And the only reason they would do that is because their automobile-powered daily existence does not otherwise compel much movement. Without consequential destinations that are part of normal human activity, by and large, the only people who walk on suburban streets do so for exercise. Since separation of commercial and residential zones by vast tracts built at automobile scale (rather than human scale) removes the possibility of accessing useful destinations on foot, it removes any practical motive for walking. The result is that running any errand or attending to any need, no matter how small, requires getting in one’s car and driving somewhere else, in many cases several miles or more. The idea, of course, is that the peaceful slumber of the suburbanite should not be interrupted by the noise generated by the transaction of commerce or any other public-sphere human activities. Residences are constructed in special areas zoned for residential construction, while shopping and work take place in altogether different areas zoned for commercial development. This means traditional design patterns like shops and offices on the first floor with apartments above are impossible. Single-use zoningĪmerican zoning law (in all but its oldest cities) forecloses on the possibility of mixed-use development. My aim is to list as many of these as I’ve discovered and been able to formulate. It’s an interdependent constellation of misanthropic zoning rules, building codes, and planning guidelines.
If one hopes to avoid broad vagueries like “Designed for cars, not humans,” and instead to get specific, then there’s no single linchpin attribute that makes suburbia what it is. When someone asks me where I’m from, and I roll my eyes and diffidently groan, “Atlanta…” Why? It’s worth asking what specifically makes Atlanta “ Atlanta.” For example, I live in Atlanta, a suburban mega-agglomeration that sucks in the same general way as cities like Los Angeles, Dallas-Ft. I don’t mean the abstract reasons why it sucks I’ve pontificated on that plenty. That’s how I came to spend a fair amount of time recently thinking about and researching what exactly makes suburbia suburbia. It irks me that many of us know, on some level, that we live in a dystopian nightmare but can’t say what makes it a dystopian nightmare. It’s because Americans took that inheritance and unceremoniously discarded it, consonantly with the rise of the mass-produced automobile. The same holds true in reverse North Americans who have not travelled abroad extensively and don’t have a clear basis for comparison can be tongue-tied when asked to explain what exactly makes a non-sprawl city street “charming” or “cozy.” It’s telling that we have no widespread cultural vernacular for why classical urban settlements, which draw on millennia of intellectual background and corpuses of architectural knowledge, are pleasant. You know it sucks, but it’s hard to say exactly why. To someone with no training in architecture, it’s often experienced as a great, non-articulated existential malaise, like depression.
However, it’s been difficult to elucidate in specific physical terms what it is about suburbia that makes it so hostile to humanity. (The virtues of a private backyard are easily exaggerated it’s vacuous and isolated, and kids quickly outgrow it.)
The spontaneity of childhood in the courtyard, on the street, or in the square gives way to the managed, curated, prearranged “play-date.” Small wonder that kids retreat within the four walls of their house and lead increasingly electronic lives. There’s literally nowhere for them to go. For just one small example of many: life in a subdivision cul-de-sac keeps children from exploring and becoming conversant with the wider world around them, because it tethers their social lives and activities to their busy parents’ willingness to drive them somewhere. The destruction of the pedestrian public realm is not merely an economic or ecological absurdity it has real deleterious effects. I’ve written some in the past about how the predominant suburban design in the US is among the worst features of life here-viewed from the perspective of a European immigrant like me, at any rate.įar from posing a mere logistical or aesthetic problem, it shapes–or perhaps more accurately, it circumscribes–our experience of life and our social relationships in insidious ways.
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