Future of Suburbia Exhibition by Center for Advanced Urbanism

exhibition 01.25.16 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 04.02.16

Around the world, the vast majority of people are moving to cities not to inhabit their centers, but to suburbanize their peripheries. Despite all the predictions and evidence pointing to a future horizontal city form, the fields of Planning and Design still lack a robust, unbiased intellectual and theoretical platform to examine and debate it. Not since rapid post-WorldWar II suburban expansion in the United States was ushered in by the stewardship of landscape architecture has any design field taken the lead on suburban futures. The allied Planning and Design fields have proven unable to significantly shape suburbia, which has continued unabated and in forms primarily driven by market-driven economic policies, speculation, tax policies, and lax government regulation. Perhaps as a reaction to our own ineffectiveness, the allied design-fields have overwhelmingly avoided suburbia. The MIT Center for Advanced Urbanism presents global speculations on the Future of Suburbia around four emerging themes: experimental, heterogeneity, autonomous, and productivity. Our dynamic model of future urbanization features a well-defined polycentric fabric where clear dualities of city versus suburb erode and are replaced with an integrated mesh of regional exchanges. As the polycentric and horizontal form spreads infinitely across the surface of the earth, combinatory networks of resources form within regional space to build sustainability and metabolic balance.

LAYOUT/CONTENT

The EXHIBITION is one of three products the CAU has created for its biennial research theme, Future of Suburbia. A CONFERENCE (Spring 2016) and a PUBLICATION entitled Infinite Suburbia (Fall 2017) compliment the exhibition. Exhibition content: Infographic mappings

THEMATIC RESEARCH

22ft x 8ft dynamic model of a 3 million population polycentric region in the year 2100

FUTURE MODEL

Aerial footage of global suburbias

EMERGING TRENDS

THEMATIC RESEARCH

One of the key elements of the exhibition is the infographic wall; composed of four large infographics surrounded by figure ground drawings of suburbia. This graphic wall creates a link between statistics collected from U.S. data sets and suburban space. The four large infographics examine a Future of Suburbia that is heterogenous, productive, autonomous and experimental. The figure ground drawings are of both existing and speculative suburban designs that were sampled for their relevance to the four themes of the infographics. These drawings are consistently scaled, abstracted, and highlighted for ease of comparison.

THEMATIC RESEARCH

Infographics

Descriptions

Figure Ground Studies

Nahalal Moshav, Israel

A C

EXPERIMENTAL

Suburbia has historically been a test bed for experimental forms. In the future, opportunities for innovative mixes of industries, building forms, and land uses will arise in suburbia’s economic hubs, particularly logistics terminals, which are attracted to suburbia by inexpensive, plentiful land, less restrictive regulation, and access to transportation corridors. Six case studies highlight the potential for new industries to vertically integrate into the hub, resulting in new building typologies, urban design forms, and lifestyles. Further, the sparsely populated towns have an opportunity to rezone areas around the intermodal hub to rapidly respond and capitalize on future innovative expansions.

LEFT: Detail illustrating the highest volume ‘ports’ across the US.

RIGHT: Detail illustration of one of the six categorical case studies selected for further spatial analysis.

DATA SOURCES Air-freight: Short Tons Landed Weight, Federal Aviation Administration Air Carrier Activity Information System (ACAIS), 2014 http://www.faa.gov/airports/planning_capacity/passenger_allcargo_stats /passenger/http://www.faa.gov/airports/planning_ capacity/passenger_allcargo_stats/passenger/ Water-freight: Short Tons, Institute for Water Resources U.S Army Corps of Engineers, Waterborne Commerce of the United States, 2013 http://www.navigationdatacenter.us/wcsc/pdf/wcusnatl13.pdf Rail-freight: Rail Intermodal Keeps America Moving, Association of American Railroads, May 2015 https://www.aar.org/BackgroundPapers/Rail%20Intermodal.pdf Economic Data: US Census Zip-Code Business Patterns http://www.census.gov/econ/cbp/index.html Land Use: Google Earth Pro, 3 mile radius, visual assessment of dominant land-uses. Population Data: 50 mile radius, captured zip-code or census block (depending), Social Explorer

Biodiversity bolsters ecosystem services that cities depend on, including clean air, water, flood protection, aesthetics, and recreation. Yet in numerous ecological studies in the United States, dense urban areas have depleted species richness (number of species in an area), whereas suburbia represents the peak in biodiversity in metropolitan regions. The underlying driver of biodiversity in suburbia is the heterogeneity of the landscape at multiple scales, influenced in part by suburbia’s socio-economic heterogeneity.

HETEROGENEITY

RIGHT: Map illustrating habitat regions that underlie the Greater Atlanta area. More species richness (darker gray) is found in the suburbs rather than in the core or even in conservation areas.

LEFT: Detail illustrating both quantity and variety of species that can be found in each of the designated land use types. Suburban and Gold Course designations carry the highest.

Water-freight: Short Tons, Institute for Water Resources U.S Army Corps of Engineers, Waterborne Commerce of the United States, 2013 http://www.navigationdatacenter.us/wcsc/pdf/wcusnatl13.pdf Rail-freight: Rail Intermodal Keeps America Moving, Association of American Railroads, May 2015 https://www.aar.org/BackgroundPapers/Rail%20Intermodal.pdf Economic Data: US Census Zip-Code Business Patterns http://www.census.gov/econ/cbp/index.html Land Use: Google Earth Pro, 3 mile radius, visual assessment of dominant land-uses. Population Data: 50 mile radius, captured zip-code or census block (depending), Social Explorer

DATA SOURCES Species Richness and Imperviousness in Selected Cities: EnviroAtlasBiodiversity Metrics by 12-digit HUC for the Southeastern and Southwestern United States, April 1, 2013 and EnviroAtlas- Percent Impervious for the Conterminous United States March 1, 2013 http://www.epa.gov/enviroatlas. Metropolitan Area Extents: 2014 United States Census Urban Area boundary lines https://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/cbf/cbf_ua.html

RIGHT: Detail isometric drawing that illustrates the amount of ecological connections that exist at the household/garden level of the suburbs.

Bird Species Data for California, Ohio, and Minnesota: Blair, Robert B, and Elizabeth M. Johnson. “Suburban Habitats and Their Role for Birds in the Urban–rural Habitat Network: Points of Local Invasion and Extinction?” Landscape Ecology 23, no. 10 (September 30, 2008): 1157–69. The conceptual model of heterogeneity is a compilation of emerging theories and ideas from 19 journal articles from ecology, conservation, and design, written by: Robert B. Blair, Sebastien Bonthoux, Karin Burghardt, Phillip Cassey, Pervaiz Dar, Paulo Farinha-Marques, Mark Goddard, Jurek Kolasa, Ingo Kowarik, Michael McKinney, Anders Nielsen, Derric Pennington, Eric E. Porter, Cristina Ramalho, Jennifer Riem, Scott Rush, Marco Vizzari, Peter Werner, Nicholas Williams, and colleagues.

LEFT: Detail illustrating that the preferred mode of transit (across the studied US metropolitan areas) is driving alone in a car, which is the fastest.

AUTONOMOUS

Suburbia is commonly associated with congestion/long commutes, but the implementation of autonomous vehicle technology will radically reshape metropolitan transportation in America. With faster travel times and efficiency, autonomous vehicles will decrease congestion and expand suburbia, allowing people to live farther away without lengthening their commute. In an autonomous future traveling for up to one hour in American metropolitan areas will unlock new development parcels and expand or even merge existing megaregions, transforming smaller cities along these corridors into strategic places for growth.

RIGHT: Map of the “Texas Triangle” commuting sheds, which illustrates distances based on time. The medium gray reveals how far one could travel in one hour using autonomous vehicle technology.

A C

B DATA SOURCES Megaregion outlines use TAZ shapefiles from 2000 United States Census TIGER shapefiles. Urban speed footprints were drawn from https://www.freemaptools.com/ how-far-can-i-travel.htm and intersected with 2015 United States Census TIGER Coastline shapefiles.

Transport Modes & Commute Times: 2014 American Community Survey, 1-year estimates. Table S0804- Means of Transportation to Work by Selected Characteristics for Workplace Geography Top 80 Fastest Growing Metro Areas by Absolute Numbers: Estimates of Resident Population Change and Rankings: July 1, 2013 to July 1, 2014, United States Census Bureau, Population Division, March 2015 Congestion: 2014 Texas A&M Transportation Institute Annual Urban Mobility Scorecard http://mobility.tamu.edu/ums/.

LEFT: Cities that can be traveled to faster by autonomous car than airplane open up speculation for the urban areas that lie along those routes.

Commute Distance: 2011 Brookings Institution Analysis of Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics Data http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports2 /2015/03/24-people-jobs-distance-metropolitan-areas-kneebone-holmes Coughlin, Joseph, and Luke Yoquinto. “The Long Road Home.” Slate, May 19, 2015. http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/05/ autonomous_cars_and_the_future_of_the_commute.html.

PRODUCTIVITY

The flip side of the suburban expansion equation is the production of semi-open space. As urbanized areas expand, their low densities permit an ensemble of connected uses to populate roofs, lawns, and interstitial spaces. By measuring these unassigned zones as portions of the urbanized area, planners and designers could assess the potential for hosting a suite of productive reuses. Distributed solar rooftops, embedded wetlands, and agricultural plots could establish a productive suburban future, tailored for each metroâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s strengths.

RIGHT: Detail illustrating areas outside the core metropolitan areas of Chicago and Charlotte. These semi-open areas are rated for their potential productive performance based on their proximity to natural resources.

A B

LEFT: Aerial photo illustrating the mix of suburban development and productive agriculture.

DATA SOURCES Data for urbanized area delineations (1990, 2010), numeric area changes, and growth percentages from U.S. Census Bureau, 2010 Urban and Rural Classification and Urban Area Criteria, available here: https://www.census.gov/geo/reference/ua/urban-rural-2010.html. Solar: estimations based on total single-detached housing units from the American Community Survey, 2013 1-year estimates and solar radiation potential from PV Watts tool, available here: http://pvwatts.nrel.gov/pvwatts.php. Agricultural: potential based on 10% area usage of all single-detached housing units from the American Community Survey 2013 1-year estimates, adjusted for urbanized area density and length of growing season available here: http://www.almanac.com/content/us-frost-chart. Wastewater: recovery based on 95% rate of return on 100 gallons/day per person from U.S. EPA, Indoor Water Use in the United States, available here: http://www3.epa.gov/watersense/pubs/indoor.html.

SUBURBAN FUTURES MODEL

All the literature tends to describe a situation about where the city begins and where it ends. There is not much in the literature that tells us that the city will go on forever and how you solve that problem or optimize that condition. When we talk about the polycentric fabric we are basically talking about an infinite fabric. Yet, from our research, we learned that there is not an optimal example â&#x20AC;&#x201C;designed or existing- of suburban fabric that can serve the needs of the suburban elements, which are vast, but also serve the needs of the core city. One of the big things that emerges from of our understanding the literature, and our own research, is that it is all a single condition: it is all urbanization. The Suburban Futures Model presents how these kinds of urbanization go together in a new synergistic way to function optimally for all.

BELOW: Schematic drawing of 4 prominent spatial features of future polycentric metro: A) Existing Urban Cores B) Future Suburban Fabric C) Conservation Areas and D) Wastebelts (Metabolic Landscapes).

Existing Urban Cores

STEP_00

Future Suburban Fabric

FUTURE POLYCENTRIC FABRIC

BASE STATE will have NO background (dark grey for illustration purposes only) show very dim lit existing roads/rivers

Conservation Areas Wastebelts (Metabolic Landscapes)

B D

B B

A C

EMERGING TRENDS

In the past two years we have been looking to the future of suburbia in a broad way. We looked not so much to the single idea of suburbia but to the fabric of the horizontal city and what it has to do with urbanization in general; having in mind that 3 billion more people in the world will need somewhere to live by the end of this century. The vast majority will live in a fabric of suburban quality: horizontal and spread out. We spent time over the past two years documenting the global suburban condition. This aerial footage is exhibited in the form of four short films.

Diepkloof, Johannesburg SOUTH AFRICA

EXPANSION

By 2030, an estimated 600,000 square miles of land worldwide will become urbanized at the edges of cities, mostly in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Many countries are already majority suburban. In the United States, 69 percent of the population lives in suburbs and over 75 percent of jobs lie outside the urban core. Many other developed countries are also majority suburban. In the global South, 45 percent of the 1.4 billion people who become new urban residents will settle in peri-urban suburbs.

Johannesburg SOUTH AFRICA

Beijing Baghdad

Cairo

Kabul

Karachi

+5.7 M

Tropic of Cancer

+7.3 M

Delhi

Istanbul

+10.4 M

Dhaka

Chongqing

Shanghai

+9.8 M

+7.0 M

+8.2 M

Hanoi Mexico City

Mumbai Addis Ababa Bogota

Lagos +11.1 M

Kinshasa +8.4 M

Tropic of Capricorn Sao Paulo

Aerial view of Diepkloof, a township near Johannesburg.

TOP 10 most populous metro areas

Mogadishu

Johannesburg

Bangkok Ho Chi Minh City Kuala Lumpur

Dar es Salaam +5.6 M

Lima

TOP 25 most populous metro areas

Nairobi

+6.8 M

Manila

Jakarta

Mulund, Mumbai, Maharashtra INDIA

TYPOLOGY

Contrary to popular belief suburbs contain more than just single family dwelling homes and strip malls. As seen from numerous case studies around the world the suburbs are often a place of typological experimentation because of relaxed municipal regulation. In turn this has created a truly diverse range of building types.

Mumbai, Maharashtra INDIA

OPEN

BELOW: A comparative chart the looks at the number of building (and lot) types sampled through just the course of the short film.

Reno USA

Clovis USA

Waterfall City ZAF

Spanish Springs USA

20,000 sq ft 5,400 sq ft

23,000 sq ft 2,300 sq ft

104,000 sq ft 3,300 sq ft

92,000 sq ft 5,800 sq ft

400,000 sq ft 2,500 sq ft

Tembisa ZAF

Faerie Glen ZAF

Aldeia da Serra BRA

Alphaville BRA

Mooikloof Ridge ZAF

2,000 sq ft 700 sq ft

3,300 sq ft 1,200 sq ft

5,000 sq ft 2,100 sq ft

8,000 sq ft 3,100 sq ft

2,700 sq ft 500 sq ft

Gurgaon IND

Thane IND

Barra da Tijuca BRA

Tangshan CHN

Huilongguan CHN

2,700 sq ft 2,700 sq ft

4,700 sq ft 3,500 sq ft

55,000 sq ft 11,000 sq ft

67,000 sq ft 8,600 sq ft

115,000 sq ft 9,300 sq ft

VERTICAL

MIX

South Florida USA

Aerial view of Mulund, near Mumbai.

LOCATION lot size bldg footprint

ENVIRONMENTAL INTERFACE

Santana de Parnaíba, São Paulo BRASIL

As suburbanization expands, it creates more edges between the built and natural environment. Traditionally this has meant encroaching and replacing ecologically rich areas.

São Paulo BRASIL

In the 1990s, São Paulo’s suburban population grew by 6%, during the same time 22mi2 of forest cover was lost Haroldo Torres, Humberto Alves, and Maria Aparecida De Oliveira São Paulo peri-urban dynamics: some social causes and environmental consequences Environment and Urbanization April 2007 19: 207-223

Aerial view of Residencial Genesis, Santana de Parnaíba, near São Paulo.