Professional Documents
Culture Documents
suburbs as...
texture
fabric
pattern
abomination?
bad?
plano, tx
henderson, nv
levittown, ny
sun city, az
good?
london, uk
paris, fr
new york, ny
tokyo, jp
9 out of 10 architects agree: the suburbs are suburban sprawl is TOTALLY GROSS BLECHHH
(Then what is more than half of the country thinking living there???)
1) Theyre UGLY 2) They embody and encourage everything thats wrong with our car-dependent consumer culture and increase our dependence on foreign oil 3) Theyre environmentally hazardous! Air pollution, loss of farmland, habitat destruction, acres of pavement causing runoff issues. The spread-out infrastructure and wasted land is unsustainable for the population we need to be able to support 4) Theyre bad for your health! All that driving is contributing to the obesity epidemic 5) They empty out our city centers, draining their essential life force (a density of people), and the cities are what generate our culture, our society, our humanity! City air makes people free! 6) Cul-de-sacs and volumetric housing breed isolation and destroy community and democracy. Theyre socially irresponsible and selfishly constructed! 7) Architects are never invited to the party!
Is this what people really want? Why havent things improved since 1947?
Possible solutions:
Abandon them!
The suburbs are a trend, people will reurbanize. Look at the foreclosure rate!
(See: Kenneth Jackson, optimists)
With mixed zoning, better access to transit and walkable neighborhoods well get it right next time!
(See: New Urbanism, Smart Growth)
Theyve already got the infrastructure, lets funnel new growth there, extend our transit network and increase density in the old neighborhoods
(See: Dolores Hayden, Tysons Corner, Build a Better Burb Competition)
6) Cul-de-sacs and volumetric housing breed isolation and destroy community and democracy. Theyre socially irresponsible and selfishly constructed!
Theyve already got the infrastructure, lets funnel new growth there, extend our transit network and increase density in the old neighborhoods
(See: Dolores Hayden, Tysons Corner, Build a Better Burb Competition)
Can you produce it or does it only exist insofar as it is claimed by the public?
MISA GRANNIS | THESIS SUMMER RESEARCH PRESENTATION | SEPTEMBER 2011
Use strip mall parking lots as staging grounds for densification/introduction of public space or program -Margaret Crawford
big public spaces are impossible to create, the big developers own every inch of land. create small moments for people to engage in on a more intimate scale -Marcel Smets
DESIGN EXPERIMENTS
glen oaks, ny
san francisco, ca
detroit, mi
west village, ny
detroit, mi
lakewood, ca
schaumburg, il
riverside, nj
MODIFIED NOLLI
public, open retail public, feebased private
Mapping Dwelling
[Renee Chows diagramming techniques, with some modifications, applied to residential neighborhoods in Mission Viejo and San Francisco, CA]
Renee Chows mappings of containment (2 left diagrams) and claim (2 right diagrams), from Suburban Space, 2002.
BUILT/UNBUILT
CONTAINED
built
unbuilt
MODIFIED NOLLI
CLAIM
private
public community
household individual
CONNECTIONS
The Articulated Strip: How the strip mall can save suburbia. De Jong and Ruffing, 2010.
Urban Sprawl Repair Kit: Repairing the urban fabric. Tahchieva, 2009.
SITE: Supermarket and strip mall at corner of major intersection between city artery and freeway exit
existing condition
proposal
-parking moved to top of existing retail -housing added on top of parking -building added to densify lot -different degrees of public space created by new structure
Parting questions:
What is the form of public space in todays suburbs? (Does it exist? Is it the mall?) At which scales do the problems of suburbia exist? (Scale of the city, neighborhood, house?) How is politics embedded in the layout of our homes, neighborhoods and cities? Is detached housing completely unsustainable or are there ways to make it work? (There will always be demand for it.) How big of a community is sustainable before it has to be subdivided into smaller ones? If were going to be stuck with the suburbs, can a rethinking of public space and how it might pertain to the decentralized city help solve some of the problems of sprawl and make the suburbs suck less? In fact, can we make them awesome?