“The median home size in America was near 2,300 square feet at the peak of the market in 2007, with many McMansions topping 10,000 square feet.  Today, the median home size has dropped to about 2,100 square feet and more than one-third of Americans say their ideal home size is actually under 2,000 square feet…”

From a sustainability perspective, (and others perhaps) seeing Americans realize the folly of wanting or buying a five bedroom, ten bathroom dwelling to house a family of three is uplifting.  As is the apparent reversal of our isolated, individualistic planning: Perman cites the latest fad of “smart growth” where developers focus on creating close-knit communities as opposed to sprawling housing sub-divisions.  She uses the community of Stapleton in Denver as an example:

“Here, their yards are tiny by design and no one has a pool — not even the million-dollar homes. Instead, they have an 80-acre shared park, aptly named Central Park, smaller “pocket parks” that become shared yards and three — soon to be four — public pools.”

The importance of a place like Stapleton lies not so much in its design or aesthetics (the single-family homes are still typical suburban homes, just smaller) but in its embodiment of a deep desire running through many American suburbanites to reconnect to their neighbors and to form some sort of community in a world that is rapidly dismantling them.  There are many people who still do not want to bother with the world around them, but a lot of people are also tired of living next to someone they never get to know, where every other human interaction is through a website or text message, or where people don’t even leave their homes to see a movie because they can watch them on a laptop.

It is possible that this has contributed to a sentiment that Americans are unused to sharing space or property, which has perhaps created varying degrees of self-containment and even selfishness.  Many of the comments on the CNBC article seem to stem from this viewpoint. And even with the positive outlook on housing espoused in the article, it not once mentions that a well-designed city already has what these new suburban community projects strive for.  Nowhere is the notion of continuous growth challenged – although this is CNBC, the survey is from the real estate search engine Trulia, and the industry magazine Builder is referenced, so one wouldn’t expect economic or infrastructure design theory to be of top priority here. Thus, despite the references to the growing unpopularity of sprawl nowhere is private car ownership addressed as the leading cause of sprawl.  Having a two car instead of a five car garage is great and relatively speaking “progressive,” but when little Billy, Sally, and Joey all hit sixteen that five car model suddenly sounds like a good idea.

Perhaps this new movement for suburban communities could be seen as one of many growing pains for a new, more sustainable and equitable American landscape.  One foot in the suburban past, one foot in the sustainable, urban future.  And maybe, with a little bit of imagination, in that future we can even call the suburban patterns we have imposed on the earth beautiful (at least when seen from the air).

Nevada suburb. Photograph by Cristoph Gielen

Read Rowan Moore’s October 24^th article in The Guardian, Samara: the disappearing wooden city on the Volga, and you can see what a hyperactive version of our beloved private development can wreak on a beautiful city center.  Moore describes Samara as a jewel of a Russian city, one that mixes historic wooden homes, constructivist worker’s clubs, and art nouveau mansions.  But all of that is under threat from rampant private developers looking to turn a quick profit off of bland, uninspired condominiums and shopping malls.  A familiar story to any American for sure, but the scale of privately funded urban destruction is multiplied to the nth degree in post-Soviet Russia.

The essential problem, according to Moore, is the role of government, or the lack thereof.  Either the regional or city governments outright ignore development abuses that are right under their noses (like the now-familiar arsons that are used to clear prime real estate), or they are in bed with private interests, to an extent that would make even the most corrupt American bureaucrat blush.  As Rowan states:

“…following the election of the current mayor Viktor Tarkhanov in 2006, the city appointed several associates of the company SOK, which since the mid-90s has aggressively taken over several businesses, to positions of influence. According to Vasili Sergeev, on the website kompromat.ru, ‘several members of the group specialised in murdering for money, drug trafficking, and extortion.’ Sergeev reports that the deputy head of property, the head of the department of architecture, the head of the department of transport and four others had SOK links. Such people are unlikely to let some old wooden houses get in the way of their plans.”

Yes, you read that correctly: there are Russian developers who specialize in murder.  In March of 2010, the Chief Architect of Solikmask was shot dead.  As a strident defender of the city’s historical center who frequently refused building and demolition permits, it is suspected she was murdered by a developer group.

Even just a cursory glance of Russia’s urban situation, courtesy of Rowan Moore, blatantly spells out the dangers of a path that far too many countries and cities around the world are following.  When we hand over too much of our urban space to an invisible hand we lose more than real estate: we lose a shared beauty, history, and humanity.  We lose the ability to create cities that grow sustainably while retaining their core identities, identities that all citizens of a city have a right to.

However, with all of their many faults, grand Modernist proposals were still earnest attempts to compile the world’s many problems, analyze them, and offer solutions.  When Corbusier dreamed of tearing down all of Paris and extruding skyscrapers on an endless grid of parks one can’t help but recognize the urgent attempt to make sense of a rapidly changing world.  To neatly and summarily solve many pressing issues in one bold, tidy statement is, after all, what architects are hired to do every day.

Luckily, many architects today are looking forward by not only admitting that they alone cannot solve all of our city’s problems, but also by embracing the unpredictability of a dynamic city (while also positing that sustainable cities can be messy and eco-friendly at the same time).  One recent instance can be found in Popular Science’s Life On the Edge: Four Visions For Inhabiting a World Transformed By Climate Change.

The first characteristic that strikes one when looking at these four different visions is the small scale and adaptability of each design. Here are four human-scaled building blocks to deal with climate change. Each one offers a projection of one instance in a very different environment; nowhere is the hand of the architect constructing a rigid formality to the city. Instead, we find some possible solutions to some very specific, entirely environmental and climatic changes that can be endlessly formed and modified.

All of the projects deal first-hand with self-sufficiency in terms of energy production – this isn’t anything new in the realm of architecture, but in terms of scale, I think (and correct me if I’m wrong, I’m sure there are more examples out there of this) these projects are some of the few that stand out in their self-resignation as components to a whole system rather than trying to be single, bold statements of sustainability as a mere marketing tool (Dubai, anyone?). Rather, their bold statement is our impending crisis of climate change. If, for example, New York City does become “an archipelago that could lose as much as a fifth of its landmass by 2080” and Mustafa Bulgur and Sinan Gunay’s City(E)scape proposal for self-sufficient modules suspended from Manhattan’s skyscrapers becomes a reality, then a wonderfully anarchic agglomeration of individuals within a collective network of support (literally and figuratively) becomes a daring new paradigm for sustainability. No single building (or architect) here will save us.

However, the social interactions between those single buildings and the people contained within are given little consideration in these four designs. What kind of public life can result from these new forms? How would habits and ideas change by living in these environments? Sustainability means far more than energy independence. As a concept it needs to infiltrate our daily lives as a theoretical shift that changes public perception of space, economics, social realities, health, art, politics, etc, etc. And without that fundamental shift, we won’t find ourselves anywhere near a City(E)scape in 2080. But we will find ourselves under 30 feet of water.