Ecomunicipality.com

We all know the story (or should): post World War II, lots of baby-boom families getting started, Leavittown, New York, cheap land, cookie-cutter homes, safe sub-divisions, a lot of road-building, new schools, new municipal governments. A whole new American Dream with profits galore.

Welcome to America's suburb. Land of enchantment, of dreams, of the perfect American experience. Clean. Ordered. Safe. Affluent.

I've never had the pleasure to live in one, though I did, as a teacher, work in one for a decade.

Well, the suburb has come in for a lot of criticism over the last several decades. From the atomizing effects of its single unit, single lot, single family approach to housing, to its consumption of massive amounts of land and habitat, to its wasteful dependence upon fossil fuel as a premise for its existence.

Now the question becomes is the suburb a thing of the past? New studies and new thinking suggest that it is.

If it does die, what happens to all that housing stock? Will it be disassembled and carted away to be used somewhere else? Will the houses be reoccupied by a working class or an underclass who lives some futuristic existence-- surrounded by technological miracles but suffering from impoverishment in every sense?

I'm not sure, but with the price of energy spiraling upward into unsustainability, and with the new generation much more disposed to dense housing and close collaboration, I have to think, as the above article suggests, as well as this one in the NYT, that BIG changes are headed in the suburbs' direction.

And, to my way of thinking, the fewer new suburbs we build, the better.

What do you think?