Suburbs have long been considered separate from the city. Many scholarly researches have defined suburbs as uncertain mass around a city's edges. But a recent publication is saying otherwise.
'Suburban Urbanities: Suburbs and the Life of the High Street,' by Urban Form and Society Professor Laura Vauhn, is a book that, unlike others before it, consider urban and suburbs together rather than two different areas. The book intends to argue the dogma that urbanity only exists in the city. It also tackles how suburb is the continuum of a city's spatial-social complexity.
The book looks at suburban centers in considering the suburbs as continuum of its urban neighbor. This approach aims to capture the full range of activities that are non-domestic in nature such as: weekly markets, outdoor leisure activities, home-based jobs, online business, and other freelance and informal employment.
An excerpt from the book explains it further, "For example, London, like most large urban spatial systems, consists of an interdependent network of linked centers which, when studied in detail on the ground, reveal a level of detail and complexity more normally attributed to cities. Taking the suburban built environment as a subject of inquiry in its own right and as a distinctive aspect of the spatial and temporal growth of cities, Suburban Urbanities presents the high street (in the United States, the main street), as the core of suburban non-domestic activity, as a special kind of space with demonstrable potential for creating the living heart of the suburb."
Despite the fact that the population of English-speaking countries mainly resides in suburbs, it has always been misunderstood.
Citylab on an article noted, "It is trapped by a historical legacy of aesthetic distaste from the cultural elite, such as the declaration of the International Congress of Modern Architecture in 1933 that the suburb is "a kind of scum churning against the walls of the city" and that it is "one of the greatest evils of the century."
