Keen readers may remember the recent post on suburbia as the new slum. Alex Steffen over at Worldchanging has added to the debate on the future of the suburb with a look at the impact suburban flight will have on the cities and what we’ll do with what’s left behind:
Urbanists tend to be great eliders: we look at the parts of cities which fit our desires or theories or confirm our prejudices, and conveniently do not see the rest of the urban fabric. That is a privilege we’re going to have to give up. For the new cities of the bright green future, with their new forms of infrastructure and new types of commerce and industry, will only function well if they are much more integrated and fully woven than the cities of the last century. In part, that will demand that they be much denser, but even more, it demands that urban land be used intelligently, and intensively, and that policies, codes and taxes push that sort of use.
But what about the suburbs we leave behind in our wake as we create these green and gleaming cities?
“The ruins of the unsustainable are the 21st century’s frontier.” The decline of sprawl of written: the kinds of demographic and cultural shifts we’re seeing are unlikely to reverse themselves, and even without carbon pricing, oil is going to continue its march towards the sea of in-affordability. It’s what we do with the ruins left behind that’s interesting.
