family homes lined up for miles, which is the stereotypical suburb, but low income and you DO occasionally people keeping farm animals, and its an hour to the nearest theater are 'rural-coded' in my mind, even if there's technically no agriculture going on.
If you put a large apartment block in the middle of nowhere, that might have decently high density but no way is it 'urban', too.
Finally, you can get weird situations where high tourist areas are 'urban' in that there's a ton of people that come around seasonally but it quiets down so much outside of that you might as well be living rurally.
This would mean that a lot of countries (it's easy to single out the United States with respect to this, but it is true of many places elsewhere, and not just in the developed world) have a vanishingly small number of urban spaces.
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Millburn, NJ is clearly suburban, despite a live theatre being right there. Density 900/km^2.
My own adjoining town is just barely over 1500/km^2, but it, too, is clearly suburban. There's also a live theatre in our downtown, such as it is.
The car thing doesn't work for the opposite reason. Philadelphia is full of cars. So is Chicago. So is New York, for that matter. No American city has a transit share of commutes above 50%, though NYC has been above that. Next closest city outside the NY metro is D.C at 26.6%.
That seems quite large, over 500 square miles no? Or am I missing something?
For me, the question is whether having a car is a practical necessity. In most areas in New Jersey, it is. In much of NYC, it is not.
Maybe there are parts of New Jersey where a car is not a practical necessity, perhaps parts of Hoboken. Conversely, there are parts of NYC where arguably you do need a car, e.g. eastern Queens near the Nassau border. But I would call those parts of Queens "suburbs" and those parts of Hoboken "urban."
You missed the slash.
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They're full of cars but what do the majority of people actually do for transport day to day?
I'm reliably told that Majority of NYC residents do not own a car.
Almost my point, though. Looking at photos of Millburn, to me it reads just barely towards the 'urban' side of the divide, and then I look at its proximity to NYC, and I am reinforced in this. I can also see, however, that it has close proximity to large swathes of nature which pulls it back towards 'rural'. Finally, Google tells me that the majority of the residents live in unincorporated "Short Hills", which appears pretty sparsely populated for its area.
So really its a ruralish area attached to an urbanized one? So my guess is the majority of residents can't walk to the theater.
Yes, its a suburb compared to New York, but if my suburban ass were to visit I think I'd feel like I was in 'the city' to some degree.
(my mental model of New Jersey, incidentally, is a lot of urban sprawl attached to a lot of deciduous forests. I have never been to New Jersey.)
Hmm,there is an impact of Zoning on all this.
For reference, I live in a single-family house that is in an area that is zoned agricultural, and is situated just outside the local town's limits in unincorporated territory. If you squint and fudge you could say I'm living rural, but I can drive to several theaters easily, clearly I'm living suburban. There's some rural territory if I drive about 20 minutes east/Inland. Lehigh Acres, Florida is just wall to wall single-family homes, but there ain't nothing to do out there in terms of amenities, so I consider that a 'developing' rural area, myself. Lehigh Acres does not (yet) have a Live Theater.
The US Forest Service agrees with you. (However, don't forget about the famous evergreen forest.)
lol.
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Say you live in a very rural part of your country. The rural area has a small administrative center with a few stores, a clerk’s office, and a court. You live in a house within walking distance from all of them. The county has no suburbs per se, at least not of the classic kind. Is your living situation rural or urban?
Now say you live in a big freestanding house surrounded largely by parkland and fields at the outer edge of a major city. But, less than ten minutes’ walk (along a narrow country lane) from your house is a commuter railroad station with very regular service that can take you to the center of one of the world’s great cities in twenty five minutes. Is your living situation rural, suburban or urban?
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Here in Russia the urban/rural divide is defined by employment. If 50% or more or the economically active population is employed in agriculture, it's a rural locality. Of course, this alone doesn't define suburban living, but I would define it like this: 50% or more of the economically active population is not employed in agriculture and their place of employment is located in another locality.
But this definition isn't great. Imagine a small town with 49 farmers and 51 people, out of which 49 commute to a large city to work. It's not rural and not suburban, which means it has to be urban, which is a silly idea. Maybe it should be defined like this:
If 50% or more are employed in agriculture, it's a rural locality;
Otherwise, if 50% or more of those not employed in agriculture work in a different locality, it's a suburban locality;
Otherwise, it's an urban locality.
Still not perfect, but I think it's a workable definition.
I don't think that works because there's plenty of small suburban or rural towns (in a way that we would definitely recognize them as such despite definitions) that are basically supported by a single big factory. People work locally, not in agriculture, but that doesn't make those tiny towns urban. And the tiny villages around them that supply some extra workers aren't necessarily suburban.
Outside of density, which could be used to make a hard criteria for analysis, but not necessarily capture the real spirit of the word, I would define the three as what proximity people are seeking there.
In urban localities, people want to be in proximity to other people. Density is a virtue here. In suburban localities, people want to be in proximity to the urban locality, but not other people. Density is not a virtue, but it will happen as there is a limit to how far people can be and meaningfully access the urban core. In rural localities, people want to be in proximity to open spaces (for economic purposes, like agricultural activity, for recreation or as an aesthetic preference).
Isn't a rural town an oxymoron?
Not in American usage. Rural town means it's not part of a larger metro, or at least not connected to it/too far for reasonable commuting. America would use the term 'farm town' for what you're envisioning(which may not be a town), a 'rural town' might be supported by tourism, mining, a single large employer, etc. A major city is something with suburbs and a suburb is attached to a major city(but may or may not have a population that commutes there for work; some suburbs have more people commuting in from the city than out to the city) and an exurb is a town detached from the major city but economically dependent on a large portion of its population commuting there. A 'village' sounds like something thirdworlders live in.
I grew up in a farming town in the fly over states. We had a both a "Town of Bumfuckville" and a "Village of Bumfuckville" as two separate municipalities. The town was technically the larger outlying land, and the village was the area around the main-street, the branches, and a few of the neighborhoods surrounding it. No clue why it incorporated like that, but while they were technically distinct legal municipalities they did play together (along with other towns) for the school district.
It's practically a tradition in some parts of the country. (Pennsylvania townships are incorporated, unlike townships in some other states.)
NJ townships are also incorporated (and are by far the most common form of municipal government), but a few of the borough/township splits have joined in the past few years, notably Princeton (home of the eponymous university)
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Oh that's hilarious. Is there a technical distinction between a Township and a Town?
It appears not.
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To me no; town I would define as a locality that has most of the services needed for day-to-day life, a core that spans a few streets rather than one, but doesn't have the businesses and services that would truly make it independant. A town would have for instance pharmacies, supermarkets, maybe some chain stores like a walmart, a few restaurants, probably a high school, medical clinics but no hospital, no mall, no airport, no nightlife outside of local bars, minimal public transport. I expect people from a town make a trip to a city in a 1-2 hours drive radius a few times a year when they want to go on real "shopping" trip, need to go to a hospital, etc... There usually aren't any higher education institutions in towns either, so the kids often end up having to move when they start studying at that level.
A village, to me, has a handful of businesses, rarely spread on more than one street: a gas station, a local diner, a very small grocery store, maybe an elementary school, maybe a bar or two but everyone there goes to the nearest town in a 15-30 minutes radius for their real actual groceries every week, and to a city as often as the townfolks do.
I would even posit that the the village/town/city distinction is sometimes completely distinct from rural/suburban/urban. There are small cities in my province that exist essentially as service hubs for the surrounding countryside. They are a bit denser than a typical suburb but the economic engine is not the city. One of them, for instance, has a large veterinary hospital, the biggest agricultural school in the province, etc...
Note that the UN definitions place the thresholds for "city" at 50,000 people, "town" at 5000, and "village" at 500. (And my aforementioned "mega-city" starts at 500,000.)
This is even worse, especially in New Jersey, where we've got weird stuff like Metutchen (pop 15,000) entirely surrounded by Edison (pop 110,000). Edison is just dense suburbia.
To clarify, both UN and US definitions operate on density-based "urban areas" rather than on legal boundaries.
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I prefer the UK system, where the rules are made up and, on the basis of fairness, Wales gets an automatic city for each Jubilee. Unfortunately, they realized they also needed a more sensible taxonomy, which does ruin the fun a bit.
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I get why they would, because other definitions are fuzzy and open to interpretations, even though in practice most people I know can tell which one a place is by looking at what its core looks like.
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Yes in the context of rigorous density-based definitions, but no in the context of employment and surroundings. Literally just yesterday, I attended a municipal council meeting where somebody referred to the municipality as part of "rural Pennsylvania" even though it's suburban under the UN definition and urban under the US definition.
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Yeah, same here. Only about 2% of the population have anything at all to do with agriculture, and yet most communities (by number, not by population) are rural villages.
I don't know about that, the Netherlands has that same statistic but that only counts owner-operator farmers and contract labour (modern farmhands, essentially). It doesn't count the tractor mechanics, feed suppliers, veterinarians, etc, all of whom would be unemployed if we were to stop farming. A tractor mechanic is in the tertiary sector (services). Those people may not be farmers but they sure have something to do with agriculture.
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I think that's pretty close, although I think it's worth pointing out that some suburbs have a good deal of garden apartment complexes, for example many towns in New Jersey. I have also seen a lot of garden apartment complexes in the Central Valley in California.
I'm tempted to distinguish urban and suburban based on whether, as a practical matter, you need a car. The idea being that the car requirement is a significant barrier for the kind of low human capital people who cause a lot of problems in cities and who suburbanites are typically trying to avoid.
I think that to a large extent this describes fleeing. I mean, what's the problem with sharing walls walls, floors, ceilings, and outdoor space with strangers? To a large extent, the problem is low human capital people.
You could theoretically live in this neighborhood without a car: https://maps.app.goo.gl/SaPWqXz55VwMcyqh9
It has a couple bus stops, lots of parks, restaurants within a short walk, gainful employment (at Space X), a QFC, and other places. However, walk around on Google Maps and it will feel very suburban.
None of the parks have restrooms. The houses largely have property values in the millions. I think in the US "suburban" means area without extra crime but you still rub elbows with your neighbors.
(Honestly I think this neighborhood is one of the ideal examples of urban planning and wish there were more neighborhoods like it. Just with more reasonably priced homes, but maybe it doesn't work with reasonably priced homes.)
Given the property values in outer Redmond, realistically anyone who lives there is going to afford and own a car, unless for whatever reason they can't drive. The developments east of Redmond are there because it's rural-adjacent. It's up a substantial hill, and far enough away from the transit center to keep out the riffraff.
Is the criteria "urban means they cannot afford a car" or is the criteria "urban means they don't need a car for 90% of the time?"
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Well, as the saying goes, in theory there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is a big difference between theory and practice.
I can also say that in practice you can go months without needing to drive unless you want to go to a specific grocery store.
I picked out a random house from your Google maps link. The address is 9424 226th Pl NE.
To be clear, I picked this house completely at random, I have no idea who lives there, if anyone.
Ok, now suppose you lived there and you wanted
(1) to go to the gym every day at 6 am.
(2) to buy groceries a couple times a week;
(3) to go out to dinner at Luigi's Cocina Restaurant (one of the nearest restaurants) once a week on Friday or Saturday night.
(4) to meet friends at an establishment with dancing and music a couple times a month (in the evening). (the nearest I could find is Palmers East); and
(5) to go to a hardware store, sporting goods store, or other specialty store a couple times a month.
How exactly would you accomplish this?
Lol, you got pretty close to the mark with your example.
...Ok, you can't live every lifestyle there. I guess there are people who want to go to a gym for the community factor instead of just exercise at home. And there are people who want to dance...
But if your demographic is "married mother of 4" then you have:
4+ playgrounds that are close enough that a toddler to walk to.
Elementary, Middle, and Preschool also within easy walking distance.
Community center within walking distance.
Library drop off/pick up within walking distance.
Really great crosswalks and sidewalks and good laws/culture that mean cars have to stop to let people cross the road at designated crosswalks.
As far as your specific requests:
(1) Anytime Fitness is a 24 hour gym that is a 12 min bike ride or half an hour walk.
(2) The QFC is a 12 minute bike ride, which tbh I don't know many people who want to walk with groceries but biking with a trailer is fine and meets the "no cars" point. And there are bike lanes and trails. If you want to walk it's about half an hour which isn't a bad walk either, though I wouldn't want to make it with a gallon of milk in each hand.
(3) Ixtapa is a much nicer restaurant and a very easy walk.
(4) Palmer's East is in Redmond Town Center? There's a bus pick up by Rosa Parks Elementary (about a 10 min walk from your selected house with a stroller) that goes straight to Redmond Town Center approx every 1 hour. (DART Route 224) This is a harder requirement because I don't think this is as popular an activity in the area. Most live shows are in Seattle proper, which is a pain to get to whether you're on bus, car, boat, or bicycle.
(5) Redmond Town Center also has a Guitar Center, does that count? Otherwise there's a lot of other cool things within easy walking distance of Redmond Town Center. Big 5 Sporting Goods, Zumiez, etc. Home Depot is a little further away but is that a thing that might be worth finding your friend with a truck anyway?
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This is America, buddy, and those parks have a lot of trees.
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I endorse this distinction wholeheartedly, although there are a lot of transitional neighbourhoods in US cities which don't feel truly suburban, and aren't objectively far from the urban core at all, but you still need a car to go anywhere. And I'd say it runs both ways - obligate urbanites like myself are attracted to dense cities in part precisely because you don't need the inconvenience of a car for your daily errands or going out at night.
The sharing walls/floors/ceilings thing can be mitigated pretty well by living in a solid older building. You can insulate your personal space with money in an urban area just as well as in the suburbs, the question is your tolerance of strung-out hobos (which shouldn't have to be a question, but there's also the tolerance of libs issue).
Yes of course. In a sense, inconvenience is the point of suburbs.
I agree with this as well, but in my opinion, there is a key difference which is that, generally speaking, it's far more expensive to insulate a family in a city than it is in the suburbs.
It's cheap enough if you buy that insulation collectively the way first-world Asian cities do.
Agreed, you'll get no argument from me on that point.
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My personal tongue-in-cheek definition:
Note that on this definition, a lot of American "suburbia" falls into the exurban/rural category. This is deliberate. "Urban" living by my definition is compatible with upper-middle-class people having houses with private gardens (many such neighbourhoods in London zone 2/3), though probably not detached ones.
This is America, and there are neighborhoods in the city center which are exurban in most metros.
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One imagines this will change completely the moment self-driving cars and self-driving fleets reach mainstream acceptance. This has been talked about for ages now but I would be genuinely surprised, especially with latest AI progress, if it isn't all sorted out within ~20 years. Actually as I think about it I can imagine some big problems that have to be solved even after the cars can be trusted to drive themselves, but in theory there's so much money at stake that I would expect them to be solved. And I would expect that to have massive repercussions on urban development and suburban density.
I very much agree. There are two great questions about the self-driving car era that we don't know the answer to yet:
Seems to me like the problem is rushhour -- everyone wants a self-driving car at the same time. If you can't convince people to get self-driving rideshares or even a bespoke self-driving programmable bus, then everyone wants their own car. And then you still need parking because otherwise empty cars returning home just produce twice as much traffic and exponential congestion.
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To your first question, I think it is likely that we will see a progression over time. At first, self-driving cars will likely be sold privately to individual owners to appeal to the existing culture of private car ownership. Tesla has already begun this. However, I'd imagine that eventually, manufacturers will transition to larger and larger taxi-style fleets, as this seems to me a more profitable business model. They might even have a subscription model where you pay X amount for Y miles of travel per month. The question will be in how these fleets are administered. Will these fleets be controlled by municipalities? Will multiple fleets coexist or will there be a clear winner that later becomes impenetrable due to market dominance? How will rural or suburban areas be served? It is going to be an interesting few decades.
I'm not sure it'd ever fully replace ownership. Many people don't treat their cars as interchangeable parts today. If you have a work truck with tools in the back, you may not want to move those often. Or reinstall a bike rack every time you use it. I do think it could replace a lot of uses, but probably not all of them.
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Tongue-in-cheek extension to Europe:
Housing style is a bit useless as definitions, since both the suburbs and rural villages will have a double digit percentage of residents living in apartment buildings.
I would put the suburban threshold at 2 rides/hour rather than 4. Hell, at the height of the train maintenance crisis a few years ago, some inner-ring parts of Berlin were reduced to 1/20min at peak hours, and I've lived in areas with 20- and 30-minute period transit that were nevertheless within 20 minutes of the centre and largely housed urban commuters.
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Every city has some rich people who live in the center with gardens. I would guess even in Beijing there are people who rent the old-fashioned courtyard homes in the city center from centuries ago, I think quite a few still exist.
Luxury condos of course wildly outnumber them in Beijing, but if you're interested in elite siheyuan:
https://architizer.com/blog/inspiration/collections/siheyuan-chinese-courtyards-renovated-with-contemporary-flare/amp/
Yeah, I wonder how much these are, I’ve heard that until recently a lot of them were actually lived in by wealthy Western expats since even very rich Chinese tend to want new build McMansion type homes.
Xicheng (near Tiananmen), 11.9M USD, ~4k USD/sq ft (estimated): https://bj.lizihang.com/siheyuanchushou/783052.html
Dongcheng (contains Tiananmen), 8.8M USD, 3121 USD/sq ft: https://mbj.lizihang.com/siheyuanchushou/872357.html
These seem lower end than the ones in the article, though, at least the finishings.
So beautiful, especially the second one that seems to have had the period detailing and artwork largely preserved. I wonder if that furniture is original.
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I'm reminded of the recent discussion online about how the United States only has <10 "real" cities, the rest being urban-suburban car-dependent Frankenstein agglomerations. Most of the second tier US cities I've been to lack a continuous urban experience outside of their downtowns, instead consisting of a sparse network of walkable business districts separated by swathes of lower-density development.
This is somewhat addressed in my mega-city comment.
We are well on our way to "Mega City One". I've seen plenty of joking commentary online about "Northeast Megalopolis Supremacy," suggesting a growing regional identity along the DC-Boston Corridor. I think this is also downstream of recent positive migration to Philadelphia and DC by young people, slowly reducing the dominance of NYC in the cultural machine.
That's under the looser US definition of "urban". Under the stricter UN definition, there is no continuous urban corridor, so in my comment I was referring only to New York City (along with Newark, Long Island, etc.).
Certainly, I'm just speaking colloquially. I'm impressed at a lot of this data, I wasn't aware it was tracked and visualized with such precision.
I do believe that eventually the corridor will become continuous, especially as NYC and Philly continue to cross-pollinate. In my eyes, it's just a question of how long it'll take. If any meaningful rail infrastructure is developed in the next 50 years, I'd expect it to accelerate dramatically.
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