suburbs

Another Way to Fix the Suburbs

- Adam Clare

The suburbs have a problem and it’s that they are lifeless. There’s little to no wildlife and human culture is confined to isolated locations and this is a problem in many ways and people know this.

We’ve looked at ways to fix the suburbs on Things Are Good before, this piece on the other hand, as an assortment of ideas and a good synopsis of efforts being made to save the suburbs from American suburban malfeasance:

After nearly four years of a McMansion mortgage crisis and new waves of Creative Class immigration into America’s leading cities, it’s time to confront a strange new phenomenon: the hollowed-out suburbs. It may not quite be the apocalyptic vision offered up by Christopher Leinberger in The Atlantic three years ago during the height of the mortgage crisis – when it was feared that empty McMansions would turn into crack dens – but it’s still bracing stuff. Indeed, the psycho-demographic pendulum appears to have shifted across America. According to most surveys, people prefer to live in walkable neighborhoods and sustainably designed communities — places that have all the perks of big-city living, as well as the goodness of green parks and good schools.

So what would it take to create these types of walkable, sustainable suburbs on a national scale?

Two architectural & design firms, Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Droog, recently hosted the Open House 2011 event where they re-imagined the classic suburban utopia – Levittown in Long Island, New York – and brainstormed ways that the suburban dream could be revitalized. They looked at what has worked in places like Manhattan and Brooklyn — places where dogwalkers, drycleaners, bohemian cafes, 24-hour bodegas and countless delivery services ease the strain of everyday urban life — and came up with suburban equivalents.

Read the full article and get some more links here.

Thanks Nick!

Retrofitting Suburbia

- Adam Clare

The suburbs are infamous for being inefficient, sprawling, violent, and a great place for growing marijuana. So what to do with all this wasted land? Well, here’s a TED talk on how to convert suburbia into a liveable and more urban space. This video gives me hope for a more sustainable North America.

Thanks to Craig!

Vote on ReBurbia Finalists

- Adam Clare

Dwell and Inahbitat have announced the finalists for ReBurbia! You can vote at their website for your favourite idea.

The submissions range from totally impossible to easy to implement to insanely practical.

I really like the AIRBIA idea because it looks slick and just imagine a city with dirigibles functioning similarly to commuter trains.

airbia

PuRE Makes Swimming Pools a Good Thing

- Adam Clare

Here’s a groovy idea that will hopefully take off: use swimming pools to filter water. Swimming pools consume a lot of water and energy and this concept is designed to take these resource-hogs and turn them into something useful. It’s part of a contest to make suburbs livable.

PuRE

Using the same principles employed in constructed wetlands, puRE treats wastewater through six stages. Wastewater first flows into closed treatment tanks during the first two stages before reaching four separate purification cells in stages 3-6. These purification cells contain several species of aquatic plants and animals which remove pollutants naturally and even allow for small-scale food production as a by-product. The solids from the wastewater stream are filtered and directed to a communal methane digester, generating another bounty for its users – power.

For those of with you with pools but think drinkable water is too expensive here’s some tips on how to make your swimming pool a little kinder for the environment.

ReBurbia: Make the Suburbs Livable Contest

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Inhabitat and Dwell are holding a contest to redesign the suburbs into a sustainable and livable place. The contest is called ReBurbia and they are encouraging wild and crazy ideas to be submitted. If you have an idea to make the suburbs a place for humans to live then you should enter the contest – you better hurry though because the deadline is July 31st.

Calling all future-forward architects, urban designers, renegade planners and imaginative engineers:
Show us how you would re-invent the suburbs! What would a McMansion become if it weren’t a single-family dwelling? How could a vacant big box store be retrofitted for agriculture? What sort of design solutions can you come up with to facilitate car-free mobility, ‘burb-grown food, and local, renewable energy generation? We want to see how you’d design future-proof spaces and systems using the suburban structures of the present, from small-scale retrofits to large-scale restoration—the wilder the better!

Via Spacing.

Scroll To Top