Dead malls. Zombie subdivisions. Metastasizing sprawl. Not a horror movie, but the suburbs circa 2014, or at least the media version of them. We’ve all seen the “suburban wasteland” photos from the Great Recession, the parched streets out West, foreclosure signs swinging in their yards. We’ve read about The End of the Suburbs. No wonder the young and the affluent have flocked back to cities: Suburbia’s demise seems imminent, and assured.

Except that it’s not. More than half of Americans live in suburbs, and about 75 percent of postwar construction has happened in the suburbs. That is a lot of people, and a lot of built environment, for urbanists to just wish away. One hundred and fifty million or so suburbanites have to live somewhere, and preferably not too far from their places of work, which are mostly in the ’burbs, too: More than three-quarters of jobs in U.S. metropolitan areas are located outside the urban core, and 43 percent are at least 10 miles away. (City living doesn’t look like such an environmental slam-dunk when you consider the number of jobs that require a long commute from downtown.) In Canada, two-thirds of the population lives in suburbs, according to a new study, and five times as many people are settling on the edges of major cities as they are in their cores.

The truth is that the suburbs aren’t going anywhere, and the vast, varied landscape of suburbia can’t be reduced to stereotypes, be they old – Leave It to Beaver, Revolutionary Road – or new. In fact, North America’s suburbs are growing and changing fast. In the U.S., diverse suburban neighborhoods now outnumber diverse city neighborhoods by more than two to one, and diverse suburbs are growing more rapidly than predominantly white ones.

Nowhere is this more apparent than on the outskirts of two cities, Washington, D.C., and Toronto. Ethnic diversity in both regions has soared, and development is surging. Two progressive suburban municipalities — Maryland’s Montgomery County and Ontario’s York Region — are trying to steer that growth in similar ways. They’re building high-quality public transit to ease traffic congestion, encouraging mixed-use, high-rise construction instead of more single-family housing, and hoping to wrest social equity out of general affluence. The ’burb boom, of course, can’t be isolated from the bigger boom in city living that has made it cheaper for immigrant families to own a two-story house in a subdivision than a two-bedroom apartment downtown. It’s no coincidence that property values in D.C. and Toronto have spiked to unprecedented highs at the same time that density increases on their periphery.

“The city-suburb distinction is falling apart,” says Brookings Institution demographer William Frey, who studies these “melting-pot” suburbs. Back in the 1950s, he notes, if you told someone you lived in the suburbs, they could easily summon a picture of your life: white, married, with kids and a house and a car. Living in the city, on the other hand — “now that was interesting, that was a microcosm of America. Now, it’s almost the other way around.”

With populations passing one million, Montgomery and York are major urban places in their own right. Spending time in them, you feel like you’re watching the suburb of the future emerge, a place where people of all colors and creeds live in apartments as well as houses, bring tres leches cake and samosas to school bake sales, and hop on the bus to run a quick errand instead of taking the minivan. Already, these new suburbs are changing in more fundamental ways than the gentrifying cities they border.

I should know: I live in one.

Eight years ago, I reluctantly moved to Silver Spring, in Montgomery County, from downtown Baltimore. I had just had a baby, and my husband and I wanted to be closer to Washington, where we both worked, and to live in a functional school district, which D.C. was not.

Although we didn’t realize it at the time, we made a long-term commitment when we bought a townhouse at 2006 prices. Home values crashed, and we shouldered an underwater mortgage through some lean years, like a lot of our neighbors. But if a couple of urbanites had to get stuck somewhere in suburbia, why not here? We can walk to places serving Salvadorean, Ethiopian and Dominican food. Buses come every five minutes. They’re packed — our neighborhood has the same density as San Francisco. As a non-Hispanic white person, I’m in the minority, and I’m used to hearing Spanish and Amharic as much as English.

Dense, transit-rich suburbs like Montgomery County and York Region, which I visited recently, are not the rule — yet. But many other places are moving in their direction, and I don’t mean the urbanism lite of shopping “squares” and passably walkable subdivisions. Tysons Corner, the ultimate autopia in D.C.’s Virginia suburbs, is reinventing itself, building 42 million city-like square feet of office, residential and commercial space around four new Metro stops. A greatly expanded transit system is in the works for suburban Broward County outside Miami. Bellevue, Washington, is putting in light rail to serve its growing downtown 10 miles from Seattle.

These places are all immigration magnets, too.

In Retrofitting Suburbia, architects June Williamson and Ellen Dunham-Jones argue that overhauling the North American suburbs — making them compact, walkable and far less resource-intensive — is the challenge of the 21st century. Nothing has the potential to curb climate change as much as suburban retrofits on a vast scale. We’re used to hearing that suburbs are the problem. Could they also be the solution?

Not the Mall You Remember

It’s a Friday in December, and the parking lot of a mall in Markham, in York Region, is jammed. This mall looks different from any other I’ve been to, like a cross between an old European railway station and a huge barn. Inside, it’s a crowded Hong Kong-style market. Tiny, glass-walled stores sell Chinese herbs, eyeglasses and Hello Kitty merchandise. You can eat Cantonese noodle soup and Beard Papa’s cream puffs in the food court. We’re in Pacific Mall, known locally as P-Mall, the largest Asian-themed indoor mall in North America.

Pacific Mall opened in 1997 on the site of what had been Cullen Country Barns, a kitschy gift shop and restaurant complex. The mall is a condominium corporation, meaning that retailers actually purchase their own units and can resell them, a setup that’s common in Hong Kong but novel in North America. Interestingly, the mall was built by a non-Chinese developer who smelled opportunity. Units sold fast — people slept outside the agent’s office the night before they went on sale. But the mall’s groundbreaking was delayed by the developer’s back-and-forth with Markham over traffic and parking, and then a political controversy.

In 1995, the then-deputy mayor of Markham, Carole Bell, complained that the Chinese were pushing other ethnic groups out of certain neighborhoods and overwhelming the area’s multicultural balance. The Chinese community demanded an apology; hundreds of mostly white residents, on the other hand, packed a town-hall meeting to greet Bell with “thunderous applause,” the Toronto Star reported at the time. The furor over Bell’s remarks was only one episode in the long and contentious run up to the mall’s opening. Many Chinese residents opposed it, on the grounds that it would become an “ethnic ghetto” and that it outstripped local demand for Chinese retail.

At the time, Markham was struggling to integrate Asian immigrants into a population of about 160,000. That population has since doubled, and the share of people of Chinese descent has risen. Now the most diverse place in all of Canada, Markham is getting over its growing pains by setting policies for inclusion and using its diversity to economic advantage. The mayor, Frank Scarpitti, has gone on trade missions to China and India. P-Mall has become a major tourist attraction. Scarpitti has sung Cantonese pop songs on its stage.

Markham expects to attract another 100,000 people over the next two decades, and planners are getting ready. When I visited late last year, Highway 7, a major east-west artery, was being retrofitted with dedicated bus lanes for its new and expanding Viva bus rapid-transit system. I watched as colorful branded buses pulled up to sleek shelters, in sync with a screen flashing real-time arrival information.