Defending The Suburbs

In the face of a new round of City-dwellers bashing the suburbs, Sun columnist Pete McMartin defends the rights of the hundreds of thousands of us who live in one:

But suburbs aren't adjuncts to urban cores, anymore: they have their own dynamics and interests to protect. And in a world of An Inconvenient Truth, the inconvenient truth about suburbs, at least in the Lower Mainland, is:

They not only constitute the majority of inhabited land, they will soon constitute the majority of the population. While Sam Sullivan's vaunted (and much covered) EcoDensity initiative hopes to squeeze a measly 70,000 people inside city limits, suburbs south of the Fraser, the Tri-Cities area and Langley in the next 15 years will quietly outstrip Vancouver's population growth by a factor of seven.

A social engineer might find it easy to muse about uprooting so large a constituency for the good of mankind: a politician, no way. Suburbs, even in a Peak Oil world, will have to be accommodated.

If I were betting on the future, I might bet that suburbs have a better chance at survival than Balfour believes.

I might also think that if the Apocalypse does arrive, the very last place I'd want to be was in a city.