The Nature of the Suburb and the Inner City in North America: A Discussion
This essay will critically examine the inner city and the suburb in modern North America, and explore the complex mythologies that obscure the reality of life in our urban settings today. It will be argued that while suburbs were originally defined by the need to escape the inner city, increasingly the inner cities of North America are today being defined by an escape from the suburbs with suburban values of security and private space redefining the public spaces of our inner cities. As will be seen, this process is a product of the complex demographic transformation of urban and suburban populations in terms of age, ethnicity, class, gender and race, occurring in the midst of a fundamental economic revolution in North America from an industrial to a post-industrial society.12 pgs. 7 sources.
