Longitudinal Slum

The American Lawn

Having grown up in several generic suburban developments I have always had a predisposition toward all things suburban: quaint single-family standalone houses, tree-lined streets, swimming pools in backyards, and lush green lawns. It’s how things were supposed to be. Never mind our front, side and backyard was a continually minefield of dogshit, but that sort of imperfection was indicative of the thin veneer of suburbia. It helped to feed the hunger for a greener lawn, a bigger and newer house with more dormers than the next, in a fresh development populated with people who looked and acted the same. Now all I ask is for the corner liquor store to stock some Cointreau so I can get my summer Margarita on. Through the two inch bullet-proof plexiglass the shop owner tells me its on order.

As the housing market is weakening and a number of homes sit empty with yellowing or overgrown lawns, post-foreclosure, tales of gangs and crack-heads (or meth-heads in the Midwest?) roving the streets are reported in the media as signs of a changing suburbia. Good. Should add some spice to the culture. Maybe the next Criminal Minded will come out of a Des Moines suburb.

When a neighborhood goes bad, one of the first signs is the overgrown or yellowing lawn, soon to be followed with the parking of vehicles on said lawn, or ravage dogs chained to a tree on a dusty lawn. This sign stands in stark contrast to the lush and velvety lawn held as the ideal, the standard, the crème de la crème of what a lawn should be. Home owners are judged by their ability to maintain an idyllic lawn, and any shortcomings are indicative of the home owner’s character.

A recent piece in the New Yorker, Turf Wars, and the publication chronicling the Edible Estates project focus on the history of the lawn and it's environmental and cultural impact, while suggesting alternative uses for the open or leftover space typically reserved for grass. This slowly developing shift in attitude toward the lawn is maybe the most recognizable or quickest physical representation of the forthcoming changing makeup of the traditional suburb. As suburbs become more economically and ethnically diverse, the homogenized image of what the suburb should be is likely to shift into something less recognizable and more eclectic than what many are comfortable with. As more lawns are turned over to native vegetation, or Edible Estates, the possibility of defining the suburbs as something more rich and diverse than they have been traditionally thought will become a greater possibility.

Turf War [New Yorker]

Retail Living

A LA Times visit to The Americana at Brand.

The new Mayberry? [LA Times]
image by Carlos Chavez/Los Angeles Times

Suburban Change

The Atlantic looks at the continued fallout of the subprime mess and its relation to larger shifts in attitudes toward dense urban areas and surrounding suburban areas. As the number of foreclosed homes sit empty in neighborhoods increase, so has activity commonly associated with urban centers such as graffiti, gangs, and even the stripping of empty properties of precious metals such as copper. It could be argued that the suburb has finally arrived - the oldest of the suburbs have reached an age where homes will have seen multi-generations and the transfer of ownership through a handful of families. As older city neighborhoods such as the Lower East Side have seen its demographic shift from Jewish, to Puerto Rican, to gentrifying transplants from the Midwest, the suburbs are reaching an age where radical shifts in demographics and character will become part of the arc of the life of a suburb.

This is a promising change from two fronts. First, the model of the suburb and suburban living is cautiously being reexamined under the guise of New Urbanism. New Urbanist communities have begun to support denser developments with an emphasis on public transportation or walkable living. Lifestyle Centers mimic the stylings of traditional Main Street, while beginning to mix retail, commercial and housing in the same development. While neither approach is perfect, and wreak of stylistic falsities more appropriate of a Disneyworld amusement center, they demonstrate the possibilities in rethinking how suburban development is approached, as opposed to a complete abandonment or disregard / distaste for the suburbs, as practiced by close-minded city dwellers who believe the revitalization of the inner city is the only honorable direction for us to take moving forward.

And second, older suburban developments and retail strips have the potential to be re-examined, as many are falling into disrepair and in need of infrastructural improvements. The opportunity exists to think about how infill projects are approached, how existing lots can be made denser, and whether larger McMansions can be subdivided into multi-tenant homes, in much the same way older brownstones or row-houses have been in neighborhoods such as Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Rather than viewing the forthcoming change approaching the suburbs in a negative light (ie: death of the suburbs), the weakening of the rigid idea of what the suburbs ought to be and what they represent should be seen as an opportunity to examine the best and worst of the suburbs, and learn how they are to be recalibrated moving forward.

The Next Slum? [The Atlantic]

Uninventing The Suburbs

A couple of articles in the Times today featuring the environmental impact of the suburbs, and the possibility of uninventing them. One statistic highlighting the differences between suburban and city environmental impact is the emission of greenhouse gases produced by the average American (24.5 metric tons), versus the average New Yorker (7.1 metric tons).

The recent increased awareness of issues related to the environment is proving to have the potential to impact the perception and future production of the city (urban, suburban, exurban, etc...). It has taken something tangible (global warming and its consequences) rather than the intangibles that have traditionally framed the debate of the merits or demerits of suburban living, which have generally been found in the form of relative judgments decreeing the right or wrong of lifestyle choices. The immediate and easy actions taken to lessen one's environmental impact are found in compact fluorescents, smaller automobiles (maybe even hybrids), and recycling. Small things that add up, but are painless and don't require a dramatic lifestyle change. The question that should be posed is whether suburbanites are willing to accept radical lifestyle changes that have the potential of having a deep impact on greenhouse gas production, but would conversely alter the composition and make-up of housing development, or redevelopment, and deep ingrained ideas of what suburban living offers, or rewards those who choose that lifestyle. Given that the installation of clotheslines is forbidden in several neighborhoods (only poor people dry their clothes outdoors), it would seem the battle for change is nothing but uphill.

Rather than vilifying the suburbs, intellectual energy will need to be spent on both how to generate new development forged from productive agriculture land, and how to modify / alter existing suburbs. Either approach will require the buy-off of those who believe it is their God-given right to their own (brand new) single-family detached home surrounded with green lawn with enough spatial and visual separation from those who are different from them, and a radically rethinking of how to approach existing suburbs, how they are zoned, how land is parceled, and how building on this land is approached in the future. This has the potential to have the biggest impact - though it will take the most time.

Don’t Let the Green Grass Fool You [NY Times]
Can We Uninvent Suburbia? [NY Times]

Homes Building Continues In High Rish Areas

Despite the recent wildfires in Southern California, over 60,000 homes are being planned in high risk areas surrounding the Los Angeles metropolitan area.

Southern California's new homes lining up in fires' path [LA Times]

Levittown: Pimped Out

The New York Times with a photo essay depicting Levittown at its inception, and today with most of the original homes pimped out to American standards of contemporary home design.

Levittown Through the Years [NY Times]
images by Associated Press, Bettmann/Corbis, Damon Winter, Ed Bailey

Finally A Substitute For The Obsolete Town Square

Lisa Selin Davis looks at a new take on the enclosed shopping mall that is developing in Natick MA, where 215 condominiums are being built adjacent and with direct access to the Natick Mall. Similar to higher-end Lifestyle Centers which combine outdoor shopping, condominium living, and commercial office space, the Natick development uses the increasingly unpopular enclosed mall as a substitute for the 'urban', and is re-branding the typology as such.

The developer, General Growth Properties, recognizes the optimized position existing malls already occupy in the suburban landscape, being situated at highway interchanges within the regional transportation network. One of the new condo owners, Michael DuGally, recognizes the development for what it really is, "People want to live there because it’s classy and yet a hip, urban environment."

This is a good thing. Regardless of the execution of this development and its resident's misconception of what constitutes 'urban', it begins to put certain components in play that can begin to form a fresh look at suburban living and eventually transform how we understand this often maligned swath of the city. Is living with direct access to a mall a bad thing? Probably not. Load the mall up with the services people require - gyms, fine dining, grocery shopping, and maybe education and religious services - and the mixture of various programmatic elements have the potential to make the mall more urban than the 9-5 downtowns of many American cities. Such cross-programming also has the potential to carry along the benefits of sustainable living already enjoyed by residents of dense urban environments like New York City.

When Downtown Is in the Suburbs [NY Times]
image by Jodi Hilton

This Weekend In The Times

Nicolai loves on Tschumi's Blue in the old neighborhood, and Eliasson gets his first major survey in the states.

Thinking Glacially, Acting Artfully [NY Times]
image by Olafur Eliasson
A Ragtag Neighborhood’s Big, Blue Newcomer [NY Times]

The Truth About Housing

Slate is offering a three-part excerpt from Witold Rybczynski's new book Last Harvest: How a Cornfield Became New Daleville where the author follows the development of a new residential subdivision from inception to completion. In the process he writes about the modern home and community. A couple of segments from the excerpts go far to, or begin to explain the look of much of residential and commercial architecture today, much to the disapproval of those in the design community who have turned their back on this market. First from Why Do We Live in Houses:

Four out of five new housing units built in the United States are single-family houses. This statistic has less to do with the nature of the home-building industry, or the suburban location of new housing, than with buyers' preferences, that is, What People Want.

The second is from The Ranch House Anomaly:

Home buyers' affair with modernistic design is over. When I leaf through a directory of one big home builder's current models, I notice that all the houses have similar architectural features: pitched roofs, gables, dormers, bay windows, keystones, shutters, porches, and paneled doors. Americans' fondness for such conventional imagery is characterized by some critics as nostalgic and retrograde. In fact, it represents a long domestic tradition that extends to colonial New England and Virginia. In that history, the brief fling with the rancher was an anomaly.

If Witold is correct, this doesn't fair well for architects or designers who can be lumped in with the critics mentioned above who dismiss house styling as nostalgic and retrograde. So is it possible for architects to contribute to this portion of the building industry, while simultaneously giving the homeowner what they want, ie: pitched roofs, gables, dormers, bay windows, keystones, shutters, porches, and paneled doors, and at the same time applying the problem solving skills that designers are more likely to have than the typical developer? Architects will likely have to get over their aversion to ornamentation (most architects anyway), and they will have to define what the problems are with the typical residential subdivision. Sustainability? Modularity? Transportation? Density? Cultural? Land-Use? Social?

Why Do We Live in Houses, Anyway? [Slate]
The Ranch House Anomaly [Slate]
How a Cornfield Became New Daleville [Slate]
image by Witold Rybczynski

Clotheslines & The Environment

Interesting piece from the New York Times Home & Garden section about the use of the clothesline as a tool for using less energy - makes sense. However, this behaviour is frowned upon by many homeowners associations:

That simple decision to hang a clothesline, however, catapults me into the laundry underground. Clotheslines are banned or restricted by many of the roughly 300,000 homeowners’ associations that set rules for some 60 million people. When I called to ask, our Rolling Hills Community Association told me that my laundry had to be completely hidden in an enclosure approved by its board of directors.

For more on clotheslines, click here.