suburban retrofitting
March 26, 2021 7:40 AM Subscribe
The People the Suburbs Were Built for Are Gone. Shayla Love @ Vice.com interviews architecture professors June Williamson and Ellen Dunham-Jones on their new book, Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Strategies for Urgent Challenges. "Since the 1990s, Williamson and Dunham-Jones have been watching the suburbs evolve. They have found that much of the suburban sprawl of the 20th century was built to serve a very different population than the one that exists now, and so preserving what the suburbs once were doesn't make sense."
"So when you talk about retrofitting, you mean finding and altering underused or abandoned suburban buildings to better accommodate the demographics and desires of the people who live there now?
JW: Absolutely. And in most of the cases we've studied, this is happening because the built places have failed or are struggling to some degree. The dead and dying malls, the vacated office parks, the ghost box stores left behind. Rather than bring back the same thing, this is a tremendous opportunity.
It can be as simple as re-inhabiting, or an adaptive reuse—fixing up the building, or changing the parking lot for something that's better suited to the times. Taking something that was commercial and turning it into housing.
It can also involve re-greening because so much of the suburbanization processes disrupted the regional ecologies and stormwater flow systems. Then it's an opportunity for wider ranging benefits. There could be places of recreation or social exchange having small plazas and program parks. And then there is redevelopment. Taking a low density, car-dependent use-separated or mono-use place and mixing it up and investing in it."
"So when you talk about retrofitting, you mean finding and altering underused or abandoned suburban buildings to better accommodate the demographics and desires of the people who live there now?
JW: Absolutely. And in most of the cases we've studied, this is happening because the built places have failed or are struggling to some degree. The dead and dying malls, the vacated office parks, the ghost box stores left behind. Rather than bring back the same thing, this is a tremendous opportunity.
It can be as simple as re-inhabiting, or an adaptive reuse—fixing up the building, or changing the parking lot for something that's better suited to the times. Taking something that was commercial and turning it into housing.
It can also involve re-greening because so much of the suburbanization processes disrupted the regional ecologies and stormwater flow systems. Then it's an opportunity for wider ranging benefits. There could be places of recreation or social exchange having small plazas and program parks. And then there is redevelopment. Taking a low density, car-dependent use-separated or mono-use place and mixing it up and investing in it."
I like the article too, and I wish the idea luck, but there is so much of it, and I'm not sure that the scale of revitalization required is at all in line with the amount of property available. How many lucha wrestling rinks (for example) are needed? How many can be turned into pools?
Look how big that Bell Labs building is - how can that be maintainable even for the next 20 years with tiny local shops?
Bulldozing lots of it and building housing would be great, but is very contentious... Putting it all on the backs of wealthy homeowners by pushing ADUs is also a cool but ultimately tiny percentage of the solution.
This all sounds more negative than I actually am - I think that there will be tiny pools of density, which can then be linked by transit, as the next step in the future.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:06 AM on March 26, 2021 [3 favorites]
Look how big that Bell Labs building is - how can that be maintainable even for the next 20 years with tiny local shops?
Bulldozing lots of it and building housing would be great, but is very contentious... Putting it all on the backs of wealthy homeowners by pushing ADUs is also a cool but ultimately tiny percentage of the solution.
This all sounds more negative than I actually am - I think that there will be tiny pools of density, which can then be linked by transit, as the next step in the future.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:06 AM on March 26, 2021 [3 favorites]
Look how big that Bell Labs building is - how can that be maintainable even for the next 20 years with tiny local shops?
That place has some pretty interesting history, including at least one Nobel Prize.
posted by TedW at 9:24 AM on March 26, 2021
That place has some pretty interesting history, including at least one Nobel Prize.
posted by TedW at 9:24 AM on March 26, 2021
True, but so what? Install the historical marker, and move on.
The dead malls are one thing but I'm looking forward to the time when the spaces between suburban houses are filled in and the structures are all connected together. Won't that be lovely?
posted by Rash at 9:35 AM on March 26, 2021 [1 favorite]
The dead malls are one thing but I'm looking forward to the time when the spaces between suburban houses are filled in and the structures are all connected together. Won't that be lovely?
posted by Rash at 9:35 AM on March 26, 2021 [1 favorite]
I love the Bell Labs / Bell Works thing. It looks like it's not just tiny local shops, it's offices / mixed use stuff as well. It would have made me sad if that place got bulldozed to make 50 McMansions. (i don't know anything about economic sustainability or whatever, i hope this works out and we can see more projects like this)
posted by capnsue at 9:41 AM on March 26, 2021 [7 favorites]
posted by capnsue at 9:41 AM on March 26, 2021 [7 favorites]
One thing that they only tangentially address is the street plan difference between 'modern' (post war, but especially post 60s) suburbs and earlier. Where I live, the so-called inner city has typically suburban densities (mostly SFH), but is built on a grid. These neighbourhoods are generally pre-war -- 1910 to 1950. The grid is inherently more walkable, and lends itself to intensification or densification.
Our inner city is surrounded by what I call the 'worm tracks' (because from an aerial or satellite view, it looks like the damage that beetle larvae do to wood): cul-de-sacs, crescents, arcing/looping forms that detach from arterial roadways (they call this a 'tree like form'). This latter is inherently a lot less walkable as you can't travel in a straight line -- making all distances farther. Further, sidewalks are often absent in the worm-tracts and the arterial roads are hostile to pedestrians and cyclists.
It has always seemed to me that this built form resists intensification/densification. Are there counter-examples? Cases where people have successfully retrofitted this street-scape. What does it take?
posted by bumpkin at 9:47 AM on March 26, 2021 [33 favorites]
Our inner city is surrounded by what I call the 'worm tracks' (because from an aerial or satellite view, it looks like the damage that beetle larvae do to wood): cul-de-sacs, crescents, arcing/looping forms that detach from arterial roadways (they call this a 'tree like form'). This latter is inherently a lot less walkable as you can't travel in a straight line -- making all distances farther. Further, sidewalks are often absent in the worm-tracts and the arterial roads are hostile to pedestrians and cyclists.
It has always seemed to me that this built form resists intensification/densification. Are there counter-examples? Cases where people have successfully retrofitted this street-scape. What does it take?
posted by bumpkin at 9:47 AM on March 26, 2021 [33 favorites]
Ottawa’s new Official Plan will require that any single family home which is demolished must be replaced with multiple dwellings. Duplex, row house, etc. In addition, the city is greatly increasing the allowed maximum density and required minimum density and building heights in many areas. The plan is to urbanize older inner suburbs, where small post-war houses are routinely knocked down and replaced with McMansions. The long term goal of the new plan is to convert as much of the city as possible to 15 minute neighbourhoods. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. There is a lot of NIMBY opposition in wealthy older suburbs.
My little 1950s neighbourhood has been a focus of urbanization, and for the most part it has been great.
posted by fimbulvetr at 10:03 AM on March 26, 2021 [17 favorites]
My little 1950s neighbourhood has been a focus of urbanization, and for the most part it has been great.
posted by fimbulvetr at 10:03 AM on March 26, 2021 [17 favorites]
In case anyone is interested, here is the new Ottawa Official Plan.
posted by fimbulvetr at 10:06 AM on March 26, 2021 [6 favorites]
posted by fimbulvetr at 10:06 AM on March 26, 2021 [6 favorites]
I have for a long time pondered about parking lots of malls being studded with tiny (or just small) homes. They could be little micro cities or arcologies surrounding the old malls built entirely at human scale. I mean, most malls have theaters and restaurants and food courts. Retrofit a few grocery stores in there and office space and you’ve got a glorious little village. It’d actually be really nice to live in a dense hub that was built to human scale (which is one of the only good things about a mall).
Maybe my fantasy dreams of winning the lotto and buying an abandoned mining town should be updated to buying a shelled out mall.
posted by furnace.heart at 10:08 AM on March 26, 2021 [26 favorites]
Maybe my fantasy dreams of winning the lotto and buying an abandoned mining town should be updated to buying a shelled out mall.
posted by furnace.heart at 10:08 AM on March 26, 2021 [26 favorites]
A have to admit to feeling a little wistful for this alternate-reality land of depressed (affordable) suburban house values. Here in Toronto, and anywhere within a hundred miles of it, the price for detached housing has been lurching up annually by low double digits for the last couple decades. Most new suburban construction I see is giant developments of row housing designed for multi-generational families - built as satellites to small towns adjacent to bigger places like Hamilton. They're more dense than older suburbs but follow the same sorts of street plan (looping streets bounded and cut off from major roads, served by big box plazas) so the prospect of efficient public transit seems dim.
posted by bonobothegreat at 10:18 AM on March 26, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by bonobothegreat at 10:18 AM on March 26, 2021 [2 favorites]
I read the authors' previous book on the subject, Retrofitting Suburbia, and I remember it being pretty interesting. Flipping through it again, they do touch on subjects like redefining the street grid of different types of suburbs (grid-based, snaking cul-de-sacs, etc.) and interventions both small-scale (individual houses/lots) and large-scale (entire subdivisions and areas). I should give it a re-read and maybe find some time for this book as well.
posted by chrominance at 10:37 AM on March 26, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by chrominance at 10:37 AM on March 26, 2021 [2 favorites]
Powerful "cattle grazing in the ruins of the Roman forum" energy especially in that Bell Labs bit.
posted by save alive nothing that breatheth at 11:09 AM on March 26, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by save alive nothing that breatheth at 11:09 AM on March 26, 2021 [1 favorite]
(On preview: sorry, I got really excited and my comment is way too long. )
Oh man, I freaking love talking about infill development, and I'm going to have to dig up their book. There are some really amazing reuse projects out there - in addition to the ones discussed in the article, there's a GORGEOUS reuse project in the oldest mall in America in Cleveland, with micro-apartments on the upper levels. I also had the opportunity to visit Central State in Indianapolis a few years ago. It's a really, really cool and gorgeous still-evolving development on the campus of a decommissioned state mental hospital. It's got new-build single family and attached houses, apartments, artist/entrepreneur space, community event space, park space, and it manages to blend new builds that have modern amenities with really creative preservation of the architecture from the original hospital that was beautiful and worth keeping around. Best of all, it got rid of the fences that made the hospital campus a giant black hole plopped in the middle of the surrounding neighborhood, so people can actually go to and through the area.
Infill development is really hard and honestly really expensive, but it's so important to do to keep communities from ossifying and dying. The way people use space changes over time and we have to find a way to change the space to suit the needs of the people who use it. My own neighborhood is one of these postwar suburbs, and my town and county are struggling to do the redevelopment that's needed, and it's not (at least completely) for lack of funding. NIMBYs are for sure a problem. People who fear gentrification are not wrong, and those concerns need to be addressed. Our suburb is where a lot of immigrant communities that got pushed out or grew out of our adjacent big city have landed over the decades, and the outdated strip malls along our pedestrian unfriendly major roads are where their businesses and services prosper, and it would be catastrophic to just tear down those facilities without accounting for whether they'd be replaced with something affordable.
Those old, untrendy garden apartments with bus stops out front are for sure an important piece of the housing puzzle, and we can't just replace them with luxury high-rises. The zoning in my area was only just updated to allow accessory dwelling units, and it's still not possible to tear down a SFH in my neighborhood and replace it with a duplex or triplex on the same lot (although you can build an oversized SFH the size of a triplex, as long as you abide by the excessive lot setback requirements). And real estate and construction is just wildly expensive - even if the law allowed it, we can't tear down our house and build a duplex and live out of one unit, or carve an apartment out of the hosue - we can only just afford to maintain our ramshackle un-updated house in its current condition.
And in the case of the planned mixed-use development in my neighborhood that's meant to replace a handful of desolate strip malls, the permitting and review processes have been nightmarishly slow, the county has been stubborn about permitting additional housing because of school capacity limits, and even then people have been really petty and complainy about it looking generic (my dudes, I would live in the world's beige-est box if it meant I got to be upstairs from Wegmans).
There are some nice things about my suburb. I like that there's a connection to the metro system. I like that there are schools and pools and libraries and community centers sprinkled throughout, so that if we have a kid, they'll grow up walking to their activities rather than being packed in a car for everything. But there's a lot of work I think community organizations and local elected leaders need to do in talking with residents and businesses about what their needs are and pushing people a little bit to buy into these redevelopment projects, and I think there's a lot that all levels of government are going to have to do to fund them, because it's never going to work on a purely profit angle.
posted by bowtiesarecool at 11:19 AM on March 26, 2021 [9 favorites]
Oh man, I freaking love talking about infill development, and I'm going to have to dig up their book. There are some really amazing reuse projects out there - in addition to the ones discussed in the article, there's a GORGEOUS reuse project in the oldest mall in America in Cleveland, with micro-apartments on the upper levels. I also had the opportunity to visit Central State in Indianapolis a few years ago. It's a really, really cool and gorgeous still-evolving development on the campus of a decommissioned state mental hospital. It's got new-build single family and attached houses, apartments, artist/entrepreneur space, community event space, park space, and it manages to blend new builds that have modern amenities with really creative preservation of the architecture from the original hospital that was beautiful and worth keeping around. Best of all, it got rid of the fences that made the hospital campus a giant black hole plopped in the middle of the surrounding neighborhood, so people can actually go to and through the area.
Infill development is really hard and honestly really expensive, but it's so important to do to keep communities from ossifying and dying. The way people use space changes over time and we have to find a way to change the space to suit the needs of the people who use it. My own neighborhood is one of these postwar suburbs, and my town and county are struggling to do the redevelopment that's needed, and it's not (at least completely) for lack of funding. NIMBYs are for sure a problem. People who fear gentrification are not wrong, and those concerns need to be addressed. Our suburb is where a lot of immigrant communities that got pushed out or grew out of our adjacent big city have landed over the decades, and the outdated strip malls along our pedestrian unfriendly major roads are where their businesses and services prosper, and it would be catastrophic to just tear down those facilities without accounting for whether they'd be replaced with something affordable.
Those old, untrendy garden apartments with bus stops out front are for sure an important piece of the housing puzzle, and we can't just replace them with luxury high-rises. The zoning in my area was only just updated to allow accessory dwelling units, and it's still not possible to tear down a SFH in my neighborhood and replace it with a duplex or triplex on the same lot (although you can build an oversized SFH the size of a triplex, as long as you abide by the excessive lot setback requirements). And real estate and construction is just wildly expensive - even if the law allowed it, we can't tear down our house and build a duplex and live out of one unit, or carve an apartment out of the hosue - we can only just afford to maintain our ramshackle un-updated house in its current condition.
And in the case of the planned mixed-use development in my neighborhood that's meant to replace a handful of desolate strip malls, the permitting and review processes have been nightmarishly slow, the county has been stubborn about permitting additional housing because of school capacity limits, and even then people have been really petty and complainy about it looking generic (my dudes, I would live in the world's beige-est box if it meant I got to be upstairs from Wegmans).
There are some nice things about my suburb. I like that there's a connection to the metro system. I like that there are schools and pools and libraries and community centers sprinkled throughout, so that if we have a kid, they'll grow up walking to their activities rather than being packed in a car for everything. But there's a lot of work I think community organizations and local elected leaders need to do in talking with residents and businesses about what their needs are and pushing people a little bit to buy into these redevelopment projects, and I think there's a lot that all levels of government are going to have to do to fund them, because it's never going to work on a purely profit angle.
posted by bowtiesarecool at 11:19 AM on March 26, 2021 [9 favorites]
The storm water angle was touched on in one of the examples, but basically, lots of concrete and asphalt puts more strain on your gutters and sewers...that water goes straight down/causes flooding, and carries oil and pollutants into your lakes if not treated. Breaking up giant sections of pavement/installing plants that filter and absorb water can help preserve a lot of infrastructure and reduce flooding.
posted by emjaybee at 11:38 AM on March 26, 2021 [11 favorites]
posted by emjaybee at 11:38 AM on March 26, 2021 [11 favorites]
I have for a long time pondered about parking lots of malls being studded with tiny (or just small) homes. They could be little micro cities or arcologies surrounding the old malls built entirely at human scale. I mean, most malls have theaters and restaurants and food courts. Retrofit a few grocery stores in there and office space and you’ve got a glorious little village. It’d actually be really nice to live in a dense hub that was built to human scale (which is one of the only good things about a mall).
Two malls near my parents' house in the DC exurbs have, in the last decade, ceded some parking space to new businesses that have built on the perimeter of the old lots. Anecdotally and by drive-by observations, both appear to be doing somewhat better than other members of their largely dying or dead 70s/80s cohort.
posted by ryanshepard at 11:40 AM on March 26, 2021
Two malls near my parents' house in the DC exurbs have, in the last decade, ceded some parking space to new businesses that have built on the perimeter of the old lots. Anecdotally and by drive-by observations, both appear to be doing somewhat better than other members of their largely dying or dead 70s/80s cohort.
posted by ryanshepard at 11:40 AM on March 26, 2021
> Look how big that Bell Labs building is - how can that be maintainable even for the next 20 years with tiny local shops?
> That place has some pretty interesting history, including at least one Nobel Prize.
> True, but so what? Install the historical marker, and move on.
It was added to the National Register of Historic Places -- even if it wasn't once the site of Bell Labs, it's still significant for its architecture -- so there are currently some serious legal obstacles to getting it removed.
posted by ardgedee at 11:55 AM on March 26, 2021 [1 favorite]
> That place has some pretty interesting history, including at least one Nobel Prize.
> True, but so what? Install the historical marker, and move on.
It was added to the National Register of Historic Places -- even if it wasn't once the site of Bell Labs, it's still significant for its architecture -- so there are currently some serious legal obstacles to getting it removed.
posted by ardgedee at 11:55 AM on March 26, 2021 [1 favorite]
there's a GORGEOUS reuse project in the oldest mall in America in Cleveland, with micro-apartments on the upper levels
Uhh . . . your link is to the Arcade Providence. You may have been thinking of the Cleveland Arcade, which has been converted into a Hyatt hotel on the upper floors. (Don't get me wrong, that Providence Arcade looks nice, too!)
posted by soundguy99 at 1:54 PM on March 26, 2021 [1 favorite]
Uhh . . . your link is to the Arcade Providence. You may have been thinking of the Cleveland Arcade, which has been converted into a Hyatt hotel on the upper floors. (Don't get me wrong, that Providence Arcade looks nice, too!)
posted by soundguy99 at 1:54 PM on March 26, 2021 [1 favorite]
I look at that crazy ring road around Bell Labs, and can’t help but think it is a monument to every fucked-up car-centric planning decision ever made from that era.
posted by fimbulvetr at 2:35 PM on March 26, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by fimbulvetr at 2:35 PM on March 26, 2021 [2 favorites]
I look at that crazy ring road around Bell Labs,
You are correct about that. Looks like it would make a decent racetrack. Look how isolated it still is too, like 60 years after it was built!
posted by The_Vegetables at 2:54 PM on March 26, 2021 [1 favorite]
You are correct about that. Looks like it would make a decent racetrack. Look how isolated it still is too, like 60 years after it was built!
posted by The_Vegetables at 2:54 PM on March 26, 2021 [1 favorite]
I was really struck by the statistics in the book about how many parking spaces there are per household in certain cities. Like how there are 1.97 cars per U.S. household, but in Des Moines, Iowa, there are 19 parking spaces per household. In Jackson, Wyoming, there are 27. These all seem like really obvious places to re-think about how we're using land.
That doesn't seem too crazy to me. You need an excess of spaces to avoid making parking like a sliding puzzle. Also parking demand for a particular space isn't even throughout the day or week, but follows people's daily cycles, so you need more excess to handle that.
posted by cosmic.osmo at 4:07 PM on March 26, 2021
That doesn't seem too crazy to me. You need an excess of spaces to avoid making parking like a sliding puzzle. Also parking demand for a particular space isn't even throughout the day or week, but follows people's daily cycles, so you need more excess to handle that.
posted by cosmic.osmo at 4:07 PM on March 26, 2021
Along those same lines I'd like to see the stats for Sturgis, SD. I've been there twice and never during the biker rally so it's a lot of HUGE parking lots that are only full a couple of weeks a year.
Cities don't have parking spots for the people that live there but the people that come there from other cities. It's still a huge waste but there is a lot more to demand for parking that just cars per household in the city. I expect that bit of nuance is in the book but it's missing in the article.
posted by VTX at 6:27 PM on March 26, 2021 [1 favorite]
Cities don't have parking spots for the people that live there but the people that come there from other cities. It's still a huge waste but there is a lot more to demand for parking that just cars per household in the city. I expect that bit of nuance is in the book but it's missing in the article.
posted by VTX at 6:27 PM on March 26, 2021 [1 favorite]
I grew up suburban (various different geographic locations, same basic thing) but left it all behind as soon as I could afford to get the hell out. And I pulled it off for almost forty years ... until Covid hit. Suddenly for various complicated family reasons, I was alternating between a remote and (some would say) paradisiacal locale and a zone defined by its strip malls.
Long story short -- for reasons too complicated and yet mundane to get into, I think I got more out of the strip malls over the past year. The housemates were better for one thing. Also marijuana helped as did bingeing on Rush, The Guess Who and Blue Oyster Cult. And Queen, of course. And Public Enemy who, like Blue Oyster Cult, hail from the grandaddy of all suburban expanses -- Long Island.
My point being -- I think we need to be at least a little careful in evolving the future of our split-level expanses. Because the last seventy-five years did happen. Untold millions grew up, got educated, joined fan clubs, dropped acid, fell in love, went crazy, got better etc in the context of (insert all your suburban hellscape-banality cliches). And most of them aren't even horrible people, don't subscribe to Qanon's newsletter, didn't even think of storming the capital.
By all means, let's retrofit. Maybe use William Gibson's Sprawl as a combination model/cautionary tale. Let's just not kick anyone off the bus who doesn't deserve it. That's just another tentacle of gentrification from where I'm sitting.
posted by philip-random at 9:30 PM on March 26, 2021 [1 favorite]
Long story short -- for reasons too complicated and yet mundane to get into, I think I got more out of the strip malls over the past year. The housemates were better for one thing. Also marijuana helped as did bingeing on Rush, The Guess Who and Blue Oyster Cult. And Queen, of course. And Public Enemy who, like Blue Oyster Cult, hail from the grandaddy of all suburban expanses -- Long Island.
My point being -- I think we need to be at least a little careful in evolving the future of our split-level expanses. Because the last seventy-five years did happen. Untold millions grew up, got educated, joined fan clubs, dropped acid, fell in love, went crazy, got better etc in the context of (insert all your suburban hellscape-banality cliches). And most of them aren't even horrible people, don't subscribe to Qanon's newsletter, didn't even think of storming the capital.
By all means, let's retrofit. Maybe use William Gibson's Sprawl as a combination model/cautionary tale. Let's just not kick anyone off the bus who doesn't deserve it. That's just another tentacle of gentrification from where I'm sitting.
posted by philip-random at 9:30 PM on March 26, 2021 [1 favorite]
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