"Quite frankly," says Mike Maguire, "suburbs take a bad rap as a bunch of people who live on cul-de-sacs and drive SUVs and don't engage with their community.

"Nothing," adds the mayor of Eagan, "is further from the truth."

It's close enough to the truth, however, that suburbs are working harder to try to create a sense of belonging -- to make a suburb more than just a staging post for a commute.

A first-ever "open house" Saturday at Burnsville City Hall is just the latest sign of a change in attitude.

Burnsville's follows a similar -- and also first-of-type -- event in Eagan this year that stunned organizers by drawing hundreds more people than they had expected.

Bloomington just launched a Parade of Schools open house for new residents.

Minnetonka is organizing a "community commission" for the first time, aimed at bringing disparate elements of the city together.

And Golden Valley is planning a "connection crew," to match new arrivals with folks who know their way around. "We do send out packets of city information to new residents," said Cheryl Weiler, the city's communications coordinator. "But for us to create personal connections would be totally different, and much more engaging."

The burst of community-building comes at a time when the disengaged "SUVs in cul-de-sacs" image is being questioned by academic experts.

"People in suburbs do have a 'sense of community,'" said Ann Forsyth, until recently the director of the Metropolitan Design Center at the University of Minnesota. "It might be different, but it's still there."

Research emerging from Harvard, she said, is suggesting that a sense of trust is much stronger in suburbs, even as the vaunted political engagement of city folks turns out to be tied to some of the problems within cities -- and the efforts of people there to combat them.

Jack Nasar, a professor of city and regional planning at Ohio State, said his research in both conventional suburban neighborhoods and neo-traditional ones with sidewalks and shops nearby shows people "knew and visited many of their neighbors, had block gatherings, and so on -- contradicting the conventional wisdom that suburbs are cold, and that people drive home into their garage and never interact with their neighbors."

Greg Miller, whose family moved from Apple Valley to Burnsville in May, said he may turn up at the city's open house on Saturday, or may not. He said he feels he has been welcomed already, even though he lives in an area of winding streets and mature oaks without any sidewalks or front porches.

"We got information packets in a variety of forms when we moved in," he said, "including one that our neighbors organize that gave us their names and phone numbers. People stopped by to welcome us: One person brought us a plant. Some invited us over. On 'National Night Out' there were so many grills out, a clown for the kids, nametags. We met a lot of folks. You know, it's contagious: If they wave at you, you wave back."

Some cities are trying to build residents' sense of identification with the city. Golden Valley's "Envision Golden Valley" planning process yielded suggestions to mark the city's borders more clearly and encourage people to list return addresses as Golden Valley, not "Minneapolis," as many suburbanites do.

In Shoreview, city surveys suggest, people don't identify so much with the city. Sixty-three percent said their strongest connection was to their neighborhood, while 16 percent said the school district and just 15 percent the city.

When Shoreview invited dozens of local groups to its community center for a Shoreview Showcase, the results were disappointing.

"We tried it two or three times," said City Manager Terry Schwerm. "For the amount of money and time and energy we spent -- it was a few thousand dollars to put on -- and then you get 150 people here at most? It just didn't seem like we drew as many people as we should have."