The lockdown, which has been of different levels depending on the city, has worked well here. Schools have been back in much of Australia for weeks.
Australian numbers below.
there's no love of local politics here, but I'm not aware of any feeling that suburban/urban councils/local area governments are inherently superior/inferior to the others.
though (obviously?) I like the services my local government provides, here transport, health and education are state level decisions...
Melbourne's suburbia, where the latest outbreaks have happened, is all part of Melbourne's urban sprawl - i.e., there are no unpopulated gaps between the inner urban area and these suburbs. And the pattern of spread reflects that; cases that begin as returning international travellers, transmitting it to hotel workers, who then take it back to their neighbourhoods further out but still part of the same metropolis. Then families intermingle with others just a few localities away, and off it goes.
Suburbs in the U.S. are more separate from the main urban centres, and are more self-contained, so there's less intermingling of people from one town to another. They're more like what we think of as rural cities like Ballarat, Geelong, Shepparton, etc.
In the past few years my partner and I moved out of inner Melbourne to the Mornington Peninsula to be closer nature and have more space for raising a family, and this feels more like the suburbia of the U.S., with localities like Frankston, Mt Eliza, Mornington and the towns further down all being quite spread out.
And so far, touch wood, the state of viral spread bears this out, with no new cases reported for a few weeks in either Frankston City or MP Shire, and indeed very few cases since the initial wave in March, which was mostly returned travellers. That said, Frankston is not insulated from the rest of Melbourne and is right next to Casey, where there are new cases, and the Peninsula gets lots of visitors from Melbourne, so there's still plenty of risk. (Edit: spoke too soon – one new case in MP Shire today, sigh.)
What the shut-downs has revealed to me is not "the revenge" of the suburbs, but a foisting of suburban lifestyle onto us against our will. Our libraries were shut, our museums, our parks, our shops, our pools. There was no option to accept or manage the risks locally. Its important to remember, the disease didn't do this to us, this was a political response to it, which is a policy choice, not a certainty.
Meanwhile, the centres of suburban life were left comparatively untouched: shopping malls, big corporate supermarkets, etc, and people drove there and mixed and shopped almost like there was no pandemic. Again, the disease didn't do this, people did. policy did.
In my city, where have the clusters of the disease have been: suburbs. some of that is definitely due to the shutting of the city, but policy has been enacted under the assumption that suburban life is the only life.
We just had a slight tightening of conditions because of a (very small) rise in cases: why? two reasons, putting returning travellers in cbd hotels as part of quarantine, and parties and socialising amongst known infected cases in... you guessed it, suburbia. Apparently, because of this, cafes and businesses in the inner city need to be further restrained for another 3 weeks.
for me, the pandemic simply accentuated everything wrong with the suburban lifestyle (because I'm now forced to live it while my facilities are shut) and I'll continue to wait and lobby for the return of our actual (and personally, better) life.