How to Use this Website
This website is a tool to help make sense of this super wicked problem called ‘the suburbs’, and spark discussions about their futures.
The first section explores the problematic nature of postwar suburbanization and calls upon architects, planners, policy makers, and citizens to recognize the challenges we are facing face. To demand more than the status quo of downtown urban growth and recognize that we must shift our attention towards the metropolitan peripheries. Asking what type of change is acceptable, and what happens after that. However, it is important to approached suburban growth and intensification with a contextual mindset that avoid the pitfalls of methodological cityism.
The second section catalogues the typologies of southern Ontario’s suburban landscapes across multiple scales. It outlines the role and rigidities which individual building systems play within the assemblage of a single house, and how those rigidities create limiting affordances when adapting individual houses. It then looks at the cumulative effect which those rigidities and permanencies have on transforming neighbourhoods to understand what possibilities are feasible.
The third section dives into the impact policy has on built form. How they are spatially and materially manifested and how they create process path dependencies which further constraint physical possibilities. In response, a new zoning by-law was written to strategically dismantle many of these constraints and give suburban residents greater agency.
The final section speculates on what the future of suburban landscapes would look like in response to the challenges of the 21st Century. It uses a relatively secluded suburban community as a site for speculative intensification. Exploring how changing domestic patterns will spatially manifest, and the cumulative effect of those changes upon the community.