The unnatural suburb

 This is my final blog post. I will be discussing my thoughts on Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson’s Retrofitting Suburbia,Urban Land, Sustainable Suburbs. I personally am not the biggest fan of suburbs. To me they feel like unnatural forced living spaces, what I mean by that is that most of the time the designs are created with the intention of fitting as many people as they can in a specific location with little regard for transportation and human socialization. Although retrofitting is the result of an unfortunate economic event I still believe it will benefit the users greatly by borrowing some of the successful aspects of a city and incorporating them into the mundane suburb. The example of the commercial strip corridor in Cathedral city, California in the reading was a fantastic representation of the benefits retrofitting a suburb could bring. By creating a multi-way palm-lined median strip and by widening the sidewalks for easier circulation to Main Street the designer helped the site attract hotels, shops, and housing.