I also think that denser, cheaper, more compact typologies require more long-term planning to do well - to stop them from turning into the type of undesirables associated in previous decades with "public housing."
I don't think we're going back to mass public housing anytime soon. The state is broke (local, Federal and state governments). The best government will be able to do is empower not-for-profits and for-profit-developers to develop affordable products through tax credits and the like.
This is where Ole Bouman and Alex D'Hooghe were wrong in their "Suburbia After the Crash" project (yea, yea, before somebody here rubs it in my face, I know I collaborated on that project, but I still think they were wrong). That project was all about the romance of a return to mass civic architecture as a palliative to decline, but the reality is that there won't be a government bailout. There isn't going to a new new deal. This time, my suspicion is that diminishing resources, capacity and political will accompanying the diminishing expectations - real imperial decline, as opposed to merely hiccup on the way to greater, future capitalistic glory. People will have to define for themselves how they will live, instead of having a government to give form to their hopes and dreams.
The big ideas will have to come from people like us.. and the people who do smaller projects, or who have a say in city-level policies.
I think, by the way, that the other problem with Bouman/D'Hooghe's treatment is that the perspective was all wrong: they (I should say, we) were Ivy League elites who were going to provide solutions for the masses, through architecture, policy, analysis, whatever. Now, we are the masses, and the optimal solution set looks very very different.
I haven't read the article but I'm looking at the description on MIT's page:
"Such an event would surely impoverish the suburban lower middle-class that lives in what D’Hooghe refers to as ‘the Grey Goo’ – the massive tarmac between our cities’ centers and their leafier exurbs – and create ‘a new underclass eager to consume the rhetoric of fascist populism, thriving on anti-intellectualism, sectarianism, conquest abroad and repression at home."
I mean, I'm not going to say that there's not some of this going on with the far right in this country, but this kind of large generalizing really hurts our cause and doesn't inspire much confidence with the people that actually live in the "grey goo." I mean, maybe MIT actually did go out and really live and meet these people, I don't know, but I'm not sure they would write the same kind of pejorative stuff if they spent, say, a year living in a Passaic County, drank some beers with the locals, maybe hooked them up with some mopeds...
I'm sure a lot of the ideas in the white papers are great and, if implemented, would have a positive effect on people in these communities. What I'd like to know is where the implementation is? Like, would D'Hooghe be willing to relocate to Passaic for 10 years and see some of these proposals implemented?
Like you said Urban, it will largely come down to people doing smaller projects, be they developers, urban planners, architects, builders...
I personally have a bias for bottom-up strategies, but some level of top-down strategy will be essential. How do you feel about the proposals in the "white papers?" Are some of them feasible or is the work more speculative?
hm, if i can be cynical, i really hope you all maintain your interest in these issues as the economy picks up again.
the economy today is not the future, so i don't believe any of the extreme things going on right now are an indication of anything significant in the long run, even if some of the trends are interesting and in a perfect world should continue...
mass housing for the less privileged is not something i feel entirely comfortable with, especially when the govt does it. i spent a few years in such when a youth and can attest to the mixed benefits. it is a long argued topic so won't get into it here. more honestly, i don't think class issues are going to be the real defining point of our age. We are all in this together, more than ever before.
about suburbia, not channelling bruegmann, more my own work from days as phd student researching topic of suburbia and sustainability. It is possible the suburbs will be abandoned, but times have been worse than this and suburbia is still around. cars too. I do have an opinion on suburbia. I don't like it much, but i can see that it is a powerful urban typology, even more powerful now than ever as jobs have followed housing to the urban fringe. downtown is now a romantic place/idea but is not the automatic future and in many ways i can see governments wasting time and money trying to force the return of the city center, when it is more useful to consider the city as a whole thing, suburbs and all. i guess i just don't see this as an either/or proposition, nor even an us against them kind of problem. real solutions are I think going to be inclusive not something to be attacked in pieces, and probably not as a normative dream.
becoming less energy wasteful does not necessarily mean we will have to stop suburban patterns. It does mean major changes, but am not certain that we should assume dense urbanity is the answer. i live in tokyo and while it is train based and dense like you would not believe (33 million people in very small piece of land), it is hard to say with a straight face that this is a sustainable city.
anyway, downward mobility is possibly real but its solution will depend more on whether our governments decide to compete with places like china in making new energy tech and investing in education and tech research. i really do believe friedmann has it right on that point...
I don't think it is. There isn't really a national crisis mentality.. the recesson seems to be letting up, despite the fact that the economy will likely come to some type of stable equilibrium with high unemployment.
More importantly, can we afford it? In the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, we spent a measly $180 billion on an infrastructure stimulus and it nearly killed us getting that through Congress. China spent a trillion dollars on their stimulus, in the same interval, and they got national high speed rail and an interstate highway system out of it, not to mention something like 100 million new homes. We got some building weatherization and a bunch of feasibility studies.. maybe a fixed bridge or two.
The deficit is now 10.6% of GDP and rising - the highest it's been since 1945. It was 2.8% before WPA, rising to a peak of 4.8%. The only time the deficit has been higher as a proportion of GDP has been WWI and WWII, when we were a total war economy.
I think what happens to suburbia, how fast, will depend on fuel prices more than anything else. At work, we have a rhetorical scenario where we ask the question, what is gas prices were $20 a gallon (actually close to the real cost to the economy of a gallon of gas, before subsidies). In such a scenario (very possible at some point in the future), the suburbs are abandoned.
as an aside, on green competing with China (from here)
United States will be increasingly reliant on just one supplier, China, for elements known as lanthanides. Lanthanum, neodymium, dysprosium and other rare earth elements are used in products from high-capacity batteries and hybrid-electric vehicles to wind turbines and oil refinery catalysts.
China controls between 95 and 100 percent of the global market in these elements. And the Chinese government is reducing its exports of lanthanides to ensure an adequate supply for its domestic manufacturers. Politicians love to demonize oil-exporting countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, but adopting the technologies needed to drastically cut U.S. oil consumption will dramatically increase America's dependence on China.
fyi ck. I've been following the rare earth thing a little bit and there's apparently other deposits throughout the world that haven't been mined. Australia, Malaysia, Brazil, South Africa, Canada, and the US all have rare earth deposits. I'm speculating, but I imagine the reason so much of this stuff is mined in China is due to government interest, investment, and the ability to sidetrack environmental regulations (provided there are any). Also, I read an article awhile back that scientists at (I think) Berkeley had figured out a potentially cheap way to replicate some of the rare earth materials. There could also be deposits underneath the arctic and antarctic that will be accessible after global warming melts everything.
Anyway, a bit of a sidetrack.
right urbanist, the suburbs could concentrate more around a center where main railways are located.
I think what's important to remember is that a future without green energy, whatever that may be, is a future where we'll derive most of our energy from coal. I'm not a believer in "clean coal" as all the junk you scrub out of it ends up somewhere, but we're staring at a very real resumption of coal consumption if we can't get alternates up and running fast.
Jump, I hope you're right and things will "return to normal" but I'm not convinced that we've really escaped history. There have been similar long periods of relative quiet but eventually the old order becomes unsustainable and large changes occur. Predicting what those are has always been tough, but I think the assumption that the last 25 years have been "normal" isn't really accurate, right?
intotheloop, in a way the whole premise of this thread is to redefine what is "normal" based on a maybe more equitable relationship between resources, society and economy.
Jump has a point, but I see intotheloop's as well.
I see the last century as a period when we managed to stay just ahead our accumulating problems, allowing economic growth (until the 1930s), government bailouts (the Depression), total war, more economic growth, and finally credit expansion (borrowing more and more and more just to stay in place) when economic growth stalled in the 1970s, to substitute for real problem-solving. Meanwhile, the underlying resource problems and stuctural crises just kept on accumulating, even as the suburbs kept on expanding.
Now the butcher's bill is finally coming due, and the loan shark is broke.
The issue with suburbia isnt so much that it's an awful place to live or that it fails semiotically. It's that it's existing depending on two things: (i) high rates of economic growth (and accompanying high rates of resource utilization and employment growth) and (ii) the ability to borrow against future high rates of economic growth. If either the growth stalls (say 0% to 2% a year after inflation on a sustained basis, which is very possible) or financial intermediaton fails, then new suburban development fails. It's kind of that simple.
Of course the suburbs will remain in some form, but, again, a lot of that housing stock is reaching end-of-life, and unless both of the two conditions above come back with a vengeance, the capital will not be there to replace the loss inventory. This means that relatively fewer people will be living in those suburbs in the future than do now. More importantly, a lot fewer people will live in those 'burbs once the current residents age out, unless those two conditions come back?
Will something reverse this, and bring back strong (3%+) rates of economic growth for sustainable intervals of time (not just for a year or two at the end of this recession)? Sure, anything is possible, but currently there is no believable scenario in which they could happen. It would be based on factors we cannot or are not yet imagining... like a future technology that doesn't yet exist to fuel the next .dom boom. Friedman thinks that it's green/cleantech, but, right now, the Chinese are cleaning our clock in that arena. A lack of leadership in this country is rapidly transforming into the fixing of failure. Again, nobody will lend you two to five times your annual income to buy that suburban home unless the economy has real growth prospects.
Right, you can go all the way back to Smith or Marx, or look more recently at Hardt & Negri or Daimond and see that it's all based on finding new resources or technology to build up the next bubble. How long can this go on for?
So far, modern capitalism has been remarkably resilient in the face a lot of challenges. Market economies in some sense or another will continue to exist no matter what, the question is what we want those markets to look like. i.e. do we want a more "equitable relationship between resources, society and economy" as ck says or a more dynamic, growth driven economy. There's always the very real possibility that we can't "innovate" ourselves out of a rut, so do we prepare ahead of time and think of strategies to address stagnant growth or do we just hope new technologies and the market show us the way.
Urbanist, you mentioned on another thread the possibility of a manufacturing boom if and when China readjusts the value of the Yuan. There's also the possibility that biotech finally delivers on its promises
Predicting our demise by looking at dwindling resources is always tricky because it's hard to guess what there is left. Eventually, we'll run out of the things we need, but I'm not sure we're there yet. I agree that we've reached that point with certain resources, but others (like coal) have the potential to keep us growing and not force us to adapt much or change our ways for the better.
If there is another speculative boom, that will be a large driver of what urban forms become the new norm. I think we're all coming to the agreement that, in North America, there will have to be some sort of densification, both in suburbia and in larger cities, and the question of new typologies is really intriguing and could make for some interesting new architectures, both from the bottom-up and top-down.
Let's not forget to point out that obvious-- many people absolutely loathe their families. My family? I'd rather die in a fire than live with them for "10 years of the best part of my life."
not as many people as you think - and these kinds of living arrangements are on the rise.
interestingly, multi-generation households also represent "decline" - however, I think this trend suggests we might have to start rethinking how we design housing. already 16% of US households are multigenerational - and seem to be increasing among all demographics. this runs counter to what has been built over the past several decades - everything is focused on the individual, couple, or nuclear family to buy. there's little accommodation for a return to households that are starting to look a little more like they did before suburbanization.
what this could look like? a very common living arrangement especially in europe and the northeast for multi-generational households are duplexes where a parent lives in one unit and a child and their family lives in another. remember the "in-law" apartment everyone seemed to want a few years ago? a lot of older houses in my neighborhood were split up to house several generations - many have since condo-ized, but this housing stock exists in older neighborhoods - and
(one striking thing from that study is that individuals living alone rose from 1% in 1900 to %10 in 2010).
urbanist - you mention wealth transfer - I think this happens at greater frequency among the working poor and working class... at least a larger percentage of their income is spread among family members.
I don't think this is a "demise" so much as it's a transition. And I think Markuse is right.. we are going to become more like Europe before this is over. At some point, an economy based on growth-seeking behavior (through economic expansion, on the American model, or imperial conquest, on the European one) gives way to a different type of state - one with high rates of structural un- and under-employment, more of a focus on quality of life, and correspondingly diminished expectations that one will always do better than one's parents. Arguably, much of contintental Europe is alraedy there, and somehow we'll get there too. Remember, European countries have much higher rates of un- and under-employment, for the most part.
Unfortunately, the whole suburban development model is based around a particular theory of credit expansion whose underlying assumptions may no longer hold (that of high rates of GDP growth). Without credit expansion, there is no return to high rates of suburban growth. Simpy put, the math doesn't work.
btw, I do think that there will be a manufacturing boom and that the US is now suffering from too many people getting college degrees. With diminshed expectations, having a decent life at $15 an hour on a non-union assemblyline may not be a such a bad thing. It beats working at Wal Mart for $8 an hour. Or being unemployed from your $20 an hour job as a young architect. And at $15, the jobs will come back from places like China (where assembly jobs, after the required room and board, not just salary, are now coming in at $3 to $4 an hour, increasing at 20% a year). After taking into account the (much) higher cost of energy, property, and shipping (to reach an American market), $15 looks darn good..which is why GM exports Buicks from Lansing to China and Chinese conglomerates like Haier are investing billions in state-side plants in places like South Carolina.
On the manufacturing note, I'd like to add that the US is still the largest manufacturer in the world. The issue w/ manufacturing in the US is that much of it is mechanized, so the need for labor is pretty low. Even if there's a boom, it might be more like the dot.com boom, where we're provided with more employment opportunities than, say, the real estate boom. However, it's hard to see it bringing down unemployment on a mass scale. A situation where China raises the value of its Yuan would be helpful though for unemployment, in easing the deficit, and also helping to raise even more people out of poverty in China. All good things.
I agree that we're looking at unemployment around 8-12% for a long time, and there will need to be a safety net established to take care of more people. On the other hand, the issue of how to adequately finance that safety net is biting Europe in the butt right now, and we'll be facing a similar problem in the US sooner, rather than later.
That's interesting that 16% of US households are multi-generational, although it's not that surprising, considering how many people in my generation move back home after graduation. Isn't the number somewhere around 50%? While it wouldn't be very fun, I think I'd live with my parents if they lived around a large metropolitan area so I could save more money. Pooling resources like that makes a lot of sense to me. Again, I think examples in rapidly growing cities in developing countries could be instructive and offer some typological precedents. But there will undoubtedly be some new types of social organizations that will require new buildings.
"urbanist - you mention wealth transfer - I think this happens at greater frequency among the working poor and working class... at least a larger percentage of their income is spread among family members."
Well.. that and the million dollar beachfront condo a friend's dad just bought his favorite daughter ;)
I think suburban families will become small scale farmers, call it suburban farming. This idea I have comes from the much discussed concept of urban farming among architects. The suburbanites can truck the food into the city twice a week and sell it. (This will be how they supplement their incomes to afford their lifestyle, which will remain.)
But otherwise, I agree with jump. And I don't see my standard of living going down.
suburbia began in the 18th century and has been going since. suburbs in europe are surprisingly similar to those in usa, with a few more rail connections. same here in japan. the suburban typology changed constantly in last 200 years and will continue to transform not just go away.
possibly there will be more farming on them. but you know if gas prices go up, i see no reason to assume people will move to the center, especially when most economies are based in suburbia nowadays. that is true of places even like germany and holland, not just USA The jobs are not downtown anymore so why would the answer to high gas prices be to move farther from employment centers? isn't it more likely that suburbia will densify, or that families who now commute individually to jobs all over the city will change jobs so they can all commute to places closer to them? or even that employment centers will shift to be more diversified and decentralised to accomodate that scenario? i have no idea what will happen but the idealised downtown vision, the street-car suburb, or walkable community are all based on a time when only one family member worked or when everyone worked for the same company and thus could live together in company housing. those days are gone for the time being, so why assume old city patterns will return?
that seems a bit like wishful thinking to me and ignores the potential in existing cities in favor of nostalgia for the past. which is to me an enormous waste. we are supposed to be the next generation and all we got to say is we don't like how it is and want to go back to the future? a bit weak isn't it? surely we got more gumption than that in us...don't we?
right now the situation is not good in so many ways. but i think the real challenges are in the developing world not in usa or europe. it is in africa and india where populations are going to explode, not usa or europe. i suspect coming to terms with those growing populations and helping them to be sustainable is going to be more important than issues at home...
I was being half sarcastic about farming in the american suburbs, btw.
As jump mentions, developing nations with exploding populations are going to be facing the real challenges and have good chances of experiencing upward mobility because of it, not downward.
Its interesting how this conversation always turns back to "the developing world"...maybe its just a numbers game - that's where most people live. However, most, if not all of the people posting here do not live there.
Looking at this in the perspective of the Copenhagen Climate summit, it seems as though development and exploitation of labor and natural resources in the context of a "culture of economic growth" may be a zero sum game.
I think the important thing is to develop an architecture, infrastructure and society that is less contingent on endless growth, while we still have the resources. Scandinavia has its problems but might provide some good examples for a culture less based on "making it" and how this translates to the materiality of their being (cities, buildings, objects, recreation, etc).
What this architecture and urbanism will look like in the context of the USA is I think the most interesting point, given our present landscape.
but you never know strawbeary, farming at home may be very normal again! my mum has always had a food garden, though just for us. not enough to live on of course.
funny you mention scandinavia, markuse. peter hall did extensive research on the topic, and found the planners of stockholm in the post war years (who were following the ideals of howard's garden city in their own way) faced problems resulting directly from the fact that the residents of the city wanted to live in detached houses. and they did so, living in a manner completely contrary to the intentions of the planners. the relevant quote is in the middle of this page, but read the whole section if interested. it is fascinating to realise how long we as planners and architects have been dealing with these issues and how strong the desire is to own a home and to get to it by car. also fascinating that planners thought cars were for getting to work when in fact they were being used for everyday life more...which meant they were designing for completely the wrong things.
as far as the 3rd world goes, of course things must go there. usa population is going to grow a bit, but india's population will surpass china's in the next decades, and africa is also growing. unless we assume the morlock lifestyle we have left for the 3rd world is going to be enforced we are going to have to deal with the inequity. problems in the usa are small. europe too. by comparison. it will be interesting to see where it all goes, but my bet is that america will not change so much, frankly. or at least not until it becomes obvious that change is leading to a powerful benefit. that could be some time from now, the way things are going. remember the switch from whale oil to kerosene and then gasoline was incredibly long. decades not years. and that was a crisis switch...
I think kazys is right that there is a level of hypocrisy when we entirely dismiss suburbia as unsustainable, when in fact, what enables the great global cities to survive is an economy based on exclusivist levels of consumption.
Publicly funded housing for artists - portfolio required to get in - with live-work spaces that were delivered with minimal finishes, and some aspects of communal governance.
The non-profit developer cobbled together city arts funds, city urban development funding (CDBG) and then got tax credit financing to make the whole thing work. The local community of artists actively worked for the project for at least 5 years through many ups and downs. It's in the downtown and provides only a .35 parking ratio on-site.
Like most recent affordable housing, it exemplifies Urbanist's original post in a couple of ways: a huge amount of work was required to get it done in relation to the number of units provided (and when viewed in light of the need); it also involves redistribution, as the tax credit program is basically a way for corporations to write down profits and thus reduce their taxes and there was substantial philanthropic giving involved as well.
Although the architecture starts from a modern ideal of social betterment and spacial interest, it comes our a lot messier than 90 (bauhaus) or even 50 (team X) years ago because it responds to the complex but invisible financing and political process.
"the relevant quote is in the middle of this page, but read the whole section if interested. it is fascinating to realise how long we as planners and architects have been dealing with these issues and how strong the desire is to own a home and to get to it by car."
I mean, the article is pretty stellar. It does mention something that I've tried to explain to many people that if you want to talk about shadow governments and massive conspiracies aimed towards manipulating the population... don't look towards the military, the vice (special police[FBI, CIA or even vice departments at local police stations]) or even elected officials, just head to your planning department!
A lot of people fail to realize the intense amount of power planners and related bureaucrats actually hold. The name "planner" ought to make a pretty clear hint.
But this is what upsets me the most (and there are more than enough examples in this thread)... is that planners, architects and even engineers are not honest or transparent about their planning. Or even worse, when they assume with modus operandi is what everyone wants.
And... this really is a very controversial, even hypocritical confounding factor. Many communities, especially those who have the funding, hire or have expanded their planning departments over the last two decades for the simple fact that many of these communities are not simply happy with what they have.
And, with the exception of a few historic areas and a few major cities, it is pretty easy to guesstimate (bad word) what the structure, layout and habits of a community affluent enough to afford a planning department.
Key point: They recognize they are not able to decipher or create to do this within the context of their current community or their current government. Two things that happen-- they are given textbook design examples regurgitated from ramblings of ramblings about Le Corbusier (sorry, architects!) or they are given more of the same in better wrappers (ugh, planners!). Logically, you would think this would be the other way around but sadly not the case.
What these communities aren't usually given is options-- lots and lots of options. Those options are expensive to formulate, expensive to disseminate and even more expensive to test! But that is the whole reason planners should be employed!
And, mostly, that brings me to my point. You link to an article about complications and implications of top-down planning, cities in economic turmoil and revolt and then the institutionalization of transportation options into developing options in TOD city-suburb destinations. I do not know how you make this magical leap from "Paris restructuring growth" to "strong the desire is to own a home and to get to it by car."
Either case, I do realize I started this suburb versus urban debate in part.
I was merely suggesting that given no other changes to budget, the only way to to increase or stabilize living conditions is by eliminating transportation as an expense.
While transportation is key to the economy, it does not or is not always key to someone's personal economy. Unless of course, that person does make significant amount of income through actually facilitating transportation (taxi, delivery or individuals who have to work at sites).
As much as transportation and cars are a cornerstone to our economy, other things like eating, drinking, buying clothes and watching movies are also a big part of our economy. While these things have to be shipped around before someone can buy a mojito at a bar or a shirt at target, the actual people buying said shirts or mojitos do not necessarily have to travel to that location by car nor do the employees who sell said products.
Part of the issue I think with urban versus suburban is how ingrained cars are into the America (and by extension) first-world psyche. It seems like cars are the ultimate goal for many people-- and like any advertising group, there's probably an unfair target demographic.
In any event, if you sit down and actually analyze a primetime tv show... they are so staggeringly unrealistic in the depictions of suburbia it is not even funny. And marketing people aren't afraid to admit that these shows are often nothing but product vehicles for advertisers.
What I am trying to get across is if cars are so great, why do car companies pay between $3-5 million per season to get exclusive product placement spots in series? Between $120-350k per 30 second commercial? Some of these TV series are even rewritten just to have the ability of demo'ing products on TV?
We have an enormous saturation of automobiles in TV and in media And more often than not, it is in a positive light. From NASCAR to children's movies to commercials, we have this intentional and crafted depicting of a life of nothing more than automobiles.
Would this discussion still be the same if Ford, Toyota, Dodge et cetera wasn't paying roughly 20 million dollars a week a piece to tell you how great cars are?
That was to drive a point about the continue not-technically-illegal environmental racism that exists.
But it was moreso referencing Ihlanfeldta & Scafidi's "Black Self-Segregation as a Cause of Housing Segregation: Evidence from the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality." A landmark data survey that empirically demonstrates racial self-segregation as a factor in housing choices and purchases. It is a practice known as "affinity" -- even outside a legal construct, segregation occurs at a macro level even amongst diverse groups of individuals who may share nothing else in common other than ethnicity or race.
For a conflicting view, Kassie Freeman's
"African American culture and heritage in higher education research and practice" eloquently states in the chapter titled 'Self segregation (pp. 120ish-140ish)' that self-segregating and self-organizing groups on college campus is more attributed to whites avoiding social confrontations and challenges in power where as black students are often pressured by other block students and organizations to maintain racial identity. In both cases, both groups suffer from the challenges to adjusting to a environmental culturally different and socially alienating.
For both reasons, intragroup relations often fail to materialize past a superficial point resulting in "collective memory." Outside of a forced environment, many people result to seeking out peers and familials in their affinity group rather than challenging the respective norm of such affinity groups.
In which case, it can be viewed that mountain states (who have relatively low African-American populations) maybe destinations for individuals who see affinity and self-segregation as potential pluses to a new home in a remote area.
Of course, if you want me to cite more sources on race relations in the US from noted Black American authors... I can gladly litter this entire page of appropriate uses of the N word. In which case quoting what someone else is saying (even hypothetically), the use is just and ethical.
i disagree. there is no need to promulgate bad taste simply because someone else has.
if interested in race and suburbia there are a number of fantastic books on the subject out there, many of them exploring the cliches we tend to maintain about segregation . i recommend this review of several recent books by margaret O'Mara.
not sure if you were addressing the question to me, unicorn slaughter, when you wrote "You link to an article about complications and implications of top-down planning, cities in economic turmoil and revolt and then the institutionalization of transportation options into developing options in TOD city-suburb destinations. I do not know how you make this magical leap from "Paris restructuring growth" to "strong the desire is to own a home and to get to it by car."...
but, if you were, it is not an article it is a book, the city is more about stockholm than paris, and the leap is simple. planners wanted density, the swedes wanted detached homes, and they bought them in spite of the planners making ideal communities with towers and train lines (Hall says this on the linked page). more dramatic, the planners planned for people to use the trains to commute downtown, but residents were already commuting laterally to nearby communities instead, so the rail system did not reflect real transportation desires...
i don't think it was a conspiracy, just a built-in problem with the time-scale of planning and the problem of conventional wisdoms driving policy...
in any case, this is a tangent, and not so important. i guess it is just a good warning to be careful of what we think we know. conventional wisdom is a dangerous thing to believe in...but usually it is all we have time to learn, especially in architecture school....
On page 342, those suburban satellites failed from your interpretation.
Right after it says where Swede wanted the new detached homes. The over supply led to low-rents where perceived social miscreants (alcoholics, immigrants et cetera) moved quickly into the new suburbs. A rise in blight (vandalism, grafitti) and social breakdown lead to the abandonment of said idea by Swedes.
The Paris example is noted because the Parisians who wanted both the Stockholm Plan and Paris settled on a mixture of the two. Despite budgetary problems, suburban-styled city centers were built on parallel running transportation corridor (by road and rail).
What makes the Paris plan so appealing was that the fundamentals of the plan were clearly spelled out to private developers (and the private sector) what to expect in the plans.
Then the author of this article reverses train of thought again and says that Swedish single-family homes were expanding. And the lastly ends the chapter with saying that all of these areas shifted back into urban schemes and massive urban development after the sucessive oil and energy crisis of the 1970s and 1980s.
There's even one part where the author makes the claim that suburb neighborhoods in London not only predate the automobile but London itself.
And if you wanted to consider the East End (Havering was technically a different state) or Westminster as suburbs of London, that is clearly a wrong assumption as Westminster for the most part was always a bigger city than London was. London 'proper' is actually a considerably small city (spatially) historically.
It's not really a tangent per ce.
What it really is an opportunity cost-- a big what if so to speak.
If for instance a person goes to a coffee shop and orders a new drink instead of their regular drink then the opportunity cost is obviously not having the regular drink. If however, the customer orders both drinks, the opportunity cost is having to pay double to enjoy both.
The thing with opportunity cost is that it usually don't have a quantifiable measure of what exactly the opportunity lost or gained is. However, if those concepts are quantified then the opportunity cost becomes and accountable economic cost.
We then can see an actual dollar amount combined with the inherent and implicit hidden costs of that course of action.
When we chose one system over another, we have an opportunity cost. This opportunity cost translates into theories we can determine from marginalism (marginal theory of value).
Sweden and France took the route of buying both cups of coffee. The US (and others) chose buying one cup of coffee over the other.
However, we are now facing the lost opportunity cost (and not even particularly relating to this recession) of having an economy nearly solely based on low-income service jobs (for the 60% of society), high housing prices and high transportation expenses.
Since this kind of situation is largely mechanical and rigid (since it deals primarily with the physical environmental), it's no stranger to the law of diminishing returns.
By adding more expense (by purchasing more expensive homes, driving more and buying more expensive cars), we also have to increase the prices of everything to afford the more expensive "expenses." To do that, one must either minimize costs or increase output. Unfortunately, "minimizing costs" generally means making the poor poorer."
I.e., I buy a house at a value of 1. I must make 1.5 to pay for house at a value of 1. To make 1.5, I must sell a house at a value of 2... and so forth.
This would be totally acceptable if it wasn't for the fact that the people who are 35, 45 and 55 are derailing the effects of diminishing returns by borrowing against my potential economy output (my future) through 30-50 year government bonds while not enabling me to produce anything by continually blocking my access to affordable housing through constant price increases.
i don't think your economic assumptions are quite right, but as you like...the point is taken. and valid irrespective of whatever numbers you apply to it...
Sounds like you don't like Sir Peter hall ;-) He is massively informed and knowledgeable about planning, but there are a few out there who don't like what he has to say.
Even so, he is one of the leaders/modern grandfathers of British Planning, advisor to mayor and crown, etc etc. But he is also realist and a careful researcher. I met him at Liverpool last year when i was presenting a paper to IFHP audience. He is clearly a very bright fellow and not inclined to making spurious claims.
anyway, not sure about suburbs predating the city but Suburbs of London do predate the car. So do suburbs of North America. If you want to say London is only the center that is fine. You are in good company. When I lived there some of my friends felt the same way - not sure if that gets you anywhere concrete mind you ;-)
thanks for that link. Those developers are insane... home sizes are definitely falling around the country and that belies the "people always want bigger" argument the contrarian developer int he article is making.
This being said, per square foot values in Las Vegas are actually low enough (and construction techniques shoody enough) that they can actually still build a financceable mcmansion - one of the few areas int he US that still can. You can't do that in Cali or even Atlanta-area anymore because no bank will provide financing for a million dollar + house, but a mcmansion in Las Vegas is available for, say, $350k, and that's definitely financeable.
to redirect a bit, one should point out that this really wasn't intended as a suburban vs urban argument - the theme of downsizing and diminishing expectations would certainly apply to the suburbs as well, as many have pointed out here, and, in fact, the suburbs present some of the biggest challenges (can more than one family come to inhabit homes designed for one family? how can an automobile-centric environment be reconstituted to support other modes and choices?).
We once ran some internal numbers, with three scenarios, for Greater NYC, based on NYMTC's overall population growth assumptions:
2035 (for population)
Scenario 1 - Business as Usual
+2.1 million, +0.7/acre exurban greenfield,
+0.4 million, +0.3/acre car oriented suburban infill
+1.7 million, +1.2/acre urban/suburban infill (development within 3 miles of a current or planned transit station, 1 million of which will be in NYC itself)
Scenario 2 - Sustainable NY (with minor changes in policy favoring transit-orientation, among other things and establishing enforceable urban growth boundaries in the upper Hudson Valley NE NJ)
+0.4 million, +0.1/acre exurban greenfield
+0.6 million, +0.4/acre car oriented suburban infill
+3.2 million, +2.3/acre urban/suburban infill
Scenario 3 - Crisis NY (gas up to $20/gallon sustained, no tech breakthrough)
+0, +0/acre exurban greenfield
-1.3 million. -0.8/acre car oriented suburban infill
+5.5 million, +4.0/acre urban/suburban infill
The article on Vegas was very fascinating. In my city, we have some suburban neighborhoods that have been hit VERY hard with foreclosures and are experiencing problems once associated with the inner city. Namely, gangs moving in and the tidy suburban houses are turning into drug houses, complete with all the crime that tends to go with that culture. Abondoned suburban homes are being filled with pot farms, with no way to bust whoever is operating them. There are few neighborhoods I would to go, this being a very safe city, but I would never go there.
I can only imagine what is happening in Vegas with the lot of empty houses that no one dare take a chance on. Especially now that you can buy new again and the near new housing stock is left empty. The image of a new suburban neighborhood over run with "inner city" problems of drugs and crime is a sad but an interesting one. How is that for architecture of the downardly mobile?
"Especially now that you can buy new again and the near new housing stock is left empty."
The problem here is that the "newest" product looks just like the "newer" product and really differs only by virtue of the fact that it is newer. It seems to me that this sort of like that classic definition of insanity - doing the same thing over and over gain, and expecting a different end... (or at least clever marketing). I urge the buyerse of the "newest" to think very carefully.
Agree that those Vegas devlopers are crazy but we can also think of the folks who loan them the money to build. Haven't we learned anything in the last three years?
getting away from the suburbia thing and back to the the whole diminishing expectations meme, I thought this Pew Research thing from 2008 makes for an interesting read.
i can relate to lots of that. here in japan i am told the trends are even worse.
i have no reason for feeling this way, but i still feel optimistic about things. maybe it is because i grew up poor, maybe it is because i have been an ex-pat for 20 years...or maybe just because i run own architectural practice.
that vegas thing is curious. not insane, just money trying to multiply. i guess i wish them luck, but am doubtful of the method. seems a bad investment, but who knows. perhaps they know something that nobody else does.
it is hard to disentangle spatial expectations from financial ones in north america. in that sense suburbia is important. i guess to me suburbs are not really worth treating as separate entities from the city wither, they ARE the city, and the trad centers are just a variant typology - this is true in paris as much as london new york LA, tokyo (popn 33 million, only about 1/3 are in the center)...solving suburbia is going to part of our future in one form or another at least in the so-called developed world. it seems that varnelis is hinting at that, though he is more pessimistic than i am...
I think diminished expectations are always a matter of perspective and denote only general trends and tendancies. Of course, if you're an immigrant or the child of immigrants or the first generation, in your family, to get a university degree, then you're likely to have a very different perspective on this issue, and, as I noted in my introduction, this whole thread is likely to come up as a being a bit whiny. If, however, you're a child of upper-middle-class boomers and grew up in a suburban mcmansion (I admit it.. that includes me), then the phenonemon discussed here may be of interest. I know (and just about everybody I grew up with know), with absolute certainty, that I will experience downward mobilty.. that living in the neighborhood I grew up in is something so out-of-reach as to be almost completely inconceivable.
The personal perspective, aside, thoguht, there are broader implications to all of this. Numbers pretty clearly show that household income growth in the US has stagnated for at least two generations (now going on three), with slow growth offset, until this Great Recession, by ever-increasing indebtedness. People had come to expect richer lifestyles, year after year, despite a lack of real income growth, and they were financing that aspiration with ever-increasing personal debt. In fact, the only thing growing at respectable rates seem to be our healthcare costs. This phenomenon has shaped the American urban and suburban development language (that we contribute to as architects) since World War II.
Now, the butcher's bill is finally coming due, and there are no solutions readily at hand. Nobel Prize Economists like Krugman say that the answer is a new era of innovation in areas like green technology, fueling GDP expansion, but there is no evidence that the US is taking the steps it needs to, to fuel such innovation and expansion, and the window for securing American competitive advantage in this arena may already have closed. There are no great society initiatives, no new deal, no national vision, and I can see no grand renewal. Efforts to introduce even mild reforms - like healthcare - have, for the most part, collapsed into disarray.
As a designer, I am interested in thinking about what a post-imperial America might look like - what kind of spaces and places will need to be generated. Suburbia is only one dimension of the problem that needs to be addressed. our leaders seem determined to deliver this post- vision as a fait accompi, and we will have to live with it, whatever form it takes. But regardles of how it looks like, our cities and communities will change.
Interesting article Urbanist. Not sure I agree that Gen Y is the worst off. Think that's coming to bear on us Gen X'ers. We've got families and mortgages, etc.
If someone can't get a job at 23 and has to wait until 26 while leeching off mom & dad, so what? I can't go home to mom & dad. Aside from them being retired and on fixed income, I have a mortgage that cannot be deferred. Expenses of children/family can't be pushed back a few years, etc. Meanwhile we're [gen x] shut off from employment advancement by a boomer generation that is postponing retirement. Stuck in the middle is the worst case senario IMO. Not to mention our alternatives to working in Architecture are hindered by our experience in the profession. Entry level people don't have that problem.
good points, but I think the Gen Y concern is that it may be about waiting 3-5 years - temp employment and underemployment for many professions and trades may be their permanent model (say Vinoly hiring people people for specific projects and even tasks - like developing a marketing brouchure and then promptly laying them off when the project is done, being a best case). Gen Y is fast becoming a generation of part-time contractors, and if that works, why would employers ever treat them differently?
"If someone can't get a job at 23 and has to wait until 26 while leeching off mom & dad, so what?"
This has less to do with a micro view point than it does a macro view point.
The oldest reaches of Gen Y were already suppose to have bought something like 1.5 million units of housing-- which has not be bought. While the market is over saturated in some housing niches, its actually behind in several other niches.
The larger point here is primarily how the United States functions as a whole and that is especially tied to generational turn over.
People aged 21-25 should have already been married, should have had or planning on having their first kid, bought or be in the stages of buying a house and have made a few major purchases (car, appliances, furniture).
The sad fact is... a majority of this generational group has done none of that. They're nowhere even close to any of that.
What this means? It means the overall economy lags and slows. Much like Italy or Japan, people 'not growing up' causes very slow growth and even negative growth economies. And while certain parts of Japan's and Italy's economy is doing quite well, there's other parts that are languishing or dying off completely.
So... for homebuilders, auto dealers, furniture sellers, retailers and appliance makers, this is big trouble.
This age group needs to get out the door, secure their own dwelling and fill it to the roof of inane useless appliances and bric-a-brac.
But even more perniciously, if employers can get away with treating these young'uns as a permanent part-time contractor class, why would they ever treat them better than that? If the job market did that to me, as a (young end of) mid-career professional, I'd be embittered and determined to get back to a "real job." But this may be the only experience a lot of young people in industries like our own will ever have... and a permanent lack of security, means they will never get around the laying down the roots unicorn described.
In a phrase, permanent structural under-employment as a typical condition for hundreds of thousands of people.
great thread --- reminds me of an old thought --- something like a cross between an extended stay hotel and universal city walk located just outside of major urban centers --- the idea is to leverage anonymity to loosen the grip of a person's socio-economic status and history in order to facilitate their own redefinition of self --- originally conceived of as a way to improve upon section 8 housing with respect to transforming people's lives
bear in mind this plays directly upon urbanist's point about many of us forced into increasingly short-term, freelance/contract labor type work, possibly a nomadic life style as well
how can architecture/planning help us transition?
it seems as though during a time when much re-valuation of one's personal property, relationships and aspirations is inevitable, the process can be facilitated, resources conserved, new relationships and directions explored, and anxiety, shame and expectation reduced, if:
-one is forced to reduce the amount of material possessions considered essential to a minimum, thus gaining clear redefinition of one's life
- one is not tethered to a house, a history, and only to a community to the extent that it is beneficial, but mostly migrates between comfortable, safe, alternative versions of a new domestic life until one finds a style, a community that fits
- one passes through a series of temporary living arrangements with similarly mobile, safe, engaged strangers, with whom stories can be shared, histories redefined, personas tried on and tweaked, self-redefined in a low-stakes, safe atmosphere
- people from different socio-economic backgrounds are mixed and no one is really aware of exactly what someone else's socio-economic backgorund is or was, unless they choose to broadcast it, thus breaking down traditional socio-economic barriers, encouraging people to share experiences and find common cause and form new communities
- mixing in the citywalk element is meant to add visitors, vacationers and others who will set a generally positive tone with respect to the quality of anonymity of the place, as well as to infuse interaction with hope and possibility, thus setting the right tone for the transformation and making lots of possibilities and trajectories visible at hand
this transition leads eventually to people finding new communities for their new life circumstances --- and when they settle down, it will be, no matter the formal characteristics of the architectural environment, into something closer to a traditional, walkable neighborhood, or even an eco-village style commune, not necessarily with respect to interest in sustainability or politics, etc, but rather with respect to organizational structure ---
what should architecture for the downwardly mobile be?
good summary above, intheloop.
I also think that denser, cheaper, more compact typologies require more long-term planning to do well - to stop them from turning into the type of undesirables associated in previous decades with "public housing."
I don't think we're going back to mass public housing anytime soon. The state is broke (local, Federal and state governments). The best government will be able to do is empower not-for-profits and for-profit-developers to develop affordable products through tax credits and the like.
This is where Ole Bouman and Alex D'Hooghe were wrong in their "Suburbia After the Crash" project (yea, yea, before somebody here rubs it in my face, I know I collaborated on that project, but I still think they were wrong). That project was all about the romance of a return to mass civic architecture as a palliative to decline, but the reality is that there won't be a government bailout. There isn't going to a new new deal. This time, my suspicion is that diminishing resources, capacity and political will accompanying the diminishing expectations - real imperial decline, as opposed to merely hiccup on the way to greater, future capitalistic glory. People will have to define for themselves how they will live, instead of having a government to give form to their hopes and dreams.
The big ideas will have to come from people like us.. and the people who do smaller projects, or who have a say in city-level policies.
I think, by the way, that the other problem with Bouman/D'Hooghe's treatment is that the perspective was all wrong: they (I should say, we) were Ivy League elites who were going to provide solutions for the masses, through architecture, policy, analysis, whatever. Now, we are the masses, and the optimal solution set looks very very different.
I was just going to say this, but Urbanist, you already shut it down, so a new WPA is no longer possible?
I haven't read the article but I'm looking at the description on MIT's page:
"Such an event would surely impoverish the suburban lower middle-class that lives in what D’Hooghe refers to as ‘the Grey Goo’ – the massive tarmac between our cities’ centers and their leafier exurbs – and create ‘a new underclass eager to consume the rhetoric of fascist populism, thriving on anti-intellectualism, sectarianism, conquest abroad and repression at home."
I mean, I'm not going to say that there's not some of this going on with the far right in this country, but this kind of large generalizing really hurts our cause and doesn't inspire much confidence with the people that actually live in the "grey goo." I mean, maybe MIT actually did go out and really live and meet these people, I don't know, but I'm not sure they would write the same kind of pejorative stuff if they spent, say, a year living in a Passaic County, drank some beers with the locals, maybe hooked them up with some mopeds...
I'm sure a lot of the ideas in the white papers are great and, if implemented, would have a positive effect on people in these communities. What I'd like to know is where the implementation is? Like, would D'Hooghe be willing to relocate to Passaic for 10 years and see some of these proposals implemented?
Like you said Urban, it will largely come down to people doing smaller projects, be they developers, urban planners, architects, builders...
I personally have a bias for bottom-up strategies, but some level of top-down strategy will be essential. How do you feel about the proposals in the "white papers?" Are some of them feasible or is the work more speculative?
hm, if i can be cynical, i really hope you all maintain your interest in these issues as the economy picks up again.
the economy today is not the future, so i don't believe any of the extreme things going on right now are an indication of anything significant in the long run, even if some of the trends are interesting and in a perfect world should continue...
mass housing for the less privileged is not something i feel entirely comfortable with, especially when the govt does it. i spent a few years in such when a youth and can attest to the mixed benefits. it is a long argued topic so won't get into it here. more honestly, i don't think class issues are going to be the real defining point of our age. We are all in this together, more than ever before.
about suburbia, not channelling bruegmann, more my own work from days as phd student researching topic of suburbia and sustainability. It is possible the suburbs will be abandoned, but times have been worse than this and suburbia is still around. cars too. I do have an opinion on suburbia. I don't like it much, but i can see that it is a powerful urban typology, even more powerful now than ever as jobs have followed housing to the urban fringe. downtown is now a romantic place/idea but is not the automatic future and in many ways i can see governments wasting time and money trying to force the return of the city center, when it is more useful to consider the city as a whole thing, suburbs and all. i guess i just don't see this as an either/or proposition, nor even an us against them kind of problem. real solutions are I think going to be inclusive not something to be attacked in pieces, and probably not as a normative dream.
becoming less energy wasteful does not necessarily mean we will have to stop suburban patterns. It does mean major changes, but am not certain that we should assume dense urbanity is the answer. i live in tokyo and while it is train based and dense like you would not believe (33 million people in very small piece of land), it is hard to say with a straight face that this is a sustainable city.
anyway, downward mobility is possibly real but its solution will depend more on whether our governments decide to compete with places like china in making new energy tech and investing in education and tech research. i really do believe friedmann has it right on that point...
I don't think it is. There isn't really a national crisis mentality.. the recesson seems to be letting up, despite the fact that the economy will likely come to some type of stable equilibrium with high unemployment.
More importantly, can we afford it? In the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, we spent a measly $180 billion on an infrastructure stimulus and it nearly killed us getting that through Congress. China spent a trillion dollars on their stimulus, in the same interval, and they got national high speed rail and an interstate highway system out of it, not to mention something like 100 million new homes. We got some building weatherization and a bunch of feasibility studies.. maybe a fixed bridge or two.
The deficit is now 10.6% of GDP and rising - the highest it's been since 1945. It was 2.8% before WPA, rising to a peak of 4.8%. The only time the deficit has been higher as a proportion of GDP has been WWI and WWII, when we were a total war economy.
We're in trouble.
I think what happens to suburbia, how fast, will depend on fuel prices more than anything else. At work, we have a rhetorical scenario where we ask the question, what is gas prices were $20 a gallon (actually close to the real cost to the economy of a gallon of gas, before subsidies). In such a scenario (very possible at some point in the future), the suburbs are abandoned.
as an aside, on green competing with China (from here)
United States will be increasingly reliant on just one supplier, China, for elements known as lanthanides. Lanthanum, neodymium, dysprosium and other rare earth elements are used in products from high-capacity batteries and hybrid-electric vehicles to wind turbines and oil refinery catalysts.
China controls between 95 and 100 percent of the global market in these elements. And the Chinese government is reducing its exports of lanthanides to ensure an adequate supply for its domestic manufacturers. Politicians love to demonize oil-exporting countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, but adopting the technologies needed to drastically cut U.S. oil consumption will dramatically increase America's dependence on China.
fyi ck. I've been following the rare earth thing a little bit and there's apparently other deposits throughout the world that haven't been mined. Australia, Malaysia, Brazil, South Africa, Canada, and the US all have rare earth deposits. I'm speculating, but I imagine the reason so much of this stuff is mined in China is due to government interest, investment, and the ability to sidetrack environmental regulations (provided there are any). Also, I read an article awhile back that scientists at (I think) Berkeley had figured out a potentially cheap way to replicate some of the rare earth materials. There could also be deposits underneath the arctic and antarctic that will be accessible after global warming melts everything.
Anyway, a bit of a sidetrack.
right urbanist, the suburbs could concentrate more around a center where main railways are located.
I think what's important to remember is that a future without green energy, whatever that may be, is a future where we'll derive most of our energy from coal. I'm not a believer in "clean coal" as all the junk you scrub out of it ends up somewhere, but we're staring at a very real resumption of coal consumption if we can't get alternates up and running fast.
Jump, I hope you're right and things will "return to normal" but I'm not convinced that we've really escaped history. There have been similar long periods of relative quiet but eventually the old order becomes unsustainable and large changes occur. Predicting what those are has always been tough, but I think the assumption that the last 25 years have been "normal" isn't really accurate, right?
intotheloop, in a way the whole premise of this thread is to redefine what is "normal" based on a maybe more equitable relationship between resources, society and economy.
Jump has a point, but I see intotheloop's as well.
I see the last century as a period when we managed to stay just ahead our accumulating problems, allowing economic growth (until the 1930s), government bailouts (the Depression), total war, more economic growth, and finally credit expansion (borrowing more and more and more just to stay in place) when economic growth stalled in the 1970s, to substitute for real problem-solving. Meanwhile, the underlying resource problems and stuctural crises just kept on accumulating, even as the suburbs kept on expanding.
Now the butcher's bill is finally coming due, and the loan shark is broke.
The issue with suburbia isnt so much that it's an awful place to live or that it fails semiotically. It's that it's existing depending on two things: (i) high rates of economic growth (and accompanying high rates of resource utilization and employment growth) and (ii) the ability to borrow against future high rates of economic growth. If either the growth stalls (say 0% to 2% a year after inflation on a sustained basis, which is very possible) or financial intermediaton fails, then new suburban development fails. It's kind of that simple.
Of course the suburbs will remain in some form, but, again, a lot of that housing stock is reaching end-of-life, and unless both of the two conditions above come back with a vengeance, the capital will not be there to replace the loss inventory. This means that relatively fewer people will be living in those suburbs in the future than do now. More importantly, a lot fewer people will live in those 'burbs once the current residents age out, unless those two conditions come back?
Will something reverse this, and bring back strong (3%+) rates of economic growth for sustainable intervals of time (not just for a year or two at the end of this recession)? Sure, anything is possible, but currently there is no believable scenario in which they could happen. It would be based on factors we cannot or are not yet imagining... like a future technology that doesn't yet exist to fuel the next .dom boom. Friedman thinks that it's green/cleantech, but, right now, the Chinese are cleaning our clock in that arena. A lack of leadership in this country is rapidly transforming into the fixing of failure. Again, nobody will lend you two to five times your annual income to buy that suburban home unless the economy has real growth prospects.
check out this article if you haven't already (it's been linked on other threads here before)
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/03/how-a-new-jobless-era-will-transform-america/7919/
"How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America"
Right, you can go all the way back to Smith or Marx, or look more recently at Hardt & Negri or Daimond and see that it's all based on finding new resources or technology to build up the next bubble. How long can this go on for?
So far, modern capitalism has been remarkably resilient in the face a lot of challenges. Market economies in some sense or another will continue to exist no matter what, the question is what we want those markets to look like. i.e. do we want a more "equitable relationship between resources, society and economy" as ck says or a more dynamic, growth driven economy. There's always the very real possibility that we can't "innovate" ourselves out of a rut, so do we prepare ahead of time and think of strategies to address stagnant growth or do we just hope new technologies and the market show us the way.
Urbanist, you mentioned on another thread the possibility of a manufacturing boom if and when China readjusts the value of the Yuan. There's also the possibility that biotech finally delivers on its promises
Predicting our demise by looking at dwindling resources is always tricky because it's hard to guess what there is left. Eventually, we'll run out of the things we need, but I'm not sure we're there yet. I agree that we've reached that point with certain resources, but others (like coal) have the potential to keep us growing and not force us to adapt much or change our ways for the better.
If there is another speculative boom, that will be a large driver of what urban forms become the new norm. I think we're all coming to the agreement that, in North America, there will have to be some sort of densification, both in suburbia and in larger cities, and the question of new typologies is really intriguing and could make for some interesting new architectures, both from the bottom-up and top-down.
not as many people as you think - and these kinds of living arrangements are on the rise.
interestingly, multi-generation households also represent "decline" - however, I think this trend suggests we might have to start rethinking how we design housing. already 16% of US households are multigenerational - and seem to be increasing among all demographics. this runs counter to what has been built over the past several decades - everything is focused on the individual, couple, or nuclear family to buy. there's little accommodation for a return to households that are starting to look a little more like they did before suburbanization.
what this could look like? a very common living arrangement especially in europe and the northeast for multi-generational households are duplexes where a parent lives in one unit and a child and their family lives in another. remember the "in-law" apartment everyone seemed to want a few years ago? a lot of older houses in my neighborhood were split up to house several generations - many have since condo-ized, but this housing stock exists in older neighborhoods - and
(one striking thing from that study is that individuals living alone rose from 1% in 1900 to %10 in 2010).
urbanist - you mention wealth transfer - I think this happens at greater frequency among the working poor and working class... at least a larger percentage of their income is spread among family members.
I don't think this is a "demise" so much as it's a transition. And I think Markuse is right.. we are going to become more like Europe before this is over. At some point, an economy based on growth-seeking behavior (through economic expansion, on the American model, or imperial conquest, on the European one) gives way to a different type of state - one with high rates of structural un- and under-employment, more of a focus on quality of life, and correspondingly diminished expectations that one will always do better than one's parents. Arguably, much of contintental Europe is alraedy there, and somehow we'll get there too. Remember, European countries have much higher rates of un- and under-employment, for the most part.
Unfortunately, the whole suburban development model is based around a particular theory of credit expansion whose underlying assumptions may no longer hold (that of high rates of GDP growth). Without credit expansion, there is no return to high rates of suburban growth. Simpy put, the math doesn't work.
btw, I do think that there will be a manufacturing boom and that the US is now suffering from too many people getting college degrees. With diminshed expectations, having a decent life at $15 an hour on a non-union assemblyline may not be a such a bad thing. It beats working at Wal Mart for $8 an hour. Or being unemployed from your $20 an hour job as a young architect. And at $15, the jobs will come back from places like China (where assembly jobs, after the required room and board, not just salary, are now coming in at $3 to $4 an hour, increasing at 20% a year). After taking into account the (much) higher cost of energy, property, and shipping (to reach an American market), $15 looks darn good..which is why GM exports Buicks from Lansing to China and Chinese conglomerates like Haier are investing billions in state-side plants in places like South Carolina.
On the manufacturing note, I'd like to add that the US is still the largest manufacturer in the world. The issue w/ manufacturing in the US is that much of it is mechanized, so the need for labor is pretty low. Even if there's a boom, it might be more like the dot.com boom, where we're provided with more employment opportunities than, say, the real estate boom. However, it's hard to see it bringing down unemployment on a mass scale. A situation where China raises the value of its Yuan would be helpful though for unemployment, in easing the deficit, and also helping to raise even more people out of poverty in China. All good things.
I agree that we're looking at unemployment around 8-12% for a long time, and there will need to be a safety net established to take care of more people. On the other hand, the issue of how to adequately finance that safety net is biting Europe in the butt right now, and we'll be facing a similar problem in the US sooner, rather than later.
That's interesting that 16% of US households are multi-generational, although it's not that surprising, considering how many people in my generation move back home after graduation. Isn't the number somewhere around 50%? While it wouldn't be very fun, I think I'd live with my parents if they lived around a large metropolitan area so I could save more money. Pooling resources like that makes a lot of sense to me. Again, I think examples in rapidly growing cities in developing countries could be instructive and offer some typological precedents. But there will undoubtedly be some new types of social organizations that will require new buildings.
"urbanist - you mention wealth transfer - I think this happens at greater frequency among the working poor and working class... at least a larger percentage of their income is spread among family members."
Well.. that and the million dollar beachfront condo a friend's dad just bought his favorite daughter ;)
is she single?
I think suburban families will become small scale farmers, call it suburban farming. This idea I have comes from the much discussed concept of urban farming among architects. The suburbanites can truck the food into the city twice a week and sell it. (This will be how they supplement their incomes to afford their lifestyle, which will remain.)
But otherwise, I agree with jump. And I don't see my standard of living going down.
What should architecture for the downwardly mobile be?
larger
I ONLY SEE LIKE 4 IMAGES ON THIS PAGE.
MAKE SOME ARCHITECTURE.
I must admit this has been a good week for my portfolio. I'm not even that good at it either!
suburbia began in the 18th century and has been going since. suburbs in europe are surprisingly similar to those in usa, with a few more rail connections. same here in japan. the suburban typology changed constantly in last 200 years and will continue to transform not just go away.
possibly there will be more farming on them. but you know if gas prices go up, i see no reason to assume people will move to the center, especially when most economies are based in suburbia nowadays. that is true of places even like germany and holland, not just USA The jobs are not downtown anymore so why would the answer to high gas prices be to move farther from employment centers? isn't it more likely that suburbia will densify, or that families who now commute individually to jobs all over the city will change jobs so they can all commute to places closer to them? or even that employment centers will shift to be more diversified and decentralised to accomodate that scenario? i have no idea what will happen but the idealised downtown vision, the street-car suburb, or walkable community are all based on a time when only one family member worked or when everyone worked for the same company and thus could live together in company housing. those days are gone for the time being, so why assume old city patterns will return?
that seems a bit like wishful thinking to me and ignores the potential in existing cities in favor of nostalgia for the past. which is to me an enormous waste. we are supposed to be the next generation and all we got to say is we don't like how it is and want to go back to the future? a bit weak isn't it? surely we got more gumption than that in us...don't we?
right now the situation is not good in so many ways. but i think the real challenges are in the developing world not in usa or europe. it is in africa and india where populations are going to explode, not usa or europe. i suspect coming to terms with those growing populations and helping them to be sustainable is going to be more important than issues at home...
I was being half sarcastic about farming in the american suburbs, btw.
As jump mentions, developing nations with exploding populations are going to be facing the real challenges and have good chances of experiencing upward mobility because of it, not downward.
Its interesting how this conversation always turns back to "the developing world"...maybe its just a numbers game - that's where most people live. However, most, if not all of the people posting here do not live there.
Looking at this in the perspective of the Copenhagen Climate summit, it seems as though development and exploitation of labor and natural resources in the context of a "culture of economic growth" may be a zero sum game.
I think the important thing is to develop an architecture, infrastructure and society that is less contingent on endless growth, while we still have the resources. Scandinavia has its problems but might provide some good examples for a culture less based on "making it" and how this translates to the materiality of their being (cities, buildings, objects, recreation, etc).
What this architecture and urbanism will look like in the context of the USA is I think the most interesting point, given our present landscape.
but you never know strawbeary, farming at home may be very normal again! my mum has always had a food garden, though just for us. not enough to live on of course.
funny you mention scandinavia, markuse. peter hall did extensive research on the topic, and found the planners of stockholm in the post war years (who were following the ideals of howard's garden city in their own way) faced problems resulting directly from the fact that the residents of the city wanted to live in detached houses. and they did so, living in a manner completely contrary to the intentions of the planners. the relevant quote is in the middle of this page, but read the whole section if interested. it is fascinating to realise how long we as planners and architects have been dealing with these issues and how strong the desire is to own a home and to get to it by car. also fascinating that planners thought cars were for getting to work when in fact they were being used for everyday life more...which meant they were designing for completely the wrong things.
as far as the 3rd world goes, of course things must go there. usa population is going to grow a bit, but india's population will surpass china's in the next decades, and africa is also growing. unless we assume the morlock lifestyle we have left for the 3rd world is going to be enforced we are going to have to deal with the inequity. problems in the usa are small. europe too. by comparison. it will be interesting to see where it all goes, but my bet is that america will not change so much, frankly. or at least not until it becomes obvious that change is leading to a powerful benefit. that could be some time from now, the way things are going. remember the switch from whale oil to kerosene and then gasoline was incredibly long. decades not years. and that was a crisis switch...
I think kazys is right that there is a level of hypocrisy when we entirely dismiss suburbia as unsustainable, when in fact, what enables the great global cities to survive is an economy based on exclusivist levels of consumption.
Another project possibility - recently completed in Ventura, Ca
WAV
Publicly funded housing for artists - portfolio required to get in - with live-work spaces that were delivered with minimal finishes, and some aspects of communal governance.
The non-profit developer cobbled together city arts funds, city urban development funding (CDBG) and then got tax credit financing to make the whole thing work. The local community of artists actively worked for the project for at least 5 years through many ups and downs. It's in the downtown and provides only a .35 parking ratio on-site.
Like most recent affordable housing, it exemplifies Urbanist's original post in a couple of ways: a huge amount of work was required to get it done in relation to the number of units provided (and when viewed in light of the need); it also involves redistribution, as the tax credit program is basically a way for corporations to write down profits and thus reduce their taxes and there was substantial philanthropic giving involved as well.
Although the architecture starts from a modern ideal of social betterment and spacial interest, it comes our a lot messier than 90 (bauhaus) or even 50 (team X) years ago because it responds to the complex but invisible financing and political process.
"the relevant quote is in the middle of this page, but read the whole section if interested. it is fascinating to realise how long we as planners and architects have been dealing with these issues and how strong the desire is to own a home and to get to it by car."
I mean, the article is pretty stellar. It does mention something that I've tried to explain to many people that if you want to talk about shadow governments and massive conspiracies aimed towards manipulating the population... don't look towards the military, the vice (special police[FBI, CIA or even vice departments at local police stations]) or even elected officials, just head to your planning department!
A lot of people fail to realize the intense amount of power planners and related bureaucrats actually hold. The name "planner" ought to make a pretty clear hint.
But this is what upsets me the most (and there are more than enough examples in this thread)... is that planners, architects and even engineers are not honest or transparent about their planning. Or even worse, when they assume with modus operandi is what everyone wants.
And... this really is a very controversial, even hypocritical confounding factor. Many communities, especially those who have the funding, hire or have expanded their planning departments over the last two decades for the simple fact that many of these communities are not simply happy with what they have.
And, with the exception of a few historic areas and a few major cities, it is pretty easy to guesstimate (bad word) what the structure, layout and habits of a community affluent enough to afford a planning department.
Key point: They recognize they are not able to decipher or create to do this within the context of their current community or their current government. Two things that happen-- they are given textbook design examples regurgitated from ramblings of ramblings about Le Corbusier (sorry, architects!) or they are given more of the same in better wrappers (ugh, planners!). Logically, you would think this would be the other way around but sadly not the case.
What these communities aren't usually given is options-- lots and lots of options. Those options are expensive to formulate, expensive to disseminate and even more expensive to test! But that is the whole reason planners should be employed!
And, mostly, that brings me to my point. You link to an article about complications and implications of top-down planning, cities in economic turmoil and revolt and then the institutionalization of transportation options into developing options in TOD city-suburb destinations. I do not know how you make this magical leap from "Paris restructuring growth" to "strong the desire is to own a home and to get to it by car."
Either case, I do realize I started this suburb versus urban debate in part.
I was merely suggesting that given no other changes to budget, the only way to to increase or stabilize living conditions is by eliminating transportation as an expense.
While transportation is key to the economy, it does not or is not always key to someone's personal economy. Unless of course, that person does make significant amount of income through actually facilitating transportation (taxi, delivery or individuals who have to work at sites).
As much as transportation and cars are a cornerstone to our economy, other things like eating, drinking, buying clothes and watching movies are also a big part of our economy. While these things have to be shipped around before someone can buy a mojito at a bar or a shirt at target, the actual people buying said shirts or mojitos do not necessarily have to travel to that location by car nor do the employees who sell said products.
Part of the issue I think with urban versus suburban is how ingrained cars are into the America (and by extension) first-world psyche. It seems like cars are the ultimate goal for many people-- and like any advertising group, there's probably an unfair target demographic.
In any event, if you sit down and actually analyze a primetime tv show... they are so staggeringly unrealistic in the depictions of suburbia it is not even funny. And marketing people aren't afraid to admit that these shows are often nothing but product vehicles for advertisers.
What I am trying to get across is if cars are so great, why do car companies pay between $3-5 million per season to get exclusive product placement spots in series? Between $120-350k per 30 second commercial? Some of these TV series are even rewritten just to have the ability of demo'ing products on TV?
We have an enormous saturation of automobiles in TV and in media And more often than not, it is in a positive light. From NASCAR to children's movies to commercials, we have this intentional and crafted depicting of a life of nothing more than automobiles.
Would this discussion still be the same if Ford, Toyota, Dodge et cetera wasn't paying roughly 20 million dollars a week a piece to tell you how great cars are?
im trying to develop some of this stuff, in the context of scandinavia here: http://www.mediaderive.blogspot.com/
Using "n****rs" doesn't absolve you from anything.
That was to drive a point about the continue not-technically-illegal environmental racism that exists.
But it was moreso referencing Ihlanfeldta & Scafidi's "Black Self-Segregation as a Cause of Housing Segregation: Evidence from the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality." A landmark data survey that empirically demonstrates racial self-segregation as a factor in housing choices and purchases. It is a practice known as "affinity" -- even outside a legal construct, segregation occurs at a macro level even amongst diverse groups of individuals who may share nothing else in common other than ethnicity or race.
For a conflicting view, Kassie Freeman's
"African American culture and heritage in higher education research and practice" eloquently states in the chapter titled 'Self segregation (pp. 120ish-140ish)' that self-segregating and self-organizing groups on college campus is more attributed to whites avoiding social confrontations and challenges in power where as black students are often pressured by other block students and organizations to maintain racial identity. In both cases, both groups suffer from the challenges to adjusting to a environmental culturally different and socially alienating.
For both reasons, intragroup relations often fail to materialize past a superficial point resulting in "collective memory." Outside of a forced environment, many people result to seeking out peers and familials in their affinity group rather than challenging the respective norm of such affinity groups.
In which case, it can be viewed that mountain states (who have relatively low African-American populations) maybe destinations for individuals who see affinity and self-segregation as potential pluses to a new home in a remote area.
Of course, if you want me to cite more sources on race relations in the US from noted Black American authors... I can gladly litter this entire page of appropriate uses of the N word. In which case quoting what someone else is saying (even hypothetically), the use is just and ethical.
i disagree. there is no need to promulgate bad taste simply because someone else has.
if interested in race and suburbia there are a number of fantastic books on the subject out there, many of them exploring the cliches we tend to maintain about segregation . i recommend this review of several recent books by margaret O'Mara.
not sure if you were addressing the question to me, unicorn slaughter, when you wrote "You link to an article about complications and implications of top-down planning, cities in economic turmoil and revolt and then the institutionalization of transportation options into developing options in TOD city-suburb destinations. I do not know how you make this magical leap from "Paris restructuring growth" to "strong the desire is to own a home and to get to it by car."...
but, if you were, it is not an article it is a book, the city is more about stockholm than paris, and the leap is simple. planners wanted density, the swedes wanted detached homes, and they bought them in spite of the planners making ideal communities with towers and train lines (Hall says this on the linked page). more dramatic, the planners planned for people to use the trains to commute downtown, but residents were already commuting laterally to nearby communities instead, so the rail system did not reflect real transportation desires...
i don't think it was a conspiracy, just a built-in problem with the time-scale of planning and the problem of conventional wisdoms driving policy...
in any case, this is a tangent, and not so important. i guess it is just a good warning to be careful of what we think we know. conventional wisdom is a dangerous thing to believe in...but usually it is all we have time to learn, especially in architecture school....
WHO WILL SAVE THE AMERICANS?
on building more new single family construction outside las vegas, post-housing bust:
“If we build more houses, we’re creating more jobs.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/business/16builder.html?pagewanted=2&ref=homepage&src=me
Yes. I get your point.
On page 342, those suburban satellites failed from your interpretation.
Right after it says where Swede wanted the new detached homes. The over supply led to low-rents where perceived social miscreants (alcoholics, immigrants et cetera) moved quickly into the new suburbs. A rise in blight (vandalism, grafitti) and social breakdown lead to the abandonment of said idea by Swedes.
The Paris example is noted because the Parisians who wanted both the Stockholm Plan and Paris settled on a mixture of the two. Despite budgetary problems, suburban-styled city centers were built on parallel running transportation corridor (by road and rail).
What makes the Paris plan so appealing was that the fundamentals of the plan were clearly spelled out to private developers (and the private sector) what to expect in the plans.
Then the author of this article reverses train of thought again and says that Swedish single-family homes were expanding. And the lastly ends the chapter with saying that all of these areas shifted back into urban schemes and massive urban development after the sucessive oil and energy crisis of the 1970s and 1980s.
There's even one part where the author makes the claim that suburb neighborhoods in London not only predate the automobile but London itself.
And if you wanted to consider the East End (Havering was technically a different state) or Westminster as suburbs of London, that is clearly a wrong assumption as Westminster for the most part was always a bigger city than London was. London 'proper' is actually a considerably small city (spatially) historically.
It's not really a tangent per ce.
What it really is an opportunity cost-- a big what if so to speak.
If for instance a person goes to a coffee shop and orders a new drink instead of their regular drink then the opportunity cost is obviously not having the regular drink. If however, the customer orders both drinks, the opportunity cost is having to pay double to enjoy both.
The thing with opportunity cost is that it usually don't have a quantifiable measure of what exactly the opportunity lost or gained is. However, if those concepts are quantified then the opportunity cost becomes and accountable economic cost.
We then can see an actual dollar amount combined with the inherent and implicit hidden costs of that course of action.
When we chose one system over another, we have an opportunity cost. This opportunity cost translates into theories we can determine from marginalism (marginal theory of value).
Sweden and France took the route of buying both cups of coffee. The US (and others) chose buying one cup of coffee over the other.
However, we are now facing the lost opportunity cost (and not even particularly relating to this recession) of having an economy nearly solely based on low-income service jobs (for the 60% of society), high housing prices and high transportation expenses.
Since this kind of situation is largely mechanical and rigid (since it deals primarily with the physical environmental), it's no stranger to the law of diminishing returns.
By adding more expense (by purchasing more expensive homes, driving more and buying more expensive cars), we also have to increase the prices of everything to afford the more expensive "expenses." To do that, one must either minimize costs or increase output. Unfortunately, "minimizing costs" generally means making the poor poorer."
I.e., I buy a house at a value of 1. I must make 1.5 to pay for house at a value of 1. To make 1.5, I must sell a house at a value of 2... and so forth.
This would be totally acceptable if it wasn't for the fact that the people who are 35, 45 and 55 are derailing the effects of diminishing returns by borrowing against my potential economy output (my future) through 30-50 year government bonds while not enabling me to produce anything by continually blocking my access to affordable housing through constant price increases.
i don't think your economic assumptions are quite right, but as you like...the point is taken. and valid irrespective of whatever numbers you apply to it...
Sounds like you don't like Sir Peter hall ;-) He is massively informed and knowledgeable about planning, but there are a few out there who don't like what he has to say.
Even so, he is one of the leaders/modern grandfathers of British Planning, advisor to mayor and crown, etc etc. But he is also realist and a careful researcher. I met him at Liverpool last year when i was presenting a paper to IFHP audience. He is clearly a very bright fellow and not inclined to making spurious claims.
anyway, not sure about suburbs predating the city but Suburbs of London do predate the car. So do suburbs of North America. If you want to say London is only the center that is fine. You are in good company. When I lived there some of my friends felt the same way - not sure if that gets you anywhere concrete mind you ;-)
apologies to others for tangent.
markuse,
thanks for that link. Those developers are insane... home sizes are definitely falling around the country and that belies the "people always want bigger" argument the contrarian developer int he article is making.
This being said, per square foot values in Las Vegas are actually low enough (and construction techniques shoody enough) that they can actually still build a financceable mcmansion - one of the few areas int he US that still can. You can't do that in Cali or even Atlanta-area anymore because no bank will provide financing for a million dollar + house, but a mcmansion in Las Vegas is available for, say, $350k, and that's definitely financeable.
Crazy, irresponsible people.
to redirect a bit, one should point out that this really wasn't intended as a suburban vs urban argument - the theme of downsizing and diminishing expectations would certainly apply to the suburbs as well, as many have pointed out here, and, in fact, the suburbs present some of the biggest challenges (can more than one family come to inhabit homes designed for one family? how can an automobile-centric environment be reconstituted to support other modes and choices?).
We once ran some internal numbers, with three scenarios, for Greater NYC, based on NYMTC's overall population growth assumptions:
2035 (for population)
Scenario 1 - Business as Usual
+2.1 million, +0.7/acre exurban greenfield,
+0.4 million, +0.3/acre car oriented suburban infill
+1.7 million, +1.2/acre urban/suburban infill (development within 3 miles of a current or planned transit station, 1 million of which will be in NYC itself)
Scenario 2 - Sustainable NY (with minor changes in policy favoring transit-orientation, among other things and establishing enforceable urban growth boundaries in the upper Hudson Valley NE NJ)
+0.4 million, +0.1/acre exurban greenfield
+0.6 million, +0.4/acre car oriented suburban infill
+3.2 million, +2.3/acre urban/suburban infill
Scenario 3 - Crisis NY (gas up to $20/gallon sustained, no tech breakthrough)
+0, +0/acre exurban greenfield
-1.3 million. -0.8/acre car oriented suburban infill
+5.5 million, +4.0/acre urban/suburban infill
The article on Vegas was very fascinating. In my city, we have some suburban neighborhoods that have been hit VERY hard with foreclosures and are experiencing problems once associated with the inner city. Namely, gangs moving in and the tidy suburban houses are turning into drug houses, complete with all the crime that tends to go with that culture. Abondoned suburban homes are being filled with pot farms, with no way to bust whoever is operating them. There are few neighborhoods I would to go, this being a very safe city, but I would never go there.
I can only imagine what is happening in Vegas with the lot of empty houses that no one dare take a chance on. Especially now that you can buy new again and the near new housing stock is left empty. The image of a new suburban neighborhood over run with "inner city" problems of drugs and crime is a sad but an interesting one. How is that for architecture of the downardly mobile?
"Especially now that you can buy new again and the near new housing stock is left empty."
The problem here is that the "newest" product looks just like the "newer" product and really differs only by virtue of the fact that it is newer. It seems to me that this sort of like that classic definition of insanity - doing the same thing over and over gain, and expecting a different end... (or at least clever marketing). I urge the buyerse of the "newest" to think very carefully.
Some relevant links, one linking back to this thread:
http://aml7.tumblr.com/post/602516902/want-to-look-ahead-look-around-instead
http://varnelis.net/blog/fear_of_flying
Agree that those Vegas devlopers are crazy but we can also think of the folks who loan them the money to build. Haven't we learned anything in the last three years?
getting away from the suburbia thing and back to the the whole diminishing expectations meme, I thought this Pew Research thing from 2008 makes for an interesting read.
http://pewsocialtrends.org/pubs/706/middle-class-poll
striking research,
i can relate to lots of that. here in japan i am told the trends are even worse.
i have no reason for feeling this way, but i still feel optimistic about things. maybe it is because i grew up poor, maybe it is because i have been an ex-pat for 20 years...or maybe just because i run own architectural practice.
that vegas thing is curious. not insane, just money trying to multiply. i guess i wish them luck, but am doubtful of the method. seems a bad investment, but who knows. perhaps they know something that nobody else does.
it is hard to disentangle spatial expectations from financial ones in north america. in that sense suburbia is important. i guess to me suburbs are not really worth treating as separate entities from the city wither, they ARE the city, and the trad centers are just a variant typology - this is true in paris as much as london new york LA, tokyo (popn 33 million, only about 1/3 are in the center)...solving suburbia is going to part of our future in one form or another at least in the so-called developed world. it seems that varnelis is hinting at that, though he is more pessimistic than i am...
Thanks for that Jump
I think diminished expectations are always a matter of perspective and denote only general trends and tendancies. Of course, if you're an immigrant or the child of immigrants or the first generation, in your family, to get a university degree, then you're likely to have a very different perspective on this issue, and, as I noted in my introduction, this whole thread is likely to come up as a being a bit whiny. If, however, you're a child of upper-middle-class boomers and grew up in a suburban mcmansion (I admit it.. that includes me), then the phenonemon discussed here may be of interest. I know (and just about everybody I grew up with know), with absolute certainty, that I will experience downward mobilty.. that living in the neighborhood I grew up in is something so out-of-reach as to be almost completely inconceivable.
The personal perspective, aside, thoguht, there are broader implications to all of this. Numbers pretty clearly show that household income growth in the US has stagnated for at least two generations (now going on three), with slow growth offset, until this Great Recession, by ever-increasing indebtedness. People had come to expect richer lifestyles, year after year, despite a lack of real income growth, and they were financing that aspiration with ever-increasing personal debt. In fact, the only thing growing at respectable rates seem to be our healthcare costs. This phenomenon has shaped the American urban and suburban development language (that we contribute to as architects) since World War II.
Now, the butcher's bill is finally coming due, and there are no solutions readily at hand. Nobel Prize Economists like Krugman say that the answer is a new era of innovation in areas like green technology, fueling GDP expansion, but there is no evidence that the US is taking the steps it needs to, to fuel such innovation and expansion, and the window for securing American competitive advantage in this arena may already have closed. There are no great society initiatives, no new deal, no national vision, and I can see no grand renewal. Efforts to introduce even mild reforms - like healthcare - have, for the most part, collapsed into disarray.
As a designer, I am interested in thinking about what a post-imperial America might look like - what kind of spaces and places will need to be generated. Suburbia is only one dimension of the problem that needs to be addressed. our leaders seem determined to deliver this post- vision as a fait accompi, and we will have to live with it, whatever form it takes. But regardles of how it looks like, our cities and communities will change.
I caught this interesting article on downward mobility and Gen Y. I'm Gen X, not Y, but I thought it was interesting nonetheless:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38364681/ns/business-economy_at_a_crossroads/
The sociology of American imperial decline is going to make for quite a few interesting dissertations in another generation or so....
Interesting article Urbanist. Not sure I agree that Gen Y is the worst off. Think that's coming to bear on us Gen X'ers. We've got families and mortgages, etc.
If someone can't get a job at 23 and has to wait until 26 while leeching off mom & dad, so what? I can't go home to mom & dad. Aside from them being retired and on fixed income, I have a mortgage that cannot be deferred. Expenses of children/family can't be pushed back a few years, etc. Meanwhile we're [gen x] shut off from employment advancement by a boomer generation that is postponing retirement. Stuck in the middle is the worst case senario IMO. Not to mention our alternatives to working in Architecture are hindered by our experience in the profession. Entry level people don't have that problem.
aqua,
good points, but I think the Gen Y concern is that it may be about waiting 3-5 years - temp employment and underemployment for many professions and trades may be their permanent model (say Vinoly hiring people people for specific projects and even tasks - like developing a marketing brouchure and then promptly laying them off when the project is done, being a best case). Gen Y is fast becoming a generation of part-time contractors, and if that works, why would employers ever treat them differently?
"If someone can't get a job at 23 and has to wait until 26 while leeching off mom & dad, so what?"
This has less to do with a micro view point than it does a macro view point.
The oldest reaches of Gen Y were already suppose to have bought something like 1.5 million units of housing-- which has not be bought. While the market is over saturated in some housing niches, its actually behind in several other niches.
The larger point here is primarily how the United States functions as a whole and that is especially tied to generational turn over.
People aged 21-25 should have already been married, should have had or planning on having their first kid, bought or be in the stages of buying a house and have made a few major purchases (car, appliances, furniture).
The sad fact is... a majority of this generational group has done none of that. They're nowhere even close to any of that.
What this means? It means the overall economy lags and slows. Much like Italy or Japan, people 'not growing up' causes very slow growth and even negative growth economies. And while certain parts of Japan's and Italy's economy is doing quite well, there's other parts that are languishing or dying off completely.
So... for homebuilders, auto dealers, furniture sellers, retailers and appliance makers, this is big trouble.
This age group needs to get out the door, secure their own dwelling and fill it to the roof of inane useless appliances and bric-a-brac.
Or everyone loses.
yeah.. exactly right unicorn.
But even more perniciously, if employers can get away with treating these young'uns as a permanent part-time contractor class, why would they ever treat them better than that? If the job market did that to me, as a (young end of) mid-career professional, I'd be embittered and determined to get back to a "real job." But this may be the only experience a lot of young people in industries like our own will ever have... and a permanent lack of security, means they will never get around the laying down the roots unicorn described.
In a phrase, permanent structural under-employment as a typical condition for hundreds of thousands of people.
It's bad.
great thread --- reminds me of an old thought --- something like a cross between an extended stay hotel and universal city walk located just outside of major urban centers --- the idea is to leverage anonymity to loosen the grip of a person's socio-economic status and history in order to facilitate their own redefinition of self --- originally conceived of as a way to improve upon section 8 housing with respect to transforming people's lives
bear in mind this plays directly upon urbanist's point about many of us forced into increasingly short-term, freelance/contract labor type work, possibly a nomadic life style as well
how can architecture/planning help us transition?
it seems as though during a time when much re-valuation of one's personal property, relationships and aspirations is inevitable, the process can be facilitated, resources conserved, new relationships and directions explored, and anxiety, shame and expectation reduced, if:
-one is forced to reduce the amount of material possessions considered essential to a minimum, thus gaining clear redefinition of one's life
- one is not tethered to a house, a history, and only to a community to the extent that it is beneficial, but mostly migrates between comfortable, safe, alternative versions of a new domestic life until one finds a style, a community that fits
- one passes through a series of temporary living arrangements with similarly mobile, safe, engaged strangers, with whom stories can be shared, histories redefined, personas tried on and tweaked, self-redefined in a low-stakes, safe atmosphere
- people from different socio-economic backgrounds are mixed and no one is really aware of exactly what someone else's socio-economic backgorund is or was, unless they choose to broadcast it, thus breaking down traditional socio-economic barriers, encouraging people to share experiences and find common cause and form new communities
- mixing in the citywalk element is meant to add visitors, vacationers and others who will set a generally positive tone with respect to the quality of anonymity of the place, as well as to infuse interaction with hope and possibility, thus setting the right tone for the transformation and making lots of possibilities and trajectories visible at hand
this transition leads eventually to people finding new communities for their new life circumstances --- and when they settle down, it will be, no matter the formal characteristics of the architectural environment, into something closer to a traditional, walkable neighborhood, or even an eco-village style commune, not necessarily with respect to interest in sustainability or politics, etc, but rather with respect to organizational structure ---
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