Understanding why people like suburbia is probably a key challenge in addressing our needs in city environments. It’s undeniable that suburbia as it stands is unsustainable, and continuing the development of suburbs as they are is likely to worsen some of the issues with environmental and spatial sustainability that we face. Therefore, we need to consider what about suburbia makes it appealing–something that is a necessary question regardless of whether someone believes in densifying suburbs that exist or trying to attract their populations back into urban environments. What about suburban environments (whether the housing environments or the broader form of the suburb) makes people want to live there?
This seems like a potentially fruitful line of questioning for the purposes of my thesis, and was the focus of most of my recent meetings and readings for this project.
Though my time to do so has been limited by other classwork–I’ve begun to change my stance insofar I understand it’s not necessarily productive to go into the research with a prescriptivist lens on how the suburb “should” exist.
I’ve broadly narrowed my research down to two possibilities that I find especially interesting about the city and its form, especially in a suburban form: first, housing choice. Understanding why and if people choose to live in the type of housing they do could be one fruitful line of thinking.
The other that I’m interested in examining is connectivity–Edinburgh is quite well-connected, but this isn’t always the case for many cities. Understanding why that is the case and how it could be rectified would also be potentially interesting to me
These were the broad focuses we talked about when I met with John on 8/4, so I’ve begun to look at some of the readings that he’s suggested, though I don’t think I’ll have read them all before the deadline for the KIPP. I’ll have to continue refining it as I proceed.
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