The Boburb vs. The Gated Community

Speaker: William [Beau] Weston, Van Winkle Professor of Sociology, Centre College, Danville, Kentucky

Some city neighborhoods are walkable, mixed-use, dense places, with coffeehouses, bookstores, arts venues, and liberals.  This is the “boburb,” the natural home of the “bourgeois bohemians” – people with a bourgeois work ethic but bohemian cultural tastes. By contrast, far out in the suburbs are car-dependent, residential-only, spread-out gated communities where swim clubs, golf courses, megachurches, and conservative families abide.  Both kinds of communities are full of college-educated middle and upper-middle class people.  So why do some choose one way to live, and some the other?  This study of Louisville aims to discover why.