sans, the best way to fix that is to contribute something tasteful, pointed, and wasteless (?) as a parisian boulevard.

rita aint time for a name change?

not joking. please remember my context from before, that many suburbanites would be better off and better contibutors to society in a small city where they can raise their kids, find large affordable housing with big yards and garages... yet they pick the suburbs because they associate their burb with the city that it chokes and IT'S culture and advantages, when clearly it falls quite short. How many times do you hear of someone who is from Chicago (but not really, they are from Wheaton.) It is the amerikan mentality of having your cake and eating it too, but the cake isn't even good when you get it that way. Am I coming off totally crazy then?
When and if I make the choice to move out of the city, this is the reasoning I will use, and will find myself in the center of a small city, rather than the outskirts of a large one.

if thats the best you've got you should really not get in my dish.

I haven't heard any good arguments FOR the suburbs yet. Better schools, less violence, more house for your money... all those things occur in small cities too.

i'm interested in how this conversation could be shaken up so that it amounts to something other than the position vado took vs the position i took. is the pap the new urbanists have proposed the only new vision for suburban development that we have?

here in ky the same product that's been built for 15 years is still being built, despite the fact that the home builders assn has been advocating for different visions. the product is not market-driven (an argument i know would come up) because the builders/developers are building a LOT, eating up a lot of agricultural land, and in a much more speculative way, just deciding to deal with the fact that these vanilla boxes will sit on the market for a while. somehow that's still lucrative. seems even crap that noone wants will EVENTUALLY sell.

what can anybody offer that's different in the face of this advance/speculative overbuilding?

*this is not my personal position, just playing devil's advocate. personally i don't like cities or suburbs very much.

Desire for newness and dislike/distrust of things old? I don't think most people care about whether its new or not - (personally I like the old). Doesn't it really boil down to the quantifiable ownership one has - 2000 SF, 2 acres of lawn, 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms - vs. the price?

aw, shucks, sans.

that would explain why real estate agents pretty much work by reeling off an inventory of stuff.

I don't like stuff. I really don't. I don't like managing the stuff. I only have what I need. My life is uber simple.

I've been arguing with my brother, the bachelor, who is searching for a house. Everytime he sends me a property he is interested in, I challenge him, ask why he "needs" a 4 bedroom 3 bath house with a 3 car garage on 2 acres? He sleeps on an air mattress and owns 3 towels, plus he travels 1/2 the week for his job.

Does his realtor have something to do with it?

Actually the 2 acres was just a random figure to represent it being quantified. My parents own 30 acres of land, but it has been deemed a part of the "green belt" by the state so no development on that land. Although the financial value decreased (severely), there is value there that isn't quantifiable by any means. That was really my point. About it being a "quantifiable" ownership. I've said it before, how do you own something that is going to last longer than you?

the new becomes old, so we make more new, which is stuff.

Im with you Straw.....

btw, great to see the discussion is going strong.

I know i have not read every single entry, but has the notion of new sub-city centres been discussed? By that I mean, the idea of nodes, that aren't the city centre, but withing close proximity to it, in essence becoming their own "new" (sorry Straw) city centre, or centre of concentration for that area.

I know this was an idea that was written about or discussed somewhere I either read or was privy to.

discuss amongst yourselves........discuss......

yeah, the pros and cons of 'stuff' won't do much for the discussion. with my realtor/inventory comment above i was attempting point out that a lot of people fail to differentiate between simply naming the stuff that they want in their domain and thinking about what the stuff actually is, whether it's good, useful, of decent quality, worth having or - on the other hand - destructive, wasteful, only for appearances/status, enabling laziness, etc.

example: 'tray' ceilings in master bedrooms which serve very little purpose except that the realtor can list 'tray ceiling in the master bedroom' and somehow stand for/take the place of design. do you think someone out there really loves these, wants them, or have they just been conditioned to think that they have value or meaning?

but new stuff = more stuff, whereas old stuff was already here. Old stuff is now a constant, while new stuff increases the overall quantity of stuff, which is why when many of us think about too much stuff, we focus on the new.

if a condition is "reenacted" enough ie tray ceiling, double height entry way, it does take on meaning. it's really about the politics of desire. how does one manufacture a product without creating desire for it? the inessential becomes essential if one thinks they need it bad enough. and as far as old stuff goes, look at appliances for the home. its cheaper to buy a new toaster ( and any number of things, tvs, stereos, coffee makers, than to fix an old one. so to correct what people on this thread see as wrong you really need to have a little cultural revolution. of course, many of you would be sent to the countryside for reeducation.

steven, yes, hence my example of my bachelor brother looking at 4 bd/3ba houses with vaulted ceilings. He is falling for all those realtor tricks.

again, why try to resist the fact that people like stuff? they want more stuff whether they need it or not. frankly that's how our economy works. make new stuff, buy new stuff.

planned obsolesence to me seems like the architect's solution to the problem. when we can admit that stuff has a life cycle and does not last forever, we can start to design to meet that lifecycle, maybe avoiding that stuff winding up in a heap of other old stuff in a landfill. this is true from product packaging to suburban housing.

resisting human nature isn't helping anything.

well, yeah, actually resisting that big of human nature can help the planet quite a lot. Where do you think all that stuff comes from, much less the infrastructure to get everyone out far enough from the city that they have room for all that stuff? It all has a negative impact on the planet.

For Schopenhauer, the Will is an aimless desire to perpetuate itself, the mainspring of life. Desire engendered by the Will is the source of all the sorrow in the world; each satisfied desire leaves us either with boredom, or with some new desire to take its place. For Schopenhauer, a world in thrall to Will must necessarily be a world of suffering. The mind can only create the world of representation, opposed to the Will; but since the Will is the source of life, and our very bodies are stamped with its image and designed to serve its purpose, the human intellect is, in Schopenhauer's simile, like a lame man who can see, but who rides on the shoulders of a blind giant.

I read that entire paragraph above misreading Wii for will. I think it makes more sense that way ;-)

To vado's credit, that is one eloquently worded post.

yeah well i copied and pasted it.

I don't really get your angle sans. If you're taking the "walk the walk, don't just talk the talk" angle please notice that this thread is named "spread like a virus...(discuss)" in the "General discussion" section of the "Discussion forum" of a website created to connect architects through the web - which would be done primarily through discussion.

I want to chime in with one slightly off-topic comment here: This is a valuable discussion, even if it isn't heavy on new ideas, if we keep in mind that there are young architects here who may not be hearing this discussed in school or certainly in their professional lives.

I've been worrying about sprawl since 1986, when I took my first urban design course. Twenty years later I still don't see any easy answers.

There are all kinds of options for how to live and how to grow in the US (and other places, of course). This type of awareness-building discussion is always a good thing to have.

well for all those who would like to do some sort of design idea charrette this might be a challenge to tackle.

I would assume this charrette would require a specific site in mind correct? Can there be a generic solution - or would that be hypocritical?

a real world condition would be preferable.

...and would that site be on a greenfield, on an existing subdivision site where we'd demolish everything, on an existing subdivision site where we'd work with what's there, or what? seems that would be a key starting point that could stymie the whole operation if it's not answered in an appropriate way.

liberty, I guess I'd have to say I've been worried about sprawl since about 1993, even though I didn't know how to put words to it then. I lived the sprawl, and it sucked, and I knew it, without any architectural education. And this makes me suspect that there are a lot of other people that know something's wrong, and can't quite put a finger on it because they haven't been educated in this area of life, they don't know that there's any alternative.

well perhaps a particular community could be found that is looking for some help.

how about those mentioned in the article posted by squirell-meister?

you input one little thing about your own opinion on the suburbs and it gets bashed to hell. wow, what a discussion.

Are you serious? I don't have anything against you because I don't know you. I was just trying to understand where you were coming from so I can understand what you were saying. By the way, a lot of your posts were clearly intended to derail a lot of the constructive discussion that has been going on here.

Anyways, is it really the suburban environment itself or is it its isolation and relationship to everything else? How can a design charette affect that?

what seems to be the issue with sprawl is that historically cities were platted, and the city provided the infastructure and planned out where the growth would happen next. The city had a downtown, parks, single residential areas, a small farm here and there, and then would bump into another town. it seems that now municipalities have no groth strategy, just write down some minimum standards, and when the developers sell the lots annex them for the tax base. no up front risk for the city, get the tax money, then attempt to pass a bond for where the new school should go.

good points emaze. when did real estate development come about? I have asked some architects this, and none of them knew. We just accept it.

In terms of a design charette, perhaps it's more of an analysis project: take an existing site, say 1/2 square mile of housing developments outside Phoenix, and looking at the region, construction techniques, design of buildings and streets, political structure, job locations, infrastructure, climate, shopping patterns etc. figure out what is wrong with it as a cohesive whole, then propose solutions to those problems.

It's easy to see how/shy sprawl is only minimally a design problem and moreso a planning and political problem.