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A valuable overview of the challenges facing the outmoded nature of the American suburban landscape and analysis of the crucial first steps to be taken towards the next stage in the evolution of our development patterns.
The American development pattern of suburban planning has reached a level of maturity that allowed for a more thorough critique by the design community. Beyond its original goals of increasing home ownership and fostering living potential outside of city centers, the full effects of suburban planning are clearer now than ever before. It would be fair to say that significant portions of the design and planning communities have come to agree that there are better holistic settlement options than suburban sprawl, at least in the form it emerged as in this country.
In many ways, such a declaration was the easy part. Identifying the flaws of what constitutes the status quo in many part of the country started a discussion about what could replace it, leading to multitudes of design professionals providing critical analysis in order to unearth aspects of what better options might include. However, there are still relatively few examples of someone making concrete statements and suggestions for what first respondents can do to improve the suburban landscape. Retrofitting Suburbia helps take important steps forward in order to help preserve the momentum of conversations and solutions.
Williamson and Dunham-Hones have created a chronicle of suburban development that spans the entire process from history, to critique, to current conditions and, most importantly, project case studies that highlight retrofitting components in action. The pair of authors begin by addressing the problems that help comprise the spatial fallout from decades of the suburban experiment and their associated effects on communities that range from growing wealth gaps, social monocultures and the absence of affordable housing to vacant retail malls and the degradation of pedestrian environments.
“Public investment is needed to further retrofit these places into healthier physical environments–with sidewalks, playgrounds and transit–but the challenge is to do so without gentrifying a culturally rich community and erasing a needed source of low-income housing.”
The authors present a series of planning goals, some based on tenets of New Urbanism, that can serve as guides for how to assess existing suburban communities and focus on valuable assets to drive community evolution. Tactics range from changes to low-density residential neighborhoods, to abandoned strip malls that line highway paths, to dilapidated former epicenters of regional malls and the detached mediocrity of suburban office parks. Each of these sections assess areas around the country to both catalog their shortcomings as well highlight what goals for renovation should be trying to achieve. The book is also rife with imagery to complement the text and help visualize design goals in action.
The text does a good job at identifying the many facets of these problems that span far beyond (or behind) only the built environment. Factors of building and zoning codes, stakeholders, local politics and cultural trends are all forces that require coordination and mediation in order to make sweeping changes to the existing landscape. Focusing on doing any single aspect well will likely end up with a compromised result that undercuts a project’s full potential.
Even if the book had accomplished all of those things it would still sit in the realm of a concisely organized collection of theory to join the musings of many other designers. The important facet is the inclusion of actual case studies with real sites as well as their intended solutions. Seeing aspects of the mentality in action help ground the book and its wealth of data in the material world of results. Admittedly, one shortcoming seemed to be that most of the case studies were projects that were relatively small on the community scale–showing a statement of intent cast over numerous blocks rather than a transformative effort that helped an entire community evolve. That being said, we are still early in the evolutionary process and community-wide examples may be difficult to come by.
While the book should be considered an asset to design and planning professionals who are interested in partaking in helping to craft the next phase of development outside of our city centers, the prose is not overloaded with professional parlance and would be equally valuable for those pursuing participation in community groups or municipal politics. While not technically a reference book, Retrofitting Suburbia provides an excellent baseline of both the problem statement and options for new solutions. If we had more books like this one, our suburban landscape may be different than it is today.
You can find a copy of the book here