[dionidium]

You're right that people in practice use the word "suburb" to talk about all these different things, but that just reinforces that the word isn't very useful. Oak Park and Naperville are both "suburbs," but this reveals nothing to us. In fact, it mostly obfuscates.

[lolinder]

A suburb is outside of the city in low density housing, typically not within walking distance of anything. That reveals plenty for a lot of purposes, and if you want to critique something more specific than that you should use a word that people will recognize as being more specific than that.

Clearly the author of TFA believed that this was the definition of suburb, because they were clearly thinking of a space where people could in fact just hang out in front of their houses and meet neighbors. So for the purpose of this conversation, this definition of suburb is the only one that makes sense.

[tptacek]

There is nobody in Chicago who would describe Oak Park and Evanston as anything other than "suburbs". You'd get laughed at if you called them "the city".

[lolinder]

Right. I'm not at all sure why some people on here think "suburb" is only meant to refer to a very specific type of housing development, rather than a description of a location's spatial and cultural relationship to "the city".