Orange County Essay, Research Paper

Many people, including scholars and journalists, refer to Orange County as a suburban region. The use of the concept suburb is a little misleading in this instance. The term suburb customarily referred to low-density settlements located on the fringe of cities. Even with the development in the 1970s of urbanization of the suburbs, much of the writing in that period about suburban areas in the United States adopted a core-periphery approach, mainly focusing on cities, on suburbs, or on the interplay between cities and suburbs. Terms as outer city, new city, and satellite sprawl were given to newly urbanized suburbs. A significant fraction of those earlier works about life in suburban United States engaged in basing the burbs and viewed traditional cities as the leading centers of civilization and cultural vitality.

More recently, there has emerged a tradition of scholarly research characterized by a more open-minded evaluation of the structures and ways of life in suburbs, in which a multicentered approach has supplanted the core-periphery model. Writer within this tradition have discovered economic, social, and cultural dynamism in what was formerly viewed as the sleepy suburban hinterland. They have also come up with some new terms to characterize these places, including technobubs, urban villages, middle landscape, and edge cities. Despite there common focus on suburbs, most of these terms, and the analytical strategies associated with them, retain an urban reference point. The term edge cities was used because they are on the frontier of U.S. civilization.

The 1990s version of bashing the burbs portrays the new metropolitan regions in the U.S. as stubbornly resistant to hetogeneity. Many recent studies of suburbia have succumbed to a form of boosterism called suburbanophilia. The intention in post suburban California was neither to bash nor to boost. It was to understand and explain. We must understand the competing of the scholarly and journalistic orientations as well as the social and moral complexities of regions such as Orange County and Silicon Valley in California. While these regions originally developed in the 1960s as suburban areas of larger cities, by the late 1980s they had developed their own economic and cultural style. By that, time the majority of the residents of Orange County worked in the region, rather than commuting to Los Angeles, as they previously have done. The county s economy had grown into the thirtieth largest in the world.

Orange County is thus no longer a suburb of Los Angeles, or even a collection of such suburbs. It now exhibits the dynamism customarily associated with major urban centers, even though it is much more decentralized than traditional cities.

Post suburban California: The Transformation of Postwar Orange County, California (2nd ed.)

University of California Press