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Designing Suburban Futures: New Models from Build a Better Burb
Suburbs deserve a better, more resilient future. June Williamson shows that suburbs aren't destined to remain filled with strip malls and excess parking lots; they can be reinvigorated through inventive design. Drawing on award-winning design ideas for revitalizing Long Island, she offers valuable models not only for U.S. suburbs, but also those emerging elsewhere with global urbanization.
Williamson argues that suburbia has historically been a site of great experimentation and is currently primed for exciting changes. Today, dead malls, aging office parks, and blighted apartment complexes are being retrofitted into walkable, sustainable communities. Williamson shows how to expand this trend, highlighting promising design strategies and tactics.
She provides a broad vision of suburban reform based on the best schemes submitted in Long Island's highly successful "Build a Better Burb" competition. Many of the design ideas and plans operate at a regional scale, tackling systems such as transit, aquifer protection, and power generation. While some seek to fundamentally transform development patterns, others work with existing infrastructure to create mixed-use, shared networks.
Designing Suburban Futures offers concrete but visionary strategies to take the sprawl out of suburbia, creating a vibrant, new suburban form. It will be especially useful for urban designers, architects, landscape architects, land use planners, local policymakers and NGOs, citizen activists, students of urban design, planning, architecture, and landscape architecture.
Williamson argues that suburbia has historically been a site of great experimentation and is currently primed for exciting changes. Today, dead malls, aging office parks, and blighted apartment complexes are being retrofitted into walkable, sustainable communities. Williamson shows how to expand this trend, highlighting promising design strategies and tactics.
She provides a broad vision of suburban reform based on the best schemes submitted in Long Island's highly successful "Build a Better Burb" competition. Many of the design ideas and plans operate at a regional scale, tackling systems such as transit, aquifer protection, and power generation. While some seek to fundamentally transform development patterns, others work with existing infrastructure to create mixed-use, shared networks.
Designing Suburban Futures offers concrete but visionary strategies to take the sprawl out of suburbia, creating a vibrant, new suburban form. It will be especially useful for urban designers, architects, landscape architects, land use planners, local policymakers and NGOs, citizen activists, students of urban design, planning, architecture, and landscape architecture.
160 pages, Paperback
First published May 6, 2013
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October 14, 2014
The first half of this book goes over the same ground as Retrofitting Suburbia (which Williamson coauthored) and thus is of more interest to people who have not read that excellent book.
The second half describes the entries in a "Build a Better Burb" competition, which asked architects and planners how to redesign the aging suburbs of Long Island to make them more environmentally friendly and more affordable. The proposals were very interesting, although I wished the book had focused more on possible obstacles and costs of the ideas.
Many of the proposals favored adding apartments in suburban downtowns near Long Island Rail Road train stations in order to make housing more affordable and more available to younger people who are not ready to buy houses. Some of the more exotic proposals were more environmentally oriented, suggesting turning areas farther from transit into farms or "carbon sinks" of various types.
The second half describes the entries in a "Build a Better Burb" competition, which asked architects and planners how to redesign the aging suburbs of Long Island to make them more environmentally friendly and more affordable. The proposals were very interesting, although I wished the book had focused more on possible obstacles and costs of the ideas.
Many of the proposals favored adding apartments in suburban downtowns near Long Island Rail Road train stations in order to make housing more affordable and more available to younger people who are not ready to buy houses. Some of the more exotic proposals were more environmentally oriented, suggesting turning areas farther from transit into farms or "carbon sinks" of various types.
Displaying 1 of 1 review