aug.
(sub)Urban
Convergence
As a lifelong fringe dweller, specifically, a New York fringe dweller, I have been afforded nearly 30 years of opportunity to engage in conversations in both defence of and distancing from everything that encompasses the “urban fringe”. First, for the readers who are less in tune with the lingo of urban planning, an urban fringe is the literal transitional area where the urban and the rural meet. These areas are not to be confused with suburban areas, most popularly known as the suburbs. Suburbs sometimes operate as urban fringe areas, but often do not. The qualifier is whether or not that particular suburb also features rural elements such as farmland, woods, or other large swaths of unplanned and undeveloped land. And why are we using the word “fringe,” you may ask? Because, just like on a piece of woven fabric, it is an outer edge – a decorative border of hanging threads that are still a part of the overall composition, but less tightly interconnected in the main pattern of the fabric. Ladies and Gents: The Urban Fringe.
Now, why is the fringe important? Because in 2024, the Pacific Research Institute reported that the contemporary demographic of the urban *exurbs, or fringes, is 76.3% African American and that dating as far back as the year 2000, more than two-thirds of African-American people lived in the interstitial urban fringe. “So much of the mainstream-media debate about urban policy, especially regarding transportation and housing, seems to assume that it’s largely a debate between the priorities of suburban-living white Americans and minorities who live mostly in cities. It’s not only white Americans who have fled failed urban policies. In fact, ‘Nearly all population growth in U.S. metropolitan areas has been suburban or exurban since before World War II.’”, the article states. Additionally, the University of Notre Dame reported that this demographic shift is as large as the post-WWII wave of the Great Migration. And somehow, even with this Black emigration to the urban fringe, there is still an overwhelming social understanding that the suburbs are almost explicitly white.
In a 1947 study on the rural-urban fringe, Myles W. Rodehaver writes that migration to the rural-urban fringe involves two opposing population streams with very different motives and backgrounds. Those moving from urban areas into the fringe are often looking to escape the crowding and noise of the city, while those moving from rural areas into the fringe are often looking for better jobs and equal opportunity. In either case, both populations desire the fringe's accessibility to the central urban area without all of the fuss.
This is an important point to understand concerning the upsurge in the urbanisation of the American suburb and growing [re]development of previously fringed areas with “luxury” apartment complexes and urban-style housing complexes that mimic urbanity but maintain American post-war suburban social structures, hierarchies, and most important of all, methods of surveillance.
This might not seem like such a harmful thing in theory, but in practice, conceptualizing a space by racial identity creates many social implications of belonging. If the suburbs are culturally understood as white spaces, then what happens when non-white bodies begin to occupy these spaces at an overwhelming rate? If roughly 50% of all fatal and injurious police encounters take place in suburban settings (with 28% in urban and 22% in rural areas), and Black Americans make up roughly 13-14% of the total U.S. population, but account for roughly 22%-25% of all people killed by law enforcement nationwide, there is something to be said about making an effort to redfine our cultural understanding of the American suburb.
I believe that as designers, urban planners, and others operating in the realm of spatial design, taking an intersectional approach to our design methodology may be one of the most radical adaptations to practice that we can make in order to be proactive in social justice through design. Intersectionality is not solely about incorporating different identities. It also explores how the varied and layered oppressions are shaped by how simultaneous identities position them in an imagined social map, or in this case, in a realized urban fringe environment.
In the era of white flight, suburbs were explicitly designed for the safety and convenience of white Americans. So I firmly believe that this is a design issue that was produced by the hand of designers and urban planners, and can be rectified by the same parties. So the next time you think about the fringes of urbanity, or if you happen to be in New York driving through that ambiguous space called the Hudson Valley, think about whose neighborhood you are really driving through, and the systems, layouts, and organization strategies that govern it by design.
Until next month,
stay BAD.d
Written by Keren Dillard
*exurb – Where suburbs sit directly outside of a major city, an exurb sits farther than the suburb in a semi-rural area between the suburb surrounding an urban center and the outer rural areas.