Contributing to the discourse taking place around the state of the suburb artist Ross Racine has created a series of fictional renderings.

Sponsored by Dwell Magazine and Inhabitat, the ReBurbia competition is seeking to bring out forward-thinking architects, urban planners, and designers to re-conceive the sprawling, foreclosure-ridden suburbs of the America. The contest’s organizers see the competition as an urgent response to dire social and material circumstances in the US, not just an exercise in good thinking and design:
Suburban communities in central California, Arizona and Florida are desolate and decaying, with for sale and foreclosure signs dotting many lawns. According to the US Census, about 90% of all metropolitan growth occurred in suburban communities in the last ten years. Urbanites who loathe [...]

After watching how new, American style, cookie-cutter housing developments in Mexico quickly became retrofitted by tenants to accommodate their informal businesses, Teddy Cruz, an architect and professor at the University of California, San Diego is attempting to integrate the same social and architectural models that he observed in Mexican shantytowns to modern housing developments in low-income communities back in the States.
Cruz noticed that many of the shantytowns he visited in Mexico operated very communally with an abundance of shared space.  This “sophisticated social collaboration,” according to Cruz, enables residents to share resources and look out for each other in way [...]