> In the suburbs kids never stopped playing in the street. There are many different suburbs out there. Some feel like small towns, as they may have been at som

> In the suburbs kids never stopped playing in the street. There are many different suburbs out there. Some feel like small towns, as they may have been at some point. Others feel like wastelands, places where you won't see many cars driving down the streets since people are either sequestered in their homes or are elsewhere. I suspect that most of the hostile sentiment against suburbia originates from the latter. Of course, there are other reasons for the sentiment. In at least some urban areas, the roads that pass through them are viewed as being destructive to their community. At best, the roads are meant to service those who may come in to work or to shop or to entertain themselves. At worse, they are virtually impassible rifts that divide communities while oozing air and noise pollution. They offer little to the communities that surround them, not even economic benefits, since the vast majority of people are simply passing through rather than stopping in. Perhaps urban/suburban is the wrong dichotomy, but it is an easy one to draw upon. It fits our stereotypes. It fits the stereotypes of both sides since those who are drawn to suburbia can always find an urban concrete wasteland to point to, while those who are drawn to urban places can always find a desolate dystopia of lawns to point to. (Of course both sides can find peachy examples that fit their own preferences.)