Originally Posted by wwmiv
I’ll throw in another wrinkle to how suburban areas around central cities were built out that some have hinted at above but not yet gone full bore:
The underlying geography, geology, and topography of the area matters with respect to the urban/suburban/exurban/rural shift and gradient and to what extent periurban features exist altogether.
Desert cities tend to build highly dense suburban rings around their (mostly) smaller urban cores with abrupt end, no exurban periphery, and only rural land beyond that. Prototypical examples here are Phoenix and Las Vegas, although Tucson, Albuquerque, El Paso, and others fit this bill as well. Their economics are largely what dictate this trend: the land beyond the suburbs isn’t economically useful, and so as the area builds up as suburban housing there largely aren’t other uses (e.g. farming, rural hamlets, etc), around which to plan not geographic barriers until you get to the nearby mountains. Therefore, there’s simply an abrupt end and nothing else afterward.
Swamp cities develop similarly, but with the added addendum that some land is not developable and there are leapfrog effects around those areas. Otherwise, suburban development tends to be relatively dense, cookie cutter, and simply ends without much exurban development before the rural hinterlands begin. Miami is perhaps prototypical here, but New Orleans and Baton Rouge fit this bill as well, and Houston and D.C. to a lesser extent is a good example of this type of city.
Mountain cities tend to have compact form with suburban development that follows the terrain with exurban features predominant on the slopes outside of the city before the true rural area begins. In other words, they tend to have a fairly fine gradient from urban, suburban, exurban, to rural. Denver and Salt Lake City, are good example, but so are Boise and Seattle. Portland would be as well, but their patterns are augmented by urban growth boundary policies.
Forest cities largely follow the same pattern as mountain cities, but for different reasons: the forest growth is denser as you get further out of the city and less easy to manage, and requires progressively less dense construction less because of the topography and more because of the forest itself. Atlanta and New York City, and everything in the northeast, are great examples of this. Houston and D.C. are as well.
I’d lay out other important categories, such as hills, plains, lakes, shore, river, etc, but the point here is really that geography and geology of the area is really important for how cities and their suburban, exurban, and rural areas around them develop and what and where their periurban features are and to what extend those exist.
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