Welcome to flaneuring, a newsletter featuring new resources on learnurbandesign.com, insightful thoughts, and street photography.
new resource
Accessible America by Bess Williamson examines how accessibility design in the U.S. evolved, from the post-WWII era to the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. It explores the challenges of making spaces inclusive, the resistance from politics and designers, and the often uneven progress. Through real-life stories, Williamson shows how American values shaped accessibility and how it impacts our daily lives.
an insight
“The future of an urban form built primarily around detached single-family homes is very much in question today. Most attempts to rate cities for sustainability, as well as many commentators on city planning, leap quickly to the conclusion that the city dominated by single-family homes cannot continue. Coupled with the intellectual critique of the suburbs is a repeated analysis of trends purporting to show that baby boomers and millennials are rapidly moving back into higher-density urban places.
Nevertheless, the single-family-home-dominated tableau remains a dominant urban form throughout the United States and increasingly throughout the world.
…
Kotkin's [Joel Kotkin, an American author and urban studies scholar] defense of the suburbs is occasionally as hyperbolic as are the New Urbanists' anti-suburban diatribes.
Still, his essential point is accurate: the single-family home remains the predominant choice of most Americans. The pattern is changing, however. The ever-larger home is no longer inevitable. Nor is the at-least-a-quarter-acre lot likely to be a standard for delivery of subdivisions. Houses and lots are shrinking to meet price points and lifestyle expectations. Phoenix is at the forefront of this trend, given its historic development of small lots and contained, walled backyards. Patio homes, attached townhomes, and condos will command a slowly increasing share of the new housing market in suburban cities.
Even if there were strong evidence that Americans were ending their centuries-long love affair with single-family homes, there are simply too many houses built since World War II to be abandoned.
The number may approach 100 million. Even for those who see the suburbanization of America as a mistake, the embedded materials, energy, and investment in so many houses deserve a measure of respect. It would be shockingly unsustainable to bulldoze huge swaths of the American urban fabric to start over again, wasting all those homes and all that history.”
Grady Gammage Jr., The Future of the Suburban City
snapshots
