ancient cities

y women moving out of slums via official housing
policies. Because young mothers were those
most likely to be at home all day, they felt the
limitations of a home-bound life more sharply
than did their husbands who went out to work.
The expert who had coined the term suburban
neurosis during the 1930s, Dr. Stephen Taylor,
renounced his earlier diagnosis, claiming by the
early 1960s that there was nothing particularly
pathogenic about suburbs and that similar symptoms
of maladjustment could be found when
women moved to other urban and rural environments.
Yet Taylor was a man assessing the morale
of women, and in the years after he was writing,
the emergence of second-wave feminism led to further
questions about the relative disempowerment
of women compared to men as a consequence of
suburbanization. Since the 1970s, feminists have
argued that women were particularly affected by
secondary access to the means of transportation
(notably the car), by lesser incomes than
men, and by the limiting cultural norms and values
that accompanied the roles of mother and
housewife.
The environmental impact of suburbanization
has also long been a cause for concern. Again, to
take England as a pioneer, the town and country
planning movement emerged between 1900 and
1950, partly as a reaction to the rural devastation
engendered by suburbanization. Much town planning
legislation since World War II has dealt—to
varying degrees of success in differing countries—
with the restriction of suburban sprawl. Today,
concern over the greenhouse gases engendered by
suburban commuting is a powerful tool of the
antisuburbanization argument. Indeed, the architectural
movement of new urbanism gains credibility
from the green critique of suburbanization.
Designed with higher densities, and containing
more mixed uses than older, lower-density residential
developments, new urban housing estates and
subdivisions are expected to encourage less dependency
on the automobile and to sustain more
walking and cycling.
Late-Twentieth-Century Suburbanization
and Postsuburban Growth
During the late twentieth century, a newer revisionist
trend in suburban studies became powerfully
Suburbanization
783
evident. As a consequence of twentieth-century
suburbanization, many younger academics had
been born and reared in suburbs and now brought
a less immediately critical perspective to them.
Most significantly, however, the social character of
suburbanization, on both the national and the
international stages, became more diverse and multicultural,
and older accusations of homogeneity
appeared redundant.
In Britain and America, for example, since 1970
the suburban aspiration of some Asian groups has
mirrored the earlier pattern of Jewish internal
migration from city to suburb. By 1970, both
London’s and New York’s Jewish populations
were already extensively suburbanized. Sociologists
also comment upon the smaller but noticeable
trend of Black internal migration from inner-urban
areas to outer suburbs. Hispanic migration in the
United States, in the vast suburban entity of Los
Angeles, emerged as a powerful trend after 1970.
Poorer-income groups, however, often lay
marooned in segregated public housing that was
often badly served by the public transport system
of the United States.
In Europe, internal migration within the
European Union, and immigration to the
European Union, has produced increasingly heterogeneous
residential suburbs since 1980. In
developing countries, notably China, South
Korea, India, and Brazil, suburbanization is massive,
rapid, and increasingly diverse. A spectrum
of suburbanization includes the shantytowns of
the poor, a range of suburbs that vary greatly in
terms of density and distance to the center, and
the exclusive, sometimes gated, communities of
the wealthy. Industrial suburbs of working-class
communities have grown up around large-scale
manufacturing plants, to some extent emulating
the postwar suburbanization of Japan’s industrial
cities. However, on the outskirts of the largest
urban centers, particularly in Asia, burgeoning
postindustrial residential areas have emerged.
Termed globurbia or globurbs by social scientists,
they appear to be a new phase of suburbanization,
where the suburban locality is shaped
from the outset by enhanced intercultural communications
via the Internet, by service-sector
places of employment, and by patterns of material
consumption that are transnational or global-
suburban in character. Indeed, as Robert