Which of the following best describes your neighborhood?

[TJ in Oregon]

Postwar suburb is the best description, full of small 1950's ranch-style houses.

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

Postwar suburb, with a modern suburb literally across the street.

Same, but the modern suburb up the street from me is more apartment/townhouses than cookie cutter gated subdivisions shown in the OP.

[Simfan34]

For the purposes of this thread urban/suburban/rural refer not to legal municipal, but rather styles of development. I tried to get pictures from a variety of locations to be as fair as possible. Postwar suburb for me, though I would like to move to streetcar one day. Unwilling to ditch my car and parking is way too much of a hassle in Urban Core.

Urban Core:


Streetcar Suburb


Postwar Suburb


Modern Suburb


Rural

This is far more idealism. Especially London.

[Platypus]

Hmmn, somewhere between the first and second categories, but Australian cities work differently.

http://maps.google.com.au/maps?q=port+melbourne&hl=en&ll=-37.838259,144.942369&spn=0.014557,0.027874&hnear=Port+Melbourne+Victoria&t=m&z=16&layer=c&cbll=-37.837817,144.941236&panoid=60JGTzgBSJQOCcmb5pKIAA&cbp=12,155.92,,0,-0.17

Reasonably typical of Port Melbourne - some pre-federation buildings, an early 1900s house, a post-war greek brick nightmare, some 60s public housing flats, and post-1990 new yuppie apartments can all be seen from this intersection.

[Ban my account ffs!]

Rural.

[Hatman 🍁]

Urban. Not far from street car suburbia though. I was raised in a post war suburb, but not very many people call it suburban, although it technically is, I guess.

[HagridOfTheDeep]

Streetcar suburb.

[memphis]

This is far more idealism. Especially London.

I did try to pick a fairly prosperous example of each so as not to be accused of bias by those who might take offense to a blighted subject. I could have just as easily picked an urban slum, a foreclosed suburb, and a rural shack. The London example is very fancy, I agree. But the urban core of European capitals are frequently where the very elite reside, which can come as a bit of a surprise to somebody more accustomed to an American style. If it makes you feel better, here is a more modest urban core photo:

And the postwar suburb I posted was not so monied. Here is a more prosperous example.

[Smash255]

postwar

[Kitteh]

Northern Virginia has some nice streetcar suburbs. Arlington county is one of the classic examples of an American streetcar suburb. There are a fair number of areas that are postwar suburbs too, but the majority of NoVA is extremely ugly modern suburbs. Which is unfortunately where I live.

[afleitch]

I live in a tenement in Glasgow so urban core I guess.

The word tenement has an extremely negative connotation in America. Dark. Dirty. Old. Dickensian. I'm thinking some element of meaning must have changed across the Atlantic. Nobody here would describe their own home as a tenement, unless he was making a special point to emphasize how awful it is.

Oh not at all. Tenements buildings in Glasgow are a mixture, none are 'awful' and many are very palatial and cost up to £750,000. Tenement here just means a style of building.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Rural. Not rural enough for my tastes, but rural.

[ZuWo]

It's hard to categorize my neighborhood because the choices that are listed here don't really apply. I'd say "urban core" or "suburb", or something in between.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Yes, the really awful tenements in Glasgow - incidentally, like most dire 19th century housing they tended to use a court structure - were all demolished (one way or another) during the twentieth century. In fact in most British cities the only remaining 19th century housing stock was built for either better paid workers or for the middle classes.

Small tenements were also a surprisingly common housing style in industrial villages in parts of North Wales.

[traininthedistance]

Just about every place that I have ever lived could plausibly be described as a "streetcar suburb", though there is significant variation on that. 

I grew up in a house from the late 1920s, but there's postwar development the next block over and I think it was designed for cars from the beginning.  But the yards are small and the architecture is two stories plus attic, not ranch-style or Cape Cod.  So, kind of transitional between streetcar and postwar.

College was in dorms, but the surroundings were very old suburb with Victorians and a train station.

Post-college (after some time at my parents) I moved to an apartment building in another very old suburb with Victorians and a train station, then I spent a year in Manayunk, which I guess is more urban core (it was all rowhomes, though it switched over to the duplexes of Roxborough not too far from me) except that it also had a sort of separate town feel far from the actual core of Philadelphia.

Then I went to grad school and lived in a Victorian two-family in West Philly.  About as streetcar suburb as you can get, complete with working streetcars.  Then I graduated and stayed there for a little longer.

Now I live in an apartment building in Brooklyn, but there are yet more old Victorians both across the street and down the block, and there's also a subway right nearby.

[Oldiesfreak1854]

Rural, although it's not far from several larger cities.

[Vazdul (Formerly Chairman of the Communist Party of Ontario)]

I live in a tenement in Glasgow so urban core I guess.

The word tenement has an extremely negative connotation in America. Dark. Dirty. Old. Dickensian. I'm thinking some element of meaning must have changed across the Atlantic. Nobody here would describe their own home as a tenement, unless he was making a special point to emphasize how awful it is.

Oh not at all. Tenements buildings in Glasgow are a mixture, none are 'awful' and many are very palatial and cost up to £750,000. Tenement here just means a style of building.

Here, it means something more akin to this:

[memphis]

I live in a tenement in Glasgow so urban core I guess.

The word tenement has an extremely negative connotation in America. Dark. Dirty. Old. Dickensian. I'm thinking some element of meaning must have changed across the Atlantic. Nobody here would describe their own home as a tenement, unless he was making a special point to emphasize how awful it is.

Oh not at all. Tenements buildings in Glasgow are a mixture, none are 'awful' and many are very palatial and cost up to £750,000. Tenement here just means a style of building.

An American would call those "townhouses" "row houses" or "brownstones"

[Grumpier Than Uncle Joe]

1960s suburban

[GMantis]

Write in: Communitst Utopia

Yeah, not pretty (though this is one the uglier examples), but one has to consider the way rapid urbanization often leads to the creation of slums. When this is considered (and also that they almost entirely owned by the people who live in them), it doesn't seem such a bad way of solving problems with housing. Or maybe I'm just too jaded;)

[memphis]

So, how does urban expansion work in Europe? When a need for growth arises, do they build "urban core" on the outskirts of the city? 

[Filuwaúrdjan]

What happens depends on the place and the time of the development.

[traininthedistance]

Europe definitely has "streetcar suburb"-style development as well, and I think that would definitely be a close analogue to the type of greenfield building that happens there, or at least closer than anything else on this list.

Take Milton Keynes for instance:

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Milton Keynes is a New Town - a centrally planned settlement - and so has nothing in common with urban development in the U.S. It's grid-based layout is also (famously) unusual and distinctive.

[muon2]

The blocks in my immediate neighborhood would classify as a streetcar suburb. In fact a streetcar once ran from two blocks away from my house all the way to the city.