Characterize your metro's city/suburban relationship
 

I will go first:

I think the relationship between Chicago and its burbs is fairly healthy. There is not much mutual animosity, although some exists. Some suburbanites view the city as crime ridden, corrupt, etc and some city residents literally refuse to go to the burbs for any reason. But for the most part, it feels like a unified region with the core of the city as the heart of the action, and nobody disputes that.

I wasn't grown up and around here in the 80's/90's but I get the sense that there was more animosity toward the city from the burbs back then, and that the burbs were on a path toward rivaling the city. But since then the city has really taken back all of its prior dominance as the center of importance in the region, and everybody seems to have given up any delusions to the contrary.

How about your metro?

South Florida functions as a collection of cities, so there's no real "one city vs the burbs" vibe there. Miami is seen as a Hispanic dominated city so more "American" residents in other places like West Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale don't venture down there unless they are going to South Beach or a sports event.

People here identify with their town, city, suburb, village, and even county more than the most dominant ones in the metro.

Dave and Bobdreamz may have better things to say about this since they been in the area longer.

Where does one end and the other begin? Sometimes it's a joke, sometimes not. As a technicality, I went to high school two miles from Houston proper but it was in Galveston County.

Not sure how to answer this since I rarely think of the suburbs. Virtually everyone at my workplace lives in the city too (the exceptions tend to also have an appointment at Fermilab or Argonne... and most of the people who live outside the city live in Oak Park...).

So far this year, I've been to the suburbs (as opposed to through the suburbs) once... in order to go kayaking in Skokie Lagoon. I guess I'll be taking the train out to Geneva in a week and a half for a workshop at Fermilab so that will be my second trip out to the suburbs this year.

Oh man, Hampton Roads it pretty much just a collection of cities/suburbs that all think they should be the center of everything. The relationship between the cities are generally decent but they compete with each other for everything under the sun so no one city can really shine.

If only Virginia Beach became a real city. Of those cities, Hampton should be the anchor imo.

Do normal people in Chicagoland really project tangible animosity toward the city proper or the suburbs? Or is that just an online partisan-warrior thing?

Is the Hampton Roads the largest metro area in the US with no obvious dominant city?

Mostly the latter, from my 4+ decades of experience, the first 2 decades of which I lived on the other side of the equation.

But, TUP is right that there was more hostility back in the '80s/'90s when the city was loosing a lot of businesses to the burbs, culminating in Sears moving out of their iconic world's tallest building headquarters in the loop to a monumentally anonymous suburban office park campus way the fuck out in the burbs.

And look how well Sears has turned out for it. :(

^ I think Sears' woes stemmed from some pretty shady corporate management over the past decade or so. Well after they abandoned the Sears Tower.

I live in a very Stepford 'exurban' area...30 miles from downtown and still live in Houston. Needless to say, Houston and the 'burbs are one in the same in a lot of ways.

Yeah,I’m not sure how much this discussion would apply to newer cities that have little difference between the development patterns of their burbs and central cities.

I imagine that older cities on the east and Midwest have stronger city-suburban identity issues, although I wouldn’t be surprised if it were as strong in places like Atlanta, New Orleans, etc. Certainly less so in less centralized metros like LA.

Not from Hampton Roads, but I'd argue that Norfolk is pretty clearly the "real city" of the bunch. Yes, Virginia Beach is the largest city by population, but that's largely due to Virginia's weird local incorporation laws, which ensure cities cannot be part of counties. In the mid 20th century the mergers of cities and counties resulted in the creation of the "cities" of Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, and Suffolk, which all had oodles of undeveloped land still at the time. The former was so large that it eventually eclipsed the more traditional cities of Hampton Roads in population, even though it lacks an urban core to speak of.

The "core four" of Hampton Roads are really Norfolk, Portsmouth, Hampton, and Newport News. Newport News and Hampton were both very small cities in the prewar area. Newport News had a downtown area close to the shipyards, but it was basically urban renewed into oblivion, with some scattered old buildings left but nothing cohesive remaining. Hampton has a very small downtown area with maybe a block of decent urbanity (but little commercial vitality).

Portsmouth, though the smallest of the "main four" today, boomed a bit earlier than the above two. It has a real downtown area which goes on for several blocks. Just to the north it has the (rather pretentiously named) Olde Towne, which is one of the handful of semi-intact rowhouse-like neighborhoods in the South. But it still doesn't hold a candle to Norfolk, which has an actual (though small) CBD area, a nice traditionally urban streetscape with prewar midrises along Granby St, and the (relatively) old urban neighborhood of Ghent.

LA's weird about this because so many suburbs don't feel like regular suburbs, just part of LA's "blob". And many have their own identity.

And it's hard to compare it to other metros, because it's so different.

I remember DC residents having more of a arrogance towards to their suburbs than Chicago.

Probably because they’re divided between three states whereas most of Chicago’s suburban population is in Illinois.

The suburbs are mostly inconsequential to NYC. I don't know the names of any mayors or elected officials outside of NYC, except for the governors of the tri-state, and the mayor of Newark.

NY's situation is completely the opposite of my experience growing up in the Detroit area, where suburban county executives were seen, locally at least, to have equal importance to the mayors of Detroit. L. Brooks Patterson, the late county exec of Oakland County, MI, was often jokingly referred to as the mayor of the suburbs. It is hard to imagine that any region had a more toxic urban-suburban divide than Detroit and suburban Detroit, from about 1970 until about 2010. The dynamic is quite noticeably less hostile now, but not perfect.

My city is Stereotypical a "giant Suburb" but the central neighborhoods and areas around the various city centers of Tempe, Scottsdale, Phoenix and Glendale are actually pretty urban.

But being a western city and very new its fully "multi-nodal" with people commuting out to job centers in neighboring suburbs almost as much as they commute in to the city core. (seriously is like a 55-45 kind of flow) the central city has the highest density of jobs in the metro but suburban employment areas are pretty big.

Edit:

If we are discussing rivalry and animosity, the East Valley (eastern Suburbs) are the wealthier, denser and more white collar side of the city, looks down on the "working class" west valley while the west valley generally sees the East as snobbish and overpriced. Scottsdale for a long time sat atop the pile as King of shit mountain but Scottsdale has really lost its aloofness in the last 10 years or so as Tempe and Phoenix have grown more urban and had a lot of gentrification. Scottsdale as a city has been fairly stagnant comfortable in its superiority until the last 18 months.

Now the fastest growing part of Scottsdale is actually just over the border in Phoenix (Kirkland area)

^ Yep, my presumption is that Detroit is probably the most extreme case of suburban-urban antipathy, although I'm glad to see that people are starting to come around

In this forum's specific context, Toronto pretends to not care much about suburban Mississauga... but is secretly jealous that "Missie" has built (the "Marilyn" twisting towers), and is still building, better towers.

No, I think it's something else.

I for one didn't experience it so strongly from DC.

Of course, I did much of my medical training there so I had to travel from DC to suburban Virginia hospitals. So perhaps my experience wasn't "typical".

But I still didn't quite have that experience in DC. DC is a very small city, geographically, plus much of its real estate is occupied by "Capital of the USA" kind of stuff. So it seems unlikely that people living there will have no reason to fathom going to/visiting/socializing in Virginia or Maryland.

Also keeping in mind how extensive the DC Metro is and how it goes out to places like Arlington, Crystal City, Fairfax County, Tysons Corner and multiple locations in Maryland, the suburb/city areas seem far more tied together than Chicago's does.