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.
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