A new vision for the suburbs
Thriving, sustainable ‘posturbs’ can be successful if planned properly
Suburbs are the most dramatic phenomenon of city growth since the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Enabled by the mass availability of the automobile and growing household wealth, they stretch out in modern cities as far as the eye can see. City designers speak of them as profoundly unsustainable, impossible to provide with services, socially exclusive, and personally alienating.
Even the name has a negative connotation: “sub-urb” — less than a city, not quite what it should be.
And yet, for modern North Americans, suburbs are the most popular way to live. In Canada, more than 60 per cent of people have chosen suburban life. They sing the praises of green space, privacy, expansive living, safety, good schools, and like-minded neighbours.
They are surely on board to fix the sustainability problems, but they do not buy the kind of solutions planners tend to talk about — major densification, diversification, and giving up the car. Frankly, most suburbanites likely think the planners are a little crazy and out of touch.
This is a fundamental contradiction. Most people prefer a lifestyle that works well for them but hits the environment hard and limits their own options.
We have to fix this, and we can start by changing the language. Let’s call these areas “posturbs.” This is a forward-looking descriptor for the next iteration of city building that will be both delightful and functional as well as respectful to the environment and affordable.
Planners have to reach out to people like never before to find new answers, but we already have some ideas of the basic themes for post-urban change.
Most people tell us a lower scale is preferred — massive tower schemes out in the “posturbs” will not be widely popular. They tell us the least disruption there is to existing neighbourhoods the better — few people look forward to a lot of political battles.
They also tell us they want their cars even if they might take other modes of transport for more trips than they do now. And, lastly, they tell us to cool it on too much density. Maybe a little density can go a lot further than we think. To meet these themes, there are five post-urban strategies that have great potential.
Gentle intensification: This is what we have seen recently in the older neighbourhoods of Vancouver. It is a slow process of adding housing units in discreet ways that people hardly notice. This strategy features secondary suites and laneway housing and modest home extensions and similar delicate additions to the community.
Corridor transformation: This approach is very attractive for the extensive areas laid out after the war with strip malls and large parking lots along arterial streets surrounded by single family subdivisions. You start by adding bus rapid transit, a cheap form of more dependable transit, along the arterials. Then those vast parking lots are converted to low-scale multiple housing, with an emphasis on townhouses and garden apartments, leaving clusters of local retail. The balance of the existing single-family areas can be left undisturbed, but these people can start enjoying benefits of better proximity to the private and public services they need and more frequent walking or cycling.
Urban acupuncture: In almost every community there are tracts of land left fallow. These can become locations to finish and enhance a neighbourhood with comprehensive development. If developed at lower heights, the development can fit in nicely, leaving much around it untouched. Like acupuncture in the body, though, the results can solve problems for the whole surrounding posturb.
Replicating streetcar suburbs: This applies most to the design of new subdivisions on the fringe. It involves reproducing the delightful suburbs built around streetcar stations back in the 1930s and are now our popular inner-city neighbourhoods. They started quite spread out but have slowly filled in. They have all kinds of housing, and rich and poor live comfortably together. They have local shopping, narrow streets, are walkable and are easily served by transit. They have lots of landscape, character, heritage and amenities. There is no reason they cannot be copied in new areas. We will have to change the current straitjacket of standards and subdivision rules and endless regulations. So be it, we can surely find viable equivalencies. That’s what good city design is about.
Town centres: This is the approach widely advocated by planners today — the transitoriented development strategy. The idea is intensive walkable development with housing, workplaces, shops and community services is clustered closely around key transit stations, usually within a five-minute walk. This is a good idea but has to be respectfully done. All too often, the planners push for higher density and taller buildings than local people want, so the proposition backfires and dies. The town centres strategy can be a great way to add a great posturban experience of place.
There are many other innovations for sustainable and livable posturbs out there waiting to be discovered in the discourse between citizens, developers and local government officials. The main point is post-urban transformation must be the top challenge of the next generation but it must be done in a way acceptable to existing consumers. After all, the posturbs are not going away. Larry Beasley, a former director of planning for the City of Vancouver, is a professor of planning at the University of British Columbia and the founding principal of Beasley and Associates, an international planning consultancy.