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

The Atlantic Cities: 

“Quantifying the Cost of Sprawl

Emily Badger. May 21, 2013

Sprawl is expensive. It costs more money to pave a road and connect a sewer line to five families each living a block apart on wooded lots than to build public infrastructure for those same five families living in a condo. It costs more money (and takes more time and gas) to serve those families with garbage trucks, fire engines, and ambulances. And in return – as we’ve previously written – those five sprawling single-family homes likely yield less in tax revenue per acre than the apartment building that could house our fictitious residents downtown.

This municipal math is a core tenet of smart growth. But the argument is even more convincing with actual numbers. A new report out today from Smart Growth America, which surveyed 17 studies of compact and sprawling development scenarios across the country, sizes up the scale of the impact this way: Compact development costs, on average, 38 percent less in up-front infrastructure than “conventional suburban development” for things like roads, sewers and water lines. It costs 10 percent less in ongoing service delivery by reducing the distances law enforcement or garbage trucks must travel to serve residents (well-connected street grids cut down on this travel time, too). And compact development produces on average about 10 times more tax revenue per acre.”

Photo: Shutterstock

The New York Times: 

Creating Hipsturbia: 

By ALEX WILLIAMS

Published: February 15, 2013

A yoga studio opened on Main Street that offers lunch-hour vinyasa classes. Nearby is a bicycle store that sells Dutch-style bikes, and a farm-to-table restaurant that sources its edible nasturtiums from its backyard garden.

 Across the street is the home-décor shop that purveys monofloral honey produced by nomadic beekeepers in Sicily. And down the street is a retro-chic bakery, where the red-velvet cupcakes are gluten-free and the windows are decorated with bird silhouettes — the universal symbol for “hipsters welcome.”

You no longer have to take the L train to experience this slice of cosmopolitan bohemia. Instead, you’ll find it along the Metro-North Railroad, roughly 25 miles north of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the suburb of Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.

Here, beside the gray-suited salarymen and four-door minivans, it is no longer unusual to see a heritage-clad novelist type with ironic mutton chops sipping shade-grown coffee at the patisserie, or hear 30-somethings in statement sneakers discuss their latest film project as they wait for the 9:06 to Grand Central.”

Illustration: Ryan Inaza

The Washington Post:

“Tysons Corner, on the verge of a do-over

By Corinne Reilly, Published: January 3

The first thing to go was the parking lot behind the Container Store. And if all goes according to plan, more lots will be bulldozed — as will dozens of mid-rise office buildings, hotels and car dealerships.

Two years after Fairfax County adopted a radical, four-decade plan to redevelop Tysons Corner, it is finally beginning to happen, block by block, building by building.

Inspired by the decision to run Metro’s new Silver Line through Tysons, the county essentially is undertaking a do-over, one that seeks to replace much of what stands today with an urban, vibrant, walkable, downtown built around residents and rail. It is a monumental task that has never been done on such a grand scale. And there is no turning back.

Even the name has been remade. It is now just Tysons — no “Corner” — a sleeker brand that the marketing people hope will sell “the new downtown.”

“No one in the history of mankind has ever tried to do this” in a place that is already so developed — and developed entirely around cars and commuters, said Christopher Leinberger, with the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. “There is nowhere to look for a model for this kind of transformation.”

Photo: Bill O’Leary/WASHINGTON POST FILE PHOTO - Lunch-time traffic is seen in Tysons Corner on International Drive.

“Can city life be exported to the suburbs?

By Jonathan O’Connell, Published: September 7 2012

It’s Friday night, and you dash downstairs from your apartment to the street. You head to dinner, strolling down the sidewalk, past the brick storefronts and the couples sitting around the fountain. What will it be tonight: Italian or a nice steak? There are lots of options nearby, not to mention the movie theater and the bowling alley with the cigar bar in back.

It’s the life of a young city-dweller. Except this scene isn’t set in a city. It’s happening in the Village at Leesburg, a new neighborhood on Route 7 in Loudoun County. And 10 years from now, it could be taking place in more than a dozen urban settings being built around the Washington area where today there are empty fields, vacant industrial centers, parking lots and shopping malls.

Instead of building more typical suburban developments, in the past two decades builders increasingly have been bringing city life to the suburbs and exurbs. Street grids are plotted around central plazas surrounded by condos, apartments and shopping. Public transportation is arranged, parking garages are hidden from view, and all the things that people love about D.C. and cities like it are layered on: public art, sidewalk performers, outdoor movies, street festivals, block parties and food carts.

The spread of “town center” projects, particularly in the Washington suburbs, is making it harder to distinguish what makes a city a city. The urban neighborhood has become an exportable commodity.

By the end of 2011, there were 398 such city replicas — town center or “lifestyle center” projects — in the United States, most of them built in suburbs, in exurbs or on farmland alongside a highway. Since the 1960s, developers had promoted suburban shopping centers as safe, clean escapes from crowded cities. But with urban living back in vogue since the late 1990s, developers are trying to create it outside city limits.

The titan of town center developments locally, and in many ways nationwide, isReston Town Center, a walkable neighborhood that is one of the densest parts of Fairfax County and has become a smashing commercial success.

Robert C. Kettler had Reston Town Center in mind when he and a partner plotted the Village at Leesburg on 57 acres of shrub land along Route 7 in 2006. An expert in condo and apartment development, Kettler wanted to build an urban environment in the middle of the suburbs. He hired consultants to design a “village square” and streetscape with block lengths, sidewalk widths, planter heights and storefront windows modeled closely after those in cities.

Kettler and others are aiming to replicate the culture and convenience of cities, minus their traffic and crime. But can a city be a city if it’s built in the middle of a cornfield?”

Via: The Washington Post

Photo: Jahi Chikwendiu/Washington Post

“Flexibility Is Key in Retrofitting Suburbs

• NATE BERG
• SEP 12, 2012

The suburbs are spreading rapidly in Australia. By one count, more than 170,000 single-family homes were built on the outskirts of Australian cities between 2006 and 2011. That’s one about every 15 minutes. Suburban growth is happening and will continue to happen. But how it happens is becoming a concern. A new report argues that these places – and suburbs everywhere – risk becoming unlivable and undesirable places in the near future.

What suburbs need is more flexibility, argues the report from the Grattan Institute, an independent think tank located in the suburbs of Melbourne. The suburbs being built in Australia today, the report says, are too focused on meeting the short-term needs of current residents, and therefore ignore the long-term. These new suburbs have too much separation of land uses, too uniformly sized housing units and lots, and too little connection to other parts of the cities they abut.

“Flexibility and adaptability are important because residents of the future need choices about where they live, work and play. Social service delivery, transport choices and housing options need to change as communities change,” the report notes. “Suburbs that do not adapt will become less desirable places to live. They will fail to attract new residents and new businesses and won’t undergo the process of renewal that is essential to a vibrant city.”

The authors of this report concede that suburban style development has improved in recent years, with more builders paying attention to open space, walkability, resource conservation, community building and other urban design concepts. But more improvement is needed. The report notes that greenfield suburban development is likely to continue in Australia as it has in many places, the U.S. included. The idea is not to stop it, but to help it evolve into a development type that is able to change and adapt to the shifting needs of its residents over time.

One major problem, the report notes, is the limited variety of housing types. Moving into a smaller home in the neighborhood as needs change or as people age isn’t really possible when there’s only one type of housing. When retail areas are centrally controlled by large corporations or management groups, there are few options for local business to emerge and succeed. And as places become less desirable overall, populations fall and business suffers, bringing the whole economy down.

The reality of suburban development doesn’t look to be going away. But it doesn’t have to maintain this pattern. By integrating more flexibility into the way these areas are designed, zoned and maintained, the suburbs of the near future may be able to provide the quality of life people want over the long term.”

Via: The Atlantic Cities

Image: The wooden frame of a new house rises in the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. Credit: Mick Tsikas / Reuters

“Multiple Families, One Roof

Owners Challenge Zoning to Make Room for Adult Children, Elderly Parents

By S. MITRA KALITA, July 18 2012

Junior’s living in the basement. Mom and Dad put a tenant in the garage. And now Grandma’s moving in. But packing them in like that isn’t always legal.

The suburban single-family home is becoming a misnomer as economic reality collides with shifting demographics.

Many suburban communities have long made it difficult, or impossible, for homeowners to convert underused space—barns, garages and basements—into rental apartments. But across the U.S., homeowners are pressing for changes in zoning laws to allow rentals while home builders report a rise in demand for houses with in-law suites or quarters with separate entry.

“There’s a change at both ends,” said Dean Palos, the director of planning in Johnson County, Kansas, near Kansas City, which is exploring allowing multiple dwellings in one house. “College graduates are going home to live, parents who are aging want to downsize. People see this as an economical way to take advantage of the property they have.”

For decades, many suburban communities have discouraged renting out space in single-family homes, citing concerns including traffic, parking and stress on utilities.

Six years ago, Johnson County considered but ultimately didn’t pass a measure to allow so-called accessory units. But with both the job and housing markets struggling to recover, “now they are far more sympathetic,” Mr. Palos said of the county planning commissioners. At least half a dozen recent meetings have been devoted to the issue.

One of five college graduates, ages 25 to 34, is living with his or her parents, according to the Pew Research Center. Meanwhile, the number of shared households—meaning an adult not enrolled in school living with another adult who isn’t a spouse—rose 11.4% between 2007 and 2010, from 19.7 million households to 22 million, the Census reported last month. Yet the number of households grew by 1.3% during the period.

That number has stagnated as families double up and college graduates accept lower-wage jobs, unable to rent a place of their own. Economists in part blame the slow recovery of the housing sector on young people who aren’t setting up house on their own.

The brunt of America’s detached single-family homes— 41.9 million, or more than half—are in the suburbs, according to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies; cities and rural areas comprise the rest.

The rise in shared households challenges the ideals upon which American suburbs were built, including ample space for families, their homes and their cars. But as baby boomers who raised families in the suburbs now age there, many don’t want to sell their homes—or can’t.

“People are occupying housing that is three to four times what they need,” said Patrick Hare, a longtime advocate for and author of books about accessory housing. “If you take all that surplus space, it can be utilized for accessory apartments.”

Via: The Wall Street Journal

Photo: Jesse Neider for The Wall Street Journal

“The Shopping Mall Turns 60 (and Prepares to Retire)

EMILY BADGER JUL 13, 2012

The enclosed suburban shopping mall has become so synonymous with the American landscape that it’s hard to imagine the original idea for it ever springing from some particular person’s imagination. Now the scheme seems obvious: of course Americans want to amble indoors in a million square feet of air-conditioned retail, of course we will need a food court because so much shopping can’t be done without meal breaks, and of course we will require 10,000 parking spaces ringing the whole thing to accommodate all our cars.

The classic indoor mall, however, is widely credited with having an inventor. And when the Vienna-born architect Victor Gruen first outlined his vision for it in a 1952 article in the magazine Progressive Architecture, the plan was a shocker. Most Americans were still shopping downtown, and suburban “shopping centers,” to the extent they existed, were most definitely not enclosed in indoor mega-destinations.

Gruen’s idea transformed American consumption patterns and much of the environment around us. At age 60, however, the enclosed regional shopping mall also appears to be an idea that has run its course (OK, maybe not in China, but among Gruen’s original clientele). He opened the first prototype in Edina, Minnesota, in 1956, and the concept spread from there (this also means the earliest examples of the archetypal American mall are now of age for historic designation, if anyone wants to make that argument).

At the mall’s peak popularity, in 1990, America opened 19 of them. But we haven’t cut the ribbon on a new one since 2006, for reasons that go beyond the recession. As we imagine ways to repurpose these aging monoliths and what the next generation of retail should look like, it’s worth recalling Gruen’s odd legacy. He hated suburbia. He thought his ideas would revitalize cities. He wanted to bring urban density to the suburbs. And he envisioned shopping malls as our best chance at containing sprawl.

“He said great quotes on suburbia being ‘soulless’ and ‘in search of a heart,’” says Jeff Hardwick, who wrote the Gruen biography Mall Maker. “He just goes on and on with these critiques. And they occur really early in his writing as well. So it’s not as if he ends up bemoaning suburbia later. He’s critiquing suburbia pretty much from the get-go, and of course the remedy he offers is the shopping mall.”

Gruen wanted to create better versions of the American downtown in the suburbs. He wanted these places to be civic centers as much as commercial ones, with day cares, libraries, post offices, community halls and public art. He wanted the shopping mall to be for suburbia what the public square was to old European cities. In fact, that mall in Edina, called Southdale, was supposed to be the centerpiece of a 500-acre master plan to include houses, apartments, office buildings, a medical center and schools.

In his book, Hardwick unearths a great quote from the president of Dayton’s, the downtown Minneapolis department store that developed Southdale. He, like Gruen, believed that all of this could happen at no expense to the city.

“We do not believe,” he said, “we or anybody else will lose any business because of the suburban move.”

Gruen’s creations did an amazing job of luring customers (and holding them captive in the shopping bliss now known as the Gruen Effect). The day Southdale opened, 75,000 happy shoppers streamed in. And it’s hard to imagine now where Gruen thought these people were coming from, if not in an exodus from downtown.

He also built a series of satellite shopping centers around Detroit for the department store J.L. Hudson. When the first of them opened in 1954, Detroit was the fifth largest city in the country and the fastest growing in the East or Midwest. Of course Gruen’s shopping centers aren’t solely to blame for Detroit’s decline. But his idea helped set off a chain reaction that recurred in cities everywhere. Suburban malls drew consumers who found shopping and parking in the city too difficult. They contributed to a boom in development that enabled not just shopping dollars, but whole households to relocate to suburbia. Cities, eying this exodus, tore down buildings and tried unsuccessfully to recreate the ease of parking and the shopping experience people found in the suburbs. And this only further hastened their decline.”

Via: The Atlantic Cities

Photo: Reuters

“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