Is Somerville a suburb?

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nico

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Is Somerville a suburb?

This is the question that I have and I'd really appreciate your input. Ron, ablarc, et al.

I had this discussion at work today and it got pretty heated, so I Googled "Is Somerville a suburb?" and found a similar discussion at the link below w/the heading "Somerville is not a fucking suburb."

http://www.rbellinger.com/blog/2007/05/somerville-is-not-fucking-suburb.html

Apparently this is a sensitive issue for some people, and I'd really like to understand it.
I've concluded that one of the bloggers, Rea, is probably right:
"Somerville is a city. But bordering on Boston makes it a suburb of Boston. Not suburban, but a suburb."

If this is correct, if a city does not have to be suburban to be a suburb, then Somerville (even though it is in fact more densely populated i.e., perhaps more urban than Boston) is a suburb of Boston simply because it is adjacent to and smaller than it.

So Worcester and Brockton are not suburbs, but Cambridge is. And though you may live in a suburb like Chelsea, you are not necessarily in "the suburbs."
How this applies to St. Paul / Minneapolis...I don't know. Or how about places where there is no city at all? If Cambridge, in spite of its urban qualities, is a suburb of Boston because of its proximity to it, what do you call non rural, yet non urban places so far removed from Boston that they can no longer be called suburbs "of Boston"?

So I?d really like to know, what are the metrics used for identifying whether a city/town is urban, suburban, or rural?

And does suburb mean ?less urban? or does it mean ?less than?? As Somerville is perhaps not less urban, just smaller than it's neighbor.

From Random House dictionary
Urban: Of, relating to, or located in a city
Suburb: A district lying immediately outside a city or town, esp. a smaller residential community.

Says nothing about density.
 
That is a good question because Somerville is a legal city, as is Cambridge, but if you were to ask a bunch of people you would probably find more think of Somerville as a suburb but not Cambridge.

It could just mean how the area developed. Cambridge was a city that developed along side Boston while Somerville really became what it is today after splitting from Charlestown and trolley lines allowed from residential growth. Of course Cambridge developed similarly, but not exclusively.

From Wikipedia
Somerville (pronounced /ˈsʌmərvɪl/) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, located just north of Boston. As of the 2000 census, the city had a total population of 77,478 and was the most densely populated municipality in New England. It is also the 17th most densely populated incorporated place in the country. It was established as a town in 1842, when it was separated from the urbanizing Charlestown.
Click to expand...

If Somerville separated in order to avoid urbanization then I would have to consider it a suburb. Cambridge was a city and it developed urban and suburban areas, but was always a whole. Suburbs are developed as reactions to urban areas, as a means to escape them usually.

So is Somerville a suburb? Yes, an urban suburb (The Bronx developed as an urban suburb as well.)
 
I think that probably, a suburb and a suburban area are two different things entirely. A suburb is a separate city or town, in the greater area of a city, regardless of density or urbanism. Last I checked,"urbanism" wasn't even in the dictionary (at least, not on Firefox's spell-check).

"Suburban" describes somewhere 'less urban,' while a "suburb" describes somewhere in the vicinity of a larger city.

I think I'm just rambling/rephrasing what Van said. Oops.

What's an Exurb?
 
kennedy said:
"Suburban" describes somewhere 'less urban,' while a "suburb" describes somewhere in the vicinity of a larger city.
Click to expand...
Exactly. Somerville is a mostly urban place in the suburbs.

You should see how urban Paris' suburbs generally are.
 
Cambridge, Somerville, Chelsea, Revere, Malden, Everett, Lynn, Quincy, Milton, Brookline, Newton, Watertown, Waltham, etc are "urban satellites" of Boston -- most have (or had) established town centers. In another part of the country, many of these cities and towns would have been annexed.

kennedy said:
What's an Exurb?
Click to expand...

Greater Boston rule-of-thumb:

  • Outside Rt 128 = Suburbs
  • Outside Rt 495 = Exurbs
 
You got me thinking about the following: If you could imagine an "inner ring road" of surface streets within 128 that defined the outer limits of the city's core urbanity (leaving the inner belt expressway out of this!) where would you place it?

My proposal: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=e...d=117728249545959482473.00047004f107c46a7fd52

That is, Rt 60 from Revere through Medford, on to Rt 16 from Mystic Valley Pkwy to Alewife, on to Soldiers Field Road, to Market St which becomes Chestnut Hill Ave, Rt 9 to Jamaicaway, and following Rt 203 from the Arborway to the Neponset River Bridge.

It certainly isn't perfect, but I wanted to use as few streets and as major arteries as possible.

Other suggestions?
 
Thanks guys

Van, I actually thought that Cambridge was originally part of Newton as Somerville was a part of Charlestown.
 
Sort of. "Newtowne," centered on today's Harvard Square, was what later became Cambridge - but also included many other areas to the west, with what is currently called Newton having split off. You can read this early history on the traffic island between Garden and Mass Ave, where the 66 bus leaves from. I've heard before and wikipedia confirms (erm...?) that Arlington, Lexington, and Brighton split from Cambridge too.

Interestingly, Watertown was also an "original" town, from which split Waltham, Weston, Belmont and Lincoln.
 
other way around - newton was part of cambridge, which was originally called newtown, or new towne, or however it was spelled.
yes somerville is a suburb, a dense one.
in urban theory an exurb - see similar edge city, technoburb, exopolis, (make your own neologism here) - is an urbanized area (ie not rural) distant from and not necessarily functionally dependent on the core. suburb traditionally connotes dependence for employment and many services.
there isn't any technical definition - these are all fluid, critical ideas, theories (exurb more than exurb), just ways of understanding social function and geography i think.
 
Yeah, because of how the town borders have shifted over the years it gets confusing. At one point Dorchester stretched as far south as Plymouth (something like that anyway.)
 
a630 said:
o
suburb traditionally connotes dependence for employment and many services.
Click to expand...

Providence is considered part of the Boston metropolitan area because a certain number of residence there commute into Boston.

Is providence a suburb, exburb or superburb?
 
ablarc said:
Exactly. Somerville is a mostly urban place in the suburbs.

You should see how urban Paris' suburbs generally are.
Click to expand...

Even more interesting are Spain's suburbs - discontinuous, completely urban, miniature models of the principle city.
 
Ronda, in southern Spain, is the one place that is the most distinguished in my memory of visiting there when I was little. The town is built around this gorge, and it's just massive. Unbelievable. Certainly not one of those 'biggest in the world' gorges, but since the city was built right up on top of it, it seemed a lot bigger than any gorge in the Alps with some cable-stayed bridge on it.
 
Beton Brut said:
Cambridge, Somerville, Chelsea, Revere, Malden, Everett, Lynn, Quincy, Milton, Brookline, Newton, Watertown, Waltham, etc are "urban satellites" of Boston -- most have (or had) established town centers. In another part of the country, many of these cities and towns would have been annexed.
Click to expand...

Good point.

Would people from Somerville say they are "from Boston?" I would consider people from there to be from the city even if it's not technically within the boundaries. Maybe when asked where they are from, Somervillers (Somervillians, Somervillanders?) would say they are from "Just outside of Boston."
 
Cambridge is a thornier case, I would think. It has some of the metropolitan area's largest employers and most important sites. It's more or less completely urban, and more consistently so than much of Boston. It's a significant component of the Boston nightlife scene.

What's so "sub" about it, other than being six times smaller in population, merely because it didn't happen to be annexed in the 19th century?

Boston is one of the most municipally fragmented metro areas in the country. It would work far better if Brookline, Cambridge, Somerville, Chelsea, and other obvious component parts of the core city of the region would amalgamate into a city that operated as a confederation with a metropolitan government that controls critical metropolis-wide features like policing. It's an arrangement that works for London and Tokyo (where the boroughs and wards, respectively, are a lot more analogous to the size of a Cambridge or Brookline than New York's boroughs).
 
I'd call Somerville a suburb because it is primarily residential and not (any more) a major employment centers. People who live in Somerville mostly commute to jobs in Boston, Cambridge, or elsewhere.
 
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