Mass Urban

“atlas of suburbanisms

The University of Waterloo’s Atlas of Suburbanisms — a research project by the School of Planning’s Markus Moos and Anna Kramer — looks like a fantastic effort to understand Canadian suburbs on their own terms and as components of larger urban systems:

“…what if we mapped characteristics commonly believed to be telling of suburbs just to see where they actually occur? What if we went to the suburbs, figuratively and literately, and conducted research as if looking from one suburb to the other, or as if looking from a suburb toward the central city? The likely result is an understanding of suburbanism, and our cities more generally, that is richer and more diverse; an understanding that does not take for granted the political or historic development of cities as drawing concrete lines between what we believe is the suburban and the urban.”

To do this, the research relies on a shift from understanding suburbia primarily as a spatial format — defined by distance from the center of a city, by a certain level of density, or by particular ways of arranging streets and buildings — towards understanding suburbanisms as a kind of urbanity constituted by certain patterns of living: driving to work, gravitating towards demographic monocultures, retreating from public space towards semi-public and private space, owning rather than renting.”

Via: mammoth

Image: ”Toronto: Percentage of residents who drive to work, live in single-detached housing, and own their homes”, from Moos and Kramer’s Atlas of Suburbanisms