It's Not Suburbia's Faulty

http://www.streets.mn/2013/09/09/its-not-the-suburbs-its-mid-late-20th-century-urban-design-and-architecture

Hello Everyone:

I'm slowly plowing through the backlog of articles in my dropbox folder with some progress.  Of course, as I get through one thing, two more pop up.  At least I won't run out of topics for a while. Speaking of which, we're back to the suburbs.  Did you think I was going to say Detroit?

American urban dwellers, such as yours truly, love to criticize "the suburbs."  In his article for his article posted on http://www.streets.mn, "It's not the suburbs, It's mid-late 20th century urban design, planning, engineering, and architecture," Professor David Levinson of the Civil Engineering Department at the University of Minnesota, asks us is it really fair to pick on suburbia?  After all they're just a place like any other place in the world.  Let me be up front with my own suburban biases.  I find the suburbs too isolating and lacking the amenities I'm accustomed to in the city.  I often think that the people living in the suburbs live in this bubble, divorced from the real world.  That's me.  However, Prof. Levinson writes, "...so long as there is housing in the suburbs, and transportation to enable people to move, someone will live in the suburbs..."  True enough anywhere.

Some of the nit-picking is politics.  Suburban politics comes with the process of self-selection, people want to live with like-minded people.  The alternative is living with a more diverse group of individuals, something Jane Jacobs whole heartedly endorses, something Prof. Levinson argues can lead to conflict.  Prof. Levinson suggests that some of the potential conflict maybe be due to travel behavior.  He further infers that this travel is actually due to suburban land use and network patterns, which elaborates on in his essay, demographics and socioeconomics which cannot be changed or changed that easily.  We can conclude that, as the title of Prof. Levinson's essay suggests, the source of suburban criticism is the architecture, planning, and engineering.  Let's elaborate on this.

On the planning side, land densities have to shoulder some of the burden of blame.  Although blaming land densities for the state of suburbia seems unfair since every place starts as a blank canvas and adds development over time, some more than others.  On the other hand, some of the burden of blame is warranted because certain subdivisions make do intense development that is both technically difficult and possibly illegal under current local zoning law.  However, urban population densities have dropped due to the hollowing out of individual houses as the average household size has shrunk and the demolition of housing housing, replacing them with lower density development with more surface parking.

Litchfield Way
Hampstead Garden Suburb
en.wkipedia.org

Another issue with suburbia is street patterns.  Streets patterns are not something that one associates with the suburbs, its more associated with an era.  When streets were built in a particular era, spacings, connectivity, widths, curvatures, and so forth from that time period were incorporated into the layout. Let's consider older towns, county seats for suburban counties.  In the nineteenth century, street grids often had road, river, and rail connection to large cities.  They were not part of the daily metropolitan system, since people didn't commute back and forth so frequently.  While the residents of these places were not as affected by the large cities, they were not suburbs.  These towns had some clarity of design.  If we turn our attention to the pre-World War II suburban development, in particular the ring suburbs, we can also see a coherent design.  Prof. Levinson postulates that if suburbs looked more like this Hampstead Garden Suburb outside of London, then the complaints would decrease.

Prof. David Levinson states the problem quite succinctly, "The problem with suburbs isn't that they are not the city.  The problems with the suburbs is the same problem as the city, they had 5 or 6 decades of urban design..."  Urban growth from the same period of time were subject to most mediocre architecture replacement of buildings with parking lots and hollowing out.  The problem is not with the city, per se, the problem, according to Prof. Levinson, is terrible design (planning and engineering) which was implemented as policy while functioning in a market that had no taste.  Yours truly concurs to a point, taste is subjective.  Even worse in suburbia because for much of those sixty or so years of urban design there was only the same number of years of development, while in the city, the older street grid remained by in large intact

Further, the problem, according to Prof. Levinson, is not the assimilated suburbs built before the big cities incorporated them into the daily metropolitan system.  It's certainly not the older suburbs within the core cities or the first stilled hewing to the grid.  It's the grid design from a particular era that's at issue which lengthens distances between places so as to offer larger parcels of land.  In order to reverse decades of bad design, planning and engineering, suburbanites need a reason to spend more time of their property, get to know their neighbors, and promote land use rules in order to enable new things.  Technology, policy, land use, and transportation network which reduce the need for a car and car storage will lead the way.  Commuter travel has peaked, urban areas are slowly gaining population, thus car ownership is down as new housing is being built in urban areas.  It appears that development is going up rather than out.  In short, according to Prof. Levinson, the signs are there for reversing the trend of bad design.  Great, one decade down, five more to go.

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