suburbia - mammoth // building nothing out of something

Tag Archives: suburbia

November 2, 2009 – 1:08 pm

re-inhabited circle-k’s

["Mini-Mart, Albuquerque, NM"; photographer Paho Mann documents the diverse array of stores that re-inhabit the empty shells abandoned by the national corporation Circle-K; the current lives of Circle-K's include "a dry cleaners, a couple of florist shops, a tattoo parlor, a tuxedo rental place, several mini-marts and dollar stores, and Bridgett’s Last Laugh Karaoke and [...]

By rholmes | Posted in asides | Also tagged , , , | Comments (2)
October 26, 2009 – 8:43 am

polis on suburban cairo

Polis on the suburbanization of Cairo; not surprising, I suppose, given that suburbanization (particularly the growth of the past decade, pre-recession) partly proceeded from the collusion of governmental and corporate interests in America’s relatively transparent political system, that suburbanization in a country with a more corrupt political system would proceed from even thicker, more direct [...]

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October 19, 2009 – 12:20 pm

ownership culture

["Subdivision: Sunshine Acres", by Ross Racine.]
Thomas Sugrue, in a Wall Street Journal article on the American culture of home ownership from August:
Every generation has offered its own version of the claim that owner-occupied homes are the nation’s saving grace. During the Cold War, home ownership was moral armor, protecting America from dangerous outside influences. “No [...]

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, urbanism | Also tagged , | Comments (5)
September 23, 2009 – 4:14 pm

avent and cowen on tysons corner

There’s a discussion about the economics and politics of urbanizing suburbia taking place between economics bloggers Ryan Avent and Tyler Cowen right now (if you’re not familiar with the two, Avent is roughly liberal and Cowen is roughly libertarian, though both are more or less independent thinkers).  It begins with this Washington Post article which [...]

By rholmes | Posted in infrastructure, urbanism | Also tagged , | Comments (0)
August 13, 2009 – 3:12 pm

burn down the suburbs, and other comments on reburbia

Though I’m on vacation at the moment, I thought I’d chime in with a couple comments on our reburbia entry (posted by Stephen below) and perhaps articulate more fully some of the thoughts behind it:
1. We were as interested in articulating a series of comments on the relationship between designers and suburbia as we were [...]

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August 3, 2009 – 11:50 am

future suburbia

Worldchanging has a nice feature extrapolating the future of suburbia from current trends, which has long been one of Stephen and I’s favorite pastimes. Excited to see what further ideas for said future(s) may percolate out of the Reburbia design competition, which just concluded this past Friday (results should be posted within a week [...]

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May 12, 2009 – 6:51 pm

a carfree suburbia

Carfree suburban living in Germany, as described in the New York Times.

By Stephen | Posted in asides | Also tagged , | Comments (1)
May 5, 2009 – 11:16 am

the city we have

In a recent feature on Archinect, Will Galloway of Front Office (they have a blog here) discusses the predilection of architects for the wholesale urban renovation (which, despite the prominence of theoretical frameworks that intend to offer alternatives, remains the dominant tendency of designers, even those working within frameworks — such as landscape urbanism — [...]

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April 29, 2009 – 3:09 pm

architecture without architects

Charles Holland points out how incredibly odd much of the architecture of the sort of ordinary housing developments that spot the suburbs of both the UK and the US is. Not exactly what Rudofsky meant by “architecture without architects”, I don’t think, but the questions Holland asks (”Where do these forms and materials come [...]

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