Boom! A master planned community. Boom! A big-box mall! Our Sprawling, Supersize Utopia. This article, by New York Times columnist David Brooks, takes a look at exploding suburbs and
exurban migration. This migration is nothing new, author Joel Garreau wrote extensively about it in his 1991 book
Edge Cities. The phenomonon really took off after World War II, during the period of post war prosperity, and is best represented by this
famous postwar American suburb. A veritable army of "suburban sprawl critics" has emerged over the years including
Jane Jacobs and
James Howard Knunstler plus
many others including some who are predicting the
immenent demise of suburbs because of
oil depletion. For Brooks the critics of suburbs "just regurgitate the same critiques decade after decade, regardless of the suburban reality flowering around them" but you can't dismiss what the architect Paolo Soleri says about American society that
"we have a society that is moving very rapidly to the
super-, super-, super-consumptive."
posted by thedailygrowl
on Apr 30, 2004 -
28 comments
Creative, cheap, participatory, the most innovative city in the world......Curitiba !! There may be no single, organic and
living font of solutions to many of the world's most pressing problems than
Curitiba (previous link from Wikipedia, and a bit more of a wonkish summary
here), a Brazilian city of 1.5 million that urban planners from around the globe make pilgrimages to, to learn.
On a budget a tiny fraction of those which
American cities have at their disposal, how did Curitiba become the world's leading model for urban sustainability and quality of life ? - with possibly
the world's most efficient and effective public transit system, a network of parks and greenery far beyond
Olmsted's visionary parks, 70% trash recycling, innovative social welfare systems, trees everywhere, and "Lighthouses of Knowledge" with small libraries and free internet access as well, a low cost open university system.....and flowers!
Curitiba's pedestrian-only (no cars) city center is filled with gardens.
posted by troutfishing
on Apr 13, 2004 -
34 comments
"Utopian Architecture" is where it's at. Unfortunately, despite how many people seem to be interested in it, there's very little documentation concerning the subject. The only books I can think of are Yesterday's Tomorrow (1984, MIT Press), Metropolis of Tomorrow by Hugo Ferriss and Impossible Worlds by Stephen Coates, and I don't know of any website on the subject.
posted by Kevs
on Nov 19, 2000 -
20 comments
