Skip to content

Commit

Permalink
Suburban nation WIP
Browse files Browse the repository at this point in the history
  • Loading branch information
@philc
philc committed Dec 30, 2024
1 parent 96f01a3 commit cc95413
Showing 1 changed file with 201 additions and 0 deletions.
201 changes: 201 additions & 0 deletions architecture/suburban nation - andres duany.md
View file
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
@@ -1,5 +1,11 @@
# Suburban Nation - Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Jeff Speck

## Gems

* "Americans may have the finest private realm in the developed world, but our public realm is
brutal. Confronted by repetitive subdivisions, treeless collector roads, and vast parking lots,
the citizen finds few public spaces worth visiting."

## Intro

* (Is "good growth" possible? NIMBYism is understandable because for most cities and suburban
Expand Down Expand Up @@ -36,3 +42,198 @@
* "Since most of this motion takes place in singly occupied automobiles, even a sparsely
populated area can generate the traffic of a much larger traditional town."
* There's a high pavement:building ratio.
* Sprawl is a result of well-intentioned public policies starting in the mid 1930s.
* Mortgage loans for 11M homes.
* Interstate highway program.
* Neglect of public transit.
* As people moved out to the suburbs, so did retail, and then offices, so they could be closer to
the people.
* Segregation of use through zoning became popular in the 1800s when factories were segregated from
residential. This improved cities, because it resolved incompatible use. But then segregation was
then inappropriately applied to all uses -- even compatible ones -- by city planners.
* In affluent areas, the sprawl can be executed with beauty, e.g. lots of greenery.
* "This raises a fundamental point: the problem with suburbia is not that it is ugly. The problem
with suburbia is that, in spite of all its regulatory controls, it is not functional: it simply
does not efficiently serve society or preserve the environment."
* "The virgin sidewalk -- the physical embodiment of sprawl's guilty conscience -- reveals the true
failure of suburbia, a landscape in which automobile use is a prerequisite to social viability."
* Planning codes are just words, no diagrams. They "have no clear picture of what they want their
communities to be. They are not imagining a place that they admire, or buildings that they hope to
emulate. Rather, all they seem to imagine is what they *don't* want: no mixed uses, no slow-moving
cars, no parking shortages, no overcrowding. Such prohibitions do not a city make."

## The devil is in the details (chap 2)

* "More than any other factor, the perception of excessive traffic is what causes citizens to ake up
arms against growth in suburban communities."
* (This is not unreasonable. While cars provide mobility, their side effect is noise, ugliness,
and a lack of peace and safety on the street. If these side effects can't be directly addressed,
given the nature of cars, then less traffic does make the town a lot nicer.)
* Sprawl has more traffic because more people are forced to take cars (avg 13 trips per household per
day) and the organization forces all traffic through a central road -- a collector.
* Traditional neighborhoods are organized as webs, which reduce demand on collector roads.
* Retail: corner stores vs convenience stores
* Retail in suburbia often takes the form of a loathed drive-in Quick Mart.
* A corner store, by contrast, is desirable and raises property values.
* They sell the same things. The difference is the "building typology." The corner store is built
like house in the same style as the neighborhood and is situated directly against the sidewalk.
Convenience stores are all glass, surrounded by asphalt, with a parking lot between the store
and the street. And usually harsh fluorescent lighting. It puts cares before pedestrians.the
* Shopping centers
* Main street is a superior model to shopping centers. On main st, the retail is on the ground,
and there can be apartments and offices above the retail. Parking is in the rear, in garages.
The architecture is harmonious with the town. People can choose to live in the same neighborhood
as their office.
* "Credit for many mian-street revivals is due to the National Trust for Historic Preservation's
Main Street Program, which provides funding and advice to communities across the country."
* (It's cool that this is a thing.)
* In the standard suburban office park, there's "offices and parking, but nothing to do at
lunchtime."
* Having offices on main street contributes to the viability of shops, because the workplace
provides daytime customers.
* Office parks are incredibly boring places to walk, because it's all parking lot. It's the worst
place to have a walking 1:1.
* Public open space requirements "have been reduced to a set of regulations that are primarily
statistical. These requirements say little about the configuration and quality of open space."
* Planning codes should provide as much detail and guidance for open space as they do for parking lots...
* Open space is often residual: it's made up of extra space between clusters of properties, rather
than pooled together intelligently.
* "Sports fields are often designed ease of maintenance rather than for accessibility. As a result,
they tend to be consolidated into excessively large parcels well beyond pedestrian range."
* Duany argues that curved streets and cul-de-sacs create a disorienting environment.
* (That sounds reasonable. But I would guess the intent is a more organic and interesting
landscape, where walking uncovers more behind the bend.)
* The original intention behind these designs seems to have been to discourage strangers cruising
around the neighborhood, to deter crime.
* To combat "boring endless vistas", streets on a grid can be slightly curved, so the view unfolds
as you travel down the street.
* Traffic calming: the practice of using roadway geometry to improve safety.
* "Drivers passing through a well-designed residential neighborhood are made to feel that they are
*borrowing* the street space from the people who live there."

## The house that sprawl built (chap 3)

* Private vs public realm
* "Americans may have the finest private realm in the developed world, but our public realm is
brutal. Confronted by repetitive subdivisions, treeless collector roads, and vast parking lots,
the citizen finds few public spaces worth visiting."
* Argues nimbys would embrace growth if they could be shown that it will provide them with a
gratifying public realm.
* On housing "clusters" within a subdivision: "there have always been better and worse
neighborhoods, and the rich have often taken refuge from the poor, but never with such precision."
* The traditional neighborhood was a social condenser. E.g. the housing type might transition
mid-block: apartments on both sides of the street, facing each other. Next to them, mansions on
each side of the street, facing each other.
* "A society is healthier when its diverse members are in daily contact with one another." It's
convenient if your doctor, teacher, and baby sitter are all within a reasonable distance.
* "In a neighborhood, people buy the community first and the house second. The more a place rsembles
an authentic community, the more it is valued, and one hallmark of a real place is variety."
* "The best way to create real variety is to vary ont the architectural style but the building type."
* Superficial variation is not sufficient. It will have a "cookie cutter" feel.
* Cites Georgetown as a good example: the architectural style is consistent, but it feels varied
because of the varied building types.
* "It is often the consistent use of a single style that makes the integration of different
building types possible."
* Mixed-use housing
* "Upstairs apartments [over retail] provide customers for the shops, activity for the street, and
nighttime surveillance for the neighborhood. They also represent one of the most economical ways
to provide housing, since the land and infrastructure costs are covered by the shops."
* Retail is usually only single story, and single story doesn't adequately define street space.
Apartments above the retail gives the buildings needed height.
* Affordable housing
* It should not look different from regular housing. "The last thing the poor need is a home that
stigmatizes them as such."
* "It should be distributed among market-rate housing as sparsely as possible in order to avoid
neighborhood blight and reinforce positive behavior." E.g. a 1-in-10 insertion rate.

## The physical creation of society (chap 4)

* "Community cannot form in the absence of communal space."
* "In the suburbs, time normally spent in the physical public realm is now spent in the automobile,
which is a private space as well as a potentially sociopathic device."
* Andres argues that driving around in "isolation chambers" has caused a decline in conversation,
politics, and getting along with others in the community.
* Why do people visit Disney Land? Partly it's because it actually provides a pleasant, pedestrian-friendly
public space that most people lake in their hometowns.
* Traffic design
* Streets have become "traffic sewers" rather than designed equally for car use and pedestrian
use.
* Streets were widened with the advent of the car to increase throughput, but this widening makes
them less friendly for pedestrians.
* Access requirements for fire departments are too onerous, and meeting these requirements
unreasonably compromises the neighborhood street design.
* "They put more weight on fire rescue than on the prevention of injury in general." Car
accidents are far more common and deadly than fires.
* Neighborhoods should be designed with narrow streets to encourage traffic calming.
* Speed limits signs don't work. People will not drive slowly unless they feel unsafe speeding.
* "The engineers' strict adherrence to their manuals is actually promising; rather than convincing
the engineers to fundamentally rethink their approach, we need only amend the manuals in order
to reform the profession."
* Prerequisites for street life
* Meaningful destinations easily accessible by foot.
* Eyes on the street: "in order to discourage crime, a street space must be watched over by
buildings with doors and windows facing it."
* Architectural enclosure: the buildings along the street should make the pedestrians feel like
they are "held within a space"; an outdoor living room.
* (It seems to me that there's a tension between feeling like you're in nature vs. an urban
setting. Taller buildings and narrow streets deliver a cozy urban feeling, but is this the only
way? Can the neighborhood instead feel like walking through a park?)
* Street trees
* When the houses themselves fail to create a well-defined space, because they're spaced too far
apart, evenly spaced street trees should be used. "The trees narrow the space and provide a
natural value that contributes to the pedestrian's sense of enclosure and comfort."
* Andres argues that landscape designers cluster trees in natural arrangements found in the
wilderness, because a row of trees would be too boring. But the trees don't do anything to
define space, so they're not helping the outdoor space feel more intimate or room-like.
* The problem with garages on the facades of houses: "architecture that fails to express the
presence of humans is unsatisfying to the pedestrian."
* Alleys are a useful dumping ground for all of the things which aren't neat. They allow the front
of the street to be clean.
* "By handling many of the neighborhood's underground utilities, alleys allow streets to be
narrower and to be planted with trees, which becomes difficult when water, sewer, gas,
electricity, cable, and telephone are all placing demands on the front right-of-way."
* "The endless repetition from lot to lot of the same house type makes walking utterly unrewarding."

## The American transportation mess (chap 5)

* Highways should connect towns but not pass through them. Cities should not grow along highways.
* In Western Europe, "most highways provide views of uninterrupted countryside."
* Induced traffic
* Adding more lanes causes people to drive more, such that in the long run, the traffic congestion
remains the same.
* The reason is that latent demand for taking more and longer trips is huge, and always saturates
new supply of traffic capacity.
* "Increased traffic capacity makes longer commutes less burdensome, and as a result, people are
willing to live farther and farther from their workplace."
* (Andres didn't seem to acknowledge that building more roads does give people what they want;
it's not wasted investment. If people can work farther away from their homes, their job options
are much improved.)
* People may demand driving because many aspects of it are a "free good." They don't directly pay
for roads, parking spots, and traffic infrastructure.
* "Government subsidies for highways and parking alone amount to between 8 and 10 percent of our
gross national product."

## Sprawl and the developer (chap 6)

* "If what you are selling is privacy and exclusivity, then every new house is a degradation of the
amenity. However, if what you are selling is community, then every new house is an enhancement of
the asset." - Vince Graham
* "When offered true community, buyers require no other amenity, not even location."
* Homebuilders are looking for gimmicks to differentiate their product against the competition. None
of them focus on the neighborhood's context enough to offer "community" as a selling point.

## The victims of sprawl (chap 7)

* Children lose their autonomy in suburbia; their mobility is to the edge of the subdivision.
* Typically, one parent has to become the parent's personal chauffeur (soccer mom).
* Cul-de-sac kid: "the child who lives as a prisoner of a thoroughly safe and unchallenging
environment."
* Andres argues that kids living in suburbs contribute to teen auto deaths (because they must drive
to achieve independence) and teen suicides, because of the isolating effect of suburbs.
* Driving skill declines with age. The dependence on autos makes the elderly "nonviable."
* "As they lose their driver's licenses, the location of that house puts them out of reach of
their physical and social needs."
* The ideal setup for the elderly i sa mixed use pedestrian friendly neighborhood.
* "Eighty percent of all suburban automobile trips have nothing to do with work at all, but are
short drives to places that used to be accessible on foot, such as shops, schools, parks, and
friends' houses."

0 comments on commit cc95413

Please sign in to comment.