slurb

slurb

(slɜːb)
n
(Human Geography) censorious US a suburban slum
Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014
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The Slurb (Christine Urspruch) is a sexless, effervescent, carrot-topped bundle of energy with a pig's snout that suddenly appears in the life of timid inventor Bruno Tasslespeare (Ulrich Noethen).
A glossy kidpic in which the prank-loving title creature (a Speckled Little Unidentified Redheaded Being) teaches a stodgy umbrella designer to loosen up, "The Slurb" has enough German backdrop to be distinctive but is universal enough to entertain moppets worldwide.
Stressing so-called sustainable design, these groups promote infill and density to undercut the Edge City "slurb" of the 1980s embodied in Southern California.
The label "slurb" is an insult that critics of urban sprawl could have hurled at dozens of conurbations that appeared after World War II, but Karl Belser, the Santa Clara County director of planning, first used it to describe the Santa Clara Valley.
Only a few have become major research concerns in urban studies (eg, "world city network") while most have remained niche ideas (eg, "slurbs" or "archipelago economy"), but it is hard to look at this list without seeing in it a sort of meta-argument for qualitative change--in other words, an "urban revolution" (Lefebvre, 2003).
Meanwhile, by turning deserts into parking lots, historic wildfire corridors into housing tracts, wetland liquefaction zones into marinas and floodplains into industrial squats and slurbs, market-driven developer greed and real-estate bingo have insured that human malfeasance will compound natural catastrophe.
This commuter-induced "metropolitan spillover" (Nelson 1991) goes by a variety of labels in the academic literature, such as exurban development (Spectorsky 1955), country residential development (CRD, Russwurm 1976), rural resettlement (Walker 1976), rural sprawl, rurban development, and slurbs (slopped-over suburbs).
As it happened, maybe Nickie Smith's advice was correct: There was, strictly speaking, "nothing to see." But when I think of Spiral Jetty now, I remember the slurbs, Thiokol, Tooele, and Golden Spike, the trailer and amphibious vehicle, the tumbleweed, the rocks, the hailstorm, the ants, and my dog retching; and I can picture the not-Spiral Jetty that quietly mocks its invisible neighbor.