Word: suburbias
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...SUBURBIA? The word alone is enough to unleash myths: a place afloat in behind-the-fridge gin, high on pot concealed in oregano jars, giddy with spouse swapping-and bored nonetheless. Perhaps an even greater fiction is that the terrain between city lines and countryside is uniform down to the last resident's outlook and lawn. In planning this week's cover story on the suburbs, TIME'S editors decided to challenge the myths head-on to discover how much diversity there really is among the nation's suburbs and suburbanites...
...pursuit of the suburban dream, Americans have precipitated one of the largest mass movements in history: during the past decade, the population of suburbia has grown by more than 15 million. According to the preliminary 1970 census reports, there are now 74.9 million people classified as suburbanites, a 25% increase over 1960. This surge has made suburbanites the largest group in the land, outnumbering both city dwellers and those who live in rural areas. So many Americans have already achieved the suburban goal that suburbia itself has undergone a mutation. Inevitably, the new migrants have undone the cliché image...
...such writers as Max Shulman (Rally Round the Flag, Boys!) and Peter De Vries (The Mackerel Plaza), elaborated more darkly in John Cheever's Bullet Park. The stereotype was neither wholly wrong nor wholly accurate. But those who have taken the trouble to look carefully have recognized that suburbia has been steadily changing. Today the demographic realities are radically different from the cliché, a change that is clearly documented in a TIME-Louis Harris survey of more than 1,600 suburban Americans in 100 different communities across the land...
...census sees it, suburbia also includes such unlikely terrain as Cascade County, around Great Falls, Mont. -lightly populated towns in flat, rolling wheat country-and Minnehaha County, surrounding Sioux Falls, S. Dak., mainly onetime farming towns that have increasingly become dormitory communities. Northwestern University Sociologist Raymond Mack says a suburb has only two distinct characteristics: proximity to a big city and specific political boundaries, which result in local control of government. Most of the people whom Harris questioned do not even think of themselves as suburbanites. More often, they would say that they live in a small city, a town...
Sociologists have made studies of single suburbs, or the suburbs of a single city, or of specific aspects of suburbia (such as politics or race), but they have never attempted a systematic nationwide classification of the types of towns that make up suburbia. Louis Harris and his polltakers set out to do just that for TIME. "Our goal," he says, "was to examine suburban complexity and to find a systematic way of classifying suburban communities that would shed light on the real differences that exist within the wide and expanding belt between the cities and the small towns and farms...