America’s suburbs are becoming more racially mixed than its cities, says an article in this week’s Economist. According to the demographer William Frey,

the white population of big-city suburbs grew by 7% between 2000 and 2006. In the same period the suburban Asian population grew by 16%, the black population by 24% and the Hispanic population by an astonishing 60%.

Los Angeles, which markets itself as the city “where the world comes together”, and New York (“the world’s second home”) both added whites and lost blacks between 2000 and 2006. So many blacks moved out of Los Angeles that, were the exodus to continue unabated, they would disappear from the city around 2050.
[America's Suburbs: An Age of Transformation via The Economist]

The article goes on to describe the blossoming commercial and cultural activity that this mixing has spawned.

This is quite a different picture of suburbs from the one that has been circulated in the media, books and movies like Edward Scissorhands. What happened to the sterile rows of cookie-cutter houses and strip malls? The conformist culture that is to blame for everything from unsustainable living habits to deep-seated psychological nausée? Among young, socially aware people, the virtues of frugal–not to mention trendy and hip–urban living has been taken for granted so much that it’s become a stereotype (see SWPL entry on “Gentrification”). It’s refreshing to hear suburbanization in America–for better or worse–discussed as a consequence of practical and (get this) economic realities.

The bad stuff hasn’t gone away though. The positive changes in suburbs mentioned in the article are limited and are mainly the result of racial integration. For many, suburbanization is still problematic as a matter of resource consumption, social cohesion, or plain-old aesthetics.

James Kunstler, an American urbanist, says [suburbs] represent “the greatest misallocation of resources the world has ever known”. Richard Florida, an influential writer, sees them as incidental, at best, to cities’ highest purpose, which is to concentrate young, creative folk who will come up with brilliant innovations.

The Kunstler quote is from a talk he gave at the TED2004 conference, embedded below. If you’re lucky enough to live in one of the few truly successful (sub)urban areas in America, Kunstler’s strident pessimism might seem a little melodramatic. But his larger social message, an affirmation of civic participation and an emphasis on community as an inherent value of urban planning, is worth reflecting on.