Project Manifesto
Suburbs exist. They aren’t going away and we can’t get rid of them. They’re secertly the most prolific means of mass house ever created. Its time to stop ignoring them.
‘Their downtowns may be full of new condo towers, but there is five times as much population growth on the suburban edges of the regions... In 2016, we found that within our metropolitan areas, 86% of the population lived in transit suburbs, auto suburbs, or exurban areas, while only 14% lived in active core neighbourhoods.’ - David L.A. Gordon et al, Still Suburban? Growth in Canadian Suburbs, 2016-2016 (2018, pp.1)
‘There are three types of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics’ - Mark Twain
Suburbs are socially, culturally, economically, spatially, typologically, and architecturally diverse.
There is no singular definition of ‘suburb’. It means different things to different people. Suburbs around the globe have different characteristics. This makes suburban discourse... problematic.
Suburbia is neither a place nor a description. It is a cultural image based upon media and propaganda, the abstraction of suburban qualities, and late 20th Century urban sprawl. Therefore, it is overly reductionist and hinders critical discussion.
‘City’ and ‘Suburb’ are nouns, they refer to places. They can refer to typological characteristics but a place should never be reduced down to something abstract, particularly in critical discourse.
‘Urban’ and ‘Suburban’ are adjectives, referring to social, spatial, aesthetic, and morphological qualities. They are not binaries but exist within a spectrum and are used to describe the characteristics of places within cities and suburbs. Suburb should only be used as an adjective to describe a specific suburb’s relationship to a city or larger census metropolitan area (CMA).
[sub]urban denotes the spectrum between urban and suburban qualities, and refers to the relationships that exist in settings that are both urban and suburban.
[sub]urban sprawl consumes ecologically and agriculturally valuable land and replaces it with highly energy and emergy consuming fabric. It is neither financially nor environmentally sustainable. Rather than perpetuating sprawl, we should adapt existing suburban landscapes to house growing populations. This project existing within a mindset of eliminating sprawl.
‘Housing is equivalent to an emergy flow of 43.52x10^16 sej/year due to building manufacturing (49%, considering a building’s lifetime of 50 years), maintenance (35%) and use (15%).’ - Pulselli et al, Emergy analysis of building manufacturing, maintenance and use: Em-building indices to evaluate housing sustainability (2007)
Car dependency is deeply embedded within suburban landscapes constructed following the postwar era, and their disbursed nature renders public transit largely ineffective. Car dependency must be accepted and considered when designing within a suburban context, not designed out.
‘Suburbs are socially ‘designed,’ intentionally or (more often) not, to achieve certain collective and individual goals. They are designed either explicitly through the logic of top-down centralized planning, either public and corporate, or indirectly through a plethora of public policies, market decisions, social attitudes and local regulatory practices. Most suburbs, in reality, reflect both logics. This is not meant to suggest yet another conspiracy theory of urban development. Rather, it is a reaffirmation on the one hand of the crucial but problematic role of the state, and on the other hand of the uneven consequences of individual decisions and corporate actions in shaping the nature and form of the suburban landscape. My hypothesis is that this landscape is becoming more unequal, fragmented and socially polarized. There are mounting troubles in paradise and those problems will increasingly come to dominate our research and planning agenda in the next decade (Hayden, 1984; Baldassare, 1986; Blakely, 1992; Langdon, 1994; Palen, 1994; Downs, 1994). The need to redesign the suburbs, both old and new, may well be the next frontier in urban research and planning’ - Larry S. Bourne, Reinventing the Suburbs: Old Myths and New Realities (1996, pp.164)
20th Century North American suburbanization is deeply interwoven with 20th Century North American culture. Postwar suburbanization’s intertwinement with the ‘American Dream’ and the ‘Nuclear Family’, constructed domestic space based on a hetero-normative, two generational domestic unit. The ‘Nuclear Family’ is not reflective of the diverse social, cultural, spatial, financial, nor familial dynamics of contemporary domestic life, yet its influence is literally built into postwar suburban landscapes. We need to open up our suburban landscapes to allow them to better adapt to our changing lifestyles.
Suburban settings allow for greater personal agency by its residents, allowing for individual adaption and customization of a dwelling to the needs of its occupant, and give greater weight to individual voices within community discourse. Urban settings engender greater community agency, through tenant or co-op collations at the building scale, and broader civic engagement through assembly, resulting in changes in policy or community land trusts.
[sub]urban planning following the postwar era shifted away from gradual growth through urbanism and embraced Modernism’s ideals of mass production through repetition. This shifted the planning of suburbs away from urbanism towards an assemblage of Modern building and neighbourhood components (Alexander et al, 1977). The result was highly repetitive assemblies which can be identified and analyzed as as multi-scalar typologies. Systematic design responses addressing this repetitive nature are therefore scalable across a typologie.
As a result, ‘We are left with a world without urbanism, only architecture, ever more architecture… It exploits and exhausts the potential that can be generated finally only by urbanism, that only the specific imagination of urbanism can invent and renew.’ - Rem Koolhass, What Ever Happened to Urbanism? (1994)
‘Architects design only a small percentage of what gets built in the United States [and Canada]. Still, it is astonishing that in the past quarter-century a vast landscape has been produced without the kind of without the kind of buildings that architects consider “architecture,” a landscape almost entirely uninformed by the critical agendas or ideas of the discipline. This landscape is the suburban fringe, the outer suburbs and exurbs—the landscape often called “urban sprawl.” ... this landscape accounts for approximately 75% of all new construction in recent decades—yet it is shunned by most architectural designers’ - Ellen Dunham-Jones, Seventy-Five Percent (2000)
‘The point, however, is to change it (Marx, 1975[sic],423).’ - Alexis Shotwell, Against Purity (2016)
North America’s 20th Century [sub]urbanism has been breaking down for decades. The COVID-19 pandemic has simply brought the underlying cracks to the surface. We now have an opportunity to embark upon repairing those problems.
‘Above all, repair occupies and constitutes an aftermath, growing at the margins, breakpoints, and interstices of complex sociotechnical systems as they creak, flex, and bend their way through time. It fills in the moment of hope and fear in which bridges from old worlds to new worlds are built, and the continuity of order, value, and meaning gets woven, one tenuous thread at a time... [repair is] the subtle acts of care by which order and meaning in complex sociotechnical systems are maintained and transformed, human value is preserved and extended, and the complicated work of fitting to the varied circumstances of organizations, systems, and lives is accomplished. Repair in this connotation has a literal and material dimension, filled with immediate questions: Who fixes the devices and systems we “seamlessly” use? Who maintains the infrastructures within and against which our lives unfold? But it also speaks directly to “the social,” if we still choose to cut the world in this way: how are human orders broken and restored (and again, who does this work”) ’ - Steven J. Jackson, Rethinking Repair (2013)
20th Century North American Suburban Formation
Research & Design Philosophy
What role do individual immaterial and immaterial structural permanencies play within the current [sub]urban formation?
How can we loosen the some of the constraintswithin these structural permanencies?
What potentials begin to emerge within a loosened framework?
When does that new potential become threatening?
When does this new system breakdown?
What is the aftermath of that breakdown?
Are we already living in the aftermath of that breakdown?
What are going to do about it?
