Suburban Living in the House!

Two things:

1) Check out the December/January issue of Dwell! The theme is suburbs, and some of the articles are still available online. They acknowledge the downsides of suburbia, without uniformly slamming it without basis. The following quote shows how balanced Dwell was in handling the suburbs, which was probably difficult because there is a huge anti-suburban bias out there in designers (and as I’ve mentioned before, urban planners).

But the suburbs–and their inhabitants–are not only ripe for resistance to conformity, they also have rich social and cultural potential. Demographic studies reveal that suburbia is diversifying; no longer the land of white flight and middle-class nuclear families, its shape and character is changing. (p. 134)

2) This one is for the grad students! (And for a brief second, made me a little sad that I am no longer one.) Global Suburbs–an interdisciplinary grad student conference put on by the University of Michigan. March 7-8, 2008.

This conference has five broad themes: Suburban politics and the history of suburbs, Sustainable development and environmentalism, Suburban life, Suburban form, and Rethinking suburbs. The following quote sums up the purpose pretty well.

Suburbanization is no longer solely the province of developed Western countries. Peripheral metropolitan expansion is now a global phenomenon and must be considered in new ways, be they within a metropolitan framework, independently of central cities, or with reference to rural surroundings. This conference seeks to examine global suburban development broadly to understand not only the past and present character of suburbia, but also with the hopes of understanding and guiding future development.

Tags: architecture, design, Dwell, Global Suburbs, graduate conference, interdisciplinary, planning, policy, suburban living, suburbs, University of Michigan
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