This article is part of Ireland’s Changing Suburbs, an Irish Times series exploring our fast-growing new towns, changing older neighbourhoods, and shrinking rural landscapes.
In 1938, the US sociologist Lewis Mumford observed that suburbia “is the collective effort to live a private life”. Suburbs first emerged in the mid-19th century with the rise of a new professional and managerial class who did not want to live in the same building as they worked, a common practice at the time.
Suburbs were clean and family-oriented, the opposite of the dirty and unhealthy cities people were trying to flee. In the original suburbia women tended to stay at home while men commuted to work on newfangled public transport such as the “omnibus”.
The fate of suburbs
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