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How to Save the Suburbs: Solutions from the Man Who Saw the Whole Thing Coming
Jebediah Reed, The Infrastructurist
For a half century, it’s been easy to mock suburbia for being too comfortable, white-bread and conformist. That’s all changed in the last 18 months as many suburbs have abruptly taken on a sense of tragedy and desperation
… One man who foresaw all the ugliness is Christopher Leinberger. The Brookings Institute fellow and distinguished scholar of the suburban living arrangement has decades of experience in real estate development and urban planning. The meme of doomed suburbs went mainstream with his cover story for the Atlantic magazine last March, “The Next Slum?” The problem, he says, goes much deeper than the foreclosure crisis. It’s part of a painful societal adjustment that will take a generation or more to work through.
After heralding the crash of America’s predominant living arrangement, his latest efforts are devoted to showing how suburbs can adjust and reemerge as healthy communities. In this conversation he analyzes the roots of suburbia’s current plight and explains how three straightforward adjustments to infrastructure can save a community.
Q: The suburbs are really suffering. What’s the short-form diagnosis?
A: Americans are undergoing a fundamental shift in where they want live, work, and play. So this is not just a normal cyclical downturn. We’ve structurally overbuilt retail, office, and housing, and we’ve done so in the wrong places.
… Q: You mentioned 40 miles outside town. Last year people were talking about high energy prices as the one of the prime causes of suburban collapse. But gas is back under $2 a gallon.
A: Energy prices have nothing to do with it. I said that at the time. They can accelerate the process, but what drives it is the shift in consumer preferences.
… Q: So you have a suburb full of flimsy houses in the middle of nowhere, with no incentive for upkeep. That’s an ugly situation.
A: Exactly. It fails. Good lord, I’m a great amateur student of ancient cities. At some point they’re just going to collapse upon themselves and blow away — unless there is some massive redevelopment agency steps in.
Q: In very practical terms, how do towns get on the right side of this multi-decade imbalance between supply and demand?
A: You need to get the right infrastructure in. Doing so is a three-step process. First, is getting a transit connection that can anchor a walkable urban core. Second, is putting in overlay zoning districts around the train stations that will allow for much greater density and mixed use development. We’re talking about a hundred, two hundred, three hundred acres. The third step is to get in place an entity to manage the thing, which generally takes the form of a non-profit business improvement district. These things are very complex, but we know how to do it now. We didn’t 50 years ago, but we do now.
(10 February 2009)
Leinberger’s site at the Brookings Institution: http://www.brookings.edu/topics/walkable-urbanism.aspx .
Casa De Botellas: Turning Waste into Modular Construction
Jeremy Faludi, WorldChanging
‘m not usually impressed by people making products or buildings out of trash. Not because it isn’t a good idea — it clearly is — but because most such projects don’t scale well. They’re nice one-offs but can’t be set up for mass manufacturing. There are several exceptions, though, and I recently stumbled upon another one: the Casa Ecologica de Botellas Plasticas in Argentina.
I was on vacation, going to Cataratas Iguazu in northern Argentina to see the amazing waterfalls, and it just happened that next to my hotel out in the countryside was a sign saying “The House of Plastic Bottles! Visit it! Surprise yourself!” Always a sucker for a quirky roadside attraction, I trotted down the little dirt road through the trees to check it out. But when I arrived, I found that Alfredo Alberto Santa Cruz and his family have built a prototype for a modular-assembly, comfortable tropical home that costs next to nothing and diverts hundreds of two-liter plastic bottles from landfills in the process. What’s more, it seems like a design that will scale reasonably well, because it uses cheap common parts, can be built either cheap-and-temporary or sturdy-and-permanent, and can even pack flat and ship in a pickup truck.
Mr. Santa Cruz first got the idea when making his daughter a little playhouse in the front yard. The construction was surprisingly robust, so he thought “hey, I’m on to something!” and built a full-sized bedroom cottage with an actual bed, three chairs, shelves full of toy cars, a broom, an octopus mobile, and even a fake hanging plant … all out of plastic bottles with some wood framing and a few nuts and bolts!
(10 February 2009)
Photos at original.
Good design makes for better communities
Annie Kelly, The Guardian
Good design and affordable housing are two words that still don’t seem to fit together. For too long, “affordable” has continued to imply accommodation that is defined by the cheapness of the rent rather than a place people would choose to live.
Now this is changing. In December communities and local government secretary Hazel Blears said the newly launched Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) must champion good design as the “bread and butter” of its house-building programme.
(10 February 2009)
