and really this kind of stuff is not for anyone with brain cells to spare. and anyway, the point is only that there is no point in citing one study as evidence of anything...worse, what i can add with a sample frm my bibliography is just more of the same and it still won't answer anything. i sincerely believe we are running up against a wall of ignorance and a new perspective is required. so my advice, actually, is to not read further.
but for those who are interested, and since you asked (and since alll i gotta do is kut and paste)...
the most famous argument (for the other side) that for me starts off things in interesting way is with these guys:
Gordon, P. and Richardson, H. W. (1989) Gasoline Consumption And Cities—a Reply. Journal of the American Planning Association, Vol.55 iss.3.
Gordon, P. and Richardson, H. W. (1997). Are Compact Cities A Desirable Planning Goal? Journal of the American Planning Association, Vol.63, iss. 1. pp 95-106.
richardson is an economist and he is in favor of the market - and for suburbia, though not ideologically. he makes good and bad points, some of them since challenged and debunked...but his data is still real and not just opinion. and if you realy wanted to you could still use it...
and then just a bunch of stuff in similar vein, from all over the world, like:
Høyer K.G. And Holden E. (2003) Household Consumption and Ecological Footprints in Norway – Does Urban Form Matter? Journal of Consumer Policy, Volume 26, Number 3, September, pp. 327-349.
Jarvis H. (2001) Urban Sustainability as a Function of Compromises Households Make Deciding Where and How to Live: Portland and Seattle compared. Local Environment, Volume 6, Number 3, 1 August, pp. 239-256.
Jarvis, H. (2003) Dispelling the Myth that Preference makes Practice in Residential Location and Transport Behaviour. Housing Studies, Volume 18, Number 4, July, pp. 587-606.
Kaido, K. (2005) Urban Densities, Quality of Life and Local Facility Accessability in Principal Japanese Cities. From Jenks, M. and dempsey, N. (2005) Future Forms and Design for Sustainable Cities, Architectural Press, London. pp. 311-337.
but if you want the best article, the one that just cuts to the chase and sets it all down, clear as a bell, try out this one. its brilliant.
Neuman, M. (2005) The Compact City Fallacy. Journal of Planning Education and Research, Vol. 25, No. 1, pp.11-26.
for books i recommend these people:
Bogart, W. (2006) Don’t Call it Sprawl: Metropolitan Structure in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge University press. New York.
Bruegmann, R. (2005) Sprawl: A Compact History, University of Chicago press, Chicago
and this doesn't even begin to get at the articles written byt the other side (the compact city ideologues, etc) or the much more interesting books written by sociologists, like herbert gans, kevin kruse and cetera. what is worse, this is just a peek at the work being done by researchers, all of it intelligent and careful and correct...but in the end also somehow all of it fails to capture the city.
Jarvis, H. (2003) Dispelling the Myth that Preference makes Practice in Residential Location and Transport Behaviour. Housing Studies, Volume 18, Number 4, July, pp. 587-606.
for me, the preferences of most consumers (american or not) is pointless. most people simply live in the best place that they can afford (and they could probably care less about urban/suburban distinctions). my curiosity asks the following questions, "who is underserved?" and "is this a market opportunity?" my instincts tell me that there is more opportunity in the "walkable niche" market right now and probably with healthy growth in the coming decades. that's where i'm in agreement with leinberger.
i could honestly care less about the environmental/sustainable implications of any development (beyond the marketability of such buzzwords) because the future of the planet is just not that important to me...i'll probably be dead before the environment really falls apart. there's nothing idealogical about the "walkable" argument from my perspective, rather it is market driven.
and i think that the other market forces impacting the suburbs (as referenced in the "next slum?" article) are the growing gaps between poor and wealthy in combination with growth of the poor in sheer numbers. when i toss all the data in the pot, i have a hard time disagreeing with the assessment that the "next slum" might very well emerge in today's suburbs.
Since the suburbs were a key factor in the segregation (financially and racially), I think that the suburbs will still attract some people that don't care about the convenience, sustainability or diversity that is a characteristic of "the city". There is a huge cultural gap that will not produce this ghetto suburb as some people think. I think there will definitely be some shifting around of neighborhoods in "cities", but there will be a point where it will probably provide another real estate crisis due to the misunderstanding of cultural influences in the city. Some people like to just live in their caves.
while i do think it is plausible that many of these mcmansions will become abandoned eventually with shifts in the housing market, i don't think the conclusion that they will become "slums" is quite right. more likely i think these subdivisions and cul-de-sacs will sit empty, similar to what has happened in parts of major cities that have become obsolete. the question this brings up for me has nothing to do with designing "walkable communities," but rather how architects can best design for obsolescence. this is one of the most pressing issues architecture is currently facing now.
this will sound really wierd concidering I live in the middle of a big walkable city with everything I need on my block - socially, my social life was BETER in the suburbs when I had a car. Sometimes I think city people are much more caveman than suburbanites. Things get freaky out there.
puddles, that whole walking thing is maybe a canard.
but the reality is that walkability doesn't work unless whole families all work in the same factory, which is after all the age that new urbanism is based on. when husband, wife, grandparents, and children are not required to can cow-parts for a living the model falls apart and it becomes a kind of pseudo-moral issue that only works if you feel guilty enough...and most don't...so am not sure if it is much of a viable trend...hell, even some new urbanists chose longer commutes and more car use, not less, in order to live in the walkable-seeming community of their guilt-based desire (yes i have an article somewhere that describes this pattern)...
anyway, i kinda hoped someone here would come up with examples of new thinking about suburbia rather than just lament about its faults etc etc...anyone out there with some ideas? planners don't seem to have many, surely the architects do???
i have not come across much, myself, which is why it would be cool to hear about more...
apart from lars lerup's work, and places like bedzed, i recently found this place, which is quite cool for me...is it the future?
ok, jump. you have me beat on the academic/research angle. i've never been very good at that, i.e., i happily scored a d+ on my thesis project, never made it to a dissertation.
but keep in mind that the entire family does not need to literally work in the same factory. hell, for the kind of people that i'm talking about it's debatable whether they even "work" at all. probably what's more important is that they are within walking distance of their private jets (and by "walking distance" here i'm referring to walking distance from their benz/puch gelandewagens to the tarmac (conveniently located in the nearest slum community).
i really should take a look at some of this lerup stuff so that i at least have an idea of what you are talking about.
i think "gossip girl" is no my favorite tv show...and, yes, i have had a few drinks tonight. monday is the new "thursday" after all.
Walkability is fine as far as it goes - everyone likes to go the big city or a town center (hell, even a mall) and walk around. But no one can access all the places they might need to go just by walking.
The real issue is that suburbs don't address access and transportation options in any real way. What you end up getting are clogged two-lane roads and most of these eventually get turned into multi-lane highways: and that seems to be all the thinking that is done by developers and local governments. But where is any actual comprehensive regional planning? or, as jump said, some new thinking about how suburbia is actually built?
The truth is that suburbia was designed for the car. Most public transportation is based on proximity and connective routes. With the windy roads of suburbia, the only realistic option would be busses. Busses are not an efficient means of public transportation and trips would be excessively long. Suburban design is not planned in the same sense that a city is and cannot be designed this way either. The form of transportation will determine how the city is designed. The car is inefficient and the landscape is as a by product.
"anyway, i kinda hoped someone here would come up with examples of new thinking about suburbia rather than just lament about its faults etc etc...anyone out there with some ideas? planners don't seem to have many, surely the architects do???"
In grad school (University of Illinois at Chicago) we produced a book based on a Chicago 2030 plan. Chicago plans for the population to grow in the suburbs and not in the city. Teams were produced with architects and specific cities in order to examine these issues. The truth is that there weren't any revolutionary designs or concepts. Sustainability, walkability and some adaptations of urban concepts were applied to the suburbs. Some were commuter hubs, shopping centers, land preserves and outer edge suburbs.
In my opinion, there needs to be a federal plan that mandates growth boundaries around city centers. Minneapolis and Portland have done this (with slight differences) and force the end of these cancerous suburbs. Urbanity is where the potential for revolutionizing American life lies. We need to minimize the suburbs and build, maintain and improve our cities. A national rail system could push this along.
21 ronin - the flipside to outer growth is you exponentially grow the population for less outward sprawl the further out you go. Eventually you'd have to have millions upon millions to expand the ring just 5 miles as the radius grows. So growth boundries, bad. Whats needed and what will happen is settlement patterns will start to even out as people start to intermingle more with other races, economic groups
Since the suburbs have developed, they have been a mechanism of segregation (not only racially). You will not be able to force people to be tolerant, but you can control where buildings are allowed to be constructed. Concentrated expansion would minimize the amount of land that would need to be utilized in a phase of expansion.
If we wait for people to accept Mexicans, we will only be disappointed when there is a new concentration of immigration. The population has only increased and we have not used cities efficiently. Growth boundaries are not bad. They are key if there is to be any reconcilliation with the environment (which plays a huge role in the developement of cities). We should not build cities in the desert and drain rivers (for example). I can tell you right now that Chicago (the city of Chicago) would benefit greatly from growth boundaries.
Ok. vado retro, with all possible respect. Growth boundaries are intended to be for a metro region. They are supposed to control how for a city (and the suburbs surrounding the city) can expand.
The truth is that suburbia was designed for the car
...NOT.
the first suburbs, were created for streetcars and rail transit into the central business districts. Cars came 50 to 75 years later. Boston, New York, Philly, Baltimore all have early residential suburban garden cities radiating out along rail corridors from the city. Los Angeles first sprawled across the LA basin and valleys connected by almost 500 miles of street car lines from santa monica to san bernadino, long beach to san fernando (read Banham) - the success of the LA freeway network is that it superceeded and mostly followed the existing the rail right-of-ways. Compare this with most east coast and midwestern cities that bulldozed freeways through poorer neighborhoods as part of urban renewal schemes of the 50s and 60s a la Robert Moses.
That is the difference between 19th/early 20th century urbanism is that there were transit villages (as we now recognize 'em), versus the post war autocentric levitown mass produced sprawl that gave us all the stuff we love to hate.
Ok. Well if you look at those suburbs today its pretty clear what the dominating form of transportation is. True some of the original suburbs (in their form) were designed street car and rail transit, but that is limited to the east coast. Also 50 to 75 years later is when the explosion of development came where the majority of the suburbs were built.
21R- don't overlook Los Angeles or San Francisco for the power of mass transit to shape the contemporary city. You're in Chicago - so what is the loop named after? if you haven't read Cronon's Nature's Metropolis, you better start reading before you make your next post.
excellent point treekiller. one of my former homes, brookline, massachusetts, is a suburb that easily predates the automobile...and provided a pivotal moment in the history of the american suburb with it 1873 annexation debate:
"Although Brookline may not have been America's first suburb, it was the first town to epitomize the ideas of the American suburb. Brookline was the first community that, when given a choice, decided it would rather be a suburb than a city."
one issue with the burbs is the travel from burb to burb. of course, in chicago you can hop the metra from naperville to the loop to get to your job as a commodities trader. thats easy. the tough part is if you live in naperville and work in schaumburg. no train goin that way. you got to get in the suburban and drive on over.
(sorry 'bout mistaking your brooklyn sas for chicago attitude). This thread is both the past and the future since the future can't ignore the past.
I grew up adjacent to Brookline, MA near the end of the D line in Newton. In my current city of Minneapolis (another midwestern example of a streetcar city), it is easy to trace the palimpsest of the streetcars if you know what to look for.
if you look at the most audacious alternative personal transportation schemes out there today, most of them use a distributed hub for picking up rechargeable electric vehicles that run on dedicated transit ways for portions of the trip. we're going back to the future.
i was always curious about the end of the D line and intended to ride the train out there one day. only made it as far as cleveland circle though...but it was quite a ways past my longwood stop.
i did have a roommate though who was coming from downtown boston after some evening drinking and he fell asleep on the D line and ended up at the last stop (last train of the night too) before he woke up. it was his first week in the city, he had no idea where he was and had to hitchhike his way back home.
Heavy handed government regulation will simply fail. You cant put growth boundries on suburbanization. Christ - thats green socialism's ultimate goal.
If and when it becomes cost effective to live in the city, like we all did happily before, in street car connected comunities, it will be because we are poor, like we so happily used to be.
Vado - there is a proposed $5 billion train proposed to go from Joiliet via naperville to Schaumburg. The problem is the $5 billion. Labor, in America, will ensure that absolutely nothing spectacular ever gets built again on a grand scale.
evilP- regulations works if the law is related to funding infrastructure like sewers. sprawl doesn't do too well with septic tanks since most folks shopping for a new house expect the convenience of flushing their toilets.
out past cleveland circle, the D line becomes more sylvan passing through several parks (with great mountain biking and rock climbing near chestnut hill), golf courses, and other bits of garden city living.
i am all for socialism and putting boundaries on lots of things. i would put boundaries on the amount of kids you can have only after you've passed an intelligence parenting test. i would put boundaries on cigarettes and booze and television programs. these things all make perfect sense to me. that said im gonna go get in my car and drive to a bar and have a scotch and enjoy some second hand smoke.
What vado wrote is true: the older transportation systems are based on a hub (the city) with lines radiating out from that center. But many suburban areas are now hubs themselves (particularly for employment and shopping), so you also need lateral transportation methods to really have an alternative to driving.
Growth boundaries do not mean that abosolutely no development can happen outside the boundary. For cities like Minneapolis, (where I was born and raised), the growth boundary only means that the city will not provide services out beyond the boundary. That is one way of doing it. Of course a city cannot prevent small town development on the other side of the state, but it can limit the effect that the city will have on the immediate land around the city.
I lived in Minneapolis/St. Paul for twenty-some odd years and moved to Chicago and then New York. I studied in Europe for 3 months and I was able to visit several major cities as well as studying these issues in college and graduate school. It is clear to me that the lack of planning that occurs in the suburbs will make them unfit for increasing density and making them "walkable". Parts of Minneapolis are very similar to many towns in Long Island, NY or Oak Park (near Chicago). These early suburbs are much more ready for installations that would make them walkable. But, other types of suburbs Eden Prairie (MN), Schaumburg (IL), or Henderson (NV) are beyond the interventions that have been proposed across the country. For those reasons coupled with the fact that early suburbs occur closer to major metropolitan centers, I think that growth boundaries would halt the poorly designed suburbs from the 60's and beyond (generally speaking.)
Why hasnt anyone asked the mexicans - they work and live by the millions in Chicago's suburbs, walking and biking between freeways and viaducts and state roads with no sidewalks. Their community could be concidered the first Hyperurban comunity weve seen.
i feel like that the "lack of planning" in the suburbs is probably their most alluring characteristic. it's in direct correlation to the perceived freedom of the suburbs. that's what gives them a chance to develop into slums.
you mock me by saying "lack of planning" but then wonder why the country as a whole cannot remedy the problem of making the suburbs walkable. They cannot be both. That's the point.
"that's what gives them a chance to develop into slums."............are you ackowledging the fact that this crock of shit ("freedom") is sold to the poor so they can emulate the rich and follow them around wherever the rich decide not to be? That's one more reason that growth boundaries should be enforced. There should be nowhere to hide for the rich.
Growth boundaries increases the value of property and can collectively support public transportation.
there is planning in suburbia, but it isn' regional, just local, which is maybe why it doesn't work so well.
urban growth boundaries are great but come at a price. portland has a growth bounday but it was set so far out that it has only recently really come into play...and some people have chosen to build beyond it because of cost (the con that is most hard to get past for this model).
me, i kinda like the finger-plan approach to assuring green space, like at copenhagen. suburbs in north america might be nicer if there was a forest within walking distance of every home...unfortunately it is too late and we have to start from reality...so what do we do next? cities are evolutionary, not visionary, which means we have to start with something that already exists (in evolution this explains why most animals share same body plan). so how are we gonna tinker with what we got so things end up better?
that early suburbs were designed for streetcars and before that the omnibuses is undeniable. unfortunately that lasted only a few decades, and by the 1920's the streetcar suburbs were already on the decline (starting in LA, which was a truly new city in the making at the time)...it would be nice to go back, but that is assuming a lot of change would happen...as vado points out suburbs are interconnected to each other as much and maybe more than suburbs are connected to tradtitional centers...this is such a problem that even in europ famed for great planning and so on is unable to deal with it. most famous example is in stockholm where a series of mini-towns were built up along rail lines conneceting to the centre...the plan was that people would use rail, but in reality everyone went sideways, using cars to work in places off the grid. the city had surpassed the plan...which is usually what happens.
i think one of the positive aspects of suburbia is that it is based on the rections of individuals and hence flexible (planners tend to think about communites rather than individuals and are based on policies- policies are not flexible by definition), so maybe it is possible to change rapidly according to new needs...maybe. so i am not so depressed about suburbia in its current form...either way, even if i despise suburbs more than half of north america lives in them, so dealing with them has to be done with care. clearly not everyone can live downtown. that just wouldn't work. so what we gonna do?
First,
Brookline, Respect! A good friend of mine lived their for a few years.
It is all about street cars. Early lines did in fact cover both the East and West Coast urban centers. Including in LA.
Also, the major possibility of the suburban form is the "flexibility" unplanned development is key.
For this i enjoy ideas like those proposed by; Teddy Cruz, Lars Lerup and anybody interested in densifying. Sure without a massive energy drought we will not step away from automobiles and hence their effect on planning.
However, they don't have to be the dominant form of planning and transport.
We can certainly have real, freemarket conditions and subsidize a train network no less than we do the auto.
As for green space. The market has a role in creating this also. Look at the Highline, Las Ramblas or the Big Dig.
wow, jump, i think we're starting to agree with each other on these issues. i'm not sure we always did. anyway...
because i have a one track mind, i'll go back to my point about obsolescence. i truly believe this is the biggest issue facing planning and architecture today. planning is no longer about planning for growth; it's about planning for urban and suburban expansion and contraction, and how we do this without wasting incredible amounts of resources. when i drive through the suburbs and see all of the throw away office parks built 25 years ago with 50% vacancy rates, i'm just stunned. how do you dispose of these buildings? do you let them decay with neglect (as is usually the case)? the problem then becomes you're looking at areas that are neither urban nor suburban nor nature. they are a huge drain on resources and a public health hazard.
at one time architecture was designed and built for permenance. architecture is now meant to be thrown away, but with little thought to the process of how you actaully do that. i'm not saying throw-away architecture is bad, in fact i think it is reflects the needs of our ever-changing society. i do think though that architects and planners need to better understand and design for the process of disposal.
the future of suburbia
burn it all!
still writing dissertation.
and really this kind of stuff is not for anyone with brain cells to spare. and anyway, the point is only that there is no point in citing one study as evidence of anything...worse, what i can add with a sample frm my bibliography is just more of the same and it still won't answer anything. i sincerely believe we are running up against a wall of ignorance and a new perspective is required. so my advice, actually, is to not read further.
but for those who are interested, and since you asked (and since alll i gotta do is kut and paste)...
the most famous argument (for the other side) that for me starts off things in interesting way is with these guys:
Gordon, P. and Richardson, H. W. (1989) Gasoline Consumption And Cities—a Reply. Journal of the American Planning Association, Vol.55 iss.3.
Gordon, P. and Richardson, H. W. (1997). Are Compact Cities A Desirable Planning Goal? Journal of the American Planning Association, Vol.63, iss. 1. pp 95-106.
richardson is an economist and he is in favor of the market - and for suburbia, though not ideologically. he makes good and bad points, some of them since challenged and debunked...but his data is still real and not just opinion. and if you realy wanted to you could still use it...
next and more interesting is by breheny, who wrote:
Breheny, M. (1995) The Compact City and Transport Energy Consumption. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, No. 20.
breheny is well regarded and showed that energy issues are not so easy to parse. very good stuff.
and then just a bunch of stuff in similar vein, from all over the world, like:
Høyer K.G. And Holden E. (2003) Household Consumption and Ecological Footprints in Norway – Does Urban Form Matter? Journal of Consumer Policy, Volume 26, Number 3, September, pp. 327-349.
Jarvis H. (2001) Urban Sustainability as a Function of Compromises Households Make Deciding Where and How to Live: Portland and Seattle compared. Local Environment, Volume 6, Number 3, 1 August, pp. 239-256.
Jarvis, H. (2003) Dispelling the Myth that Preference makes Practice in Residential Location and Transport Behaviour. Housing Studies, Volume 18, Number 4, July, pp. 587-606.
Kaido, K. (2005) Urban Densities, Quality of Life and Local Facility Accessability in Principal Japanese Cities. From Jenks, M. and dempsey, N. (2005) Future Forms and Design for Sustainable Cities, Architectural Press, London. pp. 311-337.
but if you want the best article, the one that just cuts to the chase and sets it all down, clear as a bell, try out this one. its brilliant.
Neuman, M. (2005) The Compact City Fallacy. Journal of Planning Education and Research, Vol. 25, No. 1, pp.11-26.
for books i recommend these people:
Bogart, W. (2006) Don’t Call it Sprawl: Metropolitan Structure in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge University press. New York.
Bruegmann, R. (2005) Sprawl: A Compact History, University of Chicago press, Chicago
and this doesn't even begin to get at the articles written byt the other side (the compact city ideologues, etc) or the much more interesting books written by sociologists, like herbert gans, kevin kruse and cetera. what is worse, this is just a peek at the work being done by researchers, all of it intelligent and careful and correct...but in the end also somehow all of it fails to capture the city.
the goal should be a continuous link of humanity whether its human or not. sprawl is your destiny...drink the koolaid.
i'd be curious to read this one posted by jump:
Jarvis, H. (2003) Dispelling the Myth that Preference makes Practice in Residential Location and Transport Behaviour. Housing Studies, Volume 18, Number 4, July, pp. 587-606.
for me, the preferences of most consumers (american or not) is pointless. most people simply live in the best place that they can afford (and they could probably care less about urban/suburban distinctions). my curiosity asks the following questions, "who is underserved?" and "is this a market opportunity?" my instincts tell me that there is more opportunity in the "walkable niche" market right now and probably with healthy growth in the coming decades. that's where i'm in agreement with leinberger.
i could honestly care less about the environmental/sustainable implications of any development (beyond the marketability of such buzzwords) because the future of the planet is just not that important to me...i'll probably be dead before the environment really falls apart. there's nothing idealogical about the "walkable" argument from my perspective, rather it is market driven.
and i think that the other market forces impacting the suburbs (as referenced in the "next slum?" article) are the growing gaps between poor and wealthy in combination with growth of the poor in sheer numbers. when i toss all the data in the pot, i have a hard time disagreeing with the assessment that the "next slum" might very well emerge in today's suburbs.
whats so great about walking? its fine if its an option but for people whith no other transport it sucks.
thanks Jump! not sure when I'll have time to read these (not many neurons to spare these days), but worth my time at some point.
This is what scares me puddles. It scares me a lot.
Since the suburbs were a key factor in the segregation (financially and racially), I think that the suburbs will still attract some people that don't care about the convenience, sustainability or diversity that is a characteristic of "the city". There is a huge cultural gap that will not produce this ghetto suburb as some people think. I think there will definitely be some shifting around of neighborhoods in "cities", but there will be a point where it will probably provide another real estate crisis due to the misunderstanding of cultural influences in the city. Some people like to just live in their caves.
while i do think it is plausible that many of these mcmansions will become abandoned eventually with shifts in the housing market, i don't think the conclusion that they will become "slums" is quite right. more likely i think these subdivisions and cul-de-sacs will sit empty, similar to what has happened in parts of major cities that have become obsolete. the question this brings up for me has nothing to do with designing "walkable communities," but rather how architects can best design for obsolescence. this is one of the most pressing issues architecture is currently facing now.
this will sound really wierd concidering I live in the middle of a big walkable city with everything I need on my block - socially, my social life was BETER in the suburbs when I had a car. Sometimes I think city people are much more caveman than suburbanites. Things get freaky out there.
It depends on where you live. Chicago definitely holds your statement true.
i'm surprised that the kurt russell completely failed to derail this thread.
shhhhhhhh!
puddles, that whole walking thing is maybe a canard.
but the reality is that walkability doesn't work unless whole families all work in the same factory, which is after all the age that new urbanism is based on. when husband, wife, grandparents, and children are not required to can cow-parts for a living the model falls apart and it becomes a kind of pseudo-moral issue that only works if you feel guilty enough...and most don't...so am not sure if it is much of a viable trend...hell, even some new urbanists chose longer commutes and more car use, not less, in order to live in the walkable-seeming community of their guilt-based desire (yes i have an article somewhere that describes this pattern)...
anyway, i kinda hoped someone here would come up with examples of new thinking about suburbia rather than just lament about its faults etc etc...anyone out there with some ideas? planners don't seem to have many, surely the architects do???
i have not come across much, myself, which is why it would be cool to hear about more...
apart from lars lerup's work, and places like bedzed, i recently found this place, which is quite cool for me...is it the future?
anything else out there?
ok, jump. you have me beat on the academic/research angle. i've never been very good at that, i.e., i happily scored a d+ on my thesis project, never made it to a dissertation.
but keep in mind that the entire family does not need to literally work in the same factory. hell, for the kind of people that i'm talking about it's debatable whether they even "work" at all. probably what's more important is that they are within walking distance of their private jets (and by "walking distance" here i'm referring to walking distance from their benz/puch gelandewagens to the tarmac (conveniently located in the nearest slum community).
i really should take a look at some of this lerup stuff so that i at least have an idea of what you are talking about.
i think "gossip girl" is no my favorite tv show...and, yes, i have had a few drinks tonight. monday is the new "thursday" after all.
Walkability is fine as far as it goes - everyone likes to go the big city or a town center (hell, even a mall) and walk around. But no one can access all the places they might need to go just by walking.
The real issue is that suburbs don't address access and transportation options in any real way. What you end up getting are clogged two-lane roads and most of these eventually get turned into multi-lane highways: and that seems to be all the thinking that is done by developers and local governments. But where is any actual comprehensive regional planning? or, as jump said, some new thinking about how suburbia is actually built?
The truth is that suburbia was designed for the car. Most public transportation is based on proximity and connective routes. With the windy roads of suburbia, the only realistic option would be busses. Busses are not an efficient means of public transportation and trips would be excessively long. Suburban design is not planned in the same sense that a city is and cannot be designed this way either. The form of transportation will determine how the city is designed. The car is inefficient and the landscape is as a by product.
"anyway, i kinda hoped someone here would come up with examples of new thinking about suburbia rather than just lament about its faults etc etc...anyone out there with some ideas? planners don't seem to have many, surely the architects do???"
In grad school (University of Illinois at Chicago) we produced a book based on a Chicago 2030 plan. Chicago plans for the population to grow in the suburbs and not in the city. Teams were produced with architects and specific cities in order to examine these issues. The truth is that there weren't any revolutionary designs or concepts. Sustainability, walkability and some adaptations of urban concepts were applied to the suburbs. Some were commuter hubs, shopping centers, land preserves and outer edge suburbs.
In my opinion, there needs to be a federal plan that mandates growth boundaries around city centers. Minneapolis and Portland have done this (with slight differences) and force the end of these cancerous suburbs. Urbanity is where the potential for revolutionizing American life lies. We need to minimize the suburbs and build, maintain and improve our cities. A national rail system could push this along.
21 ronin - the flipside to outer growth is you exponentially grow the population for less outward sprawl the further out you go. Eventually you'd have to have millions upon millions to expand the ring just 5 miles as the radius grows. So growth boundries, bad. Whats needed and what will happen is settlement patterns will start to even out as people start to intermingle more with other races, economic groups
Since the suburbs have developed, they have been a mechanism of segregation (not only racially). You will not be able to force people to be tolerant, but you can control where buildings are allowed to be constructed. Concentrated expansion would minimize the amount of land that would need to be utilized in a phase of expansion.
If we wait for people to accept Mexicans, we will only be disappointed when there is a new concentration of immigration. The population has only increased and we have not used cities efficiently. Growth boundaries are not bad. They are key if there is to be any reconcilliation with the environment (which plays a huge role in the developement of cities). We should not build cities in the desert and drain rivers (for example). I can tell you right now that Chicago (the city of Chicago) would benefit greatly from growth boundaries.
doesnt' chicago have growth boundary ie the city limits? the sprawl is happening in du page county...
Ok. vado retro, with all possible respect. Growth boundaries are intended to be for a metro region. They are supposed to control how for a city (and the suburbs surrounding the city) can expand.
that was supposed to be "how FAR a city (and the suburbs surrounding the city) can expand."
...NOT.
the first suburbs, were created for streetcars and rail transit into the central business districts. Cars came 50 to 75 years later. Boston, New York, Philly, Baltimore all have early residential suburban garden cities radiating out along rail corridors from the city. Los Angeles first sprawled across the LA basin and valleys connected by almost 500 miles of street car lines from santa monica to san bernadino, long beach to san fernando (read Banham) - the success of the LA freeway network is that it superceeded and mostly followed the existing the rail right-of-ways. Compare this with most east coast and midwestern cities that bulldozed freeways through poorer neighborhoods as part of urban renewal schemes of the 50s and 60s a la Robert Moses.
That is the difference between 19th/early 20th century urbanism is that there were transit villages (as we now recognize 'em), versus the post war autocentric levitown mass produced sprawl that gave us all the stuff we love to hate.
Ok. Well if you look at those suburbs today its pretty clear what the dominating form of transportation is. True some of the original suburbs (in their form) were designed street car and rail transit, but that is limited to the east coast. Also 50 to 75 years later is when the explosion of development came where the majority of the suburbs were built.
21R- don't overlook Los Angeles or San Francisco for the power of mass transit to shape the contemporary city. You're in Chicago - so what is the loop named after? if you haven't read Cronon's Nature's Metropolis, you better start reading before you make your next post.
Oops...don't forget Chicago (also one of the original center that spread to suburbs).
treekiller. You better do your research before you make your next post! I'm in Brooklyn/NYC
excellent point treekiller. one of my former homes, brookline, massachusetts, is a suburb that easily predates the automobile...and provided a pivotal moment in the history of the american suburb with it 1873 annexation debate:
"Although Brookline may not have been America's first suburb, it was the first town to epitomize the ideas of the American suburb. Brookline was the first community that, when given a choice, decided it would rather be a suburb than a city."
LA's rail transit is efficient, but very limited. San Fran, true.
Are we talking about history or the future?
secession...
one issue with the burbs is the travel from burb to burb. of course, in chicago you can hop the metra from naperville to the loop to get to your job as a commodities trader. thats easy. the tough part is if you live in naperville and work in schaumburg. no train goin that way. you got to get in the suburban and drive on over.
(sorry 'bout mistaking your brooklyn sas for chicago attitude). This thread is both the past and the future since the future can't ignore the past.
I grew up adjacent to Brookline, MA near the end of the D line in Newton. In my current city of Minneapolis (another midwestern example of a streetcar city), it is easy to trace the palimpsest of the streetcars if you know what to look for.
if you look at the most audacious alternative personal transportation schemes out there today, most of them use a distributed hub for picking up rechargeable electric vehicles that run on dedicated transit ways for portions of the trip. we're going back to the future.
i was always curious about the end of the D line and intended to ride the train out there one day. only made it as far as cleveland circle though...but it was quite a ways past my longwood stop.
i did have a roommate though who was coming from downtown boston after some evening drinking and he fell asleep on the D line and ended up at the last stop (last train of the night too) before he woke up. it was his first week in the city, he had no idea where he was and had to hitchhike his way back home.
Heavy handed government regulation will simply fail. You cant put growth boundries on suburbanization. Christ - thats green socialism's ultimate goal.
If and when it becomes cost effective to live in the city, like we all did happily before, in street car connected comunities, it will be because we are poor, like we so happily used to be.
Vado - there is a proposed $5 billion train proposed to go from Joiliet via naperville to Schaumburg. The problem is the $5 billion. Labor, in America, will ensure that absolutely nothing spectacular ever gets built again on a grand scale.
evilP- regulations works if the law is related to funding infrastructure like sewers. sprawl doesn't do too well with septic tanks since most folks shopping for a new house expect the convenience of flushing their toilets.
out past cleveland circle, the D line becomes more sylvan passing through several parks (with great mountain biking and rock climbing near chestnut hill), golf courses, and other bits of garden city living.
i am all for socialism and putting boundaries on lots of things. i would put boundaries on the amount of kids you can have only after you've passed an intelligence parenting test. i would put boundaries on cigarettes and booze and television programs. these things all make perfect sense to me. that said im gonna go get in my car and drive to a bar and have a scotch and enjoy some second hand smoke.
What vado wrote is true: the older transportation systems are based on a hub (the city) with lines radiating out from that center. But many suburban areas are now hubs themselves (particularly for employment and shopping), so you also need lateral transportation methods to really have an alternative to driving.
Growth boundaries do not mean that abosolutely no development can happen outside the boundary. For cities like Minneapolis, (where I was born and raised), the growth boundary only means that the city will not provide services out beyond the boundary. That is one way of doing it. Of course a city cannot prevent small town development on the other side of the state, but it can limit the effect that the city will have on the immediate land around the city.
I lived in Minneapolis/St. Paul for twenty-some odd years and moved to Chicago and then New York. I studied in Europe for 3 months and I was able to visit several major cities as well as studying these issues in college and graduate school. It is clear to me that the lack of planning that occurs in the suburbs will make them unfit for increasing density and making them "walkable". Parts of Minneapolis are very similar to many towns in Long Island, NY or Oak Park (near Chicago). These early suburbs are much more ready for installations that would make them walkable. But, other types of suburbs Eden Prairie (MN), Schaumburg (IL), or Henderson (NV) are beyond the interventions that have been proposed across the country. For those reasons coupled with the fact that early suburbs occur closer to major metropolitan centers, I think that growth boundaries would halt the poorly designed suburbs from the 60's and beyond (generally speaking.)
hey look...it's kurt russell!
Why hasnt anyone asked the mexicans - they work and live by the millions in Chicago's suburbs, walking and biking between freeways and viaducts and state roads with no sidewalks. Their community could be concidered the first Hyperurban comunity weve seen.
i feel like that the "lack of planning" in the suburbs is probably their most alluring characteristic. it's in direct correlation to the perceived freedom of the suburbs. that's what gives them a chance to develop into slums.
hey, where'd kurt russell go?
kurt is back
you mock me by saying "lack of planning" but then wonder why the country as a whole cannot remedy the problem of making the suburbs walkable. They cannot be both. That's the point.
"that's what gives them a chance to develop into slums."............are you ackowledging the fact that this crock of shit ("freedom") is sold to the poor so they can emulate the rich and follow them around wherever the rich decide not to be? That's one more reason that growth boundaries should be enforced. There should be nowhere to hide for the rich.
Growth boundaries increases the value of property and can collectively support public transportation.
there is planning in suburbia, but it isn' regional, just local, which is maybe why it doesn't work so well.
urban growth boundaries are great but come at a price. portland has a growth bounday but it was set so far out that it has only recently really come into play...and some people have chosen to build beyond it because of cost (the con that is most hard to get past for this model).
me, i kinda like the finger-plan approach to assuring green space, like at copenhagen. suburbs in north america might be nicer if there was a forest within walking distance of every home...unfortunately it is too late and we have to start from reality...so what do we do next? cities are evolutionary, not visionary, which means we have to start with something that already exists (in evolution this explains why most animals share same body plan). so how are we gonna tinker with what we got so things end up better?
that early suburbs were designed for streetcars and before that the omnibuses is undeniable. unfortunately that lasted only a few decades, and by the 1920's the streetcar suburbs were already on the decline (starting in LA, which was a truly new city in the making at the time)...it would be nice to go back, but that is assuming a lot of change would happen...as vado points out suburbs are interconnected to each other as much and maybe more than suburbs are connected to tradtitional centers...this is such a problem that even in europ famed for great planning and so on is unable to deal with it. most famous example is in stockholm where a series of mini-towns were built up along rail lines conneceting to the centre...the plan was that people would use rail, but in reality everyone went sideways, using cars to work in places off the grid. the city had surpassed the plan...which is usually what happens.
i think one of the positive aspects of suburbia is that it is based on the rections of individuals and hence flexible (planners tend to think about communites rather than individuals and are based on policies- policies are not flexible by definition), so maybe it is possible to change rapidly according to new needs...maybe. so i am not so depressed about suburbia in its current form...either way, even if i despise suburbs more than half of north america lives in them, so dealing with them has to be done with care. clearly not everyone can live downtown. that just wouldn't work. so what we gonna do?
First,
Brookline, Respect! A good friend of mine lived their for a few years.
It is all about street cars. Early lines did in fact cover both the East and West Coast urban centers. Including in LA.
Also, the major possibility of the suburban form is the "flexibility" unplanned development is key.
For this i enjoy ideas like those proposed by; Teddy Cruz, Lars Lerup and anybody interested in densifying. Sure without a massive energy drought we will not step away from automobiles and hence their effect on planning.
However, they don't have to be the dominant form of planning and transport.
We can certainly have real, freemarket conditions and subsidize a train network no less than we do the auto.
As for green space. The market has a role in creating this also. Look at the Highline, Las Ramblas or the Big Dig.
wow, jump, i think we're starting to agree with each other on these issues. i'm not sure we always did. anyway...
because i have a one track mind, i'll go back to my point about obsolescence. i truly believe this is the biggest issue facing planning and architecture today. planning is no longer about planning for growth; it's about planning for urban and suburban expansion and contraction, and how we do this without wasting incredible amounts of resources. when i drive through the suburbs and see all of the throw away office parks built 25 years ago with 50% vacancy rates, i'm just stunned. how do you dispose of these buildings? do you let them decay with neglect (as is usually the case)? the problem then becomes you're looking at areas that are neither urban nor suburban nor nature. they are a huge drain on resources and a public health hazard.
at one time architecture was designed and built for permenance. architecture is now meant to be thrown away, but with little thought to the process of how you actaully do that. i'm not saying throw-away architecture is bad, in fact i think it is reflects the needs of our ever-changing society. i do think though that architects and planners need to better understand and design for the process of disposal.
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