Multiple problems with the design principles behind suburbs - backyards are great for raising kids, but to a certain extent, you need to have a focal point in order to have a sacred space - many suburbs are designed to be linear, with the home as the centerpiece. Go from your home to work and back again Go to the grocery store and back again. Go to the school and back again, and so on. There's an in-betweenness about suburbs that doesn't lend itself to community. Part of the issue is our DNA, we value individual liberty much more than we like other people. We're doing a lot more Bowling Alone. Third, cars. How many places have huge debates about sidewalks? Our old front porch-centric design was based on walkability. Now, many houses have their outdoor face in their backyards. The sacred space emerges out of collective appreciation of the holy, but now most of us just want to worship our household gods.
Super interesting article. However, I'd point out a contradiction in this line:
'The “human scale” is a big buzzword in urbanism today. Contrary to what many say, the suburbs actually do a pretty good job of the human scale, especially from an automobile era perspective.'
Once you bring in the automobile, you've left the human scale. The criticism of the suburb not being built on a human scale is valid, because for everything, you rely on a very unhuman (and polluting) automobile.
Maybe an urbanist who is a quant should analyze the number of houses in the suburb that are more than 1 mile from a grocery store or pharmacy. Also, car scaled suburbs with sidewalks are a very different world than car scaled suburbs with no sidewalks.
The Indiana World War Memorial is truly remarkable. It pains me that (1) the men who designed and built the facility honoring the fallen in WWI had no idea the pain that would lie ahead a couple of decades later, and (2) the Indiana General Assembly would almost certainly never agree to develop such a memorial today.
Houston is a particularly ephemeral city, with construction a near constant part of life. So most of the places from my childhood are long gone. One might imagine Houston's sprawling suburbs would be even more ephemeral, and in some ways they are, but perhaps not always.
This article brought to mind my suburban city of Sugar Land's changing of city halls over the years. There have been three, since we moved here in 1989. The current one, built intentionally as a lasting city hall, the first with an appropriate architecture, and as the centerpiece of our Town Square multipurpose development, seems more likely to last.
In a way, it's the exception that proves the rule — once we reached an appropriate scale (close to 100K population; currently we're about 110K), it became possible to build more significant structures and public spaces. Similarly, there are also several pretty large churches in the Sugar Land, but these congregations all started out in far more modest facilities.
I agree with sacred space. I currently live in the former Connecticut Western Reserve which has many a town square, as they were created the environment of New England. Ours has a church in the middle of a green, and the old town hall. Last night I was in another Western Reserve town with a town green in the recreated small town shopping district. It was very popular. And some Ohio towns have court house squares. In my youth the court house square was the gathering place for the teens of the area to drive around the square. We went through a period of 50 years where the town square was the fake environment of the Shopping Mall.
No it doesn't. It dates from the founding of the town in 1807, the church has moved up the road, but still owns the property, and the State of Ohio runs it as state history site, opens it for tours and weddings.
Enjoyed this. I reflect on my own Indiana high school of the early 90s and my children’s in the early 2020s. Our church is across the street. Poor aesthetics all. And go downtown Indiana and some beautiful school buildings. But perhaps a reminder that form and function can definitely be divorced.
Re the Mumford quote, "Behind the wall of the city life rested on a common foundation, set as deep as the universe itself: the city was nothing less than the home of a powerful god," see also Jacques Ellul's book, *The Meaning of the City,* expanding on this idea of cities themselves as manifestations of spiritual (and usually evil) intelligences, from the first city Cain built down to Babylon the Great, and only to be redeemed in the coming of the New Jerusalem.
The suburbs are under siege. ROAD to Housing Act would further destroy them with "affordable housing", which are Section8 slums. There are 5 types of suburbs now - favela, post-industrial wasteland, Brooklyn burb, Americana, and country club: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/american-suburbs-5-types-favela-americana
Re: ROAD to Housing Act would further destroy them with "affordable housing".
Oh, good grief what a horror! Housing that is not only for the well-heeled six digit income folks!
By the way I checked out that link. It barely rises to the level of "partisan swill". It breathlessy rants about "favelas" when ethnic ghettos have been around for a long time-- all those Little Italies, Chinatowns, Greektowns, Poletowns, etc, etc. Nothing new under the sun. It attributed Section 8, passed in 1974, to Obama! And I was in Dearborn MI on my very recent Michigan visit. Are there Middle Eastern people? Yes. There's even a mosque, next door to my one-time Orthodox church. But it was no kind of "Dearbornistan" no Shari'a law evident, lots of people who were not remotely Arab ethnically (I was waited on at a favorite old garden store there by a blond teenage kid) and altogether orderly and prosperous. My only complaint, as with all of Michigan usually, is that the roads sucked. Really, Michigan should replace its state seal with a picture of a pothole.
Housing isn't a right in any shape since once again, time, labor and cash must be utilized. Now we are asking for more subsidies from actual tax payers to subsidize the lodging of people we dont know. They can call themselves fellow citizens but that term means less when a large portion of americans put their identity as an american second or third behind other criteria.
Consider suburbs to be a component of refugee resettlement to get away from the ethnic stupidity and assorted forced assimilation schemes foisted upon all americans after 1965. That black fist in Detroit is a nice relic of that idiocy and still stands like a horrible remnant in that city.
I was just in Detroit earlier this month. I had been hearing that it was doing better. Certainly there are still blighted areas (you can see them from freeways) and no doubt neighborhoods you shouldn't go in without a squad of marines. But I was pleasantly surprised by downtown and the uptown Woodward strip. New construction down there, and plenty of for traffic-- ob a Saturday around noon. Used to me it was a ghost town outside workday hours.
Why does something so trivial matter to you? No, I didn't see the fist (which I regard as unaesthetic but also no big deal). And it's no news to me that the World worships Mammon-- twas thus also in the days of the Apostles, in the heyday of Christians Byzantium, as the cathedrals were being raised in the Middle Ages, when men and women took a chance on a wilderness home in a New World.
Why are you so bitter? "Be of good cheer for I have overcome the world."
Why would I care for cities that have monuments to the movements and people (scumbag coleman young) that helped destroy those cities and also destroyed other monuments as recently as 2020? The gods they worship have been a plague on this nation and why the suburbs exist. To get away from the evil like coleman young and form new communities and school zones away from their bs like bussing. Until that is completely reversed and their statues and murals destroyed like what was done from 2016 to 2020, to heck with em. Watching that ford heiress take the knee was one of the more disgusting things I've seen come out of Detroit in a while, and that is saying something.
Why obsess about the past. Seriously- the future is amenable to change, the past is not. The obsession on the Left with slavery etc. misleads them too. Leave the dead to bury the dead, as someone wiser than me once said.
When the cities raise monuments to a drug addled criminal who died while resisting arrest for counterfeit, the monuments and gods become dumb jokes. They've been jokes for a while, got worse in 2016 and amplified through 2020 and never recovered.
Multiple problems with the design principles behind suburbs - backyards are great for raising kids, but to a certain extent, you need to have a focal point in order to have a sacred space - many suburbs are designed to be linear, with the home as the centerpiece. Go from your home to work and back again Go to the grocery store and back again. Go to the school and back again, and so on. There's an in-betweenness about suburbs that doesn't lend itself to community. Part of the issue is our DNA, we value individual liberty much more than we like other people. We're doing a lot more Bowling Alone. Third, cars. How many places have huge debates about sidewalks? Our old front porch-centric design was based on walkability. Now, many houses have their outdoor face in their backyards. The sacred space emerges out of collective appreciation of the holy, but now most of us just want to worship our household gods.
Super interesting article. However, I'd point out a contradiction in this line:
'The “human scale” is a big buzzword in urbanism today. Contrary to what many say, the suburbs actually do a pretty good job of the human scale, especially from an automobile era perspective.'
Once you bring in the automobile, you've left the human scale. The criticism of the suburb not being built on a human scale is valid, because for everything, you rely on a very unhuman (and polluting) automobile.
Maybe an urbanist who is a quant should analyze the number of houses in the suburb that are more than 1 mile from a grocery store or pharmacy. Also, car scaled suburbs with sidewalks are a very different world than car scaled suburbs with no sidewalks.
The Indiana World War Memorial is truly remarkable. It pains me that (1) the men who designed and built the facility honoring the fallen in WWI had no idea the pain that would lie ahead a couple of decades later, and (2) the Indiana General Assembly would almost certainly never agree to develop such a memorial today.
Houston is a particularly ephemeral city, with construction a near constant part of life. So most of the places from my childhood are long gone. One might imagine Houston's sprawling suburbs would be even more ephemeral, and in some ways they are, but perhaps not always.
This article brought to mind my suburban city of Sugar Land's changing of city halls over the years. There have been three, since we moved here in 1989. The current one, built intentionally as a lasting city hall, the first with an appropriate architecture, and as the centerpiece of our Town Square multipurpose development, seems more likely to last.
In a way, it's the exception that proves the rule — once we reached an appropriate scale (close to 100K population; currently we're about 110K), it became possible to build more significant structures and public spaces. Similarly, there are also several pretty large churches in the Sugar Land, but these congregations all started out in far more modest facilities.
I agree with sacred space. I currently live in the former Connecticut Western Reserve which has many a town square, as they were created the environment of New England. Ours has a church in the middle of a green, and the old town hall. Last night I was in another Western Reserve town with a town green in the recreated small town shopping district. It was very popular. And some Ohio towns have court house squares. In my youth the court house square was the gathering place for the teens of the area to drive around the square. We went through a period of 50 years where the town square was the fake environment of the Shopping Mall.
Did the church have a pride flag in front of it?
No it doesn't. It dates from the founding of the town in 1807, the church has moved up the road, but still owns the property, and the State of Ohio runs it as state history site, opens it for tours and weddings.
Good for you.
The church in front of the town square in my town dates from before the revolution, and it has a pride flag and woke slogans in front of it.
Enjoyed this. I reflect on my own Indiana high school of the early 90s and my children’s in the early 2020s. Our church is across the street. Poor aesthetics all. And go downtown Indiana and some beautiful school buildings. But perhaps a reminder that form and function can definitely be divorced.
Re the Mumford quote, "Behind the wall of the city life rested on a common foundation, set as deep as the universe itself: the city was nothing less than the home of a powerful god," see also Jacques Ellul's book, *The Meaning of the City,* expanding on this idea of cities themselves as manifestations of spiritual (and usually evil) intelligences, from the first city Cain built down to Babylon the Great, and only to be redeemed in the coming of the New Jerusalem.
The suburbs are under siege. ROAD to Housing Act would further destroy them with "affordable housing", which are Section8 slums. There are 5 types of suburbs now - favela, post-industrial wasteland, Brooklyn burb, Americana, and country club: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/american-suburbs-5-types-favela-americana
Re: ROAD to Housing Act would further destroy them with "affordable housing".
Oh, good grief what a horror! Housing that is not only for the well-heeled six digit income folks!
By the way I checked out that link. It barely rises to the level of "partisan swill". It breathlessy rants about "favelas" when ethnic ghettos have been around for a long time-- all those Little Italies, Chinatowns, Greektowns, Poletowns, etc, etc. Nothing new under the sun. It attributed Section 8, passed in 1974, to Obama! And I was in Dearborn MI on my very recent Michigan visit. Are there Middle Eastern people? Yes. There's even a mosque, next door to my one-time Orthodox church. But it was no kind of "Dearbornistan" no Shari'a law evident, lots of people who were not remotely Arab ethnically (I was waited on at a favorite old garden store there by a blond teenage kid) and altogether orderly and prosperous. My only complaint, as with all of Michigan usually, is that the roads sucked. Really, Michigan should replace its state seal with a picture of a pothole.
Housing isn't a right in any shape since once again, time, labor and cash must be utilized. Now we are asking for more subsidies from actual tax payers to subsidize the lodging of people we dont know. They can call themselves fellow citizens but that term means less when a large portion of americans put their identity as an american second or third behind other criteria.
Consider suburbs to be a component of refugee resettlement to get away from the ethnic stupidity and assorted forced assimilation schemes foisted upon all americans after 1965. That black fist in Detroit is a nice relic of that idiocy and still stands like a horrible remnant in that city.
I was just in Detroit earlier this month. I had been hearing that it was doing better. Certainly there are still blighted areas (you can see them from freeways) and no doubt neighborhoods you shouldn't go in without a squad of marines. But I was pleasantly surprised by downtown and the uptown Woodward strip. New construction down there, and plenty of for traffic-- ob a Saturday around noon. Used to me it was a ghost town outside workday hours.
Don't care if it is doing well or not. Is that stupid black fist still up? If it is than it is still a city that worships false gods and idiocy.
Why does something so trivial matter to you? No, I didn't see the fist (which I regard as unaesthetic but also no big deal). And it's no news to me that the World worships Mammon-- twas thus also in the days of the Apostles, in the heyday of Christians Byzantium, as the cathedrals were being raised in the Middle Ages, when men and women took a chance on a wilderness home in a New World.
Why are you so bitter? "Be of good cheer for I have overcome the world."
Why would I care for cities that have monuments to the movements and people (scumbag coleman young) that helped destroy those cities and also destroyed other monuments as recently as 2020? The gods they worship have been a plague on this nation and why the suburbs exist. To get away from the evil like coleman young and form new communities and school zones away from their bs like bussing. Until that is completely reversed and their statues and murals destroyed like what was done from 2016 to 2020, to heck with em. Watching that ford heiress take the knee was one of the more disgusting things I've seen come out of Detroit in a while, and that is saying something.
Why obsess about the past. Seriously- the future is amenable to change, the past is not. The obsession on the Left with slavery etc. misleads them too. Leave the dead to bury the dead, as someone wiser than me once said.
When the cities raise monuments to a drug addled criminal who died while resisting arrest for counterfeit, the monuments and gods become dumb jokes. They've been jokes for a while, got worse in 2016 and amplified through 2020 and never recovered.