Metropolitan Fringe? Really?

Notes from Geoff Nunberg's "The Long History of the Word 'Suburb'":

Recently, urban planners have been calling the suburb "metropolitan fringe" and "edge cities"...is a new name really going to attract a new wave of suburbanites?

In Europe:
tanneries
gambling houses
slaughter houses

First middle-class setting: London around 1900...but aristocrats still saw it as vulgar and pretentious

Malvina Reynolds (singer of "Little Boxes")...calling suburbs unoriginal: unfair? Is everyone supposed to be a folk singer? Sorry.

Too similar to thesis? Taped in 1996. I can add to this, finding the differences today and using today's adaptations of the suburbs (and maybe reflections of suburbs in the last centuries) to find something out.

Example: Revolutionary Road written 1961, movie taped 2008. What are the differences? Are these effected by time and disassociation?