Latin under-city zones that grew with rail commuting
Suburbs are mostly residential metropolitan belts within commuting range of a large city. English borrowed Old French subburbe from Latin suburbium—sub plus urbs—and Oxford dates the English noun to the fourteenth century as towns began naming their outskirts.
The idea is far older than the English word. Walled market towns have long been ringed by smaller villages that lived off them, and Cicero used suburbani for the grand villas wealthy Roman patricians built on the city's edge. The earliest English example, suburbes, appears around 1350 in the Midlands Prose Psalter. Mass suburbanisation, though, came only in the 19th and 20th centuries, when better railways and roads made daily commuting practical. Suburbs thrive where cities have plenty of flat land next door.
What counts as a suburb depends on where you stand. In the United States many are separate municipalities with their own governments, and the belt beyond them is called exurbia, thinner than suburbs but denser than farmland; yet Washington has no formal definition, even though most Americans say they live in one. In Britain and Ireland the word simply means a residential district outside the centre, regardless of boundaries, and many were once independent villages swallowed by growth, such as Ealing and Bromley in London or Tallaght near Dublin. In Australia, New Zealand and South Africa suburbs are formal city subdivisions used in postal addresses, split into inner, middle and outer rings, so a dense inner suburb there might count as downtown elsewhere.
Governance varies too. Cities in India, China, Brazil, Canada and Britain routinely annex new suburbs as they sprawl, whereas in France, Morocco and much of America they often stay independent or are run by counties or boroughs.
Historians of suburbia study their growth, culture and politics, including their family-centred, gendered design. A common image of early-20th-century suburbs as white middle-class enclaves is partly stereotype: some were built by working-class and minority families seeking to own homes, while others adopted explicitly racist rules to keep outsiders away.
Source: Suburb
