The Masterpiece Cakeshop case in the Supreme Court was not just a showdown over gay rights and religious liberty. It also reveals an ongoing process of redefining US suburban life as more diverse.
A For Sale sign is shown outside a house under construction in a new subdivision in Beckwith, Ont., in January 2018.
Conventional wisdom suggests urban-dwelling millennials don’t want to live in the suburbs and don’t want to raise children in a two-bedroom downtown condo. Is it really true?
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick
Poverty rates across the suburban landscape have increased by 50 percent since 1990. This suburbanization of poverty is one of the most important demographic trends of the last 50 years.
A sprawling subdivision in Vaughan, Ont., a growing “boomburb” north of Toronto.
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Urban growth and landscape transformations in York region: How Vaughan and Markham are exploding.
Point Cook is an example of the ‘super-diverse ethnoburbs’ that are home to new migrants of relatively high socioeconomic status from a mix of many countries.
Shilpi Tewari
Australia has had a large influx of skilled migrants in recent decades. Better educated and more highly paid than past generations of migrants, they are also creating a different sort of community.
The presence of sidewalks, green space, healthy food outlets, and trustworthy neighbours can all play a part in minimizing your risks of heart disease.
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As ‘Heart Month’ kicks off across North America, a cardiovascular researcher explains how the neighbourhood you live in can affect your risks of heart disease.
Highton Shopping Village in Geelong.
Leila Farahani
Low-density suburbs can cause social isolation that’s harmful for individual and community well-being. But research confirms we can plan neighbourhood centres so they become vibrant social hubs.
Without medium-density housing being built in the established suburbs – the ‘missing middle’ – the goals of more compact, sustainable and equitable cities won’t be achieved.
zstock/shutterstock
Residents of established middle suburbs are slowly coming round to the idea, but governments and the property sector lack the capacity to deliver compact cities that are acceptable to the community.
Defender Matt Besler sits on the field after losing to Trinidad and Tobago in a 2018 World Cup qualifying match.
Rebecca Blackwell/AP Photo
In a system that’s far better at identifying the best payers than finding the best players, the pipeline of talent gets choked out by costly tournament and team fees.
The mall’s inventor, Victor Gruen, envisioned thriving hubs of civic activity, rather than bland, asphalt-enclosed shopping centers. Is his original vision now being realized – or further corrupted?
Migrants can no longer afford to live in the ‘gateway’ suburbs that once helped them to leave the ranks of the ‘disadvantaged’ and feel at home in their new country.
Jack Wright/flickr
With the winding back of government support for housing, ‘gateway’ suburbs that have in the past accepted and supported recent immigrants are becoming increasingly unaffordable.
What new and innovative infrastructure is likely to emerge from the suburbs?
Roger Keil
Suburban areas feel infrastructure stress most acutely. Having to deal with severe inadequacies, suburbs offer fertile ground for infrastructure experimentation and innovation.
Schoolchildren play on a New York subway.
AP Photo/Mark Lennihan
Nine out of 10 rural places experienced increases in diversity from 1990 to 2010. Data show a more diverse future is guaranteed across all of America, and there’s no going back.
Upper Coomera is one of those fast-growing fringe suburbs that are hotter because of tightly packed housing with less greenery.
Daryl Jones/www.ozaerial.com.au/
Recently published research has found that the concentration of poorer people in hotter places is a real problem for cities’ capacity to cope with climate change.
The Western Distributor project announced by the Andrews government will benefit Melbourne’s suburban residents in the west and north, but inner-city elites are mobilising against it.
AAP/Melissa Meehan
It’s a project that creates benefits for Melbourne’s western suburbs and the state as a whole. But the inner-city elite don’t like it and recent experience suggests their opinion holds sway.
Mature gum trees will be important for visual amenity among the higher-density residences being built to house a population growing at 5.1% a year for the next two decades.
AAP/McGregor Coxall
Early residents in new communities are known as ‘pioneers’ – they arrive before many services are in place. A five-year study points to the many benefits of putting in good services early on.
Mandurah is an example of built density without intensity: five-to-ten-storey buildings with generous public space but a population density less than your average suburb.
Kim Dovey
Curbing negative gearing will help get empty housing onto the market. This could go some way to bringing life back to relatively dense urban centres that are oddly lacking intensity of public life.
To lawn or not to lawn, that is the question.
sniecikowski
Interim Director, UWA Public Policy Institute; Associate Professor & Programme Co-ordinator (Masters of Public Policy), The University of Western Australia