Um, no.
I believe that the single family home and suburbia is here to stay. With the distribution of jobs outside the usual central city cores growing - the distribution of housing is here to stay. Suburbs are an ideal, and a good one for *many* *many* people.
The war us New Urbanists are waging is upon the condo's that offer nothing more than the single family house. I believe that condos could be so much more than the parking lot with row houses model currently built by the lowest bidder.
If we make our denser building options better than the single family house we meet a demand that is only growing as people become disillusioned by their 30 year houses. Quality found in a single family home can be truly bad.
New urbanists are targeting the craptacular options we have now for density. Apartments, condos, and high-rises.
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I think we could try to re-model the suburbs to still give people the space they want, while being more conducive to walking and public transit.
ReplyDeleteThe area where we lived in Switzerland was a series of villages, which were like dense clusters of homes (the houses weren't tiny, but had small yards if any and were very close together, almost more like rowhouses), but then each village was surrounded by open fields and green space. So while you didn't get your own individual big backyard, you only had to walk 10 minutes to be out in the open and get to run around on the grass. Then, since the homes were clustered together like this, walking was much easier, and bus stops were easily accessible to everyone. You still got that dense population center required to make public transit work.
I don't know if I'd call this a "war on suburbia", but I think the current model of suburbia could certainly be improved upon a bit so they don't have to be so car-centric.
I agree that a re-modeled suburbia will be good; but honestly I expect other tech to handle the 'car crisis'.
ReplyDeletehttp://videos.howstuffworks.com/discovery/36901-mega-engineering-self-driving-car-video.htm
I really like the cluster concept for living spaces - if you note the co-housing post I've begun to think this is the start small and scale up solution... the impact really comes from distributing the infrastructure. Part of the benefit of putting all the thousands of people into single building complexes is the municipal functions like power, water/wastewater and transportation can take advantage of scaling... and therefor cost reduction.