The New York Times article, Rethinking the Country Life as Energy Costs Rise , is just one of many articles documenting the apparent demise of suburbia. Unlike the notable Atlantic article which focused mostly on the mortgage bubble (previously), these more recent articles are beginning to focus of the rising cost of gas and transportation in general. (Previously) Is this the beginning of The End of Suburbia as predicted by the curmudgeonly James Howard Kunstler? (Discussed previously here and here.) Or are Americans simply readjusting their lifestyles to fit current economic limitations?
posted by Telf on Jun 25, 2008 - 99 comments

A 350 pound black bear wandered through the automatic doors of Carilion Franklin Memorial Hospital. After being trapped in a computer room, law enforcement officers killed the bear. Sadly, as suburbs and towns grow out into the country, more bears are getting the worse of their relationship to humans.
posted by borkus on Jun 17, 2004 - 18 comments

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