Transburbia

An Evolving Repository of New Concepts, Processes & Tools That Can Help Transform Suburbia

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suburbs

2012 / 04 / 26

Aerotropolis Urbanism in Suburban Phoenix
Stitching together a new urban fabric within the suburbs is an emerging issue within both design and planning professions. This new process is particularly difficult in a changing socioeconomic context; as seen with the recent 2008 housing crisis. In the previous article Shrinking Suburbs, the phenomenon of urban decline and depopulation was reviewed, including how governments might react to such factors in the next decade. Oversaturated residential markets crashed, crippling Sun Belt cities like Phoenix, San Diego, and Las Vegas. Phoenix, in particular, became the epicenter of the housing crisis. Abandoned homes led to falling land values, which led to underwater real estate prices and widespread abandonment, resulting in more than 3800 bank-owned homes in Phoenix. However, since this ...

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land

2012 / 04 / 20

Embracing the Motor City’s Suburban Decampment
In the last ten years, Detroit has been inundated with wild ideas and assessments, many of which include promises of saving the Motor City from its inevitable collapse. However, well before this decade of hyperbole, a more pragmatic view of Detroit’s future was addressed through a collection of essays, images, and design studio work entitled Stalking Detroit. The publication framed the existing context on the ground while featuring the city’s municipal data. Through this process, the reasons for Detroit’s well-publicized trouble are unglamorous when separated from the poetry. Detroit grew and shrunk with most American Rust Belt communities. However, the city’s reliance on one product and one business model, mass private auto manufacturing, shored up its modern decline. The ...

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mobility

2012 / 01 / 19

Expanding Somerville – Reclaiming Highway Territory on Boston’s Urban Fringe
As the industrial rail yards just north of Boston began to shrink in the early 20th Century, two major highways were built across the reclaimed land on each side of the rails, the McGrath Highway or Route 28 to the west and Interstate 93 to the east. Somerville, Massachusetts, Boston’s iconic street car suburb of dense triple decker homes and American Revolution sites, lies along the McGrath Highway corridor. For decades, the eastern section of Somerville between McGrath and I-93 evolved into an auto-centric hodge podge of strip malls, industrial parks, waste stations, and car dealerships two miles from Boston's State House. However, just as the rails receded in the 20th Century, the role of the McGrath ...

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innovation

2012 / 03 / 02

Suburban Density in Cicero – The Importance of Small Affordable Housing Units in Chicagoland
In 2011 and 2012, Gang Architects and MoMA shined a spotlight on the Chicago suburb of Cicero alongside a widely overlooked programming need, small affordable housing units in American suburbia. The structured bungalow homes and factories of Cicero’s decaying industrial fabric morphed over time into a new affordable gateway city in Chicagoland for first generation Hispanics. The bungalow was cut up to accommodate the new individuals and families who initially tried to purchase the entire home but would quickly fall into foreclosure, eventually leading to a regional crisis across Chicagoland. The changing role of the suburban residential fabric from blue collar factory town to a modern day Ellis Island had to be addressed in the wake of ...

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life

2012 / 01 / 17

Urban-Suburban Ties: The Prospects of Modern Suburban Annexation in the American Northeast
Since the gradual development of the 20th century suburb in North America, the local municipal boundaries laid out during the 18th and 19th centuries where quickly crystallized and hardened, with each community scrapping for property in sought after fringe environments near the closest declining American city. Wealthy suburbs would pool commercial and residential development just across the border to lure businesses and residents to greener pastures from the decaying urban core; reaping the new economic benefits while city residents became reliant on services and employer outlets in the suburbs. In most cases, creating various edge conditions just along the border and across a fixed web of independent city and town and village cells let do ...

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materials

2012 / 03 / 01

Greening the American Triple Decker
The ‘triple decker’, a three-story apartment building of light-framed wood construction, is perhaps one of America's most famous architectural typologies. Featuring strongly throughout the suburban rings of various historic cities in the Northeast, it flourished at the close of the 19th century as a housing solution for numerous American immigrants during the Industrial Revolution. In contrast to the rowhouses popular in New York City and Pennsylvania, the triple decker was seen as an economical alternative that was preferable to the congested experience of the rowhouse, as well as being more livable, since its form allowed light and airflow on all four sides. It incorporates three stacked identical units, each often having its own front or back porch. With the cost of ...

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energy

2012 / 02 / 24

Curio House – A More Sustainable Levittown Process
Exchanging Cape Cod’s preferred trademarks of clapboard siding and gabled roofs for recycled wood decking and floor to ceiling windows, the Curio House is a newly constructed model of sustainable suburban design in Sandwich, Massachusetts. In 2012, the first complete prototype of the house is going through its first winter, testing the boundaries of the academic turned professional project and its ability to be mass-produced, informing and influencing the archetype of the 'new American' home. The story of the Curio House prototype is one of collaboration. It was originally devised as “Team Boston’s” submission into the US Department of Energy’s biannual Solar Decathlon. This competition challenged collegiate-level teams to fully design, build and use a solar powered house ...

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Kierland Commons Lifestyle Center In Scottsdale's Evolving Airpark

2012 / 04 / 26

Aerotropolis Urbanism in Suburban Phoenix

Stitching together a new urban fabric within the suburbs is an emerging issue within both design and planning professions. This new process is particularly difficult ...

2012 / 04 / 20

Embracing the Motor City’s Suburban Decampment

In the last ten years, Detroit has been inundated with wild ideas and assessments, many of which include promises of saving the Motor City from ...

2012 / 03 / 23

The Shrinking Suburb

As the world population moved past seven billion in 2011, it seems counterintuitive that some cities around the world still continue to shrink. Yet, over the last ...

2012 / 03 / 06

Leveling the Playing Field Through Balanced Suburban Regionalism

In the recent blog post Urban-Suburban Ties, the current federal funding discrepancy between the dense historic cities and suburbs of America’s Northeast and sprawling Sun ...

2012 / 03 / 02

Suburban Density in Cicero – The Importance of Small Affordable Housing Units in Chicagoland

In 2011 and 2012, Gang Architects and MoMA shined a spotlight on the Chicago suburb of Cicero alongside a widely overlooked programming need, small affordable ...

2012 / 02 / 24

Curio House – A More Sustainable Levittown Process

Exchanging Cape Cod’s preferred trademarks of clapboard siding and gabled roofs for recycled wood decking and floor to ceiling windows, the Curio House is ...

2012 / 01 / 19

Expanding Somerville – Reclaiming Highway Territory on Boston’s Urban Fringe

As the industrial rail yards just north of Boston began to shrink in the early 20th Century, two major highways were built across the ...

2011 / 12 / 07

Long Island Infill – Urban Practices East of NYC

After World War II, developers across the United States jumped on the “happily ever after” trend for US soldiers coming back from overseas to ...

2011 / 11 / 30

Promenade Plantee – Tying The Suburbs To The Greenway

Before the prominence of the High Line Corridor in New York and the subsequent projects worldwide that have converted old rail corridors into new ...

2012 / 03 / 01

Greening the American Triple Decker

The ‘triple decker’, a three-story apartment building of light-framed wood construction, is perhaps one of America's most famous architectural typologies. Featuring strongly throughout the suburban rings ...

2011 / 11 / 23

Eco-City Suburbs – With and Without the Terminology

An assortment of marketed eco-city communities have emerged in the last fifteen years as countries worldwide try to offset and reverse past environmental damage ...

2012 / 01 / 17

Urban-Suburban Ties: The Prospects of Modern Suburban Annexation in the American Northeast

Since the gradual development of the 20th century suburb in North America, the local municipal boundaries laid out during the 18th and 19th centuries ...

2012 / 01 / 13

Zollverein – From Suburban Industrial Complex To Creative Industry Hub

Like most industry in Germany’s Ruhr Valley and America’s Industrial Belt, the old factories spawned during the Industrial Revolution could no longer compete with ...

2011 / 11 / 26

Honesty Through Imagery & Text

With a series of recent books and subsequent movements devoted towards creating stronger urban and suburban conditions, a few publications have taken a simple ...

2011 / 11 / 20

Sustainable Applications Through Accelerated Commercialization

When inner and outer ring suburban residents think of reducing their heating and cooling expenses, the first thing that comes to mind is the ...