Essay | A planet of suburbs

Places apart

The world is becoming ever more suburban, and the better for it

THIRTY kilometres south of central Chennai, just out of earshot of the honking, hand-painted lorries roaring up Old Mahabalipuram Road, you seem to have reached rural India. The earth road buckles and heaves. Farmers dressed in Madras-checked dhotis rest outside huts roofed with palm leaves. Goats wander about. Then you turn a corner, go through a gate, and arrive in California.

Lakewood Enclave is a new development of 28 large two-storey houses, wedged tightly together. The houses are advertised as “Balinese-style”, although in truth they are hard to tell apart from any number of suburban homes around the world. Outside, the houses are painted a pale pinkish-brown; inside, the walls are white, the floors are stone and the design is open-plan. They each have three bedrooms (middle-class Tamil families are small these days) and a covered driveway to protect a car from the melting sun. Just one detail makes them distinctively Indian: a cupboard near the door for Hindu gods.

A quarter of a century ago your correspondent taught in a school not far from these houses. It was a rural area; bonnet macaques would sometimes invade his shower. Now farmers are selling their small parcels of land to housebuilders for sums beyond previous imagining. Commuters are rushing in so that, every morning, they can rush out again. Chengalpattu, the district where Lakewood lies (see map—where the new development is also pictured), now contains more than half a million people. Lakewood looks likely to be the rule, not the exception. “The force of human nature means it will happen,” says Balaji Narasimhan of SSPDL, its developer. “You can’t stop it.”

The shift in population from countryside to cities across the world is often called the “great urbanisation”. It is a misleading term. The movement is certainly great: the United Nations reckons that the total urban population in developing countries will double between 2010 and 2050, to 5.2 billion, while the rural population will shrink slightly. But it is nothing like as obviously urban. People may be moving towards cities, but most will not end up in their centres. Few cities are getting more crowded downtown; between 2001 and 2011 Chennai added just 7% more people while Chengalpattu swelled by 39%. In developed and developing worlds, outskirts are growing faster than cores. This is not the great urbanisation. It is the great suburbanisation.

Suburbs are curious places, neither here nor there. They have been around since ancient Rome (which gave the world the word), but it was not until the 19th and 20th centuries that first the train and then the bus and car brought them truly into their own—the first places in human history where many people lived but far fewer worked. The idea of places with little purpose other than providing space for domestic life struck those from city and country alike as peculiar and diminished. In 1904 the Times worried that London would be surrounded by “a district of appalling monotony, ugliness and dullness”. That dullness was said to seep out of the suburbs’ tidily planned streets and into the minds of their inhabitants, giving rise to a condition known as suburban neurosis. To Lewis Mumford, an American urbanist writing in 1961, suburbia was:

a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mould.

To observers like Mumford, suburbs were not just unfortunate urban appendages; they were anti-urban. They enabled a woman to opt out of the vibrant, sociable city, where she at least knew her local butcher and grocer, and live what he called “an encapsulated life” apart from others. Suburbs were machineries of isolation.

The financial crisis of 2008 turned bien-pensant concern and disdain into a new doom-mongering. The crisis hit the suburbs exceptionally hard: many, especially newer ones, became blighted by foreclosure; their economies, which rested on building and selling houses, collapsed. In 2012 Stockton, a previously fast-growing burgh in the suburban sprawl of the San Francisco Bay Area, became the biggest city in American history to file for bankruptcy. San Bernardino, another essentially suburban city, soon followed. In parts of California an uptick in cases of West Nile virus was blamed on the many abandoned swimming pools. At this point the argument against suburbia changed. It was no longer regrettable but inevitable. It was dead.

Leigh Gallagher’s book “The End of the Suburbs”, published in 2013, is not so much an attack on suburbia as a post-mortem assessment of its pathologies. Americans—especially young Americans—have turned against the car-oriented, low-rise life, she explains. They are flocking to city centres, where they live in rented apartments, take trams or walk to work, and hang out in coffee shops. The suburbs are left ever poorer and more criminal. In more subtle pieces of high-density triumphalism like “The Triumph of the City” by Edward Glaeser and “The Great Inversion” by Alan Ehrenhalt, suburbs are no longer a threat to successful cities. Instead, successful cities threaten them.

American suburbs undoubtedly have their problems, as this year’s riots and protests after the shooting of a teenager in Ferguson, a suburb of St Louis, show. Many suburbs are poorer than once they were, and a lot of city centres are much more attractive places to live than they used to be. Still, more than half of Americans now live in suburbs, and many of them do so by choice. The world as a whole is quickly following suit. In the 1950s Taiwanese planners toured Britain’s garden cities and returned to build some of their own. Orange County, north of Beijing, is a clone of the California suburb it is named after, even down to the kidney-shaped swimming pools. In much of the world people born in cities, or who came to cities young, are moving out, and incomers from the country do not manage, or aspire, to live right in the centre of their chosen city. Even as their populations grow, the density of metropolitan areas is dropping all around the developing world.

Those who argue that suburbia is dying are wrong on the facts; those who say it is doomed by the superiority of higher-density life make a far from convincing case. Cities that have sought to stop the sprawl—London is the most striking example—have achieved dubious benefits at great cost.

In one sense the critics are right: suburbs are a place apart. People who live close to the heart of buzzing cities can feel themselves part of a great project. Suburbanites have relinquished that, or forgone it. What they have gained in its stead is surprisingly consistent from city to city and from country to country. Suburbs are about family, ease and quietness. Searingly ambitious people find them dull, and some become alienated in them. But many others experience a humble liberation. D.J. Waldie, then an official in the southern California city of, as it happens, Lakewood, described his suburb as “adequate to the demands of my desire”. And to a great many other people’s desires, it turns out.

The quickening spread

“THE city is old,” says Dhakshinamoorthy Dhinakaran, a property developer who has built a gated development of two-storey houses 35km south-west of Chennai and 15km from Lakewood Enclave. He has a point. Chennai is a scruffy place. The British, who called it Madras, left it with few grand buildings, and some of those it once boasted were subsequently razed in favour of shopping centres or new digs for Tamil Nadu’s politicians. Many buildings look older than they are, and not in a good way—they have been corroded by hot sun and humid air. The sewers overflow when it rains. But outside Chennai, a new India is rising.

The roads out of the city are lined with half-finished four- and five-storey apartment blocks, most with man-sized figurines lashed to concrete pillars to ward off superstitious trespassers. Behind them, tidy family houses and high-rise apartment buildings are going up. Every other billboard seems to advertise new homes.

Chennai is spreading less because its inhabitants are desperate to leave the old city than because their jobs have moved. Carmakers have built factories outside the city, and workers have followed. Information technology has grown to the south. The World Bank calculates that, between 1998 and 2005, the number of IT jobs within 25km of the centre of Chennai increased by 27%. In the same period, 47% more IT jobs were added in an outer ring between 25km and 50km from Chennai. In high-tech manufacturing, the urban core lost about a quarter of its workers, while the outer ring gained 23% more jobs.

The biggest and most spectacular IT campus in Tamil Nadu belongs to Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). It looks like Optimus Prime taking a nap. The 60,000 people inside the Transformer lookalike do back-office tasks for Western firms and governments. One of them, taking a lunch break, is Karbagam Chandrasekaran. She lives at home with her parents in Chennai, and takes a bus to the campus each day—a journey of about an hour and a half. She likes city living for its convenience, but has heard that the schools are better in the suburbs, and would prefer to live closer to work. When she marries (young Indians almost always say “when”, not “if”) she expects to move out, particularly if her husband also works in the IT corridor.

More than 225 TCS buses run to and from campus every day, many of them carrying workers to and from homes in the old city. Other IT firms do the same, with the result that traffic jams towards Chennai in the evening are often worse than the jams in the opposite direction. But this is changing. Ravi Viswanathan, TCS’s president for growth markets, says that new employees are more likely to live in the suburbs. Buildings are newer, rents are lower and well-regarded private schools have appeared, along with new hospitals and restaurants. At the weekend, Mr Viswanathan says, the main roads around TCS’s campus used to be almost deserted except for cattle. Now they are thick with cars and motorbikes.

Officials have periodically tried to rein in this sprawl. But, in common with many other Indian cities, the government is weak and indecisive, and the city is spreading so quickly that any plan is soon out of date. The boldest attempt to restrain sprawl can be found 45km south of Chennai. In 2002 Mahindra, a conglomerate, began building a large industrial park known as Mahindra World City. The idea—pushed by the Tamil Nadu government, which provided tax breaks—was to create a new city to take pressure off the old one. It has not quite worked out that way. Mahindra World City is successful: its 63 business tenants already employ 30,000 people. But as other businesses and homes sprout nearby, it feels less and less separate from Chennai’s suburban sprawl. Mahindra World City has extended Chennai’s suburbs rather than creating an alternative to the metropolis.

To Chennai’s rather conservative inhabitants, this barely controlled spread seems evidence of official failure, and perhaps of official corruption. But it is not unusual. Other big Indian cities are losing jobs and people to the suburbs, too: the population of central Mumbai is actually falling. Chinese cities are sprawling even more extravagantly. Under the Maoist regime, they were mostly dense and organised into danwei—socialist production machines composed of factories, apartments and basic services. The introduction of market reforms severed the link between urban jobs and homes, priming a suburban explosion.

Just how powerful and widespread this centrifugal trend will be is suggested by the work of Shlomo Angel, a geographer at New York University. By using satellite images, old maps and population data, Mr Angel has run a ruler over some 3,600 metropolitan areas. He finds that, with few exceptions, they are less dense in wealthier countries (see map). Paris is less than one-third as densely populated as Cairo and barely one-seventh as dense as Mumbai. Even rich cities that seem packed are sparsely populated compared with poorer ones. Tokyo is only one-fifth as densely populated as Dhaka, for example.

Mr Angel also finds that almost every city is becoming less dense. In 1920 Chicago squeezed 59 people into each hectare of land; now, by his reckoning, it manages just 16. The urbanised area of Mexico City is about half as densely populated as it was in 1940. Beijing’s population density has collapsed from 425 people per hectare in 1970 to just 65 people per hectare, or about the same as Chicago at its most crowded. Few metropolises are becoming more crowded, and most of those that are were exceptionally spread out to begin with, such as Los Angeles and Johannesburg.

The simple truth is that as people become richer they consume more space, just as they consume more energy, more goods and more services. Even if they live in towers, those towers are likely to be widely spaced, and the households that live in them will be small—wealth also being associated with small families. Mr Angel finds that population densities tend to drop when Chinese cities knock down cheaply built walk-up apartments and replace them with high towers. And many people will opt not to live in towers but in even less dense detached or semi-detached houses.

Wealth fuels sprawl. The process is happening apace in the developing parts of the world. In the developed parts, where cities and suburbs combined expect only 160m more people by 2050, it is largely over. There the question is whether it can be reversed.

The permanent present

FEW places on Earth are as suburban as Phoenix, Arizona. The city has never been any other way: it barely existed before cheap cars and has always been subject to their centrifugal power. It is now the sixth-most-populous city in America, part of an exceedingly spread-out metropolis of 4.4m people that also includes Mesa, Scottsdale and Tempe, their borders no more easily distinguished than those of algal blooms on a pond. Apart from a handful of office blocks dotted about the place, Phoenix seldom rises above three storeys, and much of it does not rise above one. Almost everybody can afford a house and a yard somewhere. “The richest people in Phoenix live on one acre [0.4 hectares],” explains Grady Gammage, a lawyer and local expert. “The poorest live on about one-fifth of an acre.”

The extent of the sprawl is not set by people’s willingness to travel. It is set by infrastructure. Look at Phoenix in satellite pictures taken at night and its bright blobbiness has a sharp edge quite unlike those of cities such as Boston and New York. There, dense suburbs slowly give way to loose, forested suburbs and eventually to rural hamlets (albeit occupied by people who tend to spreadsheets rather than the back 40). At the edge of Phoenix, suburb turns to desert about a block from where the mains-water supply stops. Phoenix is suburban in its heart, suburban at its extremities and suburban in between. But some in power wish it was not.

Walking around downtown Phoenix—an activity that takes barely half an hour—Greg Stanton, the city’s mayor, points out a new high-rise student dormitory, new coffee shops, pocket parks and a 32km tram line installed in 2008. In a few spots, the dominance of the car has been challenged, albeit politely: large green flower pots have been plonked at the edges of roads, making them narrower.

When he gave his annual “state of the city” speech in March, much of it was devoted to downtown. Cities need dense, vibrant, youthful cores, he says. Young people are less keen on driving, partly because they cannot use their mobile phones while doing so. They wish to walk around and take trams (not buses: Americans associate those with the poor). To attract them, Phoenix must become more city-like. The tram network must be extended. High-rise apartment buildings should rise up next to its stations.

The mayor has improved the image of Phoenix a little. But neither he nor the many people who share his vision have been able to do anything about its fundamentally suburban, car-focused character. While a few people trickle into centrally located apartments, the fastest-growing places in Arizona these days are the suburban tracts on the edges of metropolitan Phoenix. Goodyear, an agglomeration of such tracts just to the west, grew by 12% between 2010 and 2013.

A few years ago, when foreclosure and rising petrol prices held American suburbs in a vice, confident predictions were made about their abandonment and the repopulation of city centres. William Frey of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, has shown that urban counties are indeed growing in population more quickly than they did a decade ago, while suburban growth has slowed. The two are now roughly equal (see chart). This does not, however, mean that Americans are now equally drawn to central cities and to suburbs. The fastest-growing parts of the country are now nearly all suburban (the exceptions are urban New Orleans, still bouncing back from Hurricane Katrina, and rural North Dakota, which is fired by a shale-gas boom). Between 2007 and 2011 the 25 biggest county-to-county migrations in America were all from more urban counties to more suburban ones.

Between 2012 and 2013 the areas that the Census Bureau calls “principal cities” absorbed 3.3m migrants from elsewhere in America—but they shed 5.4m people, leaving a net loss due to in-country migration of 2.1m. Foreign immigrants and babies saved them from outright depopulation. The suburbs, meanwhile, added 5.8m domestic migrants and only lost 3.2m, suggesting their pull remains enormously strong. A big part of the attraction is schools; they are still often dire in the middles of cities.

Mr Frey’s numbers show that the drop in suburban growth took place quickly, between 2006 and 2009. It was almost certainly the result of two sudden shocks: a tightening of mortgage lending standards caused by the financial crisis and a softening of the labour market. The bright lights of inner cities burn brighter these days, as they have tidied themselves up—but the young are also staying in them because they cannot buy homes. The drift to the suburbs may speed up as the economy returns to normal.

America’s suburbs are not withering, but many of them have changed, in ways that can seem disturbing. Recent events have made Ferguson a distressing example. It is a suburb that has become mostly black but which retains a mostly white power structure, parts of which strike its black residents as oppressive. Still, other suburbs have adapted more easily. Among them is Levittown in New Jersey, studied by the sociologist Herbert Gans in 1958. When it was built, blacks were banned from living there. It is now known as Willingboro Township and is three-quarters black.

One of the biggest, oldest and poorest suburban developments in America is Maryvale, in Phoenix. It was built at great speed in the 1950s and sold just as quickly. But many of its white inhabitants fled in the 1980s following a strange cluster of leukaemia cases. Maryvale is now home to around 200,000 people, roughly three-quarters of whom are Hispanic. It has a dismal reputation. Most people in Phoenix associate it with “the cancer cluster, crime and poverty,” explains Dwight Amery, a longtime resident. Three-bedroom houses can be bought there for less than $100,000. Maryvale is even said to be roamed by packs of feral chihuahuas.

Maryvale, quite a way from Levittown

Many old American suburbs have gone downmarket in the same way, and this has been treated as proof that they are failing. To the extent that low property prices are a sign of low demand, this is correct. Yet the people who moved out of Maryvale did not pile into the city centre; they went to newer, more distant suburbs. And the district’s new Mexican inhabitants are probably better off there than they would be crammed into tower blocks. They have space and freedom—to paint their houses bright green, to build extensions for grandparents, to have barbecues in their front yards, to keep chickens (a few even keep horses). Some run small businesses out of the local shopping mall, which has been turned into a mercado. They probably suffer less crime than they would in a more densely populated area, too. Brookings, which has crunched FBI data, finds that violent crime has dropped steeply in principal cities since the early 1990s—but only to a level twice as high as in either old suburbs or new ones.

A few cities in the world appear to have undergone an actual “great inversion”. The best example is Tokyo, where the population is growing more rapidly within 10km of the city centre than farther out. This pattern, which cannot be found in any other large Japanese city, is partly the result of the dramatic shrinking of the Japanese family and the ageing of the suburban population. Old folk rattle around houses that once contained families. Tatsuo Hatta, an urban economist, says falling land values play a part, too: it is simply a bad investment to buy a large plot, of the kind that is mostly found in the suburbs.

Yet Tokyo is a rarity. American city centres sometimes seem to revive, as Chicago did in the 1990s, only to fall back again; meanwhile, their suburbs continue to expand. Years of vote-winning giveaways to police officers and firemen, combined with unrealistic predictions of stockmarket returns, have left some cities with giant holes in their pension funds. Chicago’s unfunded liabilities work out to $18,596 per inhabitant, according to Morningstar Municipal Credit Research; New York’s amount to $9,842. To fill these holes, cities must either prune services or raise taxes. Both answers were likely to drive residents to nearby suburbs, making the problem worse. No number of trams, coffee shops or urban hipsters will save cities that slip into this whirlpool.

Suburbs rarely cease growing of their own accord. The only reliable way to stop them, it turns out, is to stop them forcefully. But the consequences of doing that are severe.

The limits to limits

GAVIN BARWELL, the member of parliament for Croydon Central, remembers when his district, on London’s southern edge, was regarded as much more salubrious than Brixton, 12km to the north. In 1981 riots in Brixton provided a blazing testament to London’s inner-city dysfunction and racial tension; now, still the cultural heart of Afro-Caribbean London, it is filled with gourmet coffee shops. Croydon, then seen as safe and staid—which in many parts it still is—has a far worse reputation. During the widespread riots of 2011, it burned hotter than anywhere else in the capital.

Croydon was a town in its own right until London engulfed it in the early 20th century. In the 1960s and 1970s local officials promoted it as a site for office towers, selling the suburb as a cheap back-office site for central London firms. The boom did not last. Those back-office jobs were soon being done even more cheaply elsewhere—by outfits like TCS, in suburban Chennai, among others. Almost half the offices in central Croydon are now empty. Many of its residential streets are distinctly dilapidated and increasingly disagreeable.

John Hickman, a retired scientist turned local historian, points to a row of large detached houses in South Norwood, a residential part of Croydon. They were once occupied by single families, he says—probably with servants. Now they have been chopped up into flats for the poor. The local high street is in a sorry state. Rubbish has been dumped in alleyways and next to a pedestrian underpass. Across the road from Mr Hickman’s house, a front garden is being used to store a bed. He locks the kitchen door when he leaves, so that any burglar who breaks in that way could only raid the refrigerator.

Croydon’s decline partly reflects the astonishing revival of inner London. A combination of improved public transport, a more liberal attitude to skyscrapers and the development of Canary Wharf—an office district on the site of the east London docks—has enabled businesses to cluster in the middle. Between 1997 and 2012 the share of Britain’s economic output supplied by firms in inner London rose from 12.3% to 15.6%. Inner London neighbourhoods have become cleaner and less criminal, too. Schools there are now better than schools in England as a whole.

Outer London has shared in only some of this joy. Its schools get good results, too—indeed they are slightly better than those in inner London. But it can scarcely compete with more central areas as a place to do business. Output per person in the outer boroughs was roughly average for Britain in 2000, but is now well below average. Croydon’s old office blocks are being converted into apartments for people who will commute to the city centre. And rising rents in inner London are pushing the poor out.

No American city has centralised to anything like the same degree. Measured by the total pay of its inhabitants, Manhattan grew only a shade more quickly than the state of New York has done over the past decade. The more suburban borough of Queens fared just as well as Manhattan, and Brooklyn did even better. Chicago and Los Angeles both account for a diminishing share of their states’ economies.

What makes London different? Part of the answer is its knowledge-driven economy, which favours dense clustering—the so-called “agglomeration effect”. The other part of the answer comes into view when you drive out of Croydon to the south. Leaving the office district, you travel through a ring of decades-old suburban houses and then, with no warning, enter a huge area of golf courses and farmland. This is the London green belt: a vast swathe, more than three times the area of London itself, in which it is almost impossible to build homes.

The London green belt came into existence in the 1930s and was strengthened by successive acts of Parliament. London was then viewed as too large and sprawling too fast, rather like Chennai today. The green belt was the solution. It was popular—The Economist, which usually believes in freedom, nonetheless endorsed it—and it remains so. Green belts soon appeared around other British cities, then in other countries, where they are often called “urban growth boundaries”.

The example of London suggests that, given powerful restrictions on growth, a buoyant urban economy and excellent transport, cities can stop suburban sprawl. But they would impose great costs on many of their inhabitants in the process. Because of the green belt London has almost no modern suburban houses and very high property prices. A three-bedroom house even in rundown South Norwood costs around £300,000 ($470,000), which would buy you an entire cul-de-sac in Maryvale. To provide desperately needed cheap housing, garages and sheds there are being converted into tiny houses; Mr Hickman calls them “shanty towns”.

Reasonably green, reasonably pleasant land

The freezing of London’s suburbs has probably aided the revival of inner-London neighbourhoods like Brixton. It has also forced many people into undignified homes, widened the wealth gap between property owners and everyone else, and enriched rentiers. It has forced many commuters out of the city altogether: between 2001 and 2011 the number of people with a fixed workplace in London who lived outside the city rose from 724,000 to 795,000, or from 19% to 21% of the total. Many parts of England that look like self-contained towns actually function as dormitories. Their inhabitants appreciate the beauty of the green belt through the windows of crowded trains and traffic-jammed cars.

All these unfortunate side effects of the green belt stem from its all-or-nothing character. It is uncompromising—and suburbia, at its heart, is the embodiment of compromise. It is a space for solving puzzles involving cost, space and commuting time, of balancing the needs for work and recreations, privacy and community. Sometimes such solutions seem brutally simple; Americans talk of “driving until you qualify” on the basis that a home’s distance from the centre and its affordability—in terms of whether you can qualify for a mortgage that will cover it—are proportional to each other. In other times and places the trade-offs are more complex.

And they are also subject to change. As it becomes less necessary to travel to work each day, and easier to order food, clothing and other essential items online for home delivery, other considerations will weigh more heavily in people’s choice of neighbourhood. Crime, air quality, schools, churches, family, friendships, beauty—such things have always influenced where people live. But they will become more important, and suburbs will provide a variety of ways for people to make different compromises on their desiderata. An often-overlooked aspect of suburbia is variety, within reason; many cities (though not the largest) boast suburbs as variegated as their central neighbourhoods.

A decade ago Edward Glaeser, an economist, explained that cities, which have long been recognised as efficient machines for production, are also good for consumption. He noted the rise of “consumer cities”, which draw residents more because of their wonderful amenities than because they put people close to jobs. San Francisco, from which many tech workers commute to suburban office parks, is a supreme example. Increasingly, the world will see consumer suburbs and consumer villages too.

Indeed, developers are beginning to build them. On the eastern edge of Mesa, a sprawling city of half a million souls next to Phoenix, a new 1,300 acre suburb called Eastmark is rising. The first few hundred families have already moved in to two-storey detached houses containing such modern perceived essentials as integral audio speakers throughout the house. Yet this suburb is not quite like the plantations of stucco boxes that sprouted a decade ago. To ensure that streets do not contain identical houses, the developer, DMB, has brought in a mix of builders. It insists that the fronts of homes do not precisely line up. And it is trying harder than most to create a society in the suburb. Houses are arranged around small parks to foster neighbourliness. Mailboxes are placed in those parks so people are obliged to congregate. A few miles away, DMB intends to build a new town centre.

Elsewhere in America, too, suburbs are being given a dab of urbanity. Mountain View in Silicon Valley—home of Google—is trying to create a modest downtown. The highly successful Research Triangle Park in North Carolina is to build a small urban core, with cafés and small offices intended to entice startups. In southern California, the developer Rick Caruso builds open-air shopping centres that emulate old-world city centres, only with musical fountains.

This sort of thing might strike urbanites as laughably ersatz. But they might consider how their own neighbourhoods have changed. The inhabitants of Greenwich Village in New York or Islington in London live in places much less densely populated than a few decades ago, and containing fewer poor people. Old cities, like suburbs, are increasingly oriented around shopping centres. Leeds city centre has been transformed by a new mall; so has Stratford, in London’s East End. Croydon’s officials hope that a Westfield shopping centre in their borough will do the same.

The pleasant character of many inner-city areas is partly a consequence of decades-ago sprawl. If the masses had been unable to move out of crowded urban districts, those places would never have become appealing to middle-class settlers. And, as suburbs come to seem more urban, the distinction between central cities and their suburbs is blurring. In time, the two may be almost impossible to tell apart—and the final victory of the compromising, humble suburb will be at hand.

This article appeared in the Essay section of the print edition under the headline "Places apart"

Sheikhs v shale

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