Suburbs have been a big problem with the design of American Cities for decades, and they’ve been an aspect of those cities that has bothered me for many years now–at minimum since I began having to drive to school back home in Portland, but very much since I lived in cities which were far more walkable–Washington, DC and Copenhagen. They were a huge reason why I wanted to learn more from this degree program, and something that I’d very much be intrigued in learning more about.
Suburbs occupy a unique place in cities in my opinion, where their very existence feels like a catch-22. Simultaneously, the suburb exists because of car-reliance, and in the same vein, suburbs further the progression of car-reliance, and create a culture of entrenchment insofar people feel more entitled to their single-family home, their gated (or gated-in-all-but-name) neighborhood, and cars that take them to work. While considering this, I feel like it’s worth saying that this relationship of how transportation and urban planning issues is part of the reason why I’ve had such a hard time deciding what I want to do–I’m both interested in the transportation issues of this as well as the urban planning issues of the suburb.
I think this has been written about at-length though. Everyone knows the suburb is damaging environmentally, socially, politically and economically. Most understand how it drives social isolation, is economically inefficient, drives climate change through its excessive land use and car-reliance, and the burden that it places on local government to provide utilities across a far wider geographic range to more buildings. Ultimately, I do want to pursue answering a new question with this work, and I think the idea that seems underexplored to me (while fitting with the theme of a *Futures Institute* and being futures-minded in its goals) is the question of what “desuburbanization” might entail. How would we transition a city that’s heavily suburbanized (Something like Dallas, Los Angeles, or smaller examples like Portland) into a more sustainable model, or even a less damaging one that can more resemble the standard East Asian/European model. This is an intriguing question for me because it’s challenging to make that transition logistically, culturally and politically- how do you get people to move into higher density urban living? How do you create that housing in a timescale that isn’t at-risk to changing sentiments and/or even more environmentally damaging than the suburbs themselves? What do you replace existing suburbs with? Is it necessary to concede that cities that already sprawl can only become more dense, but the excessive land-use of some sprawly cities isn’t something that would ever change in our lifetimes or the broader forseeable future? How does this process occur without a rapid gentrification of existing city centers, especially in neighborhoods traditionally seen as undesirable due to their makeup of poorer residents of color, but which would become far more desirable should city centers transition to bearing more of the load.
A book that I’ve heard a lot about, and would like to read, to understand more about how our cities *could* be designed as they continue to grow and as we look for ways to switch the default of housing from suburban to urban, is “Emergent Tokyo”, a book which discusses how Tokyo is designed such that city centers are multi-story commercial buildings, with signs to help people know when they need to go to an upper-story business, while dense, single-family homes or medium-density housing are able to exist in adjacent neighborhoods that remain quiet (a common complaint about housing in dense city centers in the west) because they’re isolated from commercial centers, but are in such close proximity that walkability and public transit access are still realistic goals.
That’s of course, only one solution, and one that still requires major change in our politics and zoning laws and social understanding of the city. Perhaps the most viable solution for the US doesn’t exist yet and still needs to be developed. If that’s the case, perhaps researching them would be able to get us closer to that goal. For my own reference, and yours too, if you’re interested, I’ve linked some papers I’ve been reading as I’ve been looking for if this is something that’s already been talked about. I haven’t read them all yet, but I don’t want to lose them, and maybe I’ll blog about them on my next post as I finish them.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14649357.2013.808833
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/02723638.2018.1548828
https://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/ylr116&div=26&g_sent=1&casa_token=&collection=journals
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13604813.2018.1432143
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7ee2ba40f0b62305b83cc1/14-820-what-are-future-cities.pdf
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186/s40984-016-0014-2.pdf
https://www.proquest.com/docview/2736355290?pq-origsite=gscholar&fromopenview=true&sourcetype=Scholarly%20Journals
3 December 2024 at 21:16
This reflection highlights the challenges of suburban sprawl, including car reliance, environmental harm, and social isolation. It raises important questions about transitioning heavily suburbanized cities to more sustainable, dense urban models. The author references Tokyo’s design as an inspiring example of balancing urban density with residential tranquility while emphasizing the cultural, political, and logistical hurdles of such a shift. By listing sources according to a referencing style like APA or Harvard, instead of linking them directly, the blog’s appearance could improve and make its academic references more accessible and professional.