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Many people, including scholars and journalists, refer to Orange County as a suburban region. The use of the concept “suburb” is a little misleading in this instance. The term “suburb” customarily referred to low-density settlements located on the fringe of cities. Even with the development in the 1970s of urbanization of the suburbs, much of the writing in that period about suburban areas in the United States adopted a core-periphery approach, mainly focusing on cities, …

…Los Angeles, as they previously have done. The county’s economy had grown into the thirtieth largest in the world. Orange County is thus no longer a suburb of Los Angeles, or even a collection of such suburbs. It now exhibits the dynamism customarily associated with major urban centers, even though it is much more decentralized than traditional cities. Post suburban California: The Transformation of Postwar Orange County, California (2nd ed.) University of California Press