Suburbanization and the employment linkage

When North Americans speak about suburbs they usually mean the sorts of low-density residential environments in which most of us now live. These are the sorts of landscapes that have attracted the attention of urban historians.1 For many years scholars documented the genealogy of the affluent suburb, showing how it was adapted and diluted to form the modern planned subdivision. Recently, some have attended to the grittier places that were settled by workers and immigrants, including the neighborhoods that grew up beside suburban industry. Even here, however, the factory chimney lies in the background of the picture, offering plausible depth to a scene that is still largely domestic.2 More commonly still, it has been airbrushed out. The essays collected here are written from a different standpoint, one that puts the factory-and, if only implicitly, the office functions that often went with it-in the forefront.3 The view is invigorating, if sometimes grim, and brings us closer to the balanced understanding to which scholars usually aspire. To understand suburbanization, however, we must do more than add industry to the mix and stir. Several contributors suggest that the suburbanization of homes depended on the decentralization of industry, and some hint that the reverse was also true. These were linked processes. This chapter explores that important but neglected truism. The connection of work and home-what James Vance has termed the employment linkage-is vital to the changing form of urban areas.4 It has been neglected because, as is often the case, we have allowed available evidence to shape our research. There is abundant information, for example in the decennial census, about the location of housing and of factories, and this tells us about the character of specific suburbs, and of suburbs in general. Scholars have applied descriptive terms such as the "residential" or "industrial" suburb to describe places with, respectively, a surplus of people or of manufacturing jobs, along with an intermediate category for "mixed" or "balanced" suburbs. Such terms are applied to places that have constituted themselves as municipalities but that often lack a functional identity. They describe the results of suburbanization, not the process itself. The existence of a mature industrial suburb, for example, has often been taken to indicate that industry led the way into the urban fringe. In fact, such a suburb could have evolved in different ways, beginning as a mixed or even a residential community, before acquiring its industrial character. Its mature form is a fallible guide to the formative process, and the same is true for other types of suburbs. I argue that to understand the long-term spreading out of homes and industry, we need to worry less about types of suburbs and think more about the process by which they came into being. In the first section of this chapter I elaborate on this point, distinguishing between the processes of residential, industrial, and balanced suburbanization, as well as a compound type that I call alternating development. The different processes of suburbanization have been active in every urban area, but not to the same degree. Scholars, including many of the contributors to the present collection, have suggested why suburbanization took particular forms in specific urban areas, but in an ad hoc manner that has not led to systematic reflection. For this reason we have little idea whether the importance of the different processes changed over time. In the second and third sections of this chapter I discuss the causes of local variation before considering the question of historical trends. The arguments that I develop are speculative. To test them it will often be necessary to undertake time-consuming research with primary records. In the final section I indicate how such research might proceed and why it should be undertaken. © 2004 by The Temple University Press. All rights reserved.