The Suburban Experiment vs. Traditional Development: 7 Key Differences

Over the last seventy years—a blink of the eye in the long history of city-building—we have transformed the North American continent with an approach to development that represents one of the biggest, swiftest, and, in hindsight, costliest human experiments ever conducted. At Strong Towns, we’ve dubbed it the Suburban Experiment. Below, I’ve summarized some of the differences between how humans have traditionally built cities and how we build them in North America today. But first I want to clear up two common misconceptions about the Suburban Experiment:

The Suburban Experiment isn’t limited to the suburbs. In fact, if we’re not careful, the suburbs can become a convenient but misleading foil for city people and rural people looking to deflect our own implication in the Suburban Experiment—and our own necessary role in changing it. So abruptly and so completely has our development pattern changed, we’re all “Suburbanites” now.

The Suburban Experiment isn’t defined by the automobile. We have a lot to say about cars here at Strong Towns: why we need to slow them down (and how), why we must build towns and cities for people rather than cars, why and how to curb our car-dependence, and more. Yet the defining characteristic of the North American Suburban Experiment isn’t the automobile.

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