marcszar_dontworry


 * Don't Worry? -** //The Future of Suburban Sprawl//

Above: Suburbia is populated with a unique species of "land whale" - the //Americanus fatassus//. Image sources: (1) and (2).

Over the past decade there has been a lot of chatter about "green building" and "green design." People have been bombarded with feel-good ads by corporations promising to deliver us to a bright, prosperous, "eco-friendly" future. This presentation will discuss the fallacy of "green design" in residential architecture to attempt to convince you that, despite all the hype, the suburban lifestyle is inherently unsustainable and has no future.
 * The Problem With Suburbia**

It's worth beginning the discussion with a brief history of suburbia. Suburban living is common in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, some parts of Western Europe, and increasingly in China, but the nation with by far the greatest proportion of its population living in suburbia is the United States (almost half of our population). Whereas in other parts of the world the suburbs tend to be composed of dilapidated high rise "towers in the park" populated by immigrants and the poor, in the US the suburbs tend to be composed of large single-family houses populated by the middle and upper classes.

Over the years numerous (and sometimes conflicting) studies have concluded that the suburban lifestyle might be responsible for inducing or contributing to many of our social and environmental ills. Some studies have suggested that suburbia is at least partially responsible for the obesity epidemic in America. While it has already been made clear that the consumption of heavily-processed and fast foods has contributed to the obesity epidemic in America, some researchers argue that the suburbs exacerbate the epidemic since the dispersed, car-centric environment of the typical suburb encourages sedentary behavior: few commercial, entertainment, and recreational venues are within walking distance of the typical suburban house (and there often aren't any sidewalks), so residents are forced to drive everywhere. Furthermore, the older children living in suburbia tend to engage in sedentary indoor recreational activities (computers, television, video games) since the suburban landscape outside is too boring and forbidding to bother playing in. The Committee on Environmental Health of the American Academy of Pediatrics recently received a lot of attention for suggesting that the dispersed suburban environment can contribute to sedentary behavior (and eventually to obesity) in suburban children. The Committee also proposed some excellent urban design/planning remedies of a fundamentally 'New Urbanist' nature to the mitigate the problem of childhood obesity (discussed in greater detail below).

Besides contributing to obesity, suburbs have also been responsible for contributing to (1) an excessive dependence on fossil fuels and to a corresponding increase in air pollution (requiring a greater proportion of residents to drive will result in more auto emissions than would otherwise be necessary if the same people were to live in walkable neighborhoods), (2) towards the excessive and accelerating clearing and development of farmland, forests, and countryside for tract housing (many cities can no longer grow their food on local farms - their peripheries have been overtaken by suburban sprawl), (3) towards a decline in our collective social capital (the dearth of public spaces and activities in suburbia makes it difficult for groups to organize, protest, or participate in clubs, associations, or organizations, and residents in suburbs are typically "strangers" to each other), and (4) towards the disruption of aquifer replenishment due to the extreme amounts of pavement used in vast acres of strip mall parking lots. Furthermore, despite all the hype over "green" materials, the vast majority of suburban housing (particularly the housing stock built since the 1990s) still utilizes extremely poor quality construction methods and materials - as we have often discovered during natural disasters, very old building stock tends to suffer little damage whereas newer building stock is often utterly destroyed. Like many other products present in our consumer society, suburban housing now follows the rules of "planned obsolescence" - any typical McMansion built since the 1980s uses cheap materials, is of poor construction quality, and is only designed to last from 25 to 50 years.

Most of us are at least dimly aware of the above social and environmental problems inherent in suburbia. Even suburban residents express a dissatisfaction with the suburban landscape - hence the rise of the "NIMBY" (Not In My Backyard) movement in which residents often try to stop or control further suburban expansion. Yet there is a complete disconnect between our desire to practice sustainability (being "green") and our desire to continue expanding and living in suburbs. To quote one of J.H. Kunstler's most elegant phrases, "We are blowing a lot of green smoke up our asses."
 * The Disconnect**

Why are we delusional when it comes to green design and retrofitting/greening suburbia? For example, many of us are now aware of the concept of "peak oil" but we continue to assume that a car-centric lifestyle will still be feasible without oil. The technical details of the phenomenon are beyond the scope of this presentation, but suffice it to say that "peak oil" is not crackpot theory but rather scientific/geological fact. Most of the world's oil fields are now in decline and various estimates have suggested that it will become increasingly difficult for us to obtain the amount of oil necessary to maintain our industrial society by 2025 - 2050. Many environmentalists optimistically assume that we will be able to easily and effortlessly switch our society from fossil fuels to "green" technology (solar, nuclear, ethanol, hydro, wind, tide, hydrogen, "clean" coal) in the near future. Particularly maddening is our assumption that we will be able to easily switch our automobile fleet of 250 million cars from gasoline to electricity as oil runs out (a tragic example of our delusional thinking is Amory Lovins' Hypercar). Generalist environmental thinkers such as Kunstler argue that this is an impossible feat - the scale at which we would need to produce renewable energy to power a fleet of large electric cars would be utterly staggering - even when using as much nuclear and coal power as possible we'd never be able to generate the enormous amount of electricity necessary to power so many electric cars. Electric cars //would// work if we lived at an urban scale where we only needed to use an automobile for 1% of our trips, but since most of us live in suburbia and depend on automobiles for every aspect of our livelihood, building the resulting required automobile fleet of 250 million+ electric cars will be structurally impossible. Kunstler also wonders why so many of us assume that automobile dependency is even a good thing in the first place! Even the environmental do-gooders who brag about their Priuses make a tragic assumption that continuing to live in an automobile-dependent residential environment is a good and inevitable aspect of life. Kunstler argues that we should "let the car die" since we will not under any circumstances be able to continue a lifestyle of extreme automobile dependency - our dwindling financial resources would best be spent on revitalizing energy-efficient forms of mass transportation such as heavy and light rail. Unfortunately we are victim to a "psychology of previous investment" - we have invested so much of our resources and livelihood into suburbia over the past fifty years that we cannot fathom ever having to abandon them once oil becomes too scarce to maintain our lifestyle.

I want to stress again that we are illogically fantasizing that we will soon be participating in an electric or hydrogen car society. A good example of our illogical thinking is the claim made by environmentalists that Iceland has switched to hydrogen automobiles and that we could do it as well. Actually, Iceland has only managed to convert their bus fleet to hydrogen so far. Furthermore, even if Iceland was able to switch to hydrogen cars, the issue of scale would prevent us from making the same modifications. Iceland has a population of about 300,000 - the single city of Buffalo, NY has roughly the same population! It would simply be impossible for a nation of 300 million to process enough hydrogen (it takes more energy to process and transport hydrogen than we can extract from it) to allow all of our suburbs to continue enjoying an auto-centric lifestyle. Furthermore, since we are handicapped by compartmentalized econometric thinking, we fail to see the automobile as one component within a larger oil-based framework: Let us assume that we somehow managed to produce enough electric cars for everyone and managed to generate enough non-oil energy to power them. We still wouldn't be able to use the cars - with oil in scarce supply, we would hardly be able to pave our roads; we wouldn't be able to produce the asphalt (which is made from oil). Even switching to concrete wouldn't be possible - it would take an enormous amount of energy to produce enough cement to repave all our asphalt roads. With oil in scarce supply, it will also become extremely difficult to manufacture tires - are we prepared to clear enormous swathes of rainforest to make room for vast, vast rubber tree plantations? We are so reliant on relatively cheap petrochemicals to make tires and other auto parts that it will become impossible to keep these components cheap and easily accessible when oil becomes scarce and we are forced to rely on a smaller supply of natural materials. Furthermore, it takes enormous energy to extract and process the steel and manufacture the parts necessary to make an automobile. Will we be able to generate enough renewable energy to maintain the activities of iron mining, smelting, processing, welding, molding. etc. at the enormous scale we are used to doing it? I am not arguing that we should not use renewable energy - we absolutely should, but we should also realize that we will not be able to create a renewable energy infrastructure that can match the scale of our current vast petroleum infrastructure (I.e.- can you make a solar panel from a solar panel; that is, can you extract, process, and assemble the materials necessary to make a solar panel without resorting to oil and coal? Can you grow vast quantities of corn for food or sugarcane for ethanol without pouring barrels of petroleum-based fertilizer on the soil?) And finally, our government is already functionally bankrupt - how will it be able to pay for the maintenance and construction of highways and bridges? If our highway infrastructure disintegrates (it already is in dismal shape), people won't be able to drive anywhere. Some argue that road privatization may solve this problem, but would suburbanites really tolerate paying tolls to local governments or private companies every few miles? We'd end up with a situation where the tremendous amount of financing necessary to keep a road in working condition would be such that there would need to be a toll booth practically at the end of every driveway.

Besides being trapped in the "psychology of previous investment," we also tend to engage in a lot of "technotriumphalist" thinking. We assume that "technology" will solve our energy problems and that we will all be able to "work from home" - nowhere is this tragic mindset more apparent than in the attitude of today's youth. How will electronic media (such as television, cell phones, the internet, and the social networks that depend on them) remain viable if we don't have the energy and financial resources to maintain the network of roads (you need to be able to access even the most remote of cell phone towers to maintain it) and cables that these media networks depend on to function? Many modern communication and travel networks also depend on aviation and space technology (planes and satellites) to function. We have not yet found an alternative source for the energy-intensive hydrocarbon fuels necessary to power and propel airplanes (and to launch satellites), and we probably never will.

The "technotriumphalist" mindset extends to our attitude on the individual suburban house. We fail to realize that the entire suburban pattern of living is unsustainable and instead assume that by merely making some intelligent construction, material, and assembly choices, we can make the typical suburban house "green." Changing light bulbs, eliminating carpets, using high-tech (read: energy-intensive) materials that offgas less, using good insulation, using double-glazed windows, and using natural materials are all beneficial to the environment, but if these sensible choices are deployed within the larger framework of suburban living they become meaningless - a bunch of old (supposedly inefficient) rowhouses in an urban setting will always leave a smaller footprint on the environment that the newest suburban McMansion utilizing the latest, smartest, "greenest" materials (this is why New York has often been quantified as the "greenest" American city even though it is a concrete jungle and it doesn't have as much "green space" as a suburban neighborhood). Although sensible material choices can positively impact the environment, we should be more concerned with "green" development at the urban scale rather than at the scale of the single house - in a scenario where access to cheap fossil fuels will be difficult, the single-family suburban house set in a dispersed residential landscape will always be environmentally inferior to an agglomeration of dense residential, commercial, and industrial buildings deployed in an urban setting (this is why human civilization created the city in the first place - the absence of cheap energy required that people live, work, and play in close proximity to each other). However, do not conclude that suburbs are "bad" and inherently destructive to civilization. Suburbs have //always// existed (the ancient city of Rome had patrician villas on its outskirts and the railroad and streetcar spawned the creation of small suburbs in the US before the automobile) and will continue to exist, albeit at a drastically reduced scale. It is the very //scale// of the postwar American suburbs that makes them inherently inefficient in an era of energy scarcity - the massive, democratic scale of the American suburb is simply an emergent product of an oil-rich era, and without the underpinnings of an oil economy, such democratic (accessible to such a large proportion of our population) suburbs will not be able to exist.
 * The Solution?**

We would have the greatest positive impact on the environment if we simply realized that automobile dependency and the suburban environment are inherently unsustainable in an era of fossil fuel scarcity. We would do best to move away as quickly as possible from these two aspects of our society (by forming a general consensus that we should no longer continue building new residences in suburbia) and to divert our remaining attention and resources towards urban living. This //does not// necessarily mean living in big cities - the future will probably demand that we revert to living in smaller towns and cities (perhaps at the scale of Albany and Troy) that can agriculturally sustain themselves. Fortunately there is a movement in Europe and the US composed of architects and town planners that suggest doing just that - the New Urbanists have already built and continue to propose communities that are compact, walkable, and surrounded by farmland and protected parkland. If we reinvest in and reinvigorate our inner cities (a process that is already slowly happening), voluntarily and gradually abandon suburbia and build new compact towns and cities, and rebuild a network of mass transit to link all these places together, we will be able to sustain this nation on a platform of renewable energy. If we continue to pour resources into the automobile infrastructure, into suburban environments, and into meaningless "high tech" green materials, we will find that no matter how much we attempt to develop a platform for renewable energy, it will be impossible to maintain our lifestyle at the formerly-comfortable suburban scale of the 20th century. Peak oil is thus a mixed blessing - it will lead to the decline of the suburban environment and to the end of globalization, but it will also usher in an era of turbulence and uncertainty. We can influence the outcome (and avoid much turbulence and chaos) if we give up our futile experiment in suburbia right now.

Calthorpe, Peter, and William Fulton. Duany, Andrés, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, et al. Farrelly, Elizabeth. Garreau, Joel. Hatherley, Owen. Hayden, Dolores. Hirschhorn, Joel. Hoffman, Jan. Jackson, Kenneth. Katz, Peter. Kunstler, James Howard. Leinberger, Christopher. McKee, Bradford. Polycarpou, Lakis. Salingaros, Nikos. Stern, Robert, and John Massengale.
 * References**
 * //The Regional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl.// Washington, DC: Island Press, 2001.
 * //On the Edge: Latest Views from Andrés Duany.// Lecture at Simon Fraser University. Vancouver, BC: January 16, 2008.
 * //San Antonio By Design.// Lecture at the San Antonio Design Seminar, 1991.
 * //Suburban Nation: The Rise and Fall of the American Dream.// New York: North Point Press, 2000.
 * //Blubberland: The Dangers of Happiness.// Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.
 * //Edge City: Life on the New Frontier.// New York: Anchor Books, 1991.
 * //'Sustainability' is a dangerous mirage: Even in Dubai, the language of greenwash is used to distract us from the real design issues.// Building Design Magazine: December 11, 2009.
 * //A Field Guide to Sprawl.// New York: W. W. Norton, 2004.
 * //Sprawl Kills: How Blandburbs Steal Your Time, Health, and Money.// New York: Sterling and Ross, 2005.
 * //Why Can't She Walk To School?// New York Times: September 12, 2009.
 * //Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States//. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
 * //The New Urbanism: Towards an Architecture of Community.// New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994.
 * //The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition.// New York: The Free Press, 2002.
 * //The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape.// New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
 * //Home From Nowhere: Remaking Our Everday World for the Twenty-First Century.// New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.
 * //Lecture on the end of the "Happy Motoring" era.// Commonwealth Club of California: March 19, 2007.
 * //[|The Tragedy of Suburbia.]// Presentation at the Technology, Entertainment, and Design (TED) Conference: February 2004.
 * //The Next Slum?// The Atlantic: March 2008.
 * //As Suburbs Grow, So Do Waistlines.// New York Times: September 4, 2003.
 * //Respect for the Human Scale: An Interview with Urban Theorists James Howard Kunstler and Nikos Salingaros.// Next American City: Issue 18, Spring 2008.
 * //The Compact City Replaces Sprawl.// 2006.
 * //Principles of Urban Structure.// Amsterdam: Techne Press, 2005.
 * //The Anglo-American Suburb.// London: Architectural Design, 1981.

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