Architect:

“Don’t Forget the Burbs

By Amanda Kolson Hurley

The global age of the city is upon us. But as June Williamson reminds us, architects and designers shouldn’t give up on the quest to retrofit suburbia.

Remember when we were going to save the suburbs? In 2008, Ellen Dunham-Jones, AIA, and June Williamson released Retrofitting Suburbia, a handbook for turning sprawl into walkable, sustainable, more urban places. The book got national media attention, Dunham-Jones gave a TED talk, and for a while, dead malls were the topic du jour.

Then the recession came, putting the brakes on many suburban redevelopment plans and shifting the attention of designers and policymakers elsewhere. We started to see the effects of climate change, such as powerful, more frequent storms, and grew concerned about resilience and adaptation, not just prevention. Meanwhile, Generation Y’s preference for city living intensified, and among designers, conversation shifted to designing for health and social impact, with a renewed interest in serving inner-city communities and the developing world.

The elephant in the room: In the United States, most of our aggregate metropolitan area is auto-dependent suburban sprawl, and it’s not going away. Meanwhile, countries such as China and India are starting to replicate our bad land-use decisions. If anything, the need to retrofit suburbia is more urgent now than it was five years ago, when it seemed more buzz-worthy.”

Image: A rendering of Attain This!, an affordable housing project that Holler Architecture and AB Architekten are designing in Deer Park, N.Y., for the Long Island Housing Partnership. The prototype is expected to achieve Passive House standards.

Courtesy of Tobias Holler of HOLLER Architecture and Matthias Altwicker of AB Architekten

Urbanland: 

“How to Make Suburbs Work Like Cities

Successful strategies for creatively using and adapting infrastructure to support more dense development in America’s suburbs are highlighted in Shifting Suburbs: Reinventing Infrastructure for Compact Development, a new ULI report. (Download Shifting Suburbs here.)

by Trisha Riggs. February 7, 2013

The report focuses on the growing trend for suburbs to be redesigned and redeveloped to be more people oriented than automobile dependent, offering more options for walking, cycling, or using public transit to get from one place to another. With the U.S. population anticipated to rise by 95 million over the next 30 years, and with the vast majority of this growth expected to occur in the suburbs of metropolitan areas, the challenge of providing the appropriate infrastructure to encourage compact growth has never been more important, notes Shifting Suburbs. Specifically, suburban arterials and first-ring suburbs would benefit from the development of new approaches to solving infrastructure and land use challenges, it says.”

Photo: Urbanland

” Is Growth a Prerequisite for Long-Term Community Health and Prosperity?

By David Morley, AICP
APA’s Planning Advisory Service Coordinator

For most planners the obvious answer to the title question is probably no. But if this is the case, why is it so hard to articulate a realistic and compelling vision for community health and prosperity for a city with a declining population?

The answer, in part, is that the dominant planning paradigm in the United States has always been growth oriented. In other words, communities typically make plans to accommodate or manage demand for new development. Moreover, local planning programs frequently depend primarily on private development for plan implementation. If that development never happens, the community’s vision will not come to fruition.

This doesn’t mean the dominant planning paradigm fails to acknowledge the potential for a decline in demand. On the contrary, many local planning programs focus great attention on neighborhoods suffering from disinvestment and decline. However, the proposed solution for struggling communities almost invariably involves public investment to spur catalytic private development, with the ultimate goal of reigniting demand. This approach is perhaps best typified by the massive slum clearance initiatives of the urban renewal era or the arms race over state-of-the-art downtown sports stadiums in the decades that followed.

The fundamental problem with the classic, growth-oriented planning paradigm is that it simply doesn’t work for the hundreds, if not thousands, of cities in the U.S. who’ve suffered decades of depopulation and disinvestment due to sprawl, deindustrialization, or Sun Belt migration.

Yes, I’m talking about ruin-porn pinups like Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo, but I’m also talking about smaller cities like Saginaw, Michigan, or Dayton, Ohio, that receive less attention but are nevertheless facing the same challenges.

As authors Joseph Schilling and Alan Mallach, FAICP, explain in the new PAS report titled Cities in Transition (PAS 568), growth-oriented planning hasn’t just failed post-industrial shrinking cities; it isn’t working for many inner-ring suburbs like Euclid, Ohio, or Orange, New Jersey, either. These aging suburbs have inherited many of the problems associated with their central cities; however, they frequently lack assets like regional employment centers or cultural institutions that remain bright spots for many traditional urban centers.

Perhaps more surprisingly, growth-oriented planning may have run its course both in smaller cities that have undergone rapid demographic shifts due to in-migration from other countries and in a number of Sun Belt cities that can no longer pin their economic hopes on new home construction.”

Via: APA Sustaining Places

Image: A new family tree of planning. Freely adapted from Kaiser and Godschalk 1995.