America’s suburbs are coming to resemble its city centers. That is both good news and bad. Fifteen miles east of Philadelphia, Willingboro’s Grand Marketplace is a chaotic place. Merchants hawk Christian T-shirts, Amish quilts, Chinese food, massages and Afrocentric literature. Salsa music blasts from a CD stall. Most of the shoppers are black; the shopkeepers are a variegated mix of blacks, Latinos, Asians, Arabs and whites, including Pennsylvania Dutch farmers in traditional garb. Welcome to bland, homogenous suburbia.

In 1960 fewer Americans lived in suburbs than in central cities or the countryside. Ten years later the suburbs had overhauled both; by 2000 they contained more people than the cities and countryside put together. Despite more than a decade of urban boosterism, beginning with sitcoms like “Friends” and “Sex and the City” and continuing with expensive efforts to spruce up downtown districts, the drift to the cul-de-sacs continues. Between 1990 and 2006 the city of Chicago added 50,000 residents, reversing a long decline. Not bad—but in the same period the sprawling metropolis outside the city proper grew by well over a million.

As they swell, the suburbs are changing. Perhaps none ever quite resembled the colorless domestic enclaves popularized by 1970s television programmes such as “The Brady Bunch”; now, they look nothing at all like them. America’s suburbs are ethnically and demographically mixed—sometimes more so than its cities. Many are less dormitories than economic powerhouses. Among the most changed is one of the most famous.

Willingboro, or Levittown as it used to be known, was built 50 years ago this summer. It was created by William Levitt, who kept costs down by bringing in ready-made walls and buying cookers and refrigerators direct from manufacturers. As he boasted to Time magazine, his company was the “General Motors of the housing industry”. The new suburb was composed of self-contained neighborhoods, each with its own school and swimming pool. Every street was reassuringly curved and shared the first letter of its name with the neighborhood to which it belonged. Holyoke Lane, Henderson Lane and Hummingbird Lane all lay within Hawthorne Park.

One of Willingboro’s first residents was Herbert Gans, a sociologist who wanted to find out whether suburbia conformed to the popular image of bored commuters and alienated housewives. His great book, “The Levittowners”, proved it did not. But Gans had to admit that Willingboro was homogenous. Virtually all home-buyers were white people in their 20s and 30s, with young children. The population was overwhelmingly lower-middle-class and less than 1% black.

These days Willingboro is two-thirds black. Although it remains child-oriented, it is no longer exclusively so. One in eight residents is now aged 65 or over. As the proportion of children has fallen, schools have been converted to other uses. One has been turned into a community centre where, on a recent Friday afternoon, an R&B band entertained a mixed-race crowd of old folk. The music drifted into a small room where Muslims, a growing presence in the neighborhood, had gathered for prayers.

Read it here: America’s suburbs: An age of transformation; Valencia and Willingboro