Global Suburbanisms: Beyond the White Picket Fence

Q: How do you see design fitting into discussions of suburbanization and governance?

Well, take the North American suburb. It’s important to realize that this world is created at the planning scale. The design basically follows. Space is produced in a particular form by particular governance processes, by metropolitan governments that lay out the space, build the highways, create the subdivisions. The land is subdivided, the lot size is determined, the lot size determines a certain design: will it be a ranch-style home or a bungalow? You can pretty much lay that out the entire way. The important thing has in the past been that scale.

What we now have are interesting conversations about retrofitting suburbia. The single-family home is often considered unreformable; once there’s a single-family home on a single lot, it’s basically untouchable for all kinds of reasons. But then there could be design ideas about how to start from the individual lot outward, to think differently about that space.