Not your grandfather's suburbs

Reading The Economist's "An age of transformation ... America's suburbs are coming to resemble its city centres. That is both good news and bad" (May 31), you get the feeling that they could have made their point much more sharply. It is no longer accurate to think of simply "the suburbs".

David Brooks caught some of this in his On Paradise Drive. Suburbs become exurbs which become settled rural outposts of various flavors. We tried to describe some of this variety in a recent paper.