Life is not so good in the suburbs

By: Lauren Young

While sitting in the library, I decided to go on the LexisNexis page to look up an article for this blog. I must say, I first just searched for "suburbs," not expecting to match many results. I was shocked to see that there were over 1,000 results for that! So then I narrowed down my search and focused on "life in the suburbs." This matched 7 results, and from there I decided to take a look.

I read the article It's worth the drive to Acton or is it? Readers respond to sprawl, life in the suburbs and Toronto Star series on lengthy commutes. This was very interesting because it was just a compiled list of opinions of life in the suburbs. All these opinions were biased since they all leaned toward the opinion of staying out of the suburbs. It was nice to see that this article was not written from one viewpoint, but from many viewpoints. Different people mainly from the Toronto area, and some not even living there, shared their comments. It was easy to read since each person just shared their opinion in a short and to the point manner.

This article connected with Suburban Nation since it claimed that the suburbs are a bad form of sprawl. I'm sure several people in Toronto love living in the suburbs, but this article only picked out the people who didn't. This article supported its claim by saying the drive was too long, bad for the environment, and that there is more convenience with living in the city. The only bad factor they shared was the amount of pollution in the city itself. This agrees with Suburban Nation since Duany, Platner-Zyberk & Co also argue that the modern sprawl and suburbs are all just cookie cutter houses that create more traffic, pollution, and more commuting to work. Both argue the convenience of living in the city.