suburb

Introduction

suburb, a community in an outlying section of a city or, more commonly, a nearby, politically separate municipality with social and economic ties to the central city. In the 20th cent., particularly in the United States, population growth in urban areas has spilled increasingly outside the city limits and concentrated there, resulting in large metropolitan areas where the populations of the suburbs taken together exceed that of the central city.

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2012, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.