You can say “suburb”, you can also say “weirdly regular array of houses that look like they were ordered from a catalogue”.
At its heart, suburban sprawl is a construct of capitalism and modernism. It was built (and continues to be built) thanks to massive federal subsidies in highways and oil, strong private property rights (and lack of federal land planning policy), and a long standing desire to separate uses to avoid nuisances abutting one another (conventional zoning). It’s a deeply American way of growing and it’s wildly unsustainable fiscally, environmentally, and socially.
What’s weird to me about America’s suburbs is the general emptiness. There often seems to be lots of grass but no shrubbery, tree, plants, flower beds etc. The roads are wide and asphalt, sidewalks are large slabs of concrete. It feels ad hoc and like it’s temporary.
Some of them were ordered from a catalogue
I moved into an honest to god Victorian-era rowhouse a year ago. The roof tiles are older than my grandparents.
