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East St. Louis is in the suburbs of America's heartland. Suburban spaces are growing at much faster rates than central cities in terms of household income, business growth and development, falling rates of unemployment, and digital access. The city of East St. Louis was established as an industrial suburb, and was developed to promote and protect particular industrial interests. Its government operated primarily to protect investment and industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Great Depression hit East St. Louis particularly hard before the industrial demands of World War II sparked a resurgence. East St. Louis is the city with the highest percentage of African Americans in the nation, but it has a population of just under 30,000. A range of housing remains today in East St. Louis; however, abandoned or deteriorated businesses, multifamily dwellings, and single-family homes dot almost every block and neighborhood.

Beginning in the 1860s Chicago’s assembly-line factories moved to the suburbs in search of cheaper land and lighter government oversight. Workers followed the factories to the suburbs. This chapter analyzes two classic representations of the Town of Lake, later known as Packingtown: Samuel Eberly Gross’s advertisement “The Working-Man’s Reward” (1891) and Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle (1905), reconsidering The Jungle as a story of suburbanization.

This chapter considers the suburbs composing an economy in between the city and the rural. It begins by defining suburbs and then outlining their role in the broader transformation of metropolitan and megapolitan areas. It notes the variety of settlements that compose the suburbs. It charts the industrial and service industry origins of some suburbs. It explores the role of intermediaries in the production of suburban housing. Finally, it also considers the contours of the consumption economy found in the residential suburbs. Much of this chapter is focused on North America and to a lesser extent on Europe. While the US is not the norm regarding suburban development it does represent a powerful and perhaps exceptional model, aspects of which have only just begun to be exported.

Nineteenth-century Chicago developed by selling the idea of widespread homeownership. At a time when the definition of suburb was narrowing, Chicago’s early suburbs were nevertheless diverse, including industrial suburbs, racially diverse suburbs, and many spaces where workers struggled to achieve homeownership. Working-class and elite Chicagoans helped develop the American dream of homeownership and positioned Chicago as a paradigmatic American city.

This chapter illustrates the profound and lasting change brought about by the growth of Birmingham's iron and steel industry during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Companies built new plants on the fringes of the old city that attracted thousands of workers. By 1920, most iron and steel workers had moved away from the center of the city to neighborhoods closer to their jobs. Their neighborhoods and their institutions continued to reflect and reinforce the racial, occupational, and ethnic divisions of the workplace. In some cases, companies financed and controlled “industrial suburbs” as part of their larger strategy for creating efficient and loyal workers. They offered workers comfortable housing in relatively pleasant surroundings designed to provide a refuge from the rigors of the workplace.