Aging Suburbia


1920-40s Highlands Suburbia

New vs. Old across the street divide

This past summer while doing an internship in Denver, CO, I lived in an interesting neighborhood called the Highlands in the western part of the city on the other side of the Platte River. The neighborhood was a clash of old and new, suburban and urban. It was originally founded as a suburb of Denver City, but then was absorbed into the city as it grew. I lived on a street that contained all the hallmarks of suburbia: houses sited close together that looked remarkably similar, many of them occupied by typical American families with 1.5 kids. However, the neighborhood was only a 5-10 minute drive from the urban heart of Denver. This strange dichotomy of living in a suburban but urban environment was something I had never experienced before. Denver (like many cities) is exploding with growth, so many of the old houses of the neighborhood are being sold for many times their purchase price, torn down, and replaced with a new kind of suburbia: low-rise multi-family dwellings or townhouses. We often associate suburbia with character-less, bland architecture, but seeing the old suburbia replaced with new still makes me feel like something is being lost. Even though the older architecture is suburban, to me it has more architectural merit than the new. This is something that is happening all over America, so I guess what I’ve been wondering as a result of this week’s discussions is: is older better? Or is suburbia still suburbia (with all of its flaws) regardless of age?

Comments

  1. It's such a shame that you're having to decide which is the lesser of two evils when both options are bad. Architects have such an opportunity to design something really great and somewhat dense and all that we end up with is not necessarily better than what came before it.

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  2. It does seem like the 'new' suburbia seems less authentic than the old. Society is not peddling the same domestic ideologies as they did post-war, so to forcing a new typology into the old setting of suburbia does somehow seem counterintuitive and just strange.

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  3. I agree with Lauren about the authentic of the "new suburbia". The initial suburbs were so close to the city and still had many characteristics that it is hard to characterize them as suburbs anymore. But can they be considered urban?

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