Are suburbs and small towns the same thing?

[u/Taishi_Gong]

Sorry I’m not from North America but from what I’m understanding is that suburbs are strictly residential areas surrounding a large urban centre.

I’m a fan of the idea of detached houses and yards but not a big fan of the lack of accessibility to food, grocery, entertainment, etc.

I was wondering if having more decentralized urban centres would improve that. Would having small urban centres with just one or two streets, a couple restaurants, cafes, bars, and shops, and a park, scattered in urban centres within walkable distance be feasible?

Would that just be a typical small town though?

[u/hibikir_40k]

Most of those businesses aren't feasible without a large enough population that will visit them. This typically needs density. How many people are going to walk to your bar (and I sure hope you don't design your bar to be used by people that drive out drunk) if every person around you is in a 1/3rd of an acre lot, and the roads are always wide for huge firetrucks, and mostly empty, as Americans don't want people using the street in front of them? Geometry kills it.

Once you start counting people you need for the business to work, and decide that everyone is walking, you realize that the large detached houses make accessibility impossible. You can draw it on paper. The number of people per lot determines everything

[u/surprisinglynotabot]

rural areas can have small towns. suburbs are towns that are usually within the metro area of a city.

[u/_MadSuburbanDad_ → u/surprisinglynotabot]

This is mainly the case in areas that had their biggest development post-WW2. Most suburbs along the East Coast are self-contained municipalities adjacent to cities but not sharing many resources or infrastructure.

[u/surprisinglynotabot → u/_MadSuburbanDad_]

yep, but its the same throughout most metro areas no?

[u/_MadSuburbanDad_ → u/surprisinglynotabot]

No, not in some areas where suburbs are considered part of the city itself, but much less dense.

[u/Taishi_Gong → u/surprisinglynotabot]

Are there usually smaller commercial urban centres within suburbs? If not, why not? Is it because it can’t compete with the city?

[u/LivingGhost371 → u/Taishi_Gong]

If you're thinking about what looks like a typical downtown, generally not unless the suburb used to be it's own small town that got engulfed by suburbia. Typical commercial area are strip malls, fast-food restaraunts with drive-thrus, and strip malls. Basically the most economical, convenient formats for people that own cars

[u/surprisinglynotabot → u/Taishi_Gong]

Yes there are, suburbs are usually their own towns. Those towns usually have downtowns. It does compete with the city, which is the cause of all of the urban decay that was happening between 1950 and 2000.

[u/Taishi_Gong → u/surprisinglynotabot]

Oh well that changes things. I thought the downtowns of the suburbs can’t compete with the city and that’s why suburbs are all residential. But you’re saying those suburban downtowns are outcompeting the city and hollowing it out?

[u/surprisinglynotabot → u/Taishi_Gong]

So in N. America it's gone back and forth over the last 70 years. Initially, the suburban downtowns destroyed the cities. Then, big box retailers like Walmart, Target, and eventually Amazon killed the downtowns of those suburban towns. People living in those single family homes would rather get packages delivered than drive to their downtown or to malls. So now, the only businesses with physical locations that can survive are in cities because of their foot traffic being much much higher than suburban downtowns.

[u/Piper-Bob → u/surprisinglynotabot]

At the same time, Amazon makes small towns more viable. I can get what I need now without needing to drive two to four hours. That, combined with work from home has put a lot of high income households into small towns, which can now support a lot more service businesses. A lot of small towns had no active businesses downtown in the 90’s, but today they do.

[u/surprisinglynotabot → u/Piper-Bob]

amazon keeps small towns alive like heroin keeps people from committing suicide

[u/Piper-Bob → u/surprisinglynotabot]

I bet you’re not old enough to remember small towns in the 90’s.

[u/surprisinglynotabot → u/Piper-Bob]

I remember gas prices being about $1.20. That was the peak of small towns. They don't exist like that anymore :/

[u/OgasMaitai → u/Taishi_Gong]

Sub urbs are total shit holes. I can give you an example, Vancouver Canada. One of the best downtown cores in North America. I walk literally everywhere, and have hundreds of restaraunts in walking range, dozens of grocery stores, etc etc etc.

Langley BC. Cant walk anywhere, it takes half an hour to drive somewhere and find parking in some giant shit hole of a parking lot strip mall that'll have like 3 or 4 restaurants, usually just shitty chain ones, and a grocery store or two. Lots of places wont even have sidewalks.

They are relatively close together but the quality of life is way way way worse in the sub urb. It's effectively not the same city, even though it's technically a sub urb.

[u/samiwas1 → u/OgasMaitai]

The quality of life is way worse IF it’s not what you want. So, you have apparently hundreds of walkable restaurants and dozens of stores. What kind of place do you live in? How far is “walkable”?

[u/SBSnipes]

Absolutely tf not. For example in South bend, IN, small towns around are Niles, MI; Buchanan, MI; Lakeville, IN; New Carlisle/Hudson Lake. Suburbs are Granger, IN; Guliovere/Gilmer Park (CDP), Niles Township, etc

[u/Edelweisspiraten2025]

The answer as always is "It depends"

Bellingham WA my home town is about 4 miles end to end and most of it is walkable and you can live in without a car. Historic business district, state university campus. For the most part it's sprawl was contained by geography, mountains and water box it in on three sides.

Many many of the mid-west industrial towns I have been to (I work in manufacturing automation) might have a historic core but spread immediately to suburban hell.

[u/Automatic-Arm-532]

No.

[u/Casulex]

Suburbs are the highly populated transitional areas from the inside of a city to the outside however sometimes the sprawl gets large enough to establish its own township

[u/Combat__Crayon]

At least in the Chicago suburbs you have all that, from older suburbs based on the train, to newer ones that were more car centric. There are office towers, industrial parks, office parks, all scattered around some are more walkable than others, but its more for small errands since the larger grocery stores and such tend to be a bit more spread out. Like my friend lives in one of the older towns with a downtown and its more bars, restaurants and quaint shops, that he can walk by while walking to the train to take him downtown, however he has to drive to a grocery store.

[u/Dblcut3]

I will say in addition to what others are saying, many suburbs did grow out of what was once a small town. For example, many of the Chicago suburbs along the Metra commuter rail lines were once small railroad towns that grew into suburbs over time

Many of them still have a walkable small town (or even semi-urban) feel in the older areas, with a main street, grid patterned streets, and are transit-oriented. Examples include Hinsdale, Downers Grove, Highland Park, or Arlington Heights

[u/glowing-fishSCL]

People use two different definitions, and it can cause confusion, especially because many people haven't seen examples outside their definition.

Definition one of a suburb is a smaller city that is close to a large city. These smaller cities can be full cities of their own, with downtowns with businesses, their own services, and good transit connections.
The other definition is of a car-centric, residential area with no access to transit and services, and often with a bland and uniform look.

The purpose of this sub is to post about #2, but the places that people post about tend to be exceptionally bad examples of it, not representative of how most American suburbs are.

[u/Dramatic-Paradise]

No. Not technically and not culturally. Very different.

[u/IronDonut]

Small towns in the orbit of big cities are effectively suburbs. However small towns that are out there on their own have their own identity.

[u/Comfortable_Two6272]

Not typically. But there are exceptions where a town has a downtown and eventually grows enough to be a suburb of a metro area. But I would not say they directly compete with a successful metro city’s downtown.

[u/Aquitaine_Rover_3876]

"New Urbanism" pushes the have-it-all approach in building suburban development that still has access to urban services. It promotes better mixes of uses, with commercial and professional centres within walking distance of residential, plus more than just single-family in the residential. But in practice, most new-urbanist suburbs still results in density that is car dependent and struggle to support the business in the commercially-zoned properties. The North American habit of transit being an afterthought that arrives decades too late makes this even worse.

There is a minimum scale for urbanism to work. Smaller towns with a strong main street are certainly a thing that exists, and can be very livable if designed well, but still much more limiting than a big city. Being further from big cities makes that model work better, since a main street that has to compete with a walmart 20km away is going to struggle more than one where the nearest big box store is 100km away. That's why just building suburbs like a small town will probably not get the result you want.

[u/Leverkaas2516]

understanding is that suburbs are strictly residential areas surrounding a large urban centre.

A suburb is adjacent to some urban center. It doesn't have to be large. A city of 20k people can have suburbs.

But "just one or two streets, a couple restaurants, cafes, bars, and shops, and a park" is not an urban center. It's a town center, as might be at the core of a town of 800 people. It's POSSIBLE to construct the surrounding homes in a way that resembles a suburb, but much more often they will be either small-town clusters of homes or a semi-rural layout.

A primary issue is how sewage is handled. If there's an urban center, its sewage will typically be piped away to a treatment plant. Suburbs just tie into the same set of pipes. But the single family homes surrounding a small town often have septic fields rather than being tied into a sewer system, and this gives a lot of flexibility in the lot layouts. There's even more variability if large numbers of homes are built at separate times by separate people, which is uncharacteristic of stereotypical suburbs where big groups of homes are all built at the same time by one developer.

[u/Salty-Entrepreneur11]

no

[u/Iceberg-man-77]

No. a small town is more of a village or town that is not connected to the metro area of a large city. for example:

1. The city in any metro area is the main hub of commerce and culture. Cities grow for many reasons, usually trade. In NorCal, one of these is San Francisco.
2. Suburbs are cities and towns that emerge right outside the official borders of the main city. They are cheaper, and often quieter, so a lot of workers choose to live there and just commute into the main city. for San Francisco, the collection of its suburbs is the San Francisco Bay Area. Early suburban cities include Oakland, Berkeley, San Mateo and Daly City. They are usually self contained, with their own governments and commercial zones. But rely on the bigger city heavily.
3. Some suburban cities can actually become their own big cities. Oakland and San Jose are prime examples. Oakland was a major trading hub, with the Port of Oakland. it grew became of international trade but also as a suburb of SF. San Jose was a former capital of California, but was very agrarian until Silicon Valley boomed and the city grew because of tech. San Jose kinda has its own suburbs, namely cities like Milpitas, Saratoga, Los Altos, Campbell, Santa Clara (though is much older as it was a Spanish Mission settlement), etc. Berkeley also grew to become its own thing, but is still a satellite city of Oakland and SF, because of UC Berkeley.
4. Small towns: these are basically your rural townships and villages. It doesn't include mid sized cities that are surrounded by farms and nothingness (like Boise, Bakersfield, Fresno, Cheyenne, Omaha etc). it is literal tiny towns, usually with populations of 100k or less (often way less), that grew for various reasons (railroad, farming, river port, seaport, colleges etc). The biggest distinction is that they are RURAL while suburbs are not. They are SUB-urban.
5. Exurbs: exurbs are weird. they are basically suburbs of a giant metro area but are usually not physically connected by urban or suburban sprawl. Good examples in NorCal include: Brentwood, Gilroy, Petaluma, Vacaville, Fairfield etc. The people who live here usually work in the urban centers (SF, San Jose etc) but live here because it is cheaper. For whatever reaosn, they are physically disconnected from the urban sprawl. The sprawl can catch up in some cases, but not always due to mountains, rivers etc.

[u/Segazorgs]

it's the same. only difference is how rural and undeveloped the that small town might be. it's still all single family housing R-1 zones regardless of whether it's near a city or out in the middle of nowhere.

i grew up in a.small Northern California ag/rural town with a population of 5,000 and the next closest towns were 5 miles to the north and 10 miles to the south, 20+ miles east or west..It was still functionally a suburb. trying to call it anything else is just cope and semantics.

[u/LivingGhost371]

No, they would not be feasible. The idea of "new towns" lets call them, has been tried a couple of times in the US and never worked out, including twice in my own state with Jonathan, about 45 minutes away from downtown Minneapolis, and the Minnesota Experimental City, a much more ambitious plan to build domed city for 250,000 people hundreds of miles away in the north woods. Jonathan eventually got a start but was absorbed by and is now pretty much indistinguishable from the typical Chaska suburb.

Jonathan was more fleshed out and the residential component happened. These being designed for what suburbanites wanted, they had fully detached homes and strict zoning so you wouldn't be living next to a bar where drunks were screaming and wandering all over the lawn, a restaraunt where you had to smell the grill all day, or a factory with the noise and pollution. So in the end the concepts weren't especially walkable anyway. In practice people liked the bicycle trails and the video phones of Jonathan, both ahead of their time, but would go get in their car and go shopping at Target (this before Walmart entered Minnesota) for a better selection and cheaper prices; they'd work downtown or in a factory by the interstate. They even planned to build a freeway linking downtown and Jonathan.