Subdivisions
The subdivision process imposes rules that result in a lack flexibility, convoluted urban design, and diced up landscapes.
The Urbanist
For many decades now, most communities in the United States have grown as a series of subdivisions, built on a tried and true formula. It might be time to change the math.
Strong Towns
Zoning ordinances are one of the most powerful ways local governments regulate development, and they should work to implement the policies in a Comprehensive Plan Update.
PlanIt - Metropolitan Council
The Wine Country wildfires destroyed Coffey Park, a subdivision within the urban boundaries of the Bay Area's fifth largest city, and outside of the state's severe fire hazard zones. But the cause wasn't a mystery to wildland fire scientists.
Los Angeles Times
Columbus is surprisingly suburban, given that the city is the largest in population in the state of Ohio. Maybe that perception comes from the fact that it’s also the largest in size in the state?
The Columbus Dispatch
The Arizona Daily Sun details the curious case of subdivision development, private utilities, and skyrocketing utility rates that linger as an effect of the last development cycle of boom and bust.
Arizona Daily Sun
According to researchers and practitioners in the United Kingdom, there's still room for another urbanism. Chuck Wolfe digests the recent Summit on Plot-Based Urbanism from Glasgow.
myurbanist
A new study that examines the contributing and enabling factors that led to high foreclosure rates, neighborhood decline, and disparate impacts on low-income populations in the subdivision of Windy Ridge, near Charlotte, North Carolina.
Applied Geography
Nate Berg offers his take on the replicas of Western subdivisions that have come to define social status in the burgeoning economies of the Middle and Far East.
The Atlantic Cities
Agricultural spaces are increasingly being included in housing developments.
Landscape Architecture Magazine
Arizona's long-standing open range laws allow cattle to roam freely, but the state is now reconsidering the laws as residents of the West's suburban subdivisions are growing more frustrated by encounters with roaming cattle.
New York Times
A new themed subdivision is under development in South Carolina. But this is no golf course community. It's a cyclist oriented, car-free experiment called Bicycle City.
Architizer
This article from <em>GOOD</em> wonders whether farms could become the new cornerstone amenity in suburban residential communities.
Good
Inside this gated community in the L.A. suburb of Hemet, the recession is taking a tough toll and making life difficult for the families that had moved there for quiet calm.
Los Angeles Times
<em>Metropolis</em> presents a slideshow of photographs by artist Christoph Gielen, who photographs suburban developments from a helicopter.
Metropolis
This post from <em>BLDGBLOG</em> looks at the ghost of a planned but never realized subdivision on the outskirts of a Southern California exurb where only faint lines of unfinished roads remain.
BLDGBLOG
Feature
Nandita Godbole advocates for parks and greenspaces around Atlanta. But when faced with a struggle over keeping her own quarter-acre backyard open and free, she found she was powerless.
Thousands of subdivisions across the country have been abandoned mid-development by owners and developers hit hard by the economic recession. This video takes a tour inside one of these "zombie subdivisions".
CNN
A subdivision in Florida's Dade County is left half-finished, leaving early buyers to live in a ghost town.
The Miami Herald
A stalled housing development in a Los Angeles exurb meets the wrecking ball as completing the development became too unaffordable.
Los Angeles Times
