Suburbanization in Global Society

Urban sociology and other urban disciplines have been focused on the city (the global city, the networked city, the postindustrial city). While a majority of the world population lives in urban areas, most of that population is found in suburban regions, including the shanty towns of Asia, favelas of South America, slums of Africa, and banlieues and inner-city suburbs of the developed nations.

The United Nations projects that world population will increase from some 6.9 billion to more than 9.5 billion persons by midcentury. Most of this population increase will occur in the developing nations, and most of this increase will be absorbed in the expanding metropolitan regions of these countries-the so-called megacities of the 21st Century. And as urban development accelerates across the globe, most of the population increase will occur in "suburban' areas of cities in Africa, Asia, and South America.

But can the recent and current expansion of suburbanisation across the world be understood by studying earlier patterns of suburban expansion, in particular the `Anglo-American' model that dominates our urban disciplines? What can we learn about the experience of contemporary suburbanisation in Africa, Asia and the Americas from studies that were largely conducted within the Anglo-American context? Should we look for a new paradigm to understand suburbanisation in the early twenty first century? Or should we look to local historical continuities as well as new directions in suburban growth beyond the Anglo-American experience?

Suburbanization in Global Society presents new and innovative contributions in comparative suburban studies for urban regions, not just in Europe and the United States but also including emerging metropolitan regions in China, India, and other areas of the world. This volume examines the emerging patterns of suburban development in metropolitan regions around the globe. Research is post-1945 with a particular focus on social and cultural changes in suburbanization processes in developed as well as emerging urban countries.