Anyone travelling regularly through urban and suburban England might be struck, like me, with one contrasting and, sometimes, haunting image. While our city centres have been transformed beyond recognition – give or take the aberration of countless new blocks of bland, Shanghai-style flats, many of them empty – suburbia beyond is declining and, in some cases, decaying. That great wedge of housing in between, labelled the outer-city, is often in a much more shocking state.
In many TV shows and films (think “American Beauty” and “Weeds”), suburbia is symbolized as a prison of surface homogeneity, over-fertilized green lawns, gas-guzzling SUVs and kids on swing sets.
CBS is about to shoot a reality show tentatively called “Block Party” in Kennesaw that literally turns suburbia… into a prison.
Much has been written about how suburbs have taken people away from the city and that now suburbanites need to return back to where they came. But in reality most suburbs of large cities have grown not from the migration of local city-dwellers but from migration from small towns and the countryside.
It is true that suburban areas have been growing strongly, while core cities have tended to grow much more slowly or even to decline. The predominance of suburban growth is not just an American phenomenon, but is fairly universal in the high income world).
As it once sucked the life out of Main Street, the suburban mall is being reconsidered – or torn down – as towns move back to the concept of a multiuse town center.
“Location, location, location” has been the mantra of the real estate industry for as long as anyone can remember. Still, as the national economy transforms in the wake of the economic crisis, the power of place will prove to be ever more important for a broad range of small businesses.
Everybody knows what a cloverleaf looks like — but could you identify a volleyball, a double trumpet, or a “spooey” if you drove on one in the course of your highway travels? These are among the distinctive designs that transportation engineers have conjured up to keep traffic flowing and motorists headed in the right direction when major roads intersect.
Amazing video of brand new suburban homes being razed by bulldozer. Apparently, Guaranty Bank of Austin took over the homes in foreclosure – four in a suburban Texas development and another 12 in one suburb in California – and is knocking them down ostensibly to promote a “safe environment” for neighbors, and more likely because it is cheaper to destroy them them to keep them on their books.
