Too often during the bubble, banks and builders shunned thoughtful architecture and urban design in favor of cookie-cutter houses that could be easily repackaged as derivatives to be flipped, while architects snubbed housing to pursue more prestigious projects.
But better design is precisely what suburban America needs, particularly when it comes to rethinking the basic residential categories that define it, but can no longer accommodate the realities of domestic life.
— nytimes.com
4 Comments
current problem planners and city officials are facing is the GOP's absurd war against changing zoning codes to accommodate higher density and mixed-use development. They've written the crusade of the "agenda 21-ers" into their national policy, which is this conflation of legitimate academic criticisms of sustainability with this bizarre idea that "smart growth" is some kind of massive European/UN socialist conspiracy. so instead of having cities and towns adopt much more flexible zoning codes to spur private development and more efficient and economical uses of utilities and infrastructure - we have people who are supposed to be for "less government handouts" and "less regulation" fighting to preserve the government subsidies and draconian laws that discourages anyone from doing anything other than low-density sprawl.
so - we can redesign suburbia all we want, but there's a major battle looming, and it's useful to know what we're up against.
toasteroven, I 100% agree, however suburbia will never be improved until architects embrace the idea of a developers business model. We need both policy change and initiative from the architecture community. While there are so many plausable strategies to improve suburbia, there are few addressing the issue of how such ideas can become realised within the economic constraints of contemporary society and the constraints we impose upon ourselves with the archaic architecture as service business model. While such a model is fine for most building typologies, it falls short in addressing middle-working class housing and the accompanying consumer marketplace. As long as development is determined by the business minded developer seeking easy profit nothing will change. The social entrepreneur is needed in this arena.
To add, we also need some leadership to bring these issues to the attention of the general public. Most people have no idea that there are better ways to arrange society. I know some really smart people that are clueless when talking about urbanism. We hear debates on sustainability with regard to energy and transportation in the general media, but never any suggesting that we can cut fuel emmisions in half by arranging communities in ways so that we only have to drive half as much.
As long as development is determined by the business minded developer seeking easy profit nothing will change.
if "business-minded" developers had to actually pay for, build, and maintain things like roads, transit, utilities, etc... they'd build dense cities.
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