The first category can be dismissed outright: the rules of the game for this competition are to change the suburbs. These criticism seem to arise because this submission hits “closest to home” – showing easy-to-visualize solutions to real problems.

The second can also be dismissed as criticisms – not because they are not great ideas (many of them are), but because this submission is intended to get people thinking about the current problem of the suburbs, so the presence of these comments demonstrates the success of the project. This submission is more about broad concepts that can be applied on a national level. The details will get worked out on a project-by-project basis.

The third challenge, making sprawl worse, represents the central problem in redeveloping the suburbs. Won’t this increase in density simply compound the problems of the suburbs? The underlying critique in this question assumes that people will all still drive to the redeveloped buildings. This will happen if the redevelopments proposed in this submission happen in isolation. On the other hand, if these changes are implemented as part of a larger revitalization strategy, they will create opportunities within the suburbs for multiple modes of transportation – more bicycling and walking! – and they will in fact reduce the infrastructure burdens in the suburbs, one neighborhood at a time.

The appeal of suburbs – the “wide open spaces” – is not the parking lots, or the congested highways, or the long distances between homes and retail or work. Conversely, higher densities do not necessarily mean urban congestion. There are thousands of (still) successful small towns in America that are low-density walkable communities filled with a mix of apartments, rowhomes, and single-family homes. What this submission suggests is that there are opportunities to create these kinds of opportunities everywhere without having to completely undo the development of the last half-century. The “problem” of suburbs is not the overall density (there’s actually plenty of that) – it’s the mix, which requires people to drive to accomplish every single daily task.

This entry is ultimately the greenest on multiple levels: it reduces the carbon footprint per capita of the suburbs, while keeping existing buildings (and their embodied energy), and it goes even further by creating opportunities for local businesses to survive and seed.

My idea isn’t to eliminate automobile infrastructure entirely but rather to make modest concessions to other modes to give people more choices in how they get around.

1- the parking at the fast food place is excessive (you know that everyone in suburbia has a car and you can thank robert moses for that)

2- anyone in suburbia would want to live about a grease factory…how unappealing