Classifying Black Suburbs: A Racial Spatial Orders Approach

By 2020, 54% of Black Americans in the nation's largest metropolitan areas lived in suburbs, reflecting the ongoing “third Great Migration” and a profound restructuring of metropolitan space. This study develops a novel political development framework, racial spatial orders (RSO), which conceptualizes metropolitan and Black suburban development as the result of historically contingent configurations of institutions, policies, and racial ideologies that (re-) produce metropolitan inequalities and spatial differentiation. Through mechanisms of intercurrence, path dependency, and layering, RSOs explain the persistence of racialized spatial governance while illuminating the adaptive strategies of Black spatial agency, including incorporation, political mobilization, and placemaking. Using qualitative process tracing, the study identifies five RSOs to analyze the formation and differentiation of Black suburbs in Cook County, Illinois, from 1900 to 2020, and develops a socio-spatial typology that captures variation among Black suburbs, offering a comparative lens for analyzing racialized political development across metropolitan contexts.