AUGMENTING URBANITYIN THE MODERN SUBURBIA 1

FIRST COLLOQUIA URBAN CRISIS & RESISTANCE CARDIFF UNIVERSITY & TU DELFT

AUGMENTING URBANITY IN THE MODERN SUBURBIA DESIGN STRATEGIES IN LOW-DENSE AREAS

Authors: Dr. Cristian Suau, Lecturer in Architecture, WSA, suauc@cardiff.ac.uk Stephanie Tunka, Architect and independent researcher, stetun@yahoo.com

FIRST COLLOQUIA URBAN CRISIS & RESISTANCE CARDIFF UNIVERSITY & TU DELFT

PREMISES

PROPHECY

INSTABILITY

The Battleship Potemkin by Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein (1925)

ILLUSION

The Society of the Spectacle

by Guy Debord (1977)

NEW ORDER

Streetscape life of a slum

FATAL ERROR

COMPACTNESS

Animals

by Pink Floyd (1977)

OBSOLESCENCE

Pieter Bruegel, The Tower of Babel (1563)

MYTH

Eboy view of London

SATURATION

FIRST COLLOQUIA URBAN CRISIS & RESISTANCE CARDIFF UNIVERSITY & TU DELFT

SUBURBAN SURVEY

Sprawl is the most significant and urgent issue in Europe.

Suburban sprawl’s public transportation is a need in many places. Yet most Europeans persist in their desire to live further and further away from urban centers, moving to exurbs made up almost entirely of single-family residential houses and stand-alone retail zones.

This proposal analyses the phenomenon of urbanity in suburban spaces and specific suburban patterns. It is focused on the reflection of urbanity (or anti-urbanity) in sprawl areas, based on the case study of two awarded proposals carried out at Europan 8 and 9.

The comparative cases shows new techniques of sustainable urban design in sprawls; which stimulate the debate on sustainable urban systems and new models of transformation of dysfunctional spaces by formulating new suburban configurations and types.

City Configurations

Inverted Suburbia

Classical Suburbia

The Center becomes Suburbia

Cities surrounded by Suburbia

Idealization of Suburban Life Patching Densities / Variable Densities

Rapid Declining of Sprawl Boom

Blocking connectivity

no Fuel, no Suburbia

Typologies

Suburban Housing Configurations

Detached Dwellings (single-unit housing)

Movable Dwellings

Attached Dwellings (multi-unit housing)

Additional Suburban Programming

Roadways

Office Parks

Retail

PLOT STUDIES

TESTS

OUTCOME

FIRST COLLOQUIA URBAN CRISIS & RESISTANCE CARDIFF UNIVERSITY & TU DELFT

SUBURBAN GAMES

THE SUBURBAN DREAM?

Learning from Yona Friedman, Richard Long & Others

Strategy for detached Dwellings

Typical Street

Strategy for detached Dwellings

Lifted Units

Strategy for detached Dwellings

Intensifying = Super Suburbia

Suburban Urbanity

DESIGN HYPOTHESES From the industralisation until our present time, new typologies have emerged, expressly in the periphery of cities. Nevertheless, what new spaces might represent and trigger the notion of “public life” in the European suburbia? How can designers and planners inject new urbanity in obsolete suburban tissues?

This presentation refers to the notion of urban versus suburban congestion in relation to the occupancy of public spaces and its urbanity.

These are the main assumptions: 1. The notion of ‘Culture of Congestion’ by superimposing of different densities and land-uses allows more urban negotiations and requalification of public domain.

2. The insertion of temporary uses rather than recreational ones in public spaces increases the sense of appropriation. Then suburbites become cultural consumers of their own public spaces.

A. Local Design. It deals with producing options of new suburban forms and travel networks at scales of neighborhood.

B. Suburban Patterns. It refers to the developing of various suburban forms and social networks and their interrelationship, at both urban and local scales.

C. Strategic Design. It deals with producing combinations of urban forms and social clusters for testing its application on site. It shows how the existing suburban frames are affecting sustainability of new urban forms across the different scales.

D. Social Accessibility. It refers to undertaking empirical investigations on-site to examine the behaviour of outer city residents in accessing local facilities, their propensity to gather and circulate, and the identification of communities that use the public spaces.

E. Suburban Structure. It investigates the application of generative social systems to urban design layouts, by exploring Europan awarded cases.

FIRST COLLOQUIA URBAN CRISIS & RESISTANCE CARDIFF UNIVERSITY & TU DELFT

SUBURBAN BOARD GAMES

Stoke-on trent UK Tunka, Stephanie

+ High Density Hybrid of Detached Dwellings + Attached Dwellings

Terraced Houses

Industry

Site

Concept Intensified Structure

Hamar Norway Suau,C + Markuerkiaga, N + Zappulla, C

Movable Dwellings

Concept Link Rich Mixture of Functions

REFLECTIONS Open spaces within suburbs and landscape amenities related to low-density urban development have significant influence on residential location choice. Therefore, dense and compact suburban forms seem to constrain strongly the living quality of households, while they have not proven ability to reduce car-dependence or, more generally, to be less demanding in energy use.

The location choice of a household depends on its ability to pay for neighborhood qualities (local amenities and accessibility) and whether the household is dependent on public transport for city-orientated travel.

The chosen cases of mobile suburbia in Hamar in Norway and the hybrid configuration in Stoke-on-Trent in the UK are emerging labs for suburban design investigation.

FINALE EUROPAN contributes to the implementation of new methods for urban design in suburban scenarios that could be put into practice. Each urban structure offers its own story of heroism and failures.

New models in favor of public spaces can be found by intensifying temporary occupation. These are places where a multitude of urban life can interplay and overlap together. It produces different variation of uses within free spaces.

Therefore, the abandonment and degradation of suburban public spaces in European cities is not merely a design factor, but ethical one. It derives from a lack of vision between density factors, intensity of uses and social diversity to create more compact, mixed-use communities.