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It could look like another round of flight from the city. Or what we may be witnessing is a “second draft” of the American suburbs.
Many communities that were once white, exclusionary, and car-dependent are today diverse and evolving places, still distinct from the big city but just as distinct from their own “first draft” more than a half-century ago.
— Vox
The American suburbs are continuing to diversify and gain millennials and increased numbers of immigrants, two groups that have traditionally been confined to cities. More mixed-use and affordable developments are being delivered in suburban areas where single-family constructions have long... View full entry
American homes are extravagant, having swelled from about 1,500 square feet on average in 1973 to more than 2,400 in 2018. After the pandemic, memory of the novel utility of all that space could justify even more of it. Some companies have already declared their intention to let workers telecommute forever, and real-estate analysts anticipate more companies eliminating or curtailing expensive commercial leases to save money. — The Atlantic
The new article from The Atlantic expands on the premise, "Suburbia was never as bad as anyone said it was. Now it’s looking even better."The incoming changes to built environment due to COVID-19 pandemic, might well be viewed as going back to suburban communities and escape from the density of... View full entry
The four-person California Renters Legal Advocacy and Education Fund, or CaRLA, has one reason for being — to sue cities that reject housing projects without a valid reason. The litigious nonprofit with YIMBY roots struck again last month, suing Los Altos after the city rejected a developer’s bid to streamline a project of 15 apartments plus ground-floor office space. — The Mercury News
CaRLA continues its aggressive efforts to get San Francisco Bay Area cities to stop denying by-right housing developments. “Something, by hook or by crook, has to make these cities actually build housing,” Sonja Trauss, co-executive director of CaRLA, told The... View full entry
He designed the Shard in London and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, but for his latest project, Italian architect Renzo Piano has taken his impressive legacy to the unsuspecting city of San Ramon in order to build a suburban shopping center. Completed for a reported cost of $300 million, City... View full entry
Welcome to Homewood, Illinois, a suburb of 20,000 that is marketing itself to urbanites as a hidden hipster gem.
The town, which is about 25 miles south of downtown Chicago, just launched a new advertising campaign called “Think Homewood.” Ads posted inside trains on the L’s Blue Line and elsewhere in Chicago contrast the laid-back vibe of Homewood to the stress of city living. The ads are comic strips drawn by illustrator and Homewood resident Marc Alan Fishman.
— citylab.com
The Chicago suburb Homewood harnessed the graphic skills of a local artist to launch their comic-strip ad campaign, Think Homewood, in order to attract millennials. Joining the list of suburban towns that must now work to attract the demographic they were originally intended for, Homewood strives... View full entry
It’s hard to escape the irony that the U.S., which will need something like 43 million new housing units to keep up with population growth in the next 35 years, is using space to build apartment-size garages, even as trends in ride-sharing and self-driving cars cast a measure of uncertainty on American car culture. — Bloomberg
Despite housing shortages and rent increases, 24% of the new homes completed in 2015 in the US included a garage for 3 or more vehicles. Since 1992, when the census started tracking this, more 3-car garages than 1-bedroom apartments have been built. With the ever-increasing need for housing, and... View full entry
For all the concern about the gentrification, rising housing prices and the growing gap between the rich and poor in our leading cities, an even bigger threat lies on the horizon: The urban revival that swept across America over the past decade or two may be in danger. As it turns out, the much-ballyhooed new age of the city might be giving way to a great urban stall-out. — The New York Times
Richard Florida paints a gloomy picture of the state of the great American urban revival in his NYT op-ed, "The Urban Revival Is Over," citing gentrification, income disparity, rising crime numbers, unaffordable housing prices, and the anti-urban agenda of the current White House tenants. Joe... View full entry
After fifteen years of development plans tailored to the creative classes, Florida surveys an urban landscape in ruins. The story of London is the story of Austin, the Bay Area, Chicago, New York, Toronto, and Sydney. When the rich, the young, and the (mostly) white rediscovered the city, they created rampant property speculation, soaring home prices, and mass displacement. The “creative class” were just the rich all along, or at least the college-educated children of the rich. — Jacobin Magazine
Richard Frorida's latest book, The New Urban Crisis, represents the culmination of this long mea culpa. Though he stops just short of saying it, he all but admits that he was wrong. He argues that the creative classes have grabbed hold of many of the world’s great cities and choked them to... View full entry
This isn't your grandfather's urbanization: population figures in major U.S. cities, which on the whole are on the uptick after declining in the 1960s, are adding residents not to their already built urban cores but rather in the form greenfield sprawl, which makes use of farmland and lightly... View full entry
Last month, the journal Science published a special issue examining the challenges and opportunities of an urbanizing world. Titled “Urban Planet” and featuring an image of clouds wafting across skyscrapers in Dubai, the issue opened with an eye-catching statistic: “More than half of the world’s people now live in cities.”
Of course, that number would be even more impressive if it were actually true.
— UNDark
According to the article, the statistic that half the world's population lives in cities is misleading. Many of these people live in towns and small urban enclaves, not the bustling metropolises conjured by the stat.The author argues that such thinking makes one overlook sprawling fringe... View full entry
There would be homes and industry surrounded by trees, hills and lakes. Above all, there would be no prejudice, poverty or slums, according to a Soul City brochure...Despite its name, Soul City was never intended to be an all-black town, but rather, a multi-racial community built and managed by black people.
[But] Portions of the area resemble a ghost town, rotting – or perhaps waiting. Could Soul City ever be resurrected?
— The Guardian
Read up on the rise and halt of Soul City, a suburb that attorney and civil rights activist Floyd McKissick envisioned for North Carolina's Warren County in the late 1960s-70s.More on Archinect:"Quintessential America" at play in the Museum of African American History and CultureFor Libertarian... View full entry
Some New York City real estate agents have teamed up with their counterparts outside the five boroughs for organized seminars and “immersive tours” of the suburbs. The city agents get a cut of the commission if their clients decide to buy a house in the suburbs. The services, which reside somewhere between shrink session and sales pitch, intend to address the concerns of families unsure about leaving the city and guide them to suburbia, step by step. — nytimes.com
Related news from the 'burbs on Archinect:The strength of Chinese suburbiaHow one urban planner is helping revamp a Miami suburb "without gentrification"In Chicago, forming economically integrated suburbs is more complex than it looksRenzo Piano: the future of European architecture lies in the... View full entry
“Shady,” “unethical,” “secretive,” “robbed of our due process” — these were just a few of the choice terms used by angry residents this past week at a packed City Council meeting about the selling of Pine Tree Park [in Kent, outside of Seattle, WA].
Longtime Seattle land-use attorney Rick Aramburu has another term for what happened: illegal. It’s also a growing trend in the swath of cities around Seattle, places that no longer receive much scrutiny from the press.
“It’s becoming a cancer"
— seattletimes.com
More on recent (legal) park development:A critical look at Downtown L.A.'s ambitious plans for two new public parksTalking parks with Adrian Benepe, senior vice president of The Trust for Public LandTransforming a garbage heap into a public parkAmbitious L.A. Parks Plan Will Require Coordination... View full entry
As of the 2010 census, the vast majority of Shanghai’s population lived in suburban areas. Between 2000 and 2010, suburban areas grew by 50 percent or more, compared to the city’s central districts, which grew slower or in some cases even shrank [...]
The villagers who join the urban economy, then, don’t go downtown, but to the settlements that dot the fringes of the city. The industries that really help China to grow are here, too
— citylab.com
More related news:China to sustainably build 10 New York City's worth of space in the next decadeIn weaker market, architecture firms in China are cutting backChina hopes to improve its cities with newly released urban planning visionStudent Works: "Townization", a new Chinese urbanization... View full entry
Germane Barnes wants Opa-Locka to be known for something else...He knows [change] can happen because he lives there, and has seen the work of a group of artists and organizers slowly change the landscape...The city's history intrigued him, not merely because it seemed like a perfect case study for his thesis about revitalizing a community without gentrification, but because it also spoke to his own experiences. — Curbed
More on Archinect:In Chicago, forming economically integrated suburbs is more complex than it looksWelcome to Evanston, Illinois: the carless suburbiaBerliners are getting their hopes up for transformed Kulturforum arts districtWith a little compromise, illegal urban squats like Ljubljana's... View full entry