Suburbia
The development of suburbs—residential communities on the outskirts of cities—was one of the most dominant features of American life in the twentieth century. Far from being merely a way Americans organized their housing and ordered their landscape, the suburbs created an entirely new way of ordering American social life and culture. The result was a phenomenon known as "suburbia," a term denoting not only a physical place but often a cultural and social mind-set as well. The rise of suburbia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had a major role in the development of American culture, extending long-cherished American beliefs in individuality and an agrarian ideal in new ways while simultaneously working to reshape both the American physical and social landscape.
While suburbia had its major impact during the twentieth century, it originated and developed in the nineteenth century. "I view large cities," Thomas Jefferson once wrote, "as pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man." Jefferson's anti-urban view was shared by a growing number of people in the nineteenth century. As cities became crowded with people, bringingincreased sanitation, transportation, and crime problems, those Americans who could afford to, namely the growing middle class, began moving to larger, single-family homes on the outskirts of major American cities.
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