Cities: are they hurt by "suburban influence" being dirty words?

Cities: are they hurt by "suburban influence" being dirty words?

I've noted (as I am sure have many of you) that those most passionate about an urban city fabric have the most disdain for anything that smacks of suburbia.

Is such thinking warranted or even desirable? I think not.

People in cities don't often realize that today's suburbia is often very urban and very city like and that it has been able to develop worthwhile and attractive commercial and residential developments that can be fully compatible with cities when replicated there.

I find a lot of the dislike that cities have about cars to be absurd. They were not invented by suburbanites and, as a technological advancement, they were going to be an integral part of cities whether some people didn't want them to be, or not.

A lot of the way people in cities criticize suburbs is based on snobery and the desire to think that sububranites just don't get it, that city life is the ultimate, and that suburbia has no ideas to offer (despite the fact that, for them, city life is far less gritty and far more sanitized than when cities were truly "real"). I find that absurd. Just as Britain's former colonies in America greatly influence Great Britain today, why would anyone think that suburbia wouldn't influence the very cities that spawned it? And why would urbanities think embracing concepts of architecture from suburbia isn't part of the continual change and development of histories on their march through history? Why is it that "sububan style development" automatically becomes buzz words for something totally undesirable, regardless of how it is developed?

American cities were not frozen in time in the 1950's when the real push to suburbia began. It is totally unrealistic, and frankly condesending, to think that suburbs can't influence cities or that suburbs may actually have some answers to metropolitan living that cities can learn from.>