Why Suburbia Sucks

> Basically America is bad because we had space for cars when they were invented?

I think you did an admirable job of expressing my source of dissatisfaction with the article.

That, and the author interjecting his personal preferences as architectural dogma - his passage about "No Street Enclosure" was very much of "I grew up in the tight spaces of old European cities, therefore preferring the tight spaces of old European cities is a psychological default universal in humankind".

I actually find it amusing that he thinks "parking in the rear" is some sort of architectural grand achievement, rather than the historical reality: it was something that emerged from streets strewn with mud and horse shit, allowing people to emerge from carriages on a clean, usually paved, surface. It was a practical solution to a problem that doesn't exist today.

Additionally, he seems to think the resultant alleys are "safe" (and, I don't know, maybe they are - I really don't know, and won't speculate), but in every European and Euro-style city where I've seen such "parking and garden in the back", the walls are all 10' high and topped with home-made barbed wire (usually shards of glass). It doesn't seem like the natives believe too firmly in the safety of these sorts of hidden-from-the-public-eye spaces.

Beyond that, there's plenty of false dichotomies.

Many of his other points are valid. They all just blend together in this general mash of "American cities suck because they're not like European cities; European cities are the epitome of human psychology and architecture."

Damn, Europe can be fucking beautiful. Just achingly beautiful (oh, so much of London). At other times, you can walk through street after street of 10' gates, marred only by graffiti and the occasional heavily-barred window (thinking of you here, huge swaths of Spain and Portugal). Then again, I can say the same of suburbia (see almost any part of Staten Island, New York developed pre-2000 or so if you want to see fantastic suburbs).

Quite a bit of the crime rate comes from suburban development, and the highway system.

These sorts of articles are so profoundly boring, but somehow the whole "Suburbia sucks" thing recurs on here like clockwork.

If you don't like the suburbs...don't live in the suburbs? I personally love the suburbs. In fact, in the post-commuting world I think the suburbs are a better future model than dense living. At the same time I don't declare dense living dead.

And as an aside, these sorts of articles virtually always take some incredibly myopic view and project it across the entire country or world. In suburbs where I live, appropriate retail is mixed in the suburb. I have walked, countless times, for freshly baked bread and a coffee at the local grocer. Many multi-resident buildings have mixed use where small shots are at the bottom. Etc. The world isn't the 1950s.

I've yet to read a single article about why surburbia sucks that would be convincing to me as a better alternative than my life growing up in suburbia. If I wanted to play in a field, I went to the field. If I wanted to explore the woods, I went to the woods. Too far to walk? I had a bike, and a skateboard. I didn't have to spend my life walking on pavement from concrete box to concrete box, surrounded by indifferent adults... and just the idea of it sounds positively suffocating to me.

I doubt the suburbs are actually safer. I once did the math. If you add up shooting deaths and driving deaths, the rich suburb where I grew up is about as risky as one of the north side Chicago neighborhoods. And of course upper middle class white teens are going to be at lower than average risk of getting shot in the city, but at higher than average risk of wrapping themselves around a tree in the suburbs.

As for safe streets and good schools, it's a product of segregationist urban planning, not any intrinsic qualities of cities versus suburbs. We don't build public housing out in the suburbs, we do it in the cities. Our lack of transit makes it impossible for poor people to drive around in the suburbs. So our city schools are 90% low-income and have the problems that come with concentrated poverty.

Note that in places like Paris, the situation is reversed. Rich people live in the city (or out in the country). The suburbs are where the poor are herded into ghettos.