Monthly Archive for July, 2010

From Allison Arieff at The New York Times…

That the Murphys, the couple recently arrested for spying for the Russians from Montclair, N.J., were described by a flabbergasted neighbor as “suburbia personified” is telling, an observation that perfectly sums up our collective notion that the suburbs are chock full of white, middle-class families, both nuclear and normal.

But that prevailing vision contradicts the reality of suburbia today. There may be white picket fences and home owners associations in common, but beyond that, “suburb” has outlived its usefulness as a descriptive term — and as a model for future planning, at least in its current incarnation. Suburbs continue to be designed for homogeneity even though they’re no longer homogeneous at all, and in fact have become increasingly varied in type, density, infrastructure and demographics.

The Long Island- and Maryland-based Rauch Foundation, whose efforts focus on issues relating to children, leadership and the environment, knows this and has dedicated some serious energy to addressing it where they live: on Long Island, a perfect laboratory given that it’s a textbook case of suburban sprawl. Last month, I was a juror for the Build a Better Burb competition organized by the foundation, which asked entrants to consider a series of issues like housing choice and affordability, stemming “brain drain,” enhancing car-free mobility, and equity, access and public space. More…

By Avinash Rajagopal at Metropolismag.com…

The Institute of Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) celebrates its 25th anniversary this year with an ambitious new exhibition at the Center for Architecture, in New York. A year in the making, Our Cities, Ourselves presents positive, sustainable urban visions for ten cities around the world. Developed in close collaboration with local architects and policy makers, the visions are the true successors-in-spirit of such urbanist dreams of yesteryear as Futurama, but with one big difference—the automobile is conspicuously absent.

“Our cities are constantly engaged in a game of catch-up with transportation technologies that were developed with no reference to their form,” the architecture critic Michael Sorkin said in a roundtable discussion that preceded the exhibition opening last week. (Sorkin’s re-imagination of downtown Manhattan is one of the projects on display.) With city transport responsible for about a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, the problem is obviously not just one of urban form. And things are only going to get worse: Over the next decade, 95 percent of urban growth will be in Asia and Africa alone, in cities that seem determined to replicate the car-centric model that has proven so disastrous in the developed world. Norman Garrick, a member of the national board of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), quipped that his hometown of Kingston, Jamaica, is actually striving to be more like Miami. It is not easy to counter a cultural mindset where owning a car is a matter of pride. More…