How about "incremental naturism..."

I don't think the idea of suburbia was a bad idea in the beginning. In fact, I would say it brought a sense of optimism and comradery among suburbanites. Life after WWII was a time that promoted cheap home ownership, a model signed into action by FDR and first realized by Levitt and Sons, where massive affordable suburban communities infiltrated America’s open landscapes. These communities were full of interaction: kids played outside, everyone knew their neighbor, even said “Hi!” to each other and had dinner parties with beer for everyone. Did someone say fondue! The good life, right?

But has it all been a sham? Was suburban life even a good idea to begin with? We had the automobile, so why not? But by developing suburbia we further stretched our infrastructure beyond feasibility, and stratified our communities by constructing habitable mazes of redundancy with no real connection to our surroundings. Maybe we would have all been better off if we only had two choices, the simple life or the city life, rural or urban, with no third option to ever occupy some vast made-up interstitial space that now controls America’s landscape. As a result, we find ourselves clamoring to figure out how to negotiate what remains of the built environment that emerged when suburban sprawl became the norm: the underutilized and under-performing spaces of commercial strips, big box architecture, and seas of black top.

As discussed in “Retrofitting Suburbia,” our society is now challenged with creating more sustainable “hybrids” to better the way our communities and cities work together and to focus on its citizens. That is because in some instances suburbia has grown to function as some in-between life that doesn’t satisfy anyone’s true needs, hopes, desires, or joys. On one end of the spectrum, suburbs are artificial utopias where America can “spend money they haven’t earned to buy things they don’t need to impress people they don’t like.” And in the process, build resentment toward each other that is now comically perpetuated through social media and movies because the hollow life of suburbia rings true for so many. On the other end of the spectrum, our city governments purposefully neglect lower class neighborhoods, where minorities without the means to succeed are further isolated to a condition of despair. This top-down decision making process needs to be flipped upside down.

We can find great examples of how to adapt and retrofit suburban infrastructure, to build more sustainable and connected communities, and we need to continue to explore and think about how we can begin this transition. For one, it can’t be a half-hearted endeavor, and it must be a bottom-up process, because citizens who occupy these “urban nodes within a new polycentric metropolis” are the ones obviously most impacted by how all this turns out. But is all this effort worth it? Maybe we should respond the same way “incremental urbanism” did in getting us into this predicament to begin with, just in the opposite direction. Maybe, instead of retrofitting suburbia, we install “incremental naturism” to revert the abyss of suburban life back to the natural landscape it once was.