Cities are endlessly celebrated; the suburbs are derided. Urban culture is the apex of cool. Suburbs are places to leave, settlements on a horizon just close enough to the glamour of the metropolis to feel its glow yet too far to feel a part of it.
They are places for parents, not youth, despite the irony that couples move to the suburbs to find better conditions for their children: housing, schooling, more space and safety. It is no accident that the music and fashion movements that come from the suburbs — Mod, Punk, New Wave and onwards — are based on a particularly suburban alienation and a desire for the coolness or the anarchy of the urban future.
With the suburb as a place for the young to escape from, what happens when the city becomes too successful? When the young can no longer afford to rent even the tiniest of apartments? What has tended to happen is that the centre grows, subsuming successive once-suburban centres into its maw.