Comment by CrossingBrooklynFerry
"He wouldn't relent, and a normal bar disagreement got way more heated than it needed to be. " In my experience there are three kinds of people who get stuck on using jurisdictional boundaries rather...
View ArticleComment by movement
Your penultimate paragraph says it all. There is nothing urban about the denser parts of western Fairfax or even much of Alexandria. Kingstowne urban? Not even a little but they do have a *-load of...
View ArticleComment by Dan Malouff of BeyondDC
I think a better litmus test for urban is whether buildings greet the street or greet parking. Granted, that would be a lot harder to map.
View ArticleComment by drumz
Noted sprawl advocates also like to pick whatever definition of "urban" they want and use it to hammer home their points about how density is bad (i.e. seriously saying the suburbs are king because...
View ArticleComment by drumz
Also, this map is geographic and we're talking about density. That's always going to distort some of the information (tons of people in tiny tracts). See, any geographic map of election results. Though...
View ArticleComment by Matt' Johnson
I think the dichotomy is fairly useless in the way we use it today, and I agree that municipal boundaries are completely pointless as a distinction. Rosslyn, just across the river from Downtown DC is a...
View ArticleComment by Alex B.
I got into an argument with someone at a happy hour a few years ago. Why? This dude said I lived in the suburbs, because Silver Spring was outside the District.This is true. You do live in the...
View ArticleComment by Wheatonian
Another useless distinction is the whole inside/outside the Beltway trope. I've had a couple of service providers tell me they only do work within the Beltway. Like, what? You're willing to go to...
View ArticleComment by dan reed!
@Alex B, MLD It makes no sense that I live in "the suburbs" whereas my neighbor two blocks away, living in a single-family house in the District, lives in "the city." As far as I'm concerned, I may not...
View ArticleComment by renegade09
I would argue that density and form have nothing to do with the suburban/urban divide. It's about commuting patterns. An urban place is a place where people work. A suburb is a place where people live,...
View ArticleComment by CrossingBrooklynFerry
renegade - by that definition the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and the South Bronx are both suburbs. There was no postwar movement to the suburbs, as most people were leaving (dense) residential...
View ArticleComment by Thayer-D
Silver Spring is a small city so in that sense it's urban even though it's outside the center city. Maybe a better metric would be a place's walk score. If you experience a place mostly on foot, then...
View ArticleComment by CrossingBrooklynFerry
movement Kingstowne, in addition to a lot of THs (making it relatively dense) has roads that pretty much all connect up (thus no cul de sacs) although curvilinear, has a trail network that adds...
View ArticleComment by CrossingBrooklynFerry
" If you experience a place mostly on foot, then it's urban, regardless of it's density. There are a lot of areas with high rise densities that no one would walk around. Those places to me are...
View ArticleComment by Hadur
That's true, Del Ray has a lot of small-town feel to it. You feel like you are walking down the main street of a classic small American town when you're there. That's distinct from both a suburb or a...
View ArticleComment by Frank IBC
Interesting how few "urban" areas there are in PG County, outside the Beltway. Just (outer) New Carrollton, Laurel, and two little bits near Upper Marlboro and Bowie.
View ArticleComment by charlie
This confusion is what happen when you mix identity politics with where you live.
View Article
