WHEN THE URBAN FRINGE IS NOT SUBURBAN

Attributing growth and development to suburbs is almost reflexive among urban scholars conditioned to the mass-produced housing and vast subdivisions of the latter half of the twentieth century. Many urban centers in the United States approached their maximum extent early in the twentieth century, and the interface of urban and rural land uses had moved beyond most city limits by the time suburban history emerged in the last decades of the twentieth century. Consequently, definitions of "urban fringe" after World War II invariably place it outside the city and in the suburbs (Kurtz and Eicher 1958). Prewar scholars have been more flexible concerning the location of the fringe and on occasion discuss it in the context of the city (Burgess 1925; Hoyt 1933, 1939; Kennedy and Woods 1969). Recently observers have suggested that the fringe may be most correctly located beyond the suburbs, given current trends in exurban sprawl and decentralization (Audirac 1999; Sharp and Clark 2008). This progression of the fringe away from the city core reflects well-recognized changes in the structure of metropolitan regions during the twentieth century, yet the importance of locating the fringe when discussing historical suburbanization has been generally overlooked. In this article I argue that the distinction between suburbia and the urban fringe remains a valuable one, demonstrating the argument with analyses of specific nineteenth-century cities. If the potential for problems created by conflating the twentieth-century fringe with suburbs is low, circumstances indicate that the nineteenth-century context is challenging. In that era of aggressive annexations the urban fringe would often fall deep within the incorporation limits as cities absorbed their borderlands as rapidly as legislatures would allow. Following an annexation the settlements newly proximate to the city boundary, and therefore "suburban" by the common definition, could be very distant from the dense populations and direct links to the infrastructure of the city. Similarly, some number of settlements within the city boundary following annexation will conform to the assumed typology of a suburb in all respects except location. Untangling the fringe from suburbs thereby encompasses the emerging literature documenting the presence of working-class and ethnic suburbs. Because research has been attending only to suburbs in the jurisdictional sense it remains unclear whether ethnic and working-class settlements develop in the regime of disturbance at the fringe, in the political context of the suburban region, or as a result of opportunities that emerge after the edge of development passes by. THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN SUBURB AND FRINGE The urban fringe arguably received more notice than did suburbs during the first decades of the twentieth century as the location where increasing residential density and intensifying land use cohered into new urban landscapes (Burgess 1925; Hoyt 1933, 1939; Park 1936; Kennedy and Woods 1969). This definition of the "fringe" as a process is quite distinct from the political and ideal definitions of "suburbs," and many arguments were based on the separation of fringe and suburb. This separation of meanings had largely disappeared by midcentury, when neither suburbs nor the urban fringe received much research attention. Now, however, suburbs are the subject of a rewarding research agenda--which is not the case for the separate urban fringe. John Fraser Hart suggested that the lack of properly scaled and detailed historical information about metropolitan regions outside the central city makes research so challenging that scholars have tended to neglect the urban fringe as a subject, finding it easier to represent the metropolitan region as stable and unchanging (Hart 1991, 36). For similar reasons it has also proved difficult to gain traction on quantitative projects to support the claims of ethnic and class diversity now at the heart of suburban history despite repeated calls for them (Sies 2001, 2003; McManus and Ethington 2007). …