Mike Davis, Ellen Dunham-Jones, Peter Hall, David Harvey, Jerold S. Kayden, Matthew J. Kiefer, Alex Krieger, Andrew Ross, James S. Russell, Mitchell Schwarzer.
The Museum of Domestic Architecture (MODA) at Middlesex University just finished an exhibition on suburbia, the advance of local railways and undergrounds, the towns they led to, wallpaper, streetlights, maps. Google search within the MODA domain for suburbia. Lots in there.
Kunstler is an ass. I don't necessarily disagree with the themes of his writings, but he needs to stop substituting his own alarmist, self-righteous ideas and opinions for fact supported research. I would not recommend his books as a jumping off point for learning more about suburbia.
Hayden is a neat individual, I like her work, however its kinda ironic that she actually Lives in the suburbs of CT (Guilford) instead of say New Haven
You should also read Holy Land by D.J. Waldie ... it's his memoir of growing up in Lakewood, California. Hayden also has a really interesting (yet overlooked) article about Entenza'a Case Study House Program which is interesting.
Hayden's best book is The Grand Domestic Revoltion...
america was started by people who heard about cheap land where you could build on your own lot.
yeah, it was great back then. america was the best-kept secret in town. very undervalued. and there were a lot of people who wanted to keep it that way.
but you can't stop a train nor a rumor of good real estate. and soon enough america got gentrified.
the locals, who'd been there for a long time..who'd raised families and started churches and invented the wheel independently of the new residents, really got a raw deal. tributes skyrocketed and a lot of strange-looking kids invaded the schools and tried to force their big-city ways on the local children.
didn't make it any better when the new residents didn't shop local businesses but rather brought in their own chains from back home.
but word got around nonetheless. people started pouring in from all over.
and, like any good real estate boom, this one sparked some pretty tense bidding wars over choice property.
after a while the newcomers decided they were tired of throwing their tax dollars away to distant central bureaucracies who just put it to waste. so they decided to do something about it.
however, due to lax zoning, lower-income residents had invaded the area in unsightly multi-family housing.
they were useful when they were working the backs of restaurants and as gardeners, but when the poor started requesting better schools and improved services, the newcomers--who were now oldcomers--got mad and tried to keep the other side of the tracks...on the other side of the tracks.
others just decided to find that next new subdivision where there wasn't as much traffic and the schools weren't full of that diversity shit.
but pretty soon the neighborhood got built out. and there was nowhere to go but up.
and that really ruined the neighborhood since once again, they let the poor people in.
I'm sure few here will agree, but Dolores Hayden's agenda represents just one polarized end of an incredibly wide spectrum of views toward the suburbs. "Domestic" should also read the opposite, less than popular views and decide where he/she wants to land.
"jersey sucks, brooklyn rocks, guilford has such a NICE little town square! and lots of trees! and the schools are excellent. very prestigious. and SO close to The City. it's just a darling little town...
"and i'm sorry, but i just can't send my little Jack and Madison to new haven schools...that would really put them behind when comes time to apply for harvard...
"now if only they would demolish hartford, bridgeport, and new haven...they're bringing down the property values."
oh wait...sorry, i mixed hayden up with every other white upper-class liberal hypocrite out there
That's why I suggest Bruegmann's "Sprawl" to balance the Kunstler-leaning literature. I propose that "suburbia" is used in the same way that Bruegmann says "sprawl" is... as an idea, a pejorative, not a well-defined condition or place. Suburbanization is urbanization, a particular form of the same complicated process.
I would suggest Jackson's Crabgrass Frontier as a good history (mentioned above as well). He is relatively evenhanded in his approach and his opinions about the suburbs make up less of the book than some of the others (like Suburban Nation). What opinions he does have do not make up the main argument and can easily be read through, and where he does emphasize an opinion, such as attributing a large role to government policy, it is discussed thoroughly and with acknoledgement that this isn't the only factor. It is much more of an account of what happened, rather than a manifesto.
Also check out "Edgeless Cites" by Robert E. Lang, I read it in Hayden's class and it's a pretty fascinating analysis of the nonplaces of the far outer 'burbs.
I disagree... I don't think the Hayden stuff and Bruegmann perspective are so different. What is different is that we're finally getting some literature that recognizes that today's suburbs are much different environments than the ones we slammed 50 years ago.
In Hayden's case, we get a critical view on suburbia and one of the first histories to really dive deep into economic and political influences. She also widens the perspective a bit by acknowledging that suburbia predates the post-WWII stuff that most critics focus on. In this respect Crabgrass Frontier is pretty old-school, relying on many of the same sort of critiques that came up back in 50's and 60's during the first wave of suburb-bashing. Bruegmann's book is excellent for acknowledging that suburbia is a much different landscape today than it was 50 years ago, but awfully shallow in terms of research methodology.
So, when are architects going to stop pretending that suburbia is a homogenous, socially-backward environment... when are they going to start acknowledging this recent wave of literature...
Agreement on Bruegmann, rpsnino. I take it more as a polemic ... obviously not a set of deeply researched case studies. But I think that's fine. Just like Mike Davis's 'City of Quartz': an overview of a historical narrative, but with a particular, critical edge, whose mission is to counter a huge literature full of myths and stereotypes. Rigorous history? No, but an important salvo to challenge some of those myths and look harder.
That's a good point citizen... it is really nice to see a different perspective from Bruegmann... and who knows, maybe more research inspired by his stance will develop.
but we're very seldom building the bad urban places and celebrating their newness and cleanness.
we're building the suburbs like crazy, selling them off in 1/4 acre lots for a lot of money, touting their inventory of unnecessary stuff, and naming them after the greenfield that was replaced.
it's not suburbs bad, urban places good. it's infinite replication of car-centric suburbs on fast-disappearing open land bad, reinvestment in urban places and community good.
What's missing is the added dimension of history that Bruegmann implores. One period's suburban sprawl is another's urban success. For example, the miles of late-Victorian-era rowhouses at the edge of London were pilloried a century ago in the way we commonly deride Celebration or Seaside. Today, these British neighborhoods are held up by friends of good urbanism as a model; there are other cases of this. Will Seaside be considered a good example in a hundred years? Maybe, maybe not.
All I'm arguing for is a little more nuance in the discussion... the folks in this thread clearly get it. But the kinds of posts/threads we often see here, reflecting what seems to be being taught in architecture schools (e.g. Kunstler) don't seem to encourage this.
what we haven't figured out yet is not how to stop building suburbs - i don't think we can or that anyone would go along with us - but how to build them better.
architects haven't been interested in this, except for the new urbanists. i don't love 'em, but i have to give them some credit for their ability to push their way into a market that the rest of us abandoned.
and those that even make an attempt hit a brick wall: the design/build contractor culture that "owns" the burb business, wants the lowest common denominator building and has the discretion to build a project different from the drawings you release.
until those with the vision to bring a different model can find a place to begin having an impact on suburban development, we'll continue to see the fields plowed under and paved, and big boxes and little taras sprouting where the horses and cows used to graze.
Good point, again broadening the context to economics, politics and governance in searching for a new model. The power of architecture is its potential for vision and change, and the ability to illustrate such to a broad audience, especially to those with financial and political sway. The NUs have managed to do this in a way others haven't.
I still bristle at the "suburb" vs. "city" terms that suggests some dichotomy that, I think, doesn't always exist. It's all "city-building" in my mind, though the relative locations and mixtures of land uses vary from case to case. "Peripheral urbanization" is a term used by Greg Hise in _Magnetic Los Angeles_, another useful book in understanding this phenomenon.
Yeah it seems like the suburb/city dichotomy is a hot issue right now. For architects, this imaginary line is an inhibiting factor in my opinion, preventing them from seeing the suburban landscape as a unique and challenging environment.
Although the obvious sterotypes inherent in the suburb-city distinction are limiting and clumsy, it still seems to me that suburbs do exhibit certain unique characterisitcs in terms of their physical form, economics, social aspects, etc. Even when it comes to some of Brueggmann's examples (and some projects in Denmark that I'm studying right now) where a formerly suburban neighborhood is today a desirable and "urban" neighborhood, these places still exhibit characteristics that differentiate them from the urban development of their times as well as contemporary urban development.
Looking at post-WWII suburbs, the unusually low densities, large lots and focus on private property ownership will probably ensure that in order for these environments to become more "city-like" they will have to evolve into new and unusual forms. Could be an exciting opportunity for architects and planners to encourage new building typologies and strategies.
Thanks for the tip on the Hise book.
Another good book when it comes to the diversity and unique qualities of suburbia is: Suburban Form - An International Perspective. Some interesting case studies in there.
yeah i got that one rpsnino. it ain't bad, though limited in scope. at least the writing is based on research, rather than on opinion.
absolutely read all of the above, including kunstler. anyone with education can extract the good stuff from his raving without being convinced by the nonsense (god i hope so. it would be a sad day if an architect actually bought into his nonsense).
also worth looking at the journal of the american planning association. generally very high qulaity research, and they make a point of covering both sides of the debate, which is not so common. the writing often takes some effort though, as not really written for the layman...
crabgrass frontier (one of the best books on suburbs even 20 years later) points out at the beginning that suburbs in most of the world began as slums, more akin to favellas than to levittown, and that most of what we are talking about today is a recent invention. it is important to remember that things do change, and that what we have now is here for a lot of very good reasons, very few of them connected to dumb-ass developers making money. they are just taking advantage of the context...so if we wanna have an impact it has to be in that context, and no other. which is why citizen's point of oversimplification of the issue is important.
btw, there is nothing inherently wrong with suburbia, far as i can tell.
"Nothing wrong with suburbia"??? Jump -- are you insane??? That last sentence is pretty bold statement on a board like this -- actually, I completely agree with it and the rest of your post. A pretty good surprise for me to read post like yours, and also Citizen's and Rspsnino's.
And Ochona's "...suburbs were okay until we architects realized that the production builders and traffic engineers weren't asking us how to design them..." takes an accurate jab. Well played, you clever bastard.
Although I don't currently live in the suburbs, and I am an architect, I'm frankly weary of the typical and oversophisticated condescensions of the mainstream design elite toward the suburbs and toward those who choose to live there. But all the cool kids are talking smack, and most of the books mentioned are filled with repetitions from this viewpoint. To me, and this is what's really awful, is that there is such a sort of unspoken but pretty obvious subtext to such criticisms -- that the inhabitants THEMSELVES are somehow deficient, not just the built environment of the suburbs -- you know, those hopelessly ignorant SUV-driving social-climber wannabe rich types that are allowing greedy developers to sell them another copy of fake mansions while they pave the pastures and wreck planet earth with their barbeques and emissions and affected names for their kids. Damn them and their stupid back yards and swing sets and lawn mowers. Sound familiar? Of course it does.
It would seems that the more traditional the lifestyle, the more vilified it becomes.
This is all possibly rooted in Ochona's group of architects not getting invited to the design party in the suburbs -- now there's been lots of thrashing around and struggling for relevance which seems to have resulted in the current sneering and prissy superior attitudes now evident. Here's an idea -- if the suburbs are so repellant, do not move there.
Hehe... well put Rim. Got me thinking about an old article about architects ignoring suburbia by Ellen Dunham-Jones in the Harvard Design Magazine a few years ago.
it's not a problem with the people, rim, it's what they've been sold. (your comments appear to be in reponse to some of my critiques.)
i also agree that there's nothing inherently wrong with suburbia, but a lot what suburban-dwellers have been sold sucks and needs to be handled in a smarter way.
Well, no, Steven Ward -- my post was not in response to yours. I initially only skimmed what you wrote, since it looked like standard stuff, but I now re-read them. What do want me to say? -- your comments fit the category.
A few points. First, suburban development (please, let's stop using "suburbia") is often designed by architects, for developers, those with the money. Just 'cuz it's ugly don't mean no architects were involved.
And what suburban dwellers have been sold, they willingly bought. Yes, they don't have enough range of choice, I agree, but nobody is holding a gun to consumers' heads.
Don't mistake the above for a surrender, or an aesthetic appreciation of bad, ugly development. It's not. I love good design as much as anyone. But we have to recognize that we may anoint our own profession as the arbiter of good urban form, but few others do. I agree that activism and good work and active public participation are important to changing things. Witness the New Urbanists (not crazy about the historical pastiche, but most other elements are great). Theirs is a model for the "smarter way" Steven suggests--not in design style, but in activating the public discourse on urbanism.
"And what suburban dwellers have been sold, they willingly bought. Yes, they don't have enough range of choice, I agree, but nobody is holding a gun to consumers' heads."
sure, there are architects involved. but the relationship is skewed and i haven't yet seen the opening for how it can be corrected.
in urban projects my experience has been that architects work for known clients/users to whom they are responsible and work within the constraints set by a planning/design code.
in many of the most symptomatic suburban projects the client is a developer/builder and the architect, if he chooses to take the project, has significantly less discretion in the design of a positive and sustainable addition to the suburban landscape. the result is a lot of asphalt and built pollution.
the obvious answer is that an architect shouldn't take this work but we all know the reasons they do: if they don't someone else will, and that someone may have less of a desire to improve the product & hungry small offices can't just reject work and stay in business. i believe that those architects who care about what they're doing can at least make small improvements, despite their toothlessness in the design/build relationship.
rim joist and others argue that architects aren't universally held to be the arbiters of good and bad in the built environment - and they seem to accept this state of affairs. if not architects, who? developers are entrepreneurs. they may try to provide a good product, but making of money comes first. clients want what they already know that they want, and don't see much beyond that without dialogue with a designer. architects are the only professionals in the situation who are ethically charged with protecting the interests of the community at large - its environment, the client's neighbors, etc. we can't shirk that responsibility by accepting that acres of asphalt and disappearing (in my case) bluegrass landscapes are not so bad.
and what's wrong with the word 'suburbia'? i'm never in favor of deleting a word from my vocabulary, especially if it carries expressive power or associations not carried by the alternative.
my research for phd here in japan is on the topic of suburbia; basically i am recording/studying a system that leads to incredibly ugly ( but entirely new urbanist in every other regard ) suburbs.
more interesting than mere new urbani-tudiness, the suburbs here are always on the move, with houses changing to shops, properties expanding and shrinking, sometimes making way for new roads and the new car culture, but usually just responding to new culural conditions...ie, lately there are more clinics popping up to deal with the aged. and i dont mean they are appearing in the mall down the road. no, they get built smack dab in the middle of the suburb, usually when a young doctor returns to the family home and decides to convert it to a hospital. how is that for bottom-up suburbia...very cool. ugly, but cool.
and that is all just plain old suburbia, car-ready and garage littered suburbia (though also walkable and accesable by trains more often than not)...nothing special. and i think there is not an architect or planner in site. which REALLY intrigues me.
for me this is particularly interesting because i have been trained (and practice) as an architect, and i wonder what our role can be in the mess that gets cities rolling. in north america the japanese system ain't gonna work, quite, but something like it is being done by the new urbanists already...unfortunately without any real criticism (stylistic preferences don count)...it is really too bad that real research looking at the effects of new urbanism gets lost in the aesthetic rhetoric of folks like the tulane dude (what's his name?) and discussion of suburbia sounds more like a class-based discussion than an intelligent debate...which is why bruegmann's stuff is so important.
Maybe the answer is to encourage more architects to apply for seats on public commissions: planning, architectural review, even run for city councils. It is true that real estate development is a fairly inert beast, achingly slow to change. But some of those formulae that Steven mentions (requirements for parking may be the most frustrating) are often set at this level; that would be a good place to work for change, in addition to the piecemeal projects we contribute to the landscape.
And I have no trouble with the word "suburbia," nor advocate its erasure from OED. But, as Bruegmann states about "sprawl" (and the use of "blight" fifty years ago) it means everything and nothing. It's a useful pejorative, but where is "suburbia?" How is it defined? Land use(s)? Architectural styles? Residential density? Where's the boundary between it and our beloved "city?" And, again, what about timing? "Suburban" Los Angeles of the 1960s is almost inarguably urban now. Again, just arguing for more specificity and clarification.
Building Suburbia...... by Dolores Hayden - ?
I want to buy a book to understand the suburbs better, is this the best book to get?
bourgeois utopias-robert fishman, suburban nation, edge city, crabgrass frontier, streetcar suburbs
Robert Bruegmann's _Sprawl: A Compact History_ is also required reading.
this looks like a good catch-up:
harvard design mag reader on suburbia
Mike Davis, Ellen Dunham-Jones, Peter Hall, David Harvey, Jerold S. Kayden, Matthew J. Kiefer, Alex Krieger, Andrew Ross, James S. Russell, Mitchell Schwarzer.
just go move there. its nice...
haha vado...
i would also recommend james howard kunstler...
"the geography of nowhere" and "home from nowhere"
The Museum of Domestic Architecture (MODA) at Middlesex University just finished an exhibition on suburbia, the advance of local railways and undergrounds, the towns they led to, wallpaper, streetlights, maps. Google search within the MODA domain for suburbia. Lots in there.
Kunstler is an ass. I don't necessarily disagree with the themes of his writings, but he needs to stop substituting his own alarmist, self-righteous ideas and opinions for fact supported research. I would not recommend his books as a jumping off point for learning more about suburbia.
I second Edge City, but if you like sensational bashing/insulting go for Kunstler.
Revising The Suburbs > chronicle of higher ed.
perfect! javier takes you straight to the source, domestic.
It won't be a book, but I will start blogging "A Post-Black Neighborhood."
^^ does that mean that reed kroloff has left?
All I know is that Chelsea said I can be her nigger too. Honest.
Hayden is a neat individual, I like her work, however its kinda ironic that she actually Lives in the suburbs of CT (Guilford) instead of say New Haven
wow, thanks everyone
Javier takes me straight to the source! nice links Javier, link 2 refers to Robert Bruegmann's Sprawl.
Edge City by Joel Garreau and the Harvard Mag look like good options as well.
You should also read Holy Land by D.J. Waldie ... it's his memoir of growing up in Lakewood, California. Hayden also has a really interesting (yet overlooked) article about Entenza'a Case Study House Program which is interesting.
Hayden's best book is The Grand Domestic Revoltion...
, that is ..... sorry
what's to understand? it's pretty simple.
america was started by people who heard about cheap land where you could build on your own lot.
yeah, it was great back then. america was the best-kept secret in town. very undervalued. and there were a lot of people who wanted to keep it that way.
but you can't stop a train nor a rumor of good real estate. and soon enough america got gentrified.
the locals, who'd been there for a long time..who'd raised families and started churches and invented the wheel independently of the new residents, really got a raw deal. tributes skyrocketed and a lot of strange-looking kids invaded the schools and tried to force their big-city ways on the local children.
didn't make it any better when the new residents didn't shop local businesses but rather brought in their own chains from back home.
but word got around nonetheless. people started pouring in from all over.
and, like any good real estate boom, this one sparked some pretty tense bidding wars over choice property.
after a while the newcomers decided they were tired of throwing their tax dollars away to distant central bureaucracies who just put it to waste. so they decided to do something about it.
[img]http://www.politicaldogs.org/uploaded_images/boston-tea-party-762868.jpg
however, due to lax zoning, lower-income residents had invaded the area in unsightly multi-family housing.
they were useful when they were working the backs of restaurants and as gardeners, but when the poor started requesting better schools and improved services, the newcomers--who were now oldcomers--got mad and tried to keep the other side of the tracks...on the other side of the tracks.
others just decided to find that next new subdivision where there wasn't as much traffic and the schools weren't full of that diversity shit.
but pretty soon the neighborhood got built out. and there was nowhere to go but up.
and that really ruined the neighborhood since once again, they let the poor people in.
I'm sure few here will agree, but Dolores Hayden's agenda represents just one polarized end of an incredibly wide spectrum of views toward the suburbs. "Domestic" should also read the opposite, less than popular views and decide where he/she wants to land.
Rim, I am interested, please explain Dolores' agenda, and what would you recommend Demestic to read?
maybe it's...
"jersey sucks, brooklyn rocks, guilford has such a NICE little town square! and lots of trees! and the schools are excellent. very prestigious. and SO close to The City. it's just a darling little town...
"and i'm sorry, but i just can't send my little Jack and Madison to new haven schools...that would really put them behind when comes time to apply for harvard...
"now if only they would demolish hartford, bridgeport, and new haven...they're bringing down the property values."
oh wait...sorry, i mixed hayden up with every other white upper-class liberal hypocrite out there
Agreement here, Rim Joist.
That's why I suggest Bruegmann's "Sprawl" to balance the Kunstler-leaning literature. I propose that "suburbia" is used in the same way that Bruegmann says "sprawl" is... as an idea, a pejorative, not a well-defined condition or place. Suburbanization is urbanization, a particular form of the same complicated process.
I would suggest Jackson's Crabgrass Frontier as a good history (mentioned above as well). He is relatively evenhanded in his approach and his opinions about the suburbs make up less of the book than some of the others (like Suburban Nation). What opinions he does have do not make up the main argument and can easily be read through, and where he does emphasize an opinion, such as attributing a large role to government policy, it is discussed thoroughly and with acknoledgement that this isn't the only factor. It is much more of an account of what happened, rather than a manifesto.
Also check out "Edgeless Cites" by Robert E. Lang, I read it in Hayden's class and it's a pretty fascinating analysis of the nonplaces of the far outer 'burbs.
I disagree... I don't think the Hayden stuff and Bruegmann perspective are so different. What is different is that we're finally getting some literature that recognizes that today's suburbs are much different environments than the ones we slammed 50 years ago.
In Hayden's case, we get a critical view on suburbia and one of the first histories to really dive deep into economic and political influences. She also widens the perspective a bit by acknowledging that suburbia predates the post-WWII stuff that most critics focus on. In this respect Crabgrass Frontier is pretty old-school, relying on many of the same sort of critiques that came up back in 50's and 60's during the first wave of suburb-bashing. Bruegmann's book is excellent for acknowledging that suburbia is a much different landscape today than it was 50 years ago, but awfully shallow in terms of research methodology.
For a recent review of some of this literature check out this article:
http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?d=j88qk4jh36gr2zvp82f27f6z1kf5qgz8
So, when are architects going to stop pretending that suburbia is a homogenous, socially-backward environment... when are they going to start acknowledging this recent wave of literature...
Sorry ^^^ I see the link I posted already mentioned by Javier above. Good article.
suburbs were okay until we architects realized that the production builders and traffic engineers weren't asking us how to design them.
Agreement on Bruegmann, rpsnino. I take it more as a polemic ... obviously not a set of deeply researched case studies. But I think that's fine. Just like Mike Davis's 'City of Quartz': an overview of a historical narrative, but with a particular, critical edge, whose mission is to counter a huge literature full of myths and stereotypes. Rigorous history? No, but an important salvo to challenge some of those myths and look harder.
Alongside reading Hayden and Bruegmann...walk through North Raleigh or suburban Phoenix...and see how long it takes you to puke.
Meaning?
Point taken, Parallel, but there are plenty of ugly urban places, too.
City = good
Suburb = bad
it's not that simple.
I know citizen, but sometimes you simply have to leave the classroom and books behind and walk....
I've been to some extremely horrible urban spaces in my lifetime, Naples, Macau, Sao Paulo.....I'm not saying city-good, suburb-bad
Ah, true enough. There's nothing to compare with getting out and looking around, you're right.
Indeed....and to note...I have walked through North Raleigh and suburban Phoenix too...it was torture!
That's a good point citizen... it is really nice to see a different perspective from Bruegmann... and who knows, maybe more research inspired by his stance will develop.
but we're very seldom building the bad urban places and celebrating their newness and cleanness.
we're building the suburbs like crazy, selling them off in 1/4 acre lots for a lot of money, touting their inventory of unnecessary stuff, and naming them after the greenfield that was replaced.
it's not suburbs bad, urban places good. it's infinite replication of car-centric suburbs on fast-disappearing open land bad, reinvestment in urban places and community good.
I agree with everything you write above, Steven.
What's missing is the added dimension of history that Bruegmann implores. One period's suburban sprawl is another's urban success. For example, the miles of late-Victorian-era rowhouses at the edge of London were pilloried a century ago in the way we commonly deride Celebration or Seaside. Today, these British neighborhoods are held up by friends of good urbanism as a model; there are other cases of this. Will Seaside be considered a good example in a hundred years? Maybe, maybe not.
All I'm arguing for is a little more nuance in the discussion... the folks in this thread clearly get it. But the kinds of posts/threads we often see here, reflecting what seems to be being taught in architecture schools (e.g. Kunstler) don't seem to encourage this.
what we haven't figured out yet is not how to stop building suburbs - i don't think we can or that anyone would go along with us - but how to build them better.
architects haven't been interested in this, except for the new urbanists. i don't love 'em, but i have to give them some credit for their ability to push their way into a market that the rest of us abandoned.
and those that even make an attempt hit a brick wall: the design/build contractor culture that "owns" the burb business, wants the lowest common denominator building and has the discretion to build a project different from the drawings you release.
until those with the vision to bring a different model can find a place to begin having an impact on suburban development, we'll continue to see the fields plowed under and paved, and big boxes and little taras sprouting where the horses and cows used to graze.
Good point, again broadening the context to economics, politics and governance in searching for a new model. The power of architecture is its potential for vision and change, and the ability to illustrate such to a broad audience, especially to those with financial and political sway. The NUs have managed to do this in a way others haven't.
I still bristle at the "suburb" vs. "city" terms that suggests some dichotomy that, I think, doesn't always exist. It's all "city-building" in my mind, though the relative locations and mixtures of land uses vary from case to case. "Peripheral urbanization" is a term used by Greg Hise in _Magnetic Los Angeles_, another useful book in understanding this phenomenon.
Yeah it seems like the suburb/city dichotomy is a hot issue right now. For architects, this imaginary line is an inhibiting factor in my opinion, preventing them from seeing the suburban landscape as a unique and challenging environment.
Although the obvious sterotypes inherent in the suburb-city distinction are limiting and clumsy, it still seems to me that suburbs do exhibit certain unique characterisitcs in terms of their physical form, economics, social aspects, etc. Even when it comes to some of Brueggmann's examples (and some projects in Denmark that I'm studying right now) where a formerly suburban neighborhood is today a desirable and "urban" neighborhood, these places still exhibit characteristics that differentiate them from the urban development of their times as well as contemporary urban development.
Looking at post-WWII suburbs, the unusually low densities, large lots and focus on private property ownership will probably ensure that in order for these environments to become more "city-like" they will have to evolve into new and unusual forms. Could be an exciting opportunity for architects and planners to encourage new building typologies and strategies.
Thanks for the tip on the Hise book.
Another good book when it comes to the diversity and unique qualities of suburbia is: Suburban Form - An International Perspective. Some interesting case studies in there.
yeah i got that one rpsnino. it ain't bad, though limited in scope. at least the writing is based on research, rather than on opinion.
absolutely read all of the above, including kunstler. anyone with education can extract the good stuff from his raving without being convinced by the nonsense (god i hope so. it would be a sad day if an architect actually bought into his nonsense).
also worth looking at the journal of the american planning association. generally very high qulaity research, and they make a point of covering both sides of the debate, which is not so common. the writing often takes some effort though, as not really written for the layman...
crabgrass frontier (one of the best books on suburbs even 20 years later) points out at the beginning that suburbs in most of the world began as slums, more akin to favellas than to levittown, and that most of what we are talking about today is a recent invention. it is important to remember that things do change, and that what we have now is here for a lot of very good reasons, very few of them connected to dumb-ass developers making money. they are just taking advantage of the context...so if we wanna have an impact it has to be in that context, and no other. which is why citizen's point of oversimplification of the issue is important.
btw, there is nothing inherently wrong with suburbia, far as i can tell.
"Nothing wrong with suburbia"??? Jump -- are you insane??? That last sentence is pretty bold statement on a board like this -- actually, I completely agree with it and the rest of your post. A pretty good surprise for me to read post like yours, and also Citizen's and Rspsnino's.
And Ochona's "...suburbs were okay until we architects realized that the production builders and traffic engineers weren't asking us how to design them..." takes an accurate jab. Well played, you clever bastard.
Although I don't currently live in the suburbs, and I am an architect, I'm frankly weary of the typical and oversophisticated condescensions of the mainstream design elite toward the suburbs and toward those who choose to live there. But all the cool kids are talking smack, and most of the books mentioned are filled with repetitions from this viewpoint. To me, and this is what's really awful, is that there is such a sort of unspoken but pretty obvious subtext to such criticisms -- that the inhabitants THEMSELVES are somehow deficient, not just the built environment of the suburbs -- you know, those hopelessly ignorant SUV-driving social-climber wannabe rich types that are allowing greedy developers to sell them another copy of fake mansions while they pave the pastures and wreck planet earth with their barbeques and emissions and affected names for their kids. Damn them and their stupid back yards and swing sets and lawn mowers. Sound familiar? Of course it does.
It would seems that the more traditional the lifestyle, the more vilified it becomes.
This is all possibly rooted in Ochona's group of architects not getting invited to the design party in the suburbs -- now there's been lots of thrashing around and struggling for relevance which seems to have resulted in the current sneering and prissy superior attitudes now evident. Here's an idea -- if the suburbs are so repellant, do not move there.
Hehe... well put Rim. Got me thinking about an old article about architects ignoring suburbia by Ellen Dunham-Jones in the Harvard Design Magazine a few years ago.
It's a fun read:
http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/research/publications/hdm/back/12dunhamjones.html
it's not a problem with the people, rim, it's what they've been sold. (your comments appear to be in reponse to some of my critiques.)
i also agree that there's nothing inherently wrong with suburbia, but a lot what suburban-dwellers have been sold sucks and needs to be handled in a smarter way.
Well, no, Steven Ward -- my post was not in response to yours. I initially only skimmed what you wrote, since it looked like standard stuff, but I now re-read them. What do want me to say? -- your comments fit the category.
Nice sendup, Rim.
A few points. First, suburban development (please, let's stop using "suburbia") is often designed by architects, for developers, those with the money. Just 'cuz it's ugly don't mean no architects were involved.
And what suburban dwellers have been sold, they willingly bought. Yes, they don't have enough range of choice, I agree, but nobody is holding a gun to consumers' heads.
Don't mistake the above for a surrender, or an aesthetic appreciation of bad, ugly development. It's not. I love good design as much as anyone. But we have to recognize that we may anoint our own profession as the arbiter of good urban form, but few others do. I agree that activism and good work and active public participation are important to changing things. Witness the New Urbanists (not crazy about the historical pastiche, but most other elements are great). Theirs is a model for the "smarter way" Steven suggests--not in design style, but in activating the public discourse on urbanism.
"And what suburban dwellers have been sold, they willingly bought. Yes, they don't have enough range of choice, I agree, but nobody is holding a gun to consumers' heads."
Yes, exactly. I believe it's also called freedom.
sure, there are architects involved. but the relationship is skewed and i haven't yet seen the opening for how it can be corrected.
in urban projects my experience has been that architects work for known clients/users to whom they are responsible and work within the constraints set by a planning/design code.
in many of the most symptomatic suburban projects the client is a developer/builder and the architect, if he chooses to take the project, has significantly less discretion in the design of a positive and sustainable addition to the suburban landscape. the result is a lot of asphalt and built pollution.
the obvious answer is that an architect shouldn't take this work but we all know the reasons they do: if they don't someone else will, and that someone may have less of a desire to improve the product & hungry small offices can't just reject work and stay in business. i believe that those architects who care about what they're doing can at least make small improvements, despite their toothlessness in the design/build relationship.
rim joist and others argue that architects aren't universally held to be the arbiters of good and bad in the built environment - and they seem to accept this state of affairs. if not architects, who? developers are entrepreneurs. they may try to provide a good product, but making of money comes first. clients want what they already know that they want, and don't see much beyond that without dialogue with a designer. architects are the only professionals in the situation who are ethically charged with protecting the interests of the community at large - its environment, the client's neighbors, etc. we can't shirk that responsibility by accepting that acres of asphalt and disappearing (in my case) bluegrass landscapes are not so bad.
and what's wrong with the word 'suburbia'? i'm never in favor of deleting a word from my vocabulary, especially if it carries expressive power or associations not carried by the alternative.
my research for phd here in japan is on the topic of suburbia; basically i am recording/studying a system that leads to incredibly ugly ( but entirely new urbanist in every other regard ) suburbs.
more interesting than mere new urbani-tudiness, the suburbs here are always on the move, with houses changing to shops, properties expanding and shrinking, sometimes making way for new roads and the new car culture, but usually just responding to new culural conditions...ie, lately there are more clinics popping up to deal with the aged. and i dont mean they are appearing in the mall down the road. no, they get built smack dab in the middle of the suburb, usually when a young doctor returns to the family home and decides to convert it to a hospital. how is that for bottom-up suburbia...very cool. ugly, but cool.
and that is all just plain old suburbia, car-ready and garage littered suburbia (though also walkable and accesable by trains more often than not)...nothing special. and i think there is not an architect or planner in site. which REALLY intrigues me.
for me this is particularly interesting because i have been trained (and practice) as an architect, and i wonder what our role can be in the mess that gets cities rolling. in north america the japanese system ain't gonna work, quite, but something like it is being done by the new urbanists already...unfortunately without any real criticism (stylistic preferences don count)...it is really too bad that real research looking at the effects of new urbanism gets lost in the aesthetic rhetoric of folks like the tulane dude (what's his name?) and discussion of suburbia sounds more like a class-based discussion than an intelligent debate...which is why bruegmann's stuff is so important.
ah well. such is life.
Maybe the answer is to encourage more architects to apply for seats on public commissions: planning, architectural review, even run for city councils. It is true that real estate development is a fairly inert beast, achingly slow to change. But some of those formulae that Steven mentions (requirements for parking may be the most frustrating) are often set at this level; that would be a good place to work for change, in addition to the piecemeal projects we contribute to the landscape.
And I have no trouble with the word "suburbia," nor advocate its erasure from OED. But, as Bruegmann states about "sprawl" (and the use of "blight" fifty years ago) it means everything and nothing. It's a useful pejorative, but where is "suburbia?" How is it defined? Land use(s)? Architectural styles? Residential density? Where's the boundary between it and our beloved "city?" And, again, what about timing? "Suburban" Los Angeles of the 1960s is almost inarguably urban now. Again, just arguing for more specificity and clarification.
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