Gwinnett County, Georgia, A Sunbelt Community: The Invention of a Postwar Suburb

The Sunbelt suburbs postwar rise changed the United States political narrative through coalitions and conclaves. Suburban scholars have traced the movement’s social ramifications through various lenses, including White Flight and Urban Renewal. However, suburbanization through a suburb’s viewpoint has remained unexplored. Gwinnett County, Georgia, is a southern suburb that transformed from a rural environment to a substantial political and economic power. Its trajectory is offset by about twenty years from the familiar pattern of suburbanization. Tracing its history raises several questions about United States suburbanization both in the chronology of postwar urban history and the historic dynamics that shaped it. Gwinnett County developed into a modern suburb about twenty years after World War II, so its social and political motivations followed a very different course to modernization. In spite of its delayed development, it became one of the largest suburbs in the south by the end of the twentieth century