Quote:
Originally Posted by Steely Dan
It's not always about social rank.
Resentment can play a big role too.
But that's probably a lot more common in the rustbelt than in a metro area like Denver.
But this whole discussion demonstrates how useful a metro area having its own name can be, such as with "Chicago" and "Chicagoland".
I'm guessing "Denverland" isn't a thing?
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The closest thing we have is "The Front Range," which is a silly coloqueal way of saying you live in the urban corridor between Colorado Spring and Fort Collins (we should actually call it the Colorado Piedmont since the Front Range is an actual mountain range to the west). But that would cover exurbs and other places that are definitely outside of Denver.
We have 3/4 of a completed beltway, so we could use the term "inside the beltway" (except that nobody here actually says that).
Interesting comment about resentment. Can you expand? Do you mean the city resenting the suburbs, or the other way around? Because I can see it going both ways.
Municipal boundaries say more about the laws and annexation policies of that particular place than anything else. In Phoenix, Houston, or Oklahoma City, the majority of the cities are just places that would be suburbs in other parts of America. Denver, on the other hand, was constrained by Colorado voters by the
Poundstone Amendment in 1974. That certainly reflected a sort of resentment of the city, as it was couched as being to "prevent Denver from abusing its status and size."
On the other hand, I would argue that the creation of the suburbs was largely about land developers wanting to write their own subdivision regulations rather than play ball with the established zoning and subdivision regulations of the core city. As such, their existence really only makes sense in the context of their creation and in serving the interests of the developers who built them. But does that same resentment of the center city and its policies still ring true? I suppose the honest answer is it really depends.
There are lots of examples throughout history of adjacent cities being annexed together. Sometimes it takes centuries and sometimes not (I'm thinking of Delfthaven and Rotterdam, Hollywood and LA, Altona and Hamburg, just to name a few).
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