good question. i am kind of in the same boat - except that i am already mostly through architecture school. let me think on it and i'll give a good response at some point.

i would expect some of the fellow archinectors to have good thoughts on this as well.

architecture is pretty flexible. but it means that you need to be flexible too. if you are not interested in architecture except to learn how to fix suburbs then you will not be happy at archi-school, because that particular assignment may only come up once if you push for it and/or get lucky.

the same is probably true for planning. so i guess it depends if your interests go beyond suburbs or not. if not then i would suggest based on your goals that you go into politics or become a developer. that way you can influence the way the cities look without having to do the design work (being able to draw, btw is not particularly impt).

i am an architect and practice planning (just getting into it really). i find it a challenge so usually partner with a professional planner. it is similar to architecture in a lot of abstract ways, but different in most of the details. learning to do both is not easy, but not a stretch either. after all duany and calthorpe were both architects...i think.


as for your mission. very admirable, and i believe in it totally (my phd was on the very topic), but you should be careful about what you are trying to fix. do you want to make suburbs sustainable or do you simply have an idea about what suburbia should like like regardless of sustainability or cultural issues? i.e., the problem with cars is an energy issue, not a planning issue and it is important not to conflate the two. not because it is wrong to want to reduce car use, but because if you think planning is going to fix the problem you are probably in for a very big disappointment. that is the lesson so far anyway, in several nations in fact. i have quite a bit of literature that has shown this to be the case...which is to say, you might need to rethink what your goals are and not decide the outcome a priori.

yep. planning is not exactly about having a brilliant idea and attempting to apply it to realize some idealized solution. it's about working with what you got, understanding the needs and wants of a bunch of stakeholders in a holistic way, and a lot of learning. if you think you know the answers already, they'll probably fail.

that said, architectural education might be your thing. from there you don't have to do architecture. you may, or you may transition into planning, urban design, landscape architecture, public administration, development - all paths from which you could have some influence on the built environment.

an architectural education is a hugely valuable base from which to pursue any of those roles.

another route is getting an MBA in real estate. There are several top notch programs that offer dual MRED/MArch or MLA or MUPs (UPenn & the GSD come to mind).

I'm not going to pitch landscape architecture as the solution (though it should be), since the folks that made the suburban mess only think of landscape as turf plus foundation plantings.

i would definitely say go the planning route. although architecture school will cover some of your areas of interest, it will most likely not come up until the end of your academic career.

if you are interested in regional growth, planning, and adaptive reuse on a scale that is greater than just one parcel, i believe that you will become very frustrated with both the content and expectations of the curriculum at most architecture schools. for instance, although learning how to make sweet renderings/calculate beam loads/detail a section are important skills, they may not help as much as being able to read/draw a zoning map, understanding FARs, how to implement tax increment financing/business improvement districts, etc, given your priorities.

again, im not downplaying hte importance of architecture, but it seems to me that your interests are based in planning/real estate development.

Most architecture schools avoid engaging suburbia and sprawl. most planning programs embrace it.

Wow. Thanks to everyone for posting such thoughtful responses.

Let me say first that I know there will be some frustrations with either job. I might have sounded more narrow-minded in my initial post than I really am - I just wanted to give an idea of what is truly motivating me to switch careers. I know in reality things involve compromises.

And I do realize the community ultimately has the final say. At the same time, though, I think what at least a decent percentage of what the public wants is going to be changing in coming decades - I think there's already a demand for more walkable, mixed-use style development, and I think that will only grow in the future.

I think one of the things that is throwing me is that it seems that many of the people who have been leaders in this area come from an architectural rather than a planning background - people like, as jump mentioned, Andres Duany and Peter Calthorpe.

It's true that my interests generally are in looking at cities on more of a macro level than that of an individual building. If that's all I wound up doing as an architect, I don't think that would be for me (although I do find the design process for houses and commercial buildings interesting - I didn't want to imply earlier that I didn't, just that it's not what I'd like to do). But it seems that some architects spend their time on larger-scale projects as well.

But again, as some have mentioned, maybe planning with a real estate development focus might be the way to address that.

Anyway, obviously I'm still in the process of sorting this out, and let me say again, thanks for all of the replies so far - they are helping me a lot, and I'm sure there are others out there who might have similar questions as well.

I'm not sure I agree this is a foregone conclusion. I hear a lot of people talk a good game about wanting to live in walkable neighborhoods or places with a more urban feel but when the time comes to put their money where their mouth is, they pick the single family home or the garden apartment in the burbs.

Once you take away all the dreamers and the people who bought into mixed use or semi-urban areas just because they were priced out of everything else, the core of people who truly demand and are committed to that kind of lifestyle is disappointingly small.

I won't disagree that the demand for alternatives to traditional suburbs has emerged over the past twenty years where it was virtually non-existent previously, but I believe a lot of that demand was pent up for a long time and finally released as social mores changed.

So it's not entirely clear that there really is growing demand or unmet demand. For a lot of the big talkers and dreamers, there are options and they just pass them up. This is part of the reason housing prices in so many inner-city neighborhoods are so depressed.

Going forward, what happens to the suburbs is really anybody's guess. They could be doomed in their current state, crumbling under the weight of volatile energy prices - or they could thrive if alternative energy and improved efficiency keep energy prices low.

I'm sorry if this post comes off as sounding overly negative and discouraging. I did my Master's thesis basically on the same set of issues so it's great to see others who are interested. I'm really just trying to drive home the point others alluded to earlier about not coming into it with too many preconceived notions.

1) yes, drawing skills are not essential to being an architect. but a desire to design (and more than just suburbs) is essential. those design skills you learn can and will apply to whatever your own passion/agenda is, even if it is tangentially.

2) jump: what do you mean that the car problem is an energy issue and not a planning issue? yes, the main reason cars are becoming unsustainable in the suburbs is that energy may become scarce/expensive... but there are plenty of other reasons (which would be handled by planners) to want to see car use reduced (i.e. the merits of pedestrian/transit friendly communities, the desire to see sprawl not eat up green fields....)

3) treekiller: most architecture schools i know of embraced a study of suburbs and sprawl 5-10 years ago, but now that the theme has become tired and worn out, have moved on to the study of the rapidly growing urban agglomerations in east asia and the middle east. i'm curious to see what will be next...

4) 4arch: there may not necessarily be the explicit demand for urban life and the total demise of suburbs. but if oil becomes scarce it will force communities to becomes more urban (unless car mileage becomes a lot better). also, most major cities have reached the limit of how far people will be willing to travel from the periphery to their jobs at the center; either people will move closer in to the city, or more jobs will move to the far suburbs. finally, much of my generation really dislikes the suburbs because of how boring it is to grow up there. sure, some of us will go back, but a lot of us will stay in the city.

5) donuts: i dunno what you should do. you'll be frustrated by a lot of the small scale stuff architects have to learn in school, just as i am. but there are ample opportunities to do larger scale things with urbanism. i think the main question is: do you want to DESIGN or do you want to PLAN ?

ryan,

first of all the suburbs ARE the city. separating them out as something other is in my view a grave error we all make too easily.

about cars and planning, well, yeah pedestrian friendly is great but that has nothing to do with cars. or at least there is no rule or reason that cars lead to bad planning for pedestrians in an automatic way. denmark and many other countries/cities offer examples that both can co-exist without too much problem.

sprawl is not a result of cars. sprawl has been around for centuries and is part of what cities ARE, really. Japan offers a great example of a nation that has sprawled by rail and is ugly as shit in spite of the fact that you don't need a car. many of the cities are poorly planned for walking as well, again in spite of the fact that cars are not necessary. but you can see similar in Holland and in Germany too. certainly cars play a part but i think there are other larger social issues that are really driving urban form, and removing cars from the equation will not make those go away.

the real question is if cars were benign would suburbs still be bashed? you know for instance if cars were all electric would they still be scapegoat? i have been asking this question to planners and theorists in japan and so far most say well of course that would change things dramatically. i tend to agree with them, that the problem with cars is not their existence but that they produce side-effects that are not nice. so, yeah... to me the biggest problem with cars is that they rely on fossil fuels and burn the energy very inefficiently.


the other issues we tend to connect to cars and suburbia i think should be tackled individually.

for instance, though it is seldom brought up, the fact of the matter is that high-density is not necessarily linked to sustainability (and in many cases is linked to the opposite). it is just that so many people have been yelling out that we need to live in urban centers walkable and train connected, that we have begun to take the statement for a truth. when it is i think more just conventional wisdom in the Galbraith-ian sense.

truly if we are going to make a better world i think we need to start with what we have. already 50% of economic production and power in the USA rests in the suburban parts of many/most cities. flipping it to the center is not going to be easy. there is no opportunity for a tabula rasa approach, and so we need to question all of the things we think we know and just LOOK. and then start thinking about what might come next. otherwise we will waste time on polemics instead of fixing the problem. polemics are nice, but practicality will get things done.

jump,

thanks for the thorough response and the insights. what course of study can i pursue to learn this much about urbanism?

my insights on why the car is much more than an environmental issue:

if you look at the public realm of most cities, even cities with tons of pedestrians like new york, london, paris, berlin, boston, etc., the majority of the horizontal ground plane of the public realm is given over to the automobile. what looks in an architect's rendering like a nice urban space enclosed between the street walls of buildings on either side of the street is actually very different in real life because the pedestrians are confined to the periphery while the center -- what would ostensibly be the most pleasant place to be -- is taken up by huge machines driving 30-50mph, making this a no-go zone for pedestrians.

i think cars seriously disrupt the pedestrian experience, creating a spatially very limited and unpleasantly discontinuous (i.e. waiting at a light to cross the street is a real pain) experience. yes, sometimes it is fun to watch cars drive by, but i have been much more happy on the few streets i have experienced that are pedestrian zones, without cars whatsoever, where the urban realm of the person on foot extends throughout the space between the buildings.

i don't want to sound like a new-urbanist here. i don't advocate kitschy historicist architecture whatsoever. i don't advocate traditional urban planning for the sake of tradition or reviving the 19th century european vision of the city. this has nothing to do with tradition or conservatism.

i realize that cars and trucks and busses are a reality in the contemporary city and need to be dealt with somehow. there must be innovative solutions for this, though. i haven't thought far enough
to come up with this yet though. i guess in the european pedestrian zones they accept that most of the city has cars and then route car around the pedestrianized areas. if you had the means for serious infrastructural investment you could create a sectional difference between the cars and the pedestrians, in effect creating 2 separate realms.

no worries ryan.

i studied urban planning under architecture prof who is also a planner. i guess that helps at least a little bit, but i think main thing is to have an interest.

new urbanism has much going for it, so there is no need to worry if you agree with some or all of its ideas. actually, to be fair NU also makes room for cars, as it is very pragmatic in the end. which is maybe where some of its strength as a theory/practice lays...

your observation about giving the best space to cars instead of people (ie the middle of streets) is an interesting one. here in tokyo they close down a big chunk of Ginza to auto traffic and even place a few tables in the middle of the street. its a very odd feeling to walk down one of the widest streets in the city like it was a big sidewalk. it would be quite something if that were normal on all the streets all the time. maybe that is in the future someday. i have no idea how it would work, but is intriguing...

yeah they do that in HK too. and they started doing it occasionally on a couple streets in NYC as a test but I think it was mostly for recreational purposes (i.e. cycling and urban hiking) than an average daily stroll through the city.

i don't know why they do it in ginza. a very large strip of road in front of the emperor's palace is also closed down for cycling, which is very cool. but they are just temporary and not feasible in general.

if you are in HK, Ryan, you might enjoy/be interested in the work of my prof, Dr. Hidetoshi Ohno (also here and here. He was my PhD advisor at university of Tokyo and I guess won some prizes in HK in the 90's. I don't know how well his ideas travel from the context of Japan, but at least they are pretty fresh and they also have the benefit of being Asian in a very real sense. While his planning work with fiber city is also rather utopian it at least makes some effort to deal with reality as a starting point too, which i think is not as common as it should be...

hey...!

i am not in HK presently, but i have studied it extensively and been there numerous times.

thanks for the links - was Ohno involved with that german shrinking cities thing a few years back?

ah, sorry my bad.

the shrinking cities project still continues apace, as far as i know...

dr. ohno did a show/project with oswalt here in tokyo last year with the shrinking cities guy. i was not involved except at level of studio meetings so don't know so much about how it all turned out. ohno did recently publish a book (in japanese mores the pity) about shrinking cities in japan though, so i guess there is some affinity.

not that tokyo is shrinking mind you. most of japan is, but not tokyo, nor is it projected to (the country is expected to lose about 30 million people over the next few decades, but tokyo will only change size by a few percent). which is sort of where things go slightly fish-eyed theory-wise with fiber city. it is a good idea though in spite of that inconvenient bit of truth.

i need to learn japanese.
and visit japan.
not necessarily in that order.

Jump, I think you made a lot of good points, but I have to disagree with a few. I do think sprawl is the result of cars. Obviously suburbs came about before the auto age, but it wasn't until auto-oriented development predominated beginning in the 30s or so that suburbs became unwalkable.

Also, I can't agree that Japan is ugly or isn't walkable. My experiences there were the opposite.


You as a great question what would happen if energy were not an issue. I agree that's part of it, but I also think aesthetics and quality of life play a large part in the issue.

I'd feel better about commuting 45 minutes a day if my car ran on hydrogen and emitted nothing more than water - but I'd regret nto spending that time with my kids just as much, and I'd dislike the auto-oriented landscape just as much.


4Arch, also agree with some of what you say. It's true that to some extent, this is a leap into the unknown. Still, I think there are more tangible signs that the demand is there for walkable, mixed use developments.

If you look at real estate prices, they've gone up the most (or recently, gone down the least) in urban and close-in suburban neighborhoods.

Also, I think the recent $4 gas, even though it's gone for now, has and will continue to shape consumer behavior.

Finally, I don't think the demand for traditional suburbia will entirely go away, nor does it have to in order to justify creating something different. I think there will be relativele more people wanting to live in pedestrian-friendly environments. Not everyone will, but more people will.

As far as my decision, I've been leaning all along to planning, but I want to make sure I'm making the best decision possible. The comments here have been very helpful in that regard.

I think planning probably is a better fit for me. There are aspects of architecture I find fascinating, and I think studying all of it would be interesting, but I think in practice it's fairly likely I'd find myself stuck doing things that I'm not truly interested in doing.

I might look to take some landscape architecture classes while in graduate school, if I get in, and might sit in on some architecture classes, but at this point, I think I'm going with planning.

that sound like a good plan (no pun intended).

i understand what you are saying about japan DNC. Japan is walkable but people use cars anyway, especially once you leave Tokyo (where I live). My PhD dissertation mapped that behaviour as part of my study of how people live in and use suburbs here. It is the damndest thing but basically Japan's planning laws and zoning rules (which are found in the national building codes and are not local, nor controlled by planners AT ALL) allow for and actually result in a remarkable amount of mixed land use. Since cars only really began to be used by most people in Japan since the 1980's most suburban communities here are tied into an amazing rail system as well. Otherwise the laws are performance based and almost like the NU "form-based zoning" that many architects like to bash. The result is arguably a nation where most of the ideas of NU are present just as a matter of course.

And yet, everyone drives. Culture trumps everything. The same thing happened in The Netherlands in the 1990's when they adopted Compact City rules for the entire country only to find that people were choosing to drive even when they had public transport alternatives.

In both of these examples the setting is nothing like what is happening in north america, but the lesson is nonetheless important. people do not do what planners want nor expect, and never have. of course herbert gans said that in the 60's but no one paid him much attention back then ;-)

Relly it was not clear to me until I read Sir Peter Hall's book Cities of Tomorrow, where he describes the efforts of planners to make compact towns around stockholm in the 1950's (page 338 onwards). They worked until people began to earn enough money to buy cars and then market economics took over and people started ignoring the intent of the subways, and the whole thing fell apart. The problem was not cars though, the problem was that planners had lost control over the inhabitants who had suddenly found emancipation in the automobile. The problem was one of freedom. The solution of course is to limit that freedom, but that is hardly an admirable goal...so what is a planner to do? Better design maybe. Or maybe it would be better to rethink some of the assumptions.

But the thing is really there is still nothing to say that a dispersed city is any less sustainable, intrinsically, than a centralised one. that is an enormous assumption that only holds if you believe in control and in centralised authority.

what if we took the earlier thought experiment further and not only made cars benign energy-wise, but also made suburbia and its buildings equally benign by assuming co-generation plants, locally generated power and sewage remediation in the form of "living machines" or similar technology. Suddenly the imperative for centralization is not required. Or is it?

I am also not so sure walkability is a real answer. I live in Tokyo, which is amazingly walkable and connected by trains, but my commute is still an hour one way to anywhere. There is nothing to say that most cities would be the same if given over to mass transit the way tokyo is, but i am not convinced. More problematic is that most people use entire cities as their employment and play zone, so even if you can find a place that is walkable for one, the chances that your wife, husband, children, can do the same is small. The compact city only works when people have no freedom, like the workers of industrial england where whole families worked in one company. todays culture is nothing like that, and i would say that is a good thing...so what to do? most of the real problems are supported by cars but the causes are cultural. i think architects just don't know how to deal with that so instead we focus on the built environment instead. which is problematic at best.


anyway, this is all just off the cuff thinking and slightly garbled. best thing to do is read from good writers. if interested check out Sprawl by robert bruegman, the new suburban history by kevin kruse and thomas sugrue, and don't call it sprawl by william bogart. there are tonnes of books that talk about suburbia in the negative and polemical way, but these are a bit more balanced...or so i think.

anyway, i will leave off there.

I'm late to this party, having just returned from vacation and a blissful separation from the internet. The topic of architecture viz. planning is one I love, but I don't yet have the will to read all the way through all the writing above--but I will, since most of the usual suspects around here also interested in this topic usually teach me something.

DNC-- Without going all the way through your posts (yet), my sense is that you'd be better off in planning, where the different career possibilities concerning the physical forms of development are more numerous (e.g., policy, physical planning, community organization, economic development) than architectural training will normally provide.

Jump-- Nice post above questioning some of current conventional(and decided and incontrovertible, to many in our field) wisdom (others, I among them, would say 'assumptions') about urbanization and development. I'm a fan of Bruegmann's book, and Bogart's looks really interesting, too (thanks, Amazon!). I'll have to pick it up.

Jump - you make a strong argument and, sadly, I have to agree with much of what you say. It's true that in place after place, the freedom the automobile offers has proven irresistible to people, and for understandable reasons.

I certainly don't propose to roll back the clock or use heavy-handed methods to force people from cars.

But I do think your take minimizes some factors I think are significant.

First, I think there has long been a substantially larger demand for pedestrian-friendly development than what has actually been built. A combination of outdated zoning laws and ultraconservative lenders and developers has made building something other than traditional strip mall/single-family subdivision suburbia very difficult, if not impossible.

There are many people who would choose something different if there was a choice.

Secondly, I think that market will only grow, and for a couple of reasons. I think there are significant generational differences that go into where people choose to live. Baby Boomers overwhelmingly chose the suburbs. They were new and exciting, and the idea of going everywhere by car seemed an unmitigated blessing. And, lets face it, attitudes about race factored into the move to the suburbs as well.

But for many people in their 20s and 30s, with traffic much worse than it was 40 years ago, driving everywhere seems like a curse. They don't like the sterility of traditional suburbs and appreciate the diversity and vitality of more urban areas. They like living in areas where they can walk places.

Additionally, I think trends with energy and the economy will provide economic incentive to live closer in and to minimize auto travel. Gas is relatively cheap now, but I think everyone who got a taste of $4 gas realizes what the future will be like. I don't think the current prices will last long, and I think there is a growing realization of the costs of living so far away from work and everywhere else. There also is a growing political consensus that more compact and mixed-use development is desirable. Instances of that can be found all the way from what I expect an Obama stimulus plan will look like to new zoning ordinances in municipality after municipality.

Finally, retrofitting suburbia doesn't have to mean turning it all into something resembling traditional downtowns or making it as hostile to the auto as it has been to pedestrians all these years.

It's quite possible to create something close to traditional suburbia but with enough changes on the margins to make it vastly more walkable.

I'm talking about redeveloping failing shopping centers into mini-downtowns, with dense multifamily housing mixed with retail and office uses, and creating much better transitions from there to more traditional suburban neighborhoods, so those mini-downtowns are accessible by foot or bike.

I'm talking about higher density housing along main roads, along with a mix of uses, and with a higher quality of design along the way. People don't like multifamily housing and commercial development in large part because what we build now is brutally ugly - overlarge parking lots, overlarge signs, light pollution, apartment complexes with buildings scattered randomly across unusable green spaces, etc. Improved design can address many of these issues.

I'll concede that to a certain extent, this project is a leap into the unknown. But I'd also argue that there are many signs that the time is right, and that if done properly, we can overhaul our suburbs for a new age, while retaining much of what made them attractive to people in the first place.

sorry if i sounded like i was disagreeing with you DNC. I think you are right. It IS time to start re-doing suburbia, or at least rethinking how they work. I am not sure there is the demand you assume, but that shouldn't stop us from working on the problem anyway.

I would still caution you to not assume that all of those ideas you have are going to be the answers. right now you seem to have a solution in search of a problem (to paraphrase rob bruegmann) and less of an interest in actually finding out what is needed in reality.

I don't say that because i think your solutions are wrong. they sound quite good, but the thing is we (planners and architects) spent the last 25 years developing pretty much the same ideas and getting them built only to find that lo and behold we were not addressing the real issues - and so NOTHING changed. I think we are still getting over the shock of that.

Sure some things improved, but lets face it, if a nation like Holland decides to drop the Compact City model as a failure you know there are some serious issues to be resolved. When they did that they had the resources of a very strict planning power behind them, but were bright enough to recognize that polemics does not get you far in the real world. So lately they are turning to a more pragmatic solution that recognizes the way people live and allows that people in fact are not controlled by the shape of the cities they live in (something else herbert gans recognized back in the 60's !). They are not giving up their goals but are this time around (I hope) paying attention to reality.

That is kind of interesting in itself but the real point is that the USA (and Japan too for that matter) does NOT give planning authority to the nation's planners, does not really have regional planning in any meaningful way, and otherwise lets people do what they want as small groups - each and every community is living the tragedy of the commons to the letter almost. So if holland couldn't make it work i have very large doubts that america can do so very easily...frankly i think the truth is that we have to be more flexible and drop our polemics.

For me this is not something to be sad about. it is an opportunity to see how smart we really are, and i expect some cool things to happen if we can all get off of our polemical horses long enough to wade in the muck...

well that is how i see it right now anyway...