Title, basically.
Where I live, 'suburbs' = not the city centre, detached/semi-detached houses with back gardens & sometimes small front gardens + 2-3 stories, sometimes terraced housing as well, and alrightish public transport. It's where commuters live who travel half an hour to an hour to get to work.
Any discussion of American suburbs is all about how they push out black folks, are a huge waste of resources, etc. I don't know enough about America to have an opinion but I feel like I'm missing something.
The idea is more or less the same but you have to understand the historical context of US suburbanization and American racism.
Suburbanization happened around the same time as deindustrialization and Black migration to the North. As Blacks migrated north they were met with discrimination in housing and employment so they were forced into ghettos. The most common way to segregate housing were through racial covenants, redlining, and intimidation. Racial covenants were put in the deeds of homes and would prevent Black people from buying homes in certain neighborhoods. They would say things like this home shall not be sold to someone of the negro race. I want to say these were legal until the 50s. Redlining comes from maps the federal government used to back mortgages. During the great depression the federal government started insuring mortgages so banks could offer lower rates than they otherwise would. Well, the federal government made a color coded map to decide where were the best places to make loans with red being the worst. Well, as you can imagine, black neighborhoods were always considered bad so nobody could get a mortgage in those neighborhoods so there was never any investment. Then there was straight intimidation. It wasn't uncommon for mobs to show to show up if a Black family moved into the wrong neighborhood. All this happened in central cities and new suburbs. Levittown is often considered the first suburb and it Black people were not allowed to live there.
While all this was going on the federal government was building freeways right through the middle of cities to newly built suburbs that were all backed by federal loans. Since there were so many barriers for Black to get into the suburbs the suburbs were pretty much all white. US cities got totaly fucked. They were destroyed by freeways, all the jobs and tax base left, and the people left over were legally second class citizens until the 60s.
This is why there is such a divide between US cities and their suburbs. Since about WWII US cities have been disproportionately poor and black while the suburbs have been wealthier and white.