24. Slowdown landscapes: The care and repair of our suburbs
By: Dan Hill
Tags: Cities, Architecture, Urban Planning, Suburbs, Covid 19

Yet the genuinely new ideas in Hayden’s book were in the retrofit stories. She points to Hattie Hartman’s handbook of variations for suburban spatial reorganisation, reconfiguring the archetypal single family suburban houses that have been copy-pasted across the USA into almost endless variations of apartments, much in the spirit that Hyde and Dietz would later propose. Hayden writes:

“Many experiments can take place with regards to the sizes and shapes of new apartments. They can be in the garage, extending into the backyard, under the roof, or at the bottom levels of a split-level design. A good architect can make many of these plans work. Designing for acoustical privacy is especially important.”—Dolores Hayden, Redesigning the American Dream: Gender, Housing and Family Life

In Building Suburbia, Hayden even briefly touches on the possibilities and pitfalls inherent in telecommuting. With some prescience, given the book was written in 2003, she described the “nervous mantra” of turn of the century broadband and real estate ads; the following quote could almost have been written yesterday:

“While the search for peaceful domestic life in quiet country settings has been constant since the 1820s, the most recent rush from the city has been marked by odd moments of frenzy, as paid work spilled into family life in new and anxious ways. The home as ‘electronic cottage’ might become a kind of twenty-four hour sweatshop, with one or two adults trying to accomplish a full day’s work with the computer. Psychological studies have established that prolonged hours of interaction with the Internet have tended to make people feel distant from their social circles, distant from their families, depressed and isolated.”—Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia (2004)

Hayden notes the “struggle to allocate the second shift of cooking, cleaning, and chld care after a full day on the paid job”, and that “telecommuting might reduce schedule conflicts for employed parents … but it presents potential spatial conflict.” (Again, I mentioned these issues of equality of organisation of time, space and value in the previous batch of Papers.) Hayden talks about the need for “better planning for child care and neighbourhood workplaces for telecommuters”—again akin to the strategies mentioned previously.

Yet Hayden wrote this two decades ago. With many now shoved in this direction by the virus—propelled into ‘the biggest work-from-home experiment in history’ with “decades’s worth of change in months”—now is the time to actually address these spatial, temporal, cultural, social and environmental conflicts.

Without that focus, that ‘decade’s worth of change’ will move in precisely the wrong direction, missing the opportunity for reinvention:

Outside of education, cultural and political change, part of this shift concerns the slog through the dark matter of employment law, occupational health policies, workplace insurance and so on, all moving towards a distributed, trusted model. Yet there is not enough focus yet on the supportive material changes required within architecture, urban design and planning. As Zürich-based consultant Allysson Zimmerman says: “We have to get curious and ask questions and challenge assumptions of what the ‘home’ looks like.”

Both of Hayden’s books end with the suggestion of care-ful retrofit, celebrating what is there whilst repairing, maintaining, and redirecting, rather than further expansion. These are necessary strategies for a slowdown. Crucially, Hayden writes that challenging the mental model of growth itself—the one under threat from the Slowdown—must be firmly articulated in our work. It cannot be left implicit, or simply be tinkered with by architecture alone:

“Better architecture cannot, in itself, change the larger patterns of social and economic exploitation developed by growth machines which profit from round after round of fringe development. If the United States is to become a more sustainable and more equitable place, older suburbs have to be saved rather than abandoned on the way to new projects.”—Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia (2003)

This is not simply a North American problem. The implication applies to most places, requiring a evolution of thinking from the simplistic demonisation of the suburbs that many urbanists have taken part in over the last few decades. Conversely, it also requires the steam to be taken out of the boosterish central business district/urban innovation district narrative, where the clear fields of suburban growth are simply swapped for rights to air space, subdivisions of the sky. Both city and suburbs can be retrofitted and reinvented and better sutured together, rather being seen as oppositional sites for endless growth of new developments, unsustainably pushing outwards or upwards.

As Hayden’s work indicates, these are political issues. Let President Trump and his ilk now try to own these binary oppositions between city and suburb. His craven and damaging destruction of affordable housing acts are clearly no more than an attempt to conjure votes from the suburbia. Yet his idea of those places is as anachronistic as his appallingly sexist language when he appeals to the “Suburban Housewives of America”. Fortunately, this is one of Trump’s many misunderstanding of reality, in this case, the reality of what their American suburbia has become:

“On this issue, just like on other issues like immigration, he’s trying to appeal to people who haven’t looked carefully into these issues for maybe 20 or 30 years. In this decade, suburbs are a microcosm of America.”—William Frey, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution

As Kriston Capps puts it, “For suburban areas, he’s promising to enable NIMBY neighborhoods to continue to self-segregate; for urban areas, he’s delivering something closer to all-out war.”

Clearly, we have to take the opposite tack. To design with care means dissolving this simplistic distinction between urban and suburban. This does not mean that these distinctive places cease to exist—a downtown has been meaningful for centuries, it is distinctly not suburbia—but it does mean a richer, more meaningful relationship between them. Enhancing diversity in both types, human and nonhuman, will be key to this.