So i need to start investigating a bit into this suffocating suburbia thing which troubles me so much.
And look what i found, the suburbia project on the Living Room Urban Ecology web zine.
An excerpt from Philip Allsop’s Why Suburbia Fails, and How to Succeed:
“Our bizarre zoning regulations that force single-use zones (housing only–no mixed housing and shops or offices etc.) in order to preserve property values, which in turn feed local tax bases, have already wreaked an unintended and hazardous consequence for those who have to live there. We are less fit, less healthy; we use more health care services more frequently and earlier on in our lives than ever before; we spend $12.00 going to the local strip mall just to get a pint of milk (gas cost, car loan/lease or cost of capital plus the car’s depreciation); and we have become so afraid of outsiders from having spent three generations riding about in our hermetically-sealed cars that we incarcerate ourselves in super-sized McMansions and starter-castles behind high walls and security gates.
The idea of community went out of the window long ago when General Motors (see the movie “Taken for a Ride” for more on this) started buying up and destroying suburban transit lines to encourage people to buy cars instead of riding the tram. What was good for GM was good for the country, so the saying went. So, in the re-build of New Orleans and Biloxi for example, chances are that what’s good for the developers will again be deemed “good” for the country. Once again we will probably see tracts of McMansions being extruded from the mud, and unsuspecting new owners happily occupying them, not knowing that those houses will not outlast the warranties on the shiny new built-in appliances. Meanwhile the developers brought in and encouraged by federal and local politicians “to re-build the community lost to Katrina….” will soon be skipping and high-fiving it all the way to the bank.
Today, community remains an idea, but its manifestation seems to be limited to syrupy realtors’ brochures that describe sylvan settings for new developments with “fwightfully Bwitish” or “European” sounding names. These gated tracts are the places that developers and politicians deem proper for most Americans to live in–and it’s killing us by the tens of thousands every year. The great American dream of having a home of one’s own in a nice, clean suburban neighborhood is, I believe, proving to be a waking nightmare with insidious consequences for us, all and from which there are precious few avenues of escape if we continue doing things the way we do them today.
[..] If suburbia as we know it is to change, and cities are to be more livable places, we have to start this education early and often as part of the standard school curriculum. “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us” (Winston Churchill). Churchill’s saying is as true today as it was in his lifetime. As a consequence, it is too important to leave the planning, design, and construction of our homes to the developers, the realtors, the builders, and the “architectural designers” who have already amply demonstrated their ignorance about the built environment, as well as their contempt for community.”