hesitant ideas

Creating greater awareness of complexity within the already built suburbs is partly a task for artists, partly an issue for architects working on additions and infill, partly a need for planners and engineers to stop simplifying, partly a demand for new laws and policies that encourage diversity, partly a matter of transportation and wiring. Sprawl presents the design challenge of turning already present large-scale clutter into more visible complexity and interrelation.

Here are a few rather literal minded questions and suggestions that might stimulate artists and designers to more effective ideas than these.

For planning:
- Are there tactics for spatial densification that can be applied in already built areas? Strets can be narrowed, corners changed, to slow down traffic. Bike paths and footpaths and small parks can be fitted in, to increase the sense of being in a connected neighborhood. Zoning could be changed to allow small local stores. Are there other New Urbanist or old time tactics that could be used?
- Suburban communities could increase their own inner connectedness and complexity by finding occasions for staging intense planning events similar to the charrettes where many community members of different status and expertise groups participate. Such events make everyone involved more aware of the complexities of their places. The occasions need not be proposed architectural or planning changes; they could be matters of school or recreation policy, or utility regulation, or disputes with neighboring areas, and so on.
- To combat the image of sprawl as the land of behavioral conformity, cookie-cutter houses and franchises, could we find and emphasize local items that do not fit the standard categories? "It is the residual, the irreducible -- whatever cannot be classified or codified according to categories devised subsequent to production -- which is, here as always, the most precious." (Lefebvre 1991, 220)
For style and architectural effects:
- Even though we can't rebuild all those houses and office buildings, could we alter architectural details to celebrate interdependence? For instance, could we find ways to highlight and make significant those antennas and loading docks, those boxes, transformers, lines, pipes, towers, trash bins -- all those signs of insertion into larger processes and patterns that we usually hide, or pretend are invisible? People dislike the intrusion of mobile phone antenna towers poking up everywhere. Yet as they replace wires marching across the countryside, the towers remind us that links now work in non-concentric, non-hierarchical ways, in all directions. Could we find a design for those towers that was inexpensive and sturdy yet something a community could see as a celebration of its connections and reach?
- To increase the sense of temporal complexity, changes in the built environment could be emphasized as changes, showing contrasting physical traces. Suburban houses and institutions are constantly being reworked; are there ways to point this out architecturally?
For Decoration:
- Could we resume Louis Sullivan's search for decoration based on the local natural environment?
- Are there ways of acknowledging far horizons by gestures towards them? Could we make more public use of maps and signposts that show distant as well as local destinations?
- In a suburban house or school, links to distant places are not 'on' all the time; could we find ways of emphasizing those changes, so that there was less feeling that the place was one and invariable?

These hesitant suggestions are meant to point up the goal of reducing the architectural self-sufficiency of sprawl houses and institutions. How do we remind people architecturally that they live in the network, not just in their local enclave? It may seem a paradox, but a sense of being in the wider network can strengthen our sense of unique locality, just as a better sense of how it fits into the ecology of a wider region can strengthen our loyalty to this particular valley.

Index
Sprawl outline