Sprawled Out: The Search for Community in the American Suburb

METROBURBIA, USA: Community-building and "Intersubjectivity"

Asphalt, concrete, parked cars, and -- benches notwithstanding - - no life.

From the excellent METROBURBIA, USA, by Paul K. Knox:

The basis of both individual lifeworlds and the collective structure of feeling is intersubjectivity: shared meanings that are derived from the lived experience of everyday practice. An important part of the basis for intersubjectivity is the routinization of individual and social practice in time and space. A positive and distinctive sense of place stems in large part from routine encounters and shared experiences that make for intersubjectivity. This requires plenty of opportunities for informal, casual meetings and gossip; friendly bars and pubs and a variety of settings in which to purchase and/or consume food; street markets; a variety of comfortable places to sit, wait, and people-watch; a sense of ease with changing seasons; and, above all, a sense of belonging, affection, hospitality, vitality, and historical and cultural continuity: not the attributes that anyone associates with American suburbia.

Suburban strip malls: There's no "there" there

Franklin's own Shoppes at Wyndham Village -- Good news: A handy Target store! Bad news: In no danger of being named one of the Great Places in America

Retrofitting Suburbia on suburban strip malls:

At best, the promise of freedom inherent to the road and the promise of self actualization promoted by consumerism endow the strip with the capacity to satisfy a broad range of individual needs and desires. At worst, the collective aspirations expressed by the commercial strip speak of the willing suppression of local identity by national systems of corporate investment and mass consumption.

Creating Neighborhood Capital from Strip Malls | Planetizen

This is a concept being talked about at dense urban levels - but what about suburban strip malls? Can it be possible to convert dead or dying strip malls into community-building assets?

"It's very clear to me that the rules have changed and that it's very possible for somebody who has a really good idea to create an audience that can sustain that idea if it’s really well branded and really cunningly conceived," says Sherman. "But developers, for the most part, are not those types of people. They're in a different silo."

From: Creating Neighborhood Capital from Strip Malls | Planetizen:

Strip malls probably don’t fit into the definition of progressive urbanism for most people, but maybe they should. Well, maybe after a little organizational tweaking.

The small retail centers are ubiquitous in American cities, with their generic shops selling donuts or beer, offering dry cleaning or key-cutting. They're a part of many neighborhoods, but not necessarily an essential part. They bring goods and services to the area, but are ultimately of the greatest benefit to their owners – off somewhere cashing monthly rent checks from the moms and pops running the little businesses within. That model can change, according to Ava Bromberg. She's a PhD student in UCLA's School of Public Affairs who is developing a new vision for small retail centers that would transform them into engines of social and economic capital at the neighborhood level.

"It's part mall, part business incubator, part cultural hub," says Bromberg. The idea is to overlay a distributed ownership model on the typical strip mall that enables the value created by this commercial real estate to cycle back and benefit the neighborhood it serves. Consumers are also business owners, property shareholders, and decisionmakers. In this model, the building goes from being a cash cow for one owner to being a bank for the community, into which investments can be made and from which public benefits can be funded.

But it's also about activating disused retail space for more than retail. Bromberg wants the spaces to partner with local institutions like hospitals and universities to create learning environments and job training opportunities on-site. The idea is to retool the existing neighborhood infrastructure to serve unmet needs within the community.

Read the rest at Planetizen.

Institutionalizing sprawl and looking past existing infrastructure

Shoppes at Wyndham Village: Fill vacant space or BUILD MORE?

So, the Sentry grocery store at the corner of Rawson and 76th has announced that it will close by the end of October. The store was superfluous (throw a rock in Franklin and you'll hit a Pick n Save; I have three to choose from in proximity to my house), but the property will be a blight as long as it stands vacant. Across the street from that soon-to-be-empty building are a vacant coffee shop and vacant martini bar. The Shoppes at Wyndham Village outbuildings are largely vacant as well.

Meanwhile, at the Economic Development Commission meeting last night, I suggested that we focus at least part of our efforts on nurturing small, local businesses to fill some of these vacancies and encourage rehabs and retrofits. A fellow (and long-serving) commissioner responded to my suggestion by gravely reminding all assembled  that "our mission is development of tracts of land to attract business."

Really?

I will argue in a series of subsequent posts (and at the next EDC meeting) that our mission must be much, much broader than that. Stay tuned.

Making Suburbia More Livable for Retirees

From the decidedly pedestrian-unfriendly layout of Shoppes at Wyndham Village to the habit many city administrators have of referring to bike and walking paths as no more than frivolous "recreation facilities" (more on that when I post about the first Franklin Trails Committee meeting), Franklin can be a tough place to function if you happen to be elderly, differently-abled, or without a vehicle.

Ironically, some of the Franklin politicians who roll their eyes (and I mean that literally) at suggestions that we make walkability and accessibility a priority are themselves approaching (or already in) their golden years. And who can forget the large contingent of Franklin's elderly community that Casper Green mobilized to attend a public meeting supporting developer Mark Carstensen's Shoppes at Wyndham Village despite a site plan distinctly unfriendly to the elderly? 

This past weekend's Wall Street Journal features a story about how many suburbs are "retrofitting" to better serve their aging population - and retaining that population, who otherwise would leave for Florida or Arizona retirement communities. And this means keeping our older neighbors in the mainstream and participatory in community life, not concentrated in "elderly housing facilities."

Why can't we "age in place"?

Sitting in his office in Fayetteville, Ga., Ken Steele, the town's mayor, is poring over a local street map, explaining how this suburb of Atlanta hopes to transform itself into a "lifelong community"—and why neighborhoods across the country need to do the same.

"Every small community has the same problem," says Mr. Steele, age 69. "We want residents to be able to age in place, to meet their needs…here, without having to move away."

To that end, he indicates on the map how a new street grid could reduce traffic in the center of town and help Fayetteville become a "walking community"; how new town homes and condominiums, in an area where single-family homes have long been the norm, could give residents of all ages more housing options; and how new greenways and parks could promote social interaction.

"Lenders, landowners, developers—they're all talking now," Mr. Steele says of the project. "We really can't afford to wait."

That sense of urgency is understandable. The nation's sprawling suburbs—home to as much as half of the U.S. population and more than 30 million people age 55-plus—may have been a good place to grow up. But the suburbs are proving a tough place to grow old.

Indeed, as the country ages, suburbia's widely assumed benefits—privacy, elbow room, affordability—tend to vanish. Maintaining yards and homes requires more effort; driving everywhere, and for everything, becomes expensive and, eventually, impossible. (Research shows that men and women who reach their 70s, on average, outlive their ability to drive by six and 10 years, respectively.)

Even something as simple as the absence of sidewalks can discourage older adults from walking through their neighborhoods and seeing other people.

Suddenly, "all that privacy that drew people to the suburbs in the first place can become isolation," says Ellen Dunham-Jones, associate professor of architecture and urban design at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

One answer, of course, is to leave. Active-adult communities and assisted-living facilities exist to mitigate some of the drawbacks of growing old on a cul-de-sac. That said, the vast majority of older adults don't want to move. Fully 85% of surveyed individuals age 50-plus told AARP, the Washington-based advocacy group, that they wish to remain in their communities for as long as possible. And those communities, invariably, want the same thing: a strong mix of ages, interests and abilities among residents.

Perhaps a better solution, and one finding favor in more circles, is the idea of "retrofitting" suburbia and developing, as seen on the drawing board in Fayetteville, "lifelong communities." Such projects typically involve taking a neighborhood or site within an existing town or suburb and creating a compact, walkable community—one with alternatives to single-family homes, such as condominiums or row houses. Ideally, older residents in large homes will have the option of downsizing and remaining in a community where they can access restaurants, shopping and other amenities and services on foot.

Read the rest at: Making Suburbia More Livable for Retirees - WSJ.com.

Panera Bread succeeds by creating faux-"third places" in the suburbs

In the absence of true public spaces and third places in modern suburbs, Panera Bread finds an opportunity. Bring your laptop.

Mention Panera Bread and fans are as likely to praise the free Wi-Fi as they are to gush about the Asiago cheese bagels. And that, execs at the $2.6 billion restaurant chain say, is the point. While its competitors scale back on upscale ingredients, trim portion sizes, and create value menus, Panera is selling fresh food and warm bread at full price, and encouraging customers to linger. That recipe is succeeding.

Read the rest at: Rising Dough: Why Panera Bread Is on a Roll | Fast Company.

Replacement store, replacement surface at Shoppes at Wyndham Village

On my way to Target to buy some of the new remastered Beatles CDs (buy two, get a $5 gift card - whatta deal), I noticed work being done to convert the now-shuttered Sendik's to a Pick n' Save, and that the parking lot is being resurfaced - a welcome development after the buckling and heaving that occurred soon after the first impervious surface tried in vain to conquer a former rain-absorbing wetlands area.

The parking lot resurfacing must be a TOP SECRET project. See that guy in the vest and hard hat on the left side of the photo? He's walking all the way across the parking lot to ask me why I'm taking pictures.

I should have suggested they use a giant camouflaged tarp if they're concerned. Ferch's customers: Avert your eyes.

Because we should know better by now: Rehabilitating suburbia

Dwell Magazine and Inhabitat.com sponsored a REBURBIA Suburban Design competition recently, challenging entrants to reinvent suburbia. Perhaps make crapulent, hostile landscapes (like the one above) more safe, useful, and conducive to community.

In a future where limited natural resources will force us to find better solutions for density and efficiency, what will become of the cul-de-sacs, cookie-cutter tract houses and generic strip malls that have long upheld the diffuse infrastructure of suburbia? How can we redirect these existing spaces to promote sustainability, walkability, and community? It’s a problem that demands a visionary design solution and we want you to create the vision!

Clearly, wholesale razing of asphalt-moated structures is not practical, so solutions that rehabilitate the mistakes of the past are especially intriguing. Hence, "Reburbia."

A series of before and after drawings by Galina Tahchieva immediately caught my eye. The restaurant pad below should be very familiar to residents of Franklin and surrounding communities. Unfortunately, the "new" Golden Corral restaurant slated for 27th Street - yes, the 27th Street for which the city has expensively established "design standards" - looks almost exactly like the "before" picture below. I guess we'll fix it later.

This set of simple infill techniques represents a sprawl repair toolkit to retrofit the 5 building prototypes that define Suburbia. These iconic detached structures and their parcels, via modest interventions, have the potential to contribute to a more diverse, cohesive urban fabric within a walkable and identifiable public realm.

Rather than being demolished, these existing buildings are re-purposed and/or lined with new structures using renewable technologies and energy-efficient practices, often taking advantage of Suburbia’s typically excessive setbacks and parking lots.

A drive-through restaurant pad becomes part of a main street, but largely concealed from it, with perimeter liner buildings added along the edges of its parking lot. A strip center is converted into a recycling center with a green roof and 2 side-wings with solar panels framing a courtyard that reaches to the sidewalk. A gas station remains in place while growing a two-story corner store-office extension at a busy intersection to help screen it. A suburban ranch house is permitted to utilize its deep front yard to add a wing with additional bedrooms, a home office, or a rental outbuilding that creates a courtyard with the existing home and defines a livelier street frontage at the sidewalk. Even the ubiquitous McMansion can be converted into senior housing when a five-bedroom/ three-car garage home yields a 10 room-9 bathroom facility for seniors and a caretaker.

See the other 4 building types at Urban Sprawl Repair Kit: Repairing The Urban Fabric « ReBurbia.

Placeless places: More on "The Shoppes at Wyndham Ghost Town"

A follow-up to my post about contrasting sunny Sunday afternoons at Ferch's Malt Shoppe locations in two quite different environments. A comment was left by "Anon":

I was there on 8/3 with my family at 8 PM at night. Target looked like they were ready to close then, the Starbucks and Food Court were already closed, and it seemed like a ghost town in there. We went to Ferch's, and there was like 10 people in there when we started, and another 10 people came in while we were having our desserts.

I think you have to give it time. There's nothing there to attract people to that location yet. Huntington Learning Center's looked like they were finished with drywall, and Cousins and the haircut place were closed.

I remember when the Target in New Berlin was like a ghost town the first year or so as well. The same with the Target in Oak Creek. I'm happy that it's a Target, and not a Wal-Mart.

It might have been interesting to see the Greendale Ferch's at the time "Anon" describes above; Monday evening, still light out, perfect temperature -- the park right next door, a neighborhood in safe walking distance, etc. I don't imagine a "ghost town," do you?

And, yes, we can be relieved that Wal-Mart -- whose location on 27th Street is shabbily maintained at best -- is not there.

The point is, the interlocking conditions I described in my previous post contribute to a vibrant public space that is not subject to "spurts" of 10 people or so who arrive for a single purpose and then get back in their car and leave. There is nothing of use anywhere near the Shoppes at Wyndham Village's Ferch's; it's an imitation of a replica -- where the Greendale Ferch's is explicitly designed to evoke long-departed downtown "malt shops," it works because it is part of a network of pre-planned civic and commercial amenities that rise above the level of a single developer's desire to "do a deal." The Franklin Ferch's duplicates the decor, the menu, the signage, but ignores everything else that makes for a regular flow of people in and around their site.

It's a poor site plan, driven, evidently, by the rigid requirements of Target. That vast frontage of asphalt parking is nonnegotiable for a reason; Target (and most big boxes) manipulate their site plans to discourage relationships with other commercial buildings in proximity.

So, while the Shoppes at Wyndham Village's (apparently abandoned) website claims...

The layout has been thoughtfully planned to include outdoor seating areas featuring decorative benches, lighting and abundant pedestrian paths offering connections for ideal access to the stores. Imagine carrying out your shopping errands at your favorite retailers and being able to meet friends for coffee and lunch at Franklin’s finest shopping experience – The Shoppes at Wyndham Village.

... it is abundantly clear by a cursory glance at the site plan above that this is little more than a standard Target big box location with out-buildings; nothing will cross that red border up there, even though extending structures along Lover's Lane to nearly meet Target would have created a much more useful, interconnected space. 

Go there while the weather is perfect and sit on a "decorative bench" in the treeless, open expanse and see if you don't feel like asking yourself, as I did, "what am I doing here?" It's practically hostile space.

"Thoughtfully planned"? No, this is the sort of character-free development that used to pop up near highway interchanges and still do as part of "Edge City" developments, which are "placeless" concentrations of business, shopping, and entertainment outside a traditional urban area in what had recently been a residential suburb or semi-rural community. Think Bluemound Road in Brookfield.

But this is right in the middle of Franklin, across the street from a subdivision full of McMansions. Wholly inappropriate to its surroundings because it was designed as though situated right off I-94.

I should also point out that when I looked in the windows of the outbuilding where the Sport Clipz "haircut place" sign is (see below), I saw an empty shell; there aren't even partitions delineating interior spaces. We're talking about frameworks and facades over dirt and gravel, not commercial spaces ready for occupancy.

Target will do just fine. But how do you generate more commercial growth when little or no care appears to be taken in creating a physical environment that is conducive to commerce and integrated into its surrounding community?

But we lose much more than commercial opportunities when we allow -- and even encourage -- development that is so ludicrously out of human scale. As Stacy Mitchell writes in her book, Big Box Swindle:

In the suburbs, life takes place in a series of fragmented, single-purpose zones -- home, office, shopping -- that stretch indefinitely toward the horizon, with no obvious geographic center or outer boundaries. This lack of well-defined community has a powerful negative influence on civic participation, according to Bowling Alone author Robert Putnam, as does the amount of time one spends in the car each day.

UPDATE: Greg Kowalski at Franklintoday.com speculates on possible new Shoppes at Wyndham Village tenants based on MidAmerica Real Estate's web site.They've updated their Wyndham Hills listing and PDF flier to replace Sendik's with Pick n' Save - could the other notations indicate actual pending tenant announcements?

What happens when you build to serve vehicles exclusively? The Shoppes at Wyndham Ghost Town

Yesterday, a beautiful Sunday (low humidity, mid-seventies), I traveled to Franklin's Shoppes at Wyndham Village to see how this relatively new component of the local "social ecosystem" was being utilized on such a perfect day.

The answer? Let's just say that all that were missing were tumbleweeds.

ABOVE: Ferch's in Franklin.

Blame the economy? The fact is, at that very hour (about 5pm), while the Shoppes at Wyndham Village version of Ferch's Malt Shoppe was completely customer-free, the original Ferch's in Greendale (see photo below, taken 45 minutes later) was bustling with people - as is typical - inside and out.

Two Ferch's on the same sunny afternoon. What's the difference?

I saw vehicles come and go from Target at the Franklin Shoppes complex on a fairly regular basis. From the looks of it, these were all fairly joyless excursions; single-purpose errands for practical necessities (though one guy came out with a flat-screen TV and a huge smile). Everyone took straight-line courses from their vehicle to the Target entrance and back again. Occasionally you would see someone emerge with a coffee cup, having stopped at Target's in-store Starbucks.

ABOVE: Ferch's in Greendale.

A different story at the original Greendale Ferch's. There is a shaded, building-enveloped courtyard; on this afternoon, every table save one or two were occupied. Young families, elderly couples, groups of teens, etc., all shared this comfortable space and casually interacted. People walked between the courtyard tables and the adjacent park and coffee shop (the small neighboring stores were mostly closed for the day), stopping periodically to greet neighbors and acquaintances. And almost everyone I passed said hi to me as well.

An adjacent park, welcoming "outdoor room" courtyard environment, pedestrian- and bike-friendly local streets, and attached neighborhood make Ferch's of Greendale a vibrant public space. And commercially lucrative.

Back at Wyndham Village, I noticed a couple of random benches on islands in the asphalt sea. I sat on one for a while -- long enough to contemplate exactly where I was. Why would anyone want to sit right here, in the middle of... nothing? What would bring a person to this particular bench in a strip mall like this, so obscenely out of synch with any sense of human scale?

Benches?

Judging by the quizzical looks emanating from the windows of vehicles whizzing past me, I was not the only one wondering what I was doing there.

 

ABOVE: Ghost town.

I walked the entire Shoppes complex via the exposed strip of sidewalk; no enclosing "street wall" of mature trees and/or buildings to create a comfortable walking environment. I was the lone person on foot in the entire area for the entire period of my visit; again, cars passed me and looked me over as though I was dressed at the lead guitarist for KISS (which I was not). Needless to say, no one said "hi." After all, what the heck was I doing there?!?!

No, the people of Greendale are not inherently friendlier than the people in Franklin. This is an example of how our built environment creates us as much as we create it. Build formless, uninspiring, unwelcoming commercial spaces and you create single-purpose destinations that discourage the sorts of interaction and "lingering" that is crucial to the success of local (i.e. non-big box) businesses -- and, by extension, you strangle local economic livelihood. Who's in a hurry to lease space here as opposed to any other anonymous strip mall?

By contrast, Greendale offers a superior physical environment that attracts people whether or not they need to shop. The small, locally-owned businesses benefit, and a real community is maintained. 

More on this later ...

More photos at: Shoppes at Wyndham Ghosttown - a set on Flickr: