Introduction: International perspectives on suburbanization: A post-suburban world?

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Abstract

Definitions of cities and suburbs are rarely very precise and are rendered relative and arbitrary in geographical terms by the passage of time and in the manner in which their cultural meaning and socioeconomic content is socially constructed. Historically, in ancient and medieval times, the suburbs were composed of those usually noxious activities and disenfranchised citizens outside of the physical boundary of the city wall. In modern times, with the literal or figurative destruction of city walls, definitions of the suburbs are curious in their being incredibly vaguely defined in geographical terms and yet strongly invested with particular popular and academic meaning - a meaning, moreover, that is in some contrast to that historically, as a new found escape from the city. Indeed successive academic simplifications produced since the Chicago School models of the city have created their own misrecognitions of the character of the suburbs (Harris and Lewis, 1998). As we shall see, the term post-suburbia encounters many of the same problems when we try to use it to distinguish this potential class of settlements from those of cities and suburbs.

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Phelps, N. A., & Wu, F. (2011). Introduction: International perspectives on suburbanization: A post-suburban world? In International Perspectives on Suburbanization: A Post-Suburban World? (pp. 1–11). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230308626_1

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