Who will reinvent the suburbs?

The Miami Congress will turn the spotlight on the role the New Urbanism can play in the transformation of suburbs into towns. Over the past five years, an increasing number of postwar suburbs and small cities have taken on the challenge of turning pod-type bedroom communities and edge cities into walkable communities with a sense of place. Cities and towns have used a variety of techniques, from the construction of a downtown in an undeveloped part of town, to greyfield mall revitalization, to the reanimation of a desolate main street. These efforts will be featured at CNU X in Miami Beach, where the central theme is “From Suburb to Town.” So far, most of the efforts at converting post-WWII suburbs into walkable towns have focused on downtowns and arterial strips. For example, Cathedral City, in Southern California, converted an arterial strip into a walkable, attractive downtown street through clever traffic engineering and urban design. Dozens of greenfield developments, including King Farm, Maryland, and Prescott Valley, Arizona, are building new downtowns as an alternative to conventional big-box retail development along their arterials and freeways. Instant downtowns Los Angeles Times correspondent Morris Newman coined the term “instant downtowns” to refer to the projects in California suburbs like Brea, Valencia, and Pleasant Hill, where central areas are being retrofit into walkable commercial or mixed-use strips. Similar projects have been undertaken throughout the Sunbelt, with some of the most ambitious being built near Dallas — Addison Circle and Legacy Town Center. The technology center Redmond, Washington, has made an effort to retrofit a mixed-use downtown in the midst of its post-war sprawl of industrial parks and low-density residential areas. And in Reston, Virginia, pods of housing — widely disdained by new urbanists — now connect to a walkable downtown. There have been modest efforts to help post-war residential areas adapt to changing times. For example, a 1999 conference held by the Design Center for the American Urban Landscape on “Reframing the 1945-1965 Suburb” included discussion of how to retrofit neighborhoods of small homes to appeal to current homebuyers. However, there has been little action on the ground in promoting this agenda. CULTURAL URBANISM One fascinating aspect of how suburbs are already being retrofit is the “cultural urbanism” that new immigrants are bringing to suburbs. As more immigrants make suburbia their first home in the United States, urbanists are watching closely to understand how they adapt the built environment to their cultural traditions of walkable neighborhoods, housing for extended families, and workplaces close to home. Sessions at the Congress will explore whether cultural urbanism exists in the suburbs, and if so, what it looks like. CNU X should see lively debate on where new urbanists should focus their efforts, how much change is possible in a built suburb, and how changing demographics will change our post-WW II landscape. See you there.