Suburbia: Difference between revisions

{{tropeUseful Notes}}

[[File:Suburbia_2_6027Suburbia by David Shankbone.jpg|framethumb|400px|Where the developers bulldoze the trees and then name streets after them.]]

{{quote|''Little boxes onmade theof hillsideticky-tacky,''<br />

''Little boxes madeon ofthe ticky-tackyhillside,''<br />

''Little boxes onall the hillside,same.''<br />

''Little boxes all the same.''|'''Malvina Reynolds'''}}

[['''Suburbia]]''' in TV has three distinct flavors.

* '''[[Everytown, America|The Midwest]]''', which is more rural. Family Values often abound. Frequent forays into the [[Quirky Town]] and the [[Town Withwith a Dark Secret]]. Poorer and less educated than their coastal brethren, and somewhat more likely to be conservative. Often, these portrayals stray far from real life and enjoy an undercurrent of hypocrisy (the respectable church-goers are all sleeping with each other), partly to add color, but mostly because the Midwest is just slightly less alien than Mars to most of the folks who write TV.

* '''The gated community'''. Entrance to this neighborhood is restricted to residents, mail and delivery men, cops, and visitors, with a guard booth at the road in and out. Often shares the conservatism of Midwestern suburbs, with the residents of the community hoping to create a idyllic life for themselves, just like in those [[The Fifties|Fifties]] [[Sit Com|sitcomssitcom]]s, free from "[[Lower Class Lout|those people]]" outside. There's also a big element of [[Slobs Versus Snobs|snobbery and class warfare]] -- these—these people ''bought'' their way into Sunnyside Estates, thank you very much.

Now for the boring history lesson. While American cities have always had suburbs, especially in the early 20th century with the rise of inexpensive streetcar, automobile and rail transit, the modern concept of suburbia didn't take off until after [[World War II]], when the G.I. Bill,<ref>Short version -- a law passed near the end of the war that gave veterans access to higher education, as well as loans to buy homes and to start businesses.</ref>, cheap gas, cheap land, the new Interstate Highway System, and the postwar baby boom created an enormous demand for housing that couldn't be met by the cities alone. As a result, cities began to expand outward rather than upward. Similar factors were in play in other countries, like Canada and Australia, both of which also now have very large suburban populations.

Note that, in much of Europe, the suburbs have ''very'' different connotations, and are often depicted as ghettoes and housing projects where the chronically poor and recent immigrants find themselves in -- notin—not unlike how the inner city is depicted in American media. Compare, say, the British trope of the [[Council Estate]], which is, superficially and functionally, similar to suburbia (they're both cheap housing built after the war on the outskirts of the city), but is associated with poverty and crime rather than safety and prosperity. American-style suburbia, with single-family homes occupied by middle-class families, does exist in Europe,<ref>Again, a British example -- the Dursleys in ''[[Harry Potter]]'' live in such an area.</ref>, but it's uncommon due to much tougher land use and zoning laws necessitated by Europe's relative lack of space.<ref>The population density of the US is 32 per square km, while the EU has 112 per square km; put another way, Europe fits 1.5 times as many people as America in under half the amount of land. Now you know why Europe has stricter land-use laws and less sprawl: there's less land to go around. This is because Europe has supported large cities for far longer than the US--the Native Americans of what is now the US had some occasional proto-cities, but Europeans showed up around the time the most recent native North American urbanization had petered out--arguably causing it to peter out, by introducing plagues--and in any case urban civilization in the future USA never got close to where it did in Mexico and the Andes.</ref> These connotations are more in line with how suburbs have traditionally been viewed -- "suburbs" translates from Latin as "under-city", or the red-light district. That's the meaning [[William Shakespeare]] would have had in mind when, in ''[[Measure for Measure (Theatre)|Measure for Measure]]'', he has Mistress Overdone keeping a bawdy house in the suburbs.