SuBlurbia: How Cities and Their Suburbs Are Becoming One and the Same

Old stereotypes about suburban and city lifestyles are falling away as the two residential categories become more and more similar. Changing poverty concentrations, traffic congestion and transit infrastructure, school quality, and the proliferation of online shopping are some of the factors causing this convergence. 

Companies like Amazon are able to doubly profit off this trend, and with their new HQ2 project, their presence has the potential to reshape suburban areas with more housing, new retail development, and infrastructure updates, further erasing the line between urban and suburban, per BloombergView.

One way to study the future is to see how new cities and suburbs are being built, mostly looking toward Asia. Rapidly growing areas have lots of well-distributed skyscrapers, but without a clearly defined urban center as you might find in European (or some American) cities with 18th century or medieval roots. Singapore is sometimes called a “city-state,” but outside of its small central core, it often feels more like a “suburb-state,” albeit with high population density.

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