Sprawl: the urban setting waiting to happen

Monday's edition of the Georgia Tech Daily Digest made mention of the recent Ecohome magazine article about the book Retrofitting Suburbia. It was mentioned because it was authored by Georgia Tech professor Ellen Dunham-Jones (left) and so it was just an odd coincidence that I happened across it, but I'm glad I did. Apparently Retrofitting Suburbia, as the title suggests, discusses the idea of building traditional neighborhoods around suburbia instead of over top of suburbia's debris. I realize that this is probably not a new idea, but my experience with sprawl being limited mostly to the realm of Suburban Nation, I had never considered it. Suburban Nation mostly discusses the problems with suburbia without acknowledging what is to be done about it.

The article went on to discuss the topic not as an idea, but as a proven fact. The article spoke about the transformation of the Dadeland mall into a pedestrian friendly mixed use neighborhood. The original Dadeland mall (below) was prized for its sheer size, and it kept

increasing as new sections were added on. This continuous growth caused a growth in consumer enjoyment, but also in parking space. As can be seen above, the Dadeland parking lot is more than twice the size of its mall and which it surrounds like a huge moat as if the intention were to scare off its customers. Dadeland became the perfect example of the horror of sprawl and suburbia. But then a public transit system was installed and because of the easy access it provided, Dadeland became the target of a traditionalization experiment. The builders, none other than our good friends Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company, are working toward making it a fairly large town complete with housing and work and public space adjacently oriented.

Before reading this article, I saw the fight against suburbia as a fairly bleak ordeal, but now I see how much hope there is. If suburbia can simply be transformed into traditional-esque "hybrid" neighborhoods, its end could be in the near future. I use the word "simply" lightly because according to Dunham-Jones, transforming sprawl into urbanity is not a simple task, but that does nothing to harm the hope that I now have for the traditional neighborhood.