Designing Suburban Futures: New Models from Build a Better Burb

Since June Williamson’s and Ellen Dunham-Jones’s book Retrofitting Suburbia was completed in 2008, the number of suburban retrofit projects in their database has risen 475 percent, showing that interest in this subject has not diminished. In 2010, the Build a Better Burb competition was held on Long Island, New York, the winning projects inspiring Williamson’s new book, Designing Suburban Futures: New Models from Build a Better Burb.

Designing Suburban Futures has two parts. The first is a concise, pithy, and lucid analysis of how the suburbs came to be and the efforts underway to reform them. The second part is less practical, but I’ll get to that later.

The book is “an urgent response to the documented ecological, environmental, social, and economic problems of the dominant sprawling suburban form,” Williamson writes.

More than 60 percent of the US population — that’s 190 million people — live in the suburbs including 550 “micropolitan areas,” Williamson says. How did so many become attracted to the suburban lifestyle? She traces the suburbanization of America back to the pastoral English ideal promoted in the first half of the 19th Century which influenced leading designers like Frederick Law Olmsted. Streetcar suburbs followed in the late 19th and early 20th Century. They are walkable and mixed-use and have more in common with historic cities and towns that the suburbs of today.

The shift to totally automobile-oriented suburbs came after World War II, supported by federal policies such as “redlining” of existing neighborhoods. The late 20th Century “saw an explosion of nonresidential development in the suburbs, as office jobs and retail decanted out of cities into the expanded metropolitan landscape.” Designing Suburban Futures is a hopeful book, written on the premise that sprawl will one day grow into healthy, diverse, culturally rich communities.

Williamson describes many of the tactics for placemaking and promoting diversity and transportation options in the suburbs that have been successfully implemented in recent decades. She doesn’t shy away from specific design recommendations that planners may find useful. “Many suburban streets are overly wide and lack comfortable sidewalks and crosswalks. In residential areas within an interconnected street system, an overall right-of-way of 60 feet with 16-foot sidewalk and tree-planting strips on either side of a 28-foot roadway should be sufficient,” she notes.

Suburbs that thrive must meet changing market demands. “The future success of suburbs will hinge on the ability of housing markets to be nimble in response to changing demographics,” she writes. Suburbs, particularly those where homeowners’ associations are ubiquitous, may have a difficult time acting nimbly. To wit: The author’s examples of how policymakers are encouraging more housing diversity often come from cities. Seattle has passed a law on allowing widespread accessory units on single-family lots and New York City is encouraging very small apartments called “micro-units.” One hopes to see more suburban municipalities encouraging the construction of diverse housing types.

While this book lacks case studies of built projects — that’s the strength of Retrofitting Suburbia — many of the best examples of mall retrofits are discussed in some detail, such as Belmar in Lakewood, Colorado, and Mashpee Commons in Mashpee, Massachusetts.

The author recognizes the importance of the New Urbanism in reforms critical to suburban revitalization. As the new urbanists pursued greenfield and infill developments, they encountered substantial obstacles. “However, conventional zoning codes, building and lot regulations, street standards, and developer’s practices and pro formas stood in the way and had to be engaged and reformed, a complex, one might say radical, process that is still ongoing.”

Obsession with novelty

The rest of the book focuses on projects submitted to the Build a Better Burb competition. The entries suffer from architects’ obsession with novelty and attention-seeking at the expense of the proven and practical.

There is no shortage of more sustainable and resilient communities to learn from, but with a few exceptions the winners bear them little resemblance. As Williamson argues, the suburbs are ill ecologically, economically, and socially. Yet instead of tested cures, the submissions reach for edgy ideas with slick images and cool-sounding names.

One submission uses major infrastructure like roads or underutilized parcels for carbon sequestration. That’s fine — but this concept is rendered as a Midwestern-style combine harvesting grain from what is now a parking lot and other startling landscape transformations. What about just planting lots of street trees? These would comfort people on foot, calm traffic and improve safety, reduce health costs from accidents, and raise social capital if volunteer groups do the planting. But humble street trees are less likely to win a design competition than more radical visions.

Another winning project utilizes suburban school bus fleets as mass transit. The designers argue that these fleets are evenly distributed geographically throughout the suburbs and could offer important service — when not carrying kids — that the regular transit system fails to provide. The elementary schools become transit hubs. “The submission is a clever, well-presented value-added response to the problem of intra-suburban transportation,” wrote one juror. Except that it is highly unlikely to work. Suburban elementary schools built in the last 30 years are too isolated to be useful as transit hubs. Even if schools could serve that function, school buses are used in the mornings and the better part of the afternoon, when mass transit is most needed.

Long Island Radically Rezoned. One of the Build a Better Burb proposals. From Designing Suburban Futures, Island Press, 2013

Those are two of the more practical submissions. A wilder one envisions the obliteration of municipal boundaries on Long Island, replaced by new governments drawn to resemble the spots on a giraffe or butterfly wings. Much of what is now inhabited — we’re talking areas with hundreds of thousands of people — revert back to nature as current residents presumably abandon their homes, perhaps in migration, to take the overt biological analogy a step further.

The over-valuing of novelty is imbedded in the culture of the architecture profession and arguably is part the problem for the built environment. Designing Suburban Futures is targeted at architects who will be attracted to the images of Build a Better Burb. In doing so, they may learn something from Williamson’s own ideas, which are well-researched and practical. Serious-minded urbanists and developers might also benefit from this mixture of good sense and oddball schemes. It’s good to get exposure to a wide range of thinking and keep a finger on the pulse, for good or ill, of current design culture.