Suburbs Without The Sprawl

Posted by: Nate Berg

24 October 2006 - 11:00am

Joel Kotkin looks to Reston, Virginia, and other suburban villages as the new way for America to handle an increasing population without succumbing to the negative aspects of traditional sprawl.

"Despite their unrelenting march to the peripheries, Americans remain deeply uneasy about its social and environmental impacts. The New Urbanists are correct in one important aspect: many suburbanites express a real yearning for the type of social cohesion created by authentic places."

"Clearly we need a planning model that embraces both the need for community and our continuing desire for privacy, space, and autonomy. We call our model the Suburban Village. Individually these villages would be self-sustaining communities—vibrant hubs—offering a variety of economic, cultural, and social benefits. Nationally we see the potential for a network of such communities—an archipelago of villages—that if smartly designed and fully wired would eliminate the need for unnecessary commutes, provide a better quality of life for residents, and create opportunities for the preservation of open space."

Full Story: Toward a New Archipelago

Source: Metropolis Magazine, October 11, 2006

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Reasonable, If

Submitted by Michael Patrick on Wed, 10/25/2006 - 08:18.

This "Suburban Village" sounds like a reasonable idea...

if public policy makers choose this as an alternative to and not a replacement of downtown-/TODism and the status quo's better elements, with those outside Kotkin's cited "80 percent" not marginalized as an ignorable, irrelevant population segment as they sometimes have been; and
if these "self-sustaining villages" are actually self-sustaining villages, not the same, old 2-DU/ac residential subdivisions with commuter streets and sprawling across good farmland, watersheds, etc., and with walls and/or tree-branch streets impeding access to the "community"'s cultural/commercial/recreational centers, but rather with physical forms actually allowing for
- home businesses (and tolerance for related neighborhood impacts),
- pedestrian access (how can a school be a focal point if kids can't walk there?),
- neighborhood parks,
- choices of housing types and lot sizes (including small ones--this is a "village," right?), and
- the stated "opportunities for the preservation of open space" (sorry, but I'm not sure Reston is much of an example in this respect).

Hmmm, realistic? On second thought, this "Suburban Village" idea sounds like a justification for outlying, leapfrog development, at least in the near term, before this supposed explosion of telecommuting. Nice idea overall, but, until driving to a physical office becomes unnecessary, the "Suburban Village" will function as "Bedroom Village."