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

[angus]

I went with sub, although I'm not well versed in the parameter.  (MT has ~1500 people per sq. mi.)

[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.

[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.

[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.)