outskirts vs. suburbs vs. exurbs

[Tintrlvr]

I think "outskirts" is mostly synonymous with "exurbs". Both mean areas that are on the border between rural and suburban.

Exurbs have pockets of detached single-family homes with significant undeveloped spaces between. Suburbs have continuous stretches of detached single-family homes throughout their area with no significant undeveloped spaces other than parkland, but are less dense than urban areas and have only a small portion if any of their housing as attached, semi-detached or multi-family homes. Urban areas have a significant portion, sometimes but not necessarily a majority, of their housing in forms other than detached single-family homes (whether that's in multi-family homes, attached or semi-detached single-family homes or something else depends on the area).

This means that some places within a large city's boundaries might be suburban (or even exurban, rarely, when city boundaries are wildly overinclusive, such as Jacksonville, Florida) in certain cases, while areas outside of a large city's boundaries may still be urban (such as Cambridge, Massachusetts relative to Boston or Jersey City, New Jersey relative to New York City) in other cases.

For what it's worth, I think this definition puts the suburban/exurban boundary on Long Island further east than others placed it - eyeballing Google Maps, perhaps at NY-112, which seems to be about when you start getting significant amounts of land that is simply undeveloped.

[Tintrlvr]

Personally, I never really use the term "exurb."  If a city/town/village/whatever is anchored around a "major city," then it is that city's suburb.  Inner, outer, whatever; it's a suburb.  I appreciate the clarity that suburb vs. exurb provides some people, however.  Additionally, there is probably a cutoff for me where at a certain point I feel silly calling somewhere a suburb due to the cultural connotations the word has.  For example, West Des Moines is absolutely a suburb of Des Moines, but I feel kind of goofy calling Morton a "suburb" of Peoria, because it has more of a small town feel (even though, objectively, Morton really IS a "suburb" of Peoria).

I don't think Peoria is big enough to even talk about exurbs. Maybe more to the point, its metro area isn't growing much. Exurbs exist mostly around large to very large cities where there is population growth on the fringes (even if there's not much growth/decline in the center - Detroit does have exurbs despite the metro area as a whole being stagnant).