Do You Live in an Urban, Suburban, Exurban, or Rural Area?

[angus]

the American distinction between urban/suburban/exurban

I tried to find a good definition on line.  There is of course an unconvincing entry on exurbs at Wikipedia, in an article which also defines urban sprawl, suburbs, and commuter towns.  

Urban dictionary defines Exurb as "Master Planned Communities that lay outside the ring of city suburbs. Exurbs are where people can live in big, crappily built houses on the cheap, pretend to be rich yet shop at Walmart, while they spend 2 hours a day commuting to and from their highly mortgaged cribs. A place where a trip to the grocery store is a social event that involves a 10 mile drive.Where Daddy feels pressure to lease his teen a BMW, while he makes mom drive the 10 year old mini-van."

Notwithstanding the fact that "crappily" is not an actual adverb, and overlooking the grammatical error consisting of the use of the transitive verb "lay" rather than the intransitive (and correct) verb "lie", I admit that some of this applies to me.  We live in a master planned community outside the ring of city suburbs.  On the other hand, my job is only about 25 minutes (9 miles) from my crib, and the big grocery store is only 2 miles away (smaller ones are much closer.)  There are several restaurants, a small grocery, my son's dentist, our athletic club with gym and pool, a park, auto fuel, and, significantly, a liquor store, all within 1000 meters from my crib.  Also, I don't have a BMW and my wife doesn't have a mini-van.  Moreover, we definitely do not "pretend to be rich."  Rather the opposite, in fact:  despite the many threads and posts on this forum that try to apply that term to all of us in the upper quintile, I object to the term being applied to me or to my neighbors.  Still, I have to admit that a trip to Wal-mart is definitely a social event.  

m-w.com has this to say about suburb:

1  a :  an outlying part of a city or town
    b :  a smaller community adjacent to or within commuting distance of a city

and this to say about exurb:

:  a region or settlement that lies outside a city and usually beyond its suburbs and that often is inhabited chiefly by well-to-do families

Citycomfortsblog makes the argument that the distinction between suburb and exurb is neither useful nor relevant.  Not sure I agree with that either.

I suggest the following:  If the community in the 3.14 square mile area immediately surrounding your crib has a population density of 5000 people per square mile or greater, then it is urban.  If it is less than 5000 but greater than 1000, then it shall be deemed suburban.  If it is less than 1000 but greater than 100 then it shall be deemed exurban.  If it is less than 100 then it is rural.  These numbers are arbitrary and random, of course, and someone can come up with numbers that correlate to something concrete--e.g., the population density above which you are likely not to have to walk more than a mile to the nearest McDonald's or to your child's elementary school--but I suggest making the distinction, if it is to be useful, based on wholly or primarily on population density rather than aggregate population or other factors.

[Keystone Phil]

Urban but it's right across from a suburb and my area is considered more suburban when compared to the rest of the city. It really isn't though.

[checkers]

the American distinction between urban/suburban/exurban

I tried to find a good definition on line.  There is of course an unconvincing entry on exurbs at Wikipedia, in an article which also defines urban sprawl, suburbs, and commuter towns.  

Urban dictionary defines Exurb as "Master Planned Communities that lay outside the ring of city suburbs. Exurbs are where people can live in big, crappily built houses on the cheap, pretend to be rich yet shop at Walmart, while they spend 2 hours a day commuting to and from their highly mortgaged cribs. A place where a trip to the grocery store is a social event that involves a 10 mile drive.Where Daddy feels pressure to lease his teen a BMW, while he makes mom drive the 10 year old mini-van."

Notwithstanding the fact that "crappily" is not an actual adverb, and overlooking the grammatical error consisting of the use of the transitive verb "lay" rather than the intransitive (and correct) verb "lie", I admit that some of this applies to me.  We live in a master planned community outside the ring of city suburbs.  On the other hand, my job is only about 25 minutes (9 miles) from my crib, and the big grocery store is only 2 miles away (smaller ones are much closer.)  There are several restaurants, a small grocery, my son's dentist, our athletic club with gym and pool, a park, auto fuel, and, significantly, a liquor store, all within 1000 meters from my crib.  Also, I don't have a BMW and my wife doesn't have a mini-van.  Moreover, we definitely do not "pretend to be rich."  Rather the opposite, in fact:  despite the many threads and posts on this forum that try to apply that term to all of us in the upper quintile, I object to the term being applied to me or to my neighbors.  Still, I have to admit that a trip to Wal-mart is definitely a social event.  

m-w.com has this to say about suburb:

1  a :  an outlying part of a city or town
    b :  a smaller community adjacent to or within commuting distance of a city

and this to say about exurb:

:  a region or settlement that lies outside a city and usually beyond its suburbs and that often is inhabited chiefly by well-to-do families

Citycomfortsblog makes the argument that the distinction between suburb and exurb is neither useful nor relevant.  Not sure I agree with that either.

Thanks for the definitions! It sounds like I was pretty much right in what I imagined an exurb to be - though of course here that would be simply a "suburb". I'd never presume to stereotype people based on where they live quite so much, though, haha. Nor do I think that anyone in the upper quintile is "rich" - I'd say that term only applies to people who are significantly better off than the average income, personally.

I suggest the following:  If the community in the 3.14 square mile area immediately surrounding your crib has a population density of 5000 people per square mile or greater, then it is urban.  If it is less than 5000 but greater than 1000, then it shall be deemed suburban.  If it is less than 1000 but greater than 100 then it shall be deemed exurban.  If it is less than 100 then it is rural.  These numbers are arbitrary and random, of course, and someone can come up with numbers that correlate to something concrete--e.g., the population density above which you are likely not to have to walk more than a mile to the nearest McDonald's or to your child's elementary school--but I suggest making the distinction, if it is to be useful, based on wholly or primarily on population density rather than aggregate population or other factors.

Based on this definition (and my suburb's wikipedia page), it has a population density of 7,200/sq mi (2,800km2), which I guess makes it fairly solidly urban. It falls short though on your other definitions - McDonald's and elementary schools - and it really isn't all that walkable, for some reason.

[Hash]

Outer suburban. I don't really feel like my area is 'exurban', mostly because the houses here are from the 1980s or something.

[they don't love you like i love you]

Outer suburban. I don't really feel like my area is 'exurban', mostly because the houses here are from the 1980s or something.

hmmm? Newer houses such as from the 80s are exactly the sort of thing found in exurbs.

[angus]

...it really isn't all that walkable, for some reason.

Red posted a "walkscore" map at some point.  Or maybe it was someone else.

Okay, here it is.  It was phknrocket who posted it:

https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=103474.0

Typing in my zip code I get "55:  somewhat walkable."  I'm not really sure what goes into that algorithm, or whether it works for locations outside the United States, but it's an interesting website.  It is problematic, however.  It seems to take into account mostly how many stores, bars, schools, cinemas, and other commercial venues are near your location, and apply some algorithm, and come up with a score based on that.  This is misleading, however.  In the US, it is not uncommon for people to live 500 meters from a huge shopping mall, but to walk that path directly would be exceedingly dangerous and illegal, so that in reality one might have to travel many miles to arrive at the nearest retail outlet, even though your location might have a fairly high "walkability" score.  Also, it doesn't seem to take into account the pleasantness of the walk.  Is there a sidewalk to walk upon?  Does crossing a major street involve pushing a button and waiting for the crosswalk light, or do you just cross your fingers and run like hell hoping not to get hit by a car?  It seems only to be about distances.  It also seems to be funded by apartment renters and realtors, which probably raises flags with respect to its objectivity.

Maybe there's a better algorithm out there, which compares walking in various neighborhoods in a more practical way.

[traininthedistance]

...it really isn't all that walkable, for some reason.

Red posted a "walkscore" map at some point.  Or maybe it was someone else.

Okay, here it is.  It was phknrocket who posted it:

https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=103474.0

Typing in my zip code I get "55:  somewhat walkable."  I'm not really sure what goes into that algorithm, or whether it works for locations outside the United States, but it's an interesting website.  It is problematic, however.  It seems to take into account mostly how many stores, bars, schools, cinemas, and other commercial venues are near your location, and apply some algorithm, and come up with a score based on that.  This is misleading, however.  In the US, it is not uncommon for people to live 500 meters from a huge shopping mall, but to walk that path directly would be exceedingly dangerous and illegal, so that in reality one might have to travel many miles to arrive at the nearest retail outlet, even though your location might have a fairly high "walkability" score.  Also, it doesn't seem to take into account the pleasantness of the walk.  Is there a sidewalk to walk upon?  Does crossing a major street involve pushing a button and waiting for the crosswalk light, or do you just cross your fingers and run like hell hoping not to get hit by a car?  It seems only to be about distances.  It also seems to be funded by apartment renters and realtors, which probably raises flags with respect to its objectivity.

Maybe there's a better algorithm out there, which compares walking in various neighborhoods in a more practical way.

Yeah, that pretty much hits the nail on the head wrt Walkscore's limitations.  Of course, making a more robust algorithm is actually really hard, because if you're gonna scale it to large areas, it's going to have to be automated, and it's not so easy to automate the subjective pedestrian experience.  Even though it is easy to tell the difference between a) auto-centered development where you have to walk out of the way, with intermittent-to-no-sidewalks, with cars whizzing by, and b) traditional town centers.  How do you plug that in to the formula?  I'm not aware of a computer that's able to look at Street View imagery and make the determination.  (Yet. If there are any programmers out there that have cracked that nut, I will raise my glass.)

Well, there is one thing I can think of that would make a little bit of difference- if we could get super-detailed maps that actually know when there are sidewalks and pedestrian paths*, and if we calculate distance based on walking paths rather than just radii.  That's definitely calculable, and even if it can't tell the difference between high-quality sidewalks and worthless tokens on the side of speedways, it's a start.  Of course, that depends on having all that data in your map layer, and I don't think we're there yet, at least not in most places.  So we're stuck with the imperfect WalkScore as the best scalable tool so far.

*One thing that I see sometimes, but not nearly enough, when looking at twisty auto-maze development, is walking paths that provide shortcuts and don't just go along the roads.  I suspect that adding them back in is going to be one of the few bits of retrofit low-hanging fruit that those areas will be able to do to increase their quality of life.  But of course there is going to need to be a bit of a culture change where people realize that maybe they want to be able to walk to places, or at least recognize that the freedom to be able to walk to places is a legitimate freedom.

[politicallefty]

My parents lived in urban San Diego when I was born. Other than that, I've lived in the suburbs my entire life.

[Smash255]

I live in one of those inner suburbs that popped up right after WW2.

^^^ This

[traininthedistance]

Oh, and to answer the OP's question... urban of course.

My neighborhood actually has a bunch of turn-of-the-century Victorians which in another context could seem suburban, but it also has apartment buildings and a subway line and all that jazz.  

The neighborhood I grew up in was very much inner-suburban; my street was developed in the 1920s though some nearby areas are postwar.  There's a small commercial strip very nearby that makes walking for some things feasible (restaurants, dry-cleaning, barbershops, that sort of stuff) but it's limited what you can do.  The other side of town is older and more urban- if you plug my parents' home into WalkScore you get 49 for our address, but just the zip code gets you a 71 (and certain areas will go higher than that).

Oh and it appears that WalkScore does in fact calculate distances along paths rather than just a circular buffer, which is a decent baseline level of sophistication.

[Linus Van Pelt]

I don't think I've ever heard anyone use the term "exurb" outside the Atlas Forum and maybe one or two buzzwordish newspaper or magazine articles.

[muon2]

There are lots of definitions of urban, etc. which make it hard to sort communities into categories. I would start with the Census definition of an urbanized area (total population > 50 K) which has a core population density of at least 1000 persons per sq mi (ppsm) in a 3 sq mi area and contiguous tracts and blocks of at least 500 ppsm. Within that area I would count communities with densities in excess of 4-5K as urban and those under that number as suburban. In large municipalities one can have both urban and suburban areas, particularly when an older city became engulfed by suburbs. Outside of that are small to mid-sized towns (often represented by urban clusters in the Census) and rural areas.

Exurbs are areas that overlap between suburban and rural. I think that the Brookings Institution had a reasonably good definition in their 2006 report.

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The operative phrases for me are "urban fringe" and "population growth".  By this definition suburbs on the edge can be exurbs, but are prone to lose that designation after a couple of decades once development moves further out. It's why we see posts debating whether 1980's housing still qualifies. This definition also picks up urban clusters just outside the urbanized area that have developed into growing commuter towns, but differentiates it from a rural community that historically provided some commuting workforce but is relatively stable in population.

[angus]

total population > 50 K; a core population density of at least 1000 persons per sq mi (ppsm) in a 3 sq mi area

That's a coarse grain.  With it you'd end up categorizing Shanghai (90000 per square mile) and Manhattan (50000 per square mile) with Athens--the one in Georgia--which has 852 people per square mile, and Denton, Texas (with 1279 people per square mile).  Maybe there's a good reason for that.  I'm not well schooled in demographic studies, but it strikes me as a very broad definition.

Your Brookings Institute definition of exurbs fits us a little better than the Urban Dictionary one, but I've already voted for Suburban.  Also, Manheim Township has ~40K people, a density of ~1500 per square mile, is something of a bedroom community, and is an urban fringe:  it borders Lancaster (~60K people; ~8000 per square mile).  MT also has a fairly rapid growth (from 30ish to 40ish over the past 15 years).  But Lancaster isn't really big enough to support both a ring of suburbs and a ring of exurbs, so I'd regard MT, being on the inner ring--we're about 4 or 5 miles from downtown Lancaster--as more more of a suburb.  Beyond MT it gets rural for a bit, but in any direction you'll hit other suburban communities.  E.g., Lititz, PA, population 10K and density 4K, is just a few miles north of here.  Is lititz urban, suburban, or exurban?  It certainly has a very closely packed little group of buildings, and in that core it's walking distance to everything and it has regularly-scheduled bus service, but its core doesn't have greater than 50K.  (Lititz also has the distinction of having as its high school football team mascot a very fierce looking amerindian warrior, and as far as I know, no newspaper editorial has ever complained of it being a racial stereotype.  It may very well be the only one in the USA that has that distinction.)

[checkers]

...it really isn't all that walkable, for some reason.

Red posted a "walkscore" map at some point.  Or maybe it was someone else.

Yeah, that pretty much hits the nail on the head wrt Walkscore's limitations. 

Thanks for the link - I'd been on that bikescore website, but I didn't know it extended to neighbourhoods here. My neighbourhood scored 88 (very walkable) and 63 (good transit). I think though, the criticisms you and traininthedistance raised of the site are spot on. Looking at that map made me realise just how many shops/restaurants etc. were in my area but I don't walk to them all that much - in my case, not because walking is that unpleasant, but because the commercial things here just aren't that appealing - the supermarket is tiny and the restaurants (bar one) just aren't all that good. In part, that's because there are lots of commercial streets nearby by car but out of walking distance. Pretty much all the streets in my suburb are either quiet and residential, or get a lot of heavy traffic leading out of the city, meaning that there's just no naturally pleasant environment for shopping, dining, etc.

The suburb next to mine is a similar instance of this - it was a commercial centre in the 19th century and it has some great Victorian housing - but it was bisected by a freeway in the 1970s (due to some really poor urban planning) and hence it's really unpleasant to walk anywhere.

[Frodo]

Inner suburban actually, but for the purpose of this exercise I guess 'suburban' would cover it. 

[Dave from Michigan]

Suburban although my city existed way before the suburbs but has been overtaken by them. If you go west of where I live you enter the country but with some exurban subdivisions.

[muon2]

Suburban although my city existed way before the suburbs but has been overtaken by them. If you go west of where I live you enter the country but with some exurban subdivisions.

That's the situation for my city as well. Since I live in the old center I get a walkscore of 75 - very walkable, most errands can be accomplished on foot. That seems accurate since I'm within a half mile of the train station, library, banks, restaurants, grocers, Ace Hardware, and Walgreens. Even so, it's definitely a suburban area.

[Sol]

Rural area.

Where in NJ is rural?

[traininthedistance]

Rural area.

Where in NJ is rural?

While all of NJ is in a statistical metro area, that's an artifact of county boundaries.  More of NJ than you'd think is rural, especially in the south.  Salem and Cumberland still have plenty of farms, and the sparsely-populated Pine Barrens take up much of Burlington and Ocean.  You could make an argument for parts of the northwest as well, though the exurban fringe has been eating into that for awhile.

[Sol]

Rural area.

Where in NJ is rural?

While all of NJ is in a statistical metro area, that's an artifact of county boundaries.  More of NJ than you'd think is rural, especially in the south.  Salem and Cumberland still have plenty of farms, and the sparsely-populated Pine Barrens take up much of Burlington and Ocean.  You could make an argument for parts of the northwest as well, though the exurban fringe has been eating into that for awhile.

I suppose so. Though my post was more a divining effort to see if NJ Christian is one of those suburbanites who claims to be rural.

[TJ in Oregon]

I'd say urban, though it feels weird to call Madison "urban" . I do live in an apartment in fairly dense part of town.

[they don't love you like i love you]

I don't think I've ever heard anyone use the term "exurb" outside the Atlas Forum and maybe one or two buzzwordish newspaper or magazine articles.

I've seen it in TIME magazine and the NY Times. Not that unmainstream of a word, though not commonly used in day to day convo, you'll never hear someone say "I live in an exurb" or describe some town as an exurb in real life of course. I've found that even people who play Ingress are unfamiliar with it. There was once and an argument in our team chat about if Watertown, MN (an important site for a variety of reasons) should be considered part of the metro or if it's "rural", when I explained that it's an exurb I got a bunch of replies like "wtf is that?"

[traininthedistance]

Rural area.

Where in NJ is rural?

While all of NJ is in a statistical metro area, that's an artifact of county boundaries.  More of NJ than you'd think is rural, especially in the south.  Salem and Cumberland still have plenty of farms, and the sparsely-populated Pine Barrens take up much of Burlington and Ocean.  You could make an argument for parts of the northwest as well, though the exurban fringe has been eating into that for awhile.

I suppose so. Though my post was more a divining effort to see if NJ Christian is one of those suburbanites who claims to be rural.

The municipality I live in is included on this list:

http://www.rurdev.usda.gov/NJEligibleAreas.html

Plus, city-data.com says it is overwhelmingly rural.

I'm not entirely sure how Burlington City got on that USDA list, among others.  A lot of those towns are functionally exurban or even just suburban.

City-data's rural/urban classifications seem to be pretty appropriately strict, though.  If they say you're rural... you're rural.  (I assume they're using the Census Bureau definition of less than 500 people per sq mi, measured by tract.)

[MaxQue]

Other: Regional center.

A 35k city in the middle of nowhere. Clearly not rural.

[TDAS04]

Small urban area, close to suburban in its feel, but not quite.