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Lijit Search

David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, is one of a handful of urban pundits who, like Rich Karlgaard at Forbes, has recognized that something strange and important is happening in the exurban and micropolitan fringes of America:

On the one hand, people move to exurbs because they want some order in their lives. They leave places with arduous commutes, backbreaking mortgages, broken families and stressed social structures and they head for towns with ample living space, intact families, child-friendly public culture and intensely enforced social equality. That's bourgeois.

On the other hand, they are taking a daring leap into the unknown, moving to towns that have barely been built, working often in high-tech office parks doing pioneering work in biotech and nanotechnology. These exurbs are conservative but also utopian - Mayberrys with BlackBerrys.

Take a Ride to Exurbia (registration required)

It's difficult to categorize the many instantiations of this new American frontier along familiar conservative-liberal, Republican-Democrat, business-environmentalist spectra.  Nevertheless, patterns do emerge from the confusion, sometimes in the form of surprising creativity.  At the very least, as Brooks has concluded, the changes at the margins of America matter, regardless of your political leanings.

5:59:56 AM