The restless landscape of metroburbia

Abstract

The metropolitan form in the United States (US), a product of egalitarian liberalism, the New Deal, the collapse of the welfare state, and then the rise of neoliberalism, is a landscape of political and economic change that manifests itself in physical and social landscapes. In turn, these landscapes naturalize these political-economic structures. The challenges of characterizing this changing metropolitan form have prompted a great number of neologisms, including exurbia, edge city, edgeless city, exopolis, boomburb, cosmoburb, nerdistan, technoburb, generica, satellite sprawl, mallcondoville, as well as post-suburbia and metroburbia. The term ‘metroburbia’ emerged in Internet and media usage around 2005 to capture an important dimension of the New Metropolis: the intermixing of office employment and high-end retailing, with residential settings in suburban and exurban areas, along with established dormitory towns and small cities within a metropolitan area that has acquired many of the amenities of a large city. In short, it represents a fragmented and multinodal mixture of employment and residential settings, with a fusion of suburban, exurban, and central-city characteristics.