Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

Suburbs are such a characteristic feature of the twentieth century, especially here in the United States, that you'd be forgiven for assuming they're a wholly modern phenomenon. In fact, the general concept of "not quite in the city, but very much associated with it" is very old; it's just the scale and to some extent the organization of it that changes.

And it isn't hard to see why. Cities are, by nature, going to be noisier, smellier, and more crowded than the countryside; because of that, it's practically a universal law that rich people will want to get away from them -- but not too far away. They'll maintain villas or equivalent just outside the city walls, within easy distance so they can go in for an afternoon or a day, then retire to more comfortable surroundings at night. They get all the economic and political benefits of being close to where the action is, without subjecting themselves to too many of the downsides.

Living outside the city isn't only for the rich, though. Most pre-modern cities are going to have vegetable gardens and/or dairy farms outside their walls, which means they'll probably also have the houses of the people tending those gardens and farms, and it isn't uncommon for those to nucleate slightly into villages. After all, you don't want to have to walk into the city for everything; much more convenient to have your parish church and local alehouse (or regional equivalents) closer at hand.

These things don't form evenly. If you look at early modern maps -- which are usually the first point at which we can see anything like accurate visual representation -- they very much tend to string out along the major roads leading to and from the city. That's because they also serve the function of catering to travelers, who might prefer to lodge just outside the city rather than in its (noisy, smelly, crowded) heart. Or the outskirts are where those travelers leave their horses and carriages, rather than trying to wrangle such things in tighter confines. Or they pause to eat and freshen up, then continue on in. The city winds up looking like an octopus, with legs stretching in all directions.

But that's the thin end of the suburban wedge -- the sort of thing called a fauborg in French, with the English "fore-town" being a less common equivalent. (A "suburb" is "below the city," and reflects the tendency to build fortified towns on hilltops, meaning that their outlying settlements are literally below them.) So long as urban populations remain small, so will their penumbra.

As soon as something causes the city to boom, though, it's going to have growing pains. Maybe the capital shifts there, or a war causes refugees to flood in, or famine and economic disaster hit the countryside, or industrialization creates a huge new demand for labor. Suddenly you have a lot more people, and the very pressing question of where to put them. Are existing sites in the city sufficient to take in these people? And even if the answer is "yes," will they? Especially if the influx consists of refugees and penniless migrants, local establishments may not want to rent to them, or local government may forbid them to settle within the city's bounds.

Since those people still want to be in or near the city, though, they're going to crowd as close as they can get -- and I do mean crowd. The kind of shanty town that springs up in these circumstances usually has an insanely high population density, not least because the kind of people shoved out to the margins don't have a lot of money to spend on construction. The buildings may barely even merit the name, being a conglomeration of tents, lean-tos, and whatever makeshift materials can be pressed into service, or shoddy walls and roofs thrown up in a hurry that may come down even faster. There's little to no infrastructure, and because these places are frequently outside the official authority of the city, there's little to no governance. Disease and crime are extremely high -- but the people who live there can't just afford to pack up and go somewhere else. They have no choice but to cope.

Until, of course, something else intervenes. Quite frequently that is fire: all it takes is one spark and a place like this is liable to go up in flames. Then, since the people who lived there almost certainly have no legal title to the land, it's easy for someone else to snap that up, or for whoever owned it in the first place to seize their chance to evict everyone en masse. The area is unlikely to revert to green field pastoralism, though, because by now you're no longer looking at a modest little city supplied by its neighboring vegetable gardens. If the settlement has grown enough to have this kind of extramural slum, odds are very good that it will also grow straight into the space left behind: gentrification by fire.

Throw all of these factors into a pot together, and you get the process by which a city grows. I used the term "extramural" there very deliberately, because in any society without efficient artillery or equivalent, most cities are going to be walled, and these elite houses, neighboring villages, and suburban slums are outside that line. But walls aren't a one-and-done affair; new ones may be built farther out, with or without demolishing the older version first. If you look at the historical geography of Constantinople, you'll find a steady march up the peninsula on which the city sits, with the Severan Wall enclosing a modest area, the Constantinian Wall significantly farther out, and the famous Theodosian Walls farther still. You can track the growth of the city by how much later rulers felt needed to be protected.

Or cities can grow without moving their walls. London and Westminster were separate settlements about two miles (three kilometers) apart, but a lot of business was in London while much of the work of government was in Westminster. When an enterprising earl received a chunk of the land between them in the mid-sixteenth century, he deliberately constructed a fashionable area -- now Covent Garden Square -- to attract the kind of rich tenants who might be regularly visiting both places. It was the prototype of a later building spree that created the West End we see today, part and parcel of how for the last two or three hundred years, London has been steadily absorbing those and all the smaller towns around it. Nor is it the only one: many other cities worldwide have sprawled to an enormous footprint many times larger than their original cores.

What's different about modern suburbs -- especially in the U.S. -- is that they're often entirely new construction, along the lines of Covent Garden, with developers creating communities out of whole cloth. Or perhaps I shouldn't say "communities," because that implies a kind of social fabric that rarely exists there. Many of these places get referred to with phrases like "bedroom town," pointing at the way residents are expected to sleep but not really live there. The worst of them have few if any local businesses, so that you have to conduct all your shopping, doctor's visits, and outside entertainments somewhere else.

But to get that kind of suburb, you need something else in the mix: transportation. And that's next week's essay!



(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/4alWQd)