![]() Now Airport Boulevard, the main road leading to the airport, is being considered for a transit line. It's a big chunk sitting out in the suburbs. It's being redeveloped as a new urbanist neighborhood. The suburbs aren't promoting quite as healthy lifestyles as the stereotype has projected.Ĭan you give an example of a suburban retrofit?Īustin decommissioned their smaller, older airport. Today, the majority of kids are driven or bussed to school. People who live in walkable neighborhoods tend to be more physically fit. We're seeing much more correlation with obesity in people leading more sedentary lifestyles. When people live in places that don't have sidewalks, they're spending a lot of time sitting in the car, sitting at work, sitting at home. As we've been sprawling in terms of our development patterns, we're also seeing a lot of human sprawl. Obesity has been rising at alarming rates and has very much paralleled our development patterns. But now, bigger concerns are chronic diseases. ![]() In most of the 19th century, the big concerns were infectious diseases. It's not that cities are necessarily healthier, but the suburbs are not as healthy as we used to think. For the last half-century, the suburbs have literally been understood to be the healthy, green choice. Often surprising to people are the issues of public health. The more we can urbanize the suburbs and get more of our population living more compactly where they don't have to drive so much, we'd see a lot of greenhouse gas emission reduction from that. Detached buildings tend to leak a lot more energy than if you're living with units on top of each other or sharing walls. Because of the development patterns, suburbanites have to drive a lot more. In general, suburbanites have larger carbon footprints. One of them is from the perspective of climate instability or climate change. There are a variety of reasons why we need to be paying attention to our suburban areas. The majority of them have done better over the last 10 to 15 years than before. But we've done a good job, for the most part, on our downtowns. They say we should be focused on our downtowns. ![]() Why do we need to retrofit suburbia? And what's the goal?Ī lot of people, rightfully so, will challenge this. Some of the more ambitious projects are combining all three strategies. Retrofitting can look very different in different places. Or, if an area is beginning to urbanize, to create parks. Re-greening: In lots of places, where perhaps we shouldn't have built there, there is opportunity for ecological repair or to restore the wetlands.Or you're infilling in between existing buildings in an office park to create a more walkable, transit-served place Redevelopment: You're scraping most of those existing buildings and, in some cases, building the downtown that suburb never had. ![]()
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