About Suburbs

The term “suburbs” generally identifies the position and condition of a part of the city with respect to the centre. The variety and heterogeneity of the factors according to which we attribute a value to these judgement parameters (position and condition) make the concept of suburbs difficult to ascribe to a single pattern. Hence, suburbs are not all the same. However, we can find many common aspects within the concept of suburban condition. One of these is certainly the assessment model of this condition based on the comparison - or more precisely the contraposition - between centre and suburbs, i.e. between architectural quality and aesthetic decline, concentration of identity values and absence of identity, functional efficiency and lack of services and infrastructures, richness and shortage of culture, etc. It is the perception of this condition, which is manifested with the evidence of even just one of these “contrasting characteristics” that makes the profile of a suburban landscape easily recognisable, referred to in this book as "Suburbanscapes".