Our development pattern became, in a word: fragile. For many decades, we were able to grow our economy very robustly with this approach. What we give up for near-term growth is long-term stability. This is always the tradeoff in the phase shift when complex systems become merely complicated. The top image is of a mature city, something once ubiquitous but now found in North America only in isolated museum-type places think historic Charleston or even Greenwich Village. It was a book largely interpreted through the prism of technology, but I read it in more revolutionary ways.
They are dinosaurs waiting for the meteorite. I thought that meteorite struck with the economic crisis in It may have, and history may yet record the past decade as merely an effort to buy time. History may also point to coronavirus as the meteorite, the event that fatally revealed the fragility of big.
By our standards, it received hardly any readership, which sometimes happens for random reasons. It should be required reading for anyone talking about shifts in our development pattern in response to pandemic.
To summarize, traditional development patterns are based off an assembly of neighborhoods. Each neighborhood is its own independent unit in some state of maturity.
You can live in a neighborhood and get food, work, recreation, and all your other needs without being forced to leave the neighborhood.
Many neighborhoods come together to form a city. We can travel from neighborhood to neighborhood, city to city, but each are their own fully functional unit. Not to get too technical, but this is what Benoit Mandelbrot described as a fractal pattern of development. In a pandemic, if there is a breakout in one neighborhood, it can be temporarily closed and isolated from other neighborhoods without destroying the function of either place.
In one neighborhood there can be a shelter-in-place impacting everyone in that neighborhood, and in the adjacent neighborhood there would be no need for any restriction except one on travel to and from the infected neighborhood. Our local economy can be open for business and closed for transmission simultaneously. The suburban experiment includes a false sense of security of allowing people to isolate in a pod of residential dwellings.
That is, isolated until they need to go get food. Or go to work. Or, as was apparently happening in my hometown this weekend, when half the population of Central Minnesota needs to get out and buy mulch at Home Depot.
For spread of a virus, there is no better petri dish than the frequent mass clustering of people demanded by the Suburban Experiment. Another way to think about this is through the brilliant case study of the Texas Donut and Historic Charleston put together by Bevan and Liberatos on CivicConversation.
You can go through that case study and see all the density, greenspace, parking, and other metrics, but for our discussion, focus only on mass clustering. With the Texas Donut, there are a limited number of access points in and out of the building.
Everyone must travel through these points, often at similar time schedules, touching the same doors and buttons and breathing the same air. Very efficient, for constructing, financing, and as a viral vector. Now look at the Charleston block. You could image, even in pandemic conditions where people are sheltering in place, the residents of such a place being able to travel around within that neighborhood to get food, get some exercise, check in on a neighbor, all while being able to keep a safe distance from other people.
Very resilient approach to building, and far more naturally resistant to viral spreading during a pandemic. This used to be how every city was built; there is nothing magical, mythical, or even particularly difficult about it. In this approach, local governments get the cash benefits of immediate growth and in exchange take on the long-term liabilities of providing service and maintenance. You can think of the local government portion of this as a chronic problem, one that is pernicious in that the decline is of the slow and grinding variety.
What is going on now with coronavirus, and what is going to thwart the fantasy that Americans are going to suddenly flock to the suburbs, is more acute. Americans are broke. Yes, stay-at-home orders have devastated the economy, but the velocity and totality of the economic collapse is almost exclusively attributable to just how fragile we are. Americans living in the most affluent country in the world are less financially secure than any other advanced economy. Sure, the government might pass an infrastructure bill to try and make it happen.
They might give banks and high-levered investors lots of money to buy up real estate in the hopes of re-re-inflating the housing bubble that is about to burst. They might even rain cash down on Americans to test the limits of our exorbitant privilege. We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from.
To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. A comparison of downtown dwellers and suburbanites in Chicago disputes idea urban living gets a green halo. Downtown High-Rise vs. Comparing life in a downtown high-rise near the Loop and Lakefront areas of Chicago with a suburban existence in nearby Oak Park—as opposed to a wider, more representative sample of these living styles—is bound to create interesting comparisons and exceptions.
Researchers Dr. Many of the results, and their conclusions, reinforce established beliefs. Downtown dwellers required much less infrastructure per person 1. Sprawl does have resources costs. This proposal suggests planting the parking lot and roof, turning the interior into a greenhouse, and enjoying hyper-local fresh produce. For this entry by Forrest Fulton, an empty mega-supermarket becomes a food producer, underscoring the need for suburbs to localize food production.
Crops are grown on the roof or in the underutilized parking lot. Inside, customers dine in restaurants that cook with the locally-grown goods, or shop the fresh produce to bring home. The rooftop farm, planted by Up Top Acres, supplies produce to the nearby restaurants and residents. Ten years on, rooftop farms exist. The rooftop farm supplies produce to nearby restaurants and acts as a local CSA. Entrepreneurbia was focused on policy change, and specifically, tweaking zoning laws to allow small businesses to operate in residential domains.
With a new baby on the way and the soon-to-be grandmother moving in, Seattleites Ilga Paskovskis and Kyle Parmentier asked Best Practice Architecture to expand their detached garage into a square-foot ADU, which they now call the Granny Pad. In the years since the competition, accessory dwelling units have popped up all over the United States and are a flexible means for adding space to a single-family home, whether that space is used as a rental or a home office.
Still, they remain a more popular build for the backyard, and are hardly ever seen in the front—the prospect of giving up the iconic suburban front lawn might be the final frontier.
For Frog's Dream, an abundance of plants and the installation of wetlands overtake empty suburban homes to clean and filter water. As proposed by Calvin Chiu, this entry turns an abandoned subdivision into a biofilter water treatment plant. Take Meriden Green. Today, it's a acre park in downtown Meriden, Connecticut, which is located between the cities of New Haven and Hartford. The park serves to control annual flood waters, provide a communal green space, and has spurred economic development, thanks to new apartment buildings, an amphitheater, and a weekend farmer's market.
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