This Isn't Yelp

Because of the rapid suburban growth of the Charleston area, I’ve grown up watching many of my childhood fishing spots, swimming holes, and rope swings being replaced by fancy docks, golf courses, and mcmansions...




Daniel Island and Mount Pleasant, SC 1999




Daniel Island and Mount Pleasant, SC 2020





But that’s somewhat besides the point right now. Because so far it seems that the discussion on suburbs that typically takes place here only centers around individual testimonies over whether or not people here like the suburbs, or if they have lived there in the past, or if they would live there in the future. Providing personal testimonies on suburbia maybe is a good way to open a discussion on suburbia, yet to only focus on that topic leads us nowhere in terms of having productive discussion. The personal vantage points that people share repeatedly on the topic of suburbia, I must say, are simply not objective enough to provide a critical context. This is not how we should be analyzing a topic of concern when it comes to urban design. I still share many similar experiences and likes/dislikes of suburbia as everyone else who has posted about it--literally every blog post about it I can find things to agree with. But as designers right now, that’s besides the point. So many of these expressions have been talking about suburbia like we are only consumers, with discussions which lead like “oh yeah I like it because…” or “I lived in suburbia and it's not as bad as the examples we seem to show in class…” A crude analogy would be a critical discussion on how the total fenestration of a building affects its overall performance in terms of heating/cooling, yet the discussion gets upended by people talking about how much they like or dislike windows, and proceed to share personal anecdotes of their fondest window memory. This is not a google review on suburbia, folks. And frankly, though somewhat unrelated, almost anyone in America can provide a similar opinion anyway--so it’s not special! We really need to be dissecting this topic from the perspective of designers, not consumers.


Seems like everyone here clearly is able to talk about sustainability in architecture on the level of building performance, and very clearly understands that “sustainability” is often a hollow notion which has been used and misused so many times that it is almost meaningless. Everyone clearly seems to agree that matters of building performance, longevity, and efficiency are perhaps more realistic ways to interpret the idea of sustainability. So why then, does the idea of building performance, longevity, and efficiency completely disappear when you’re no longer talking about just one building, but instead a landscape of buildings? As designers, this is our concern as well. We can’t limit ourselves to just the building, and not pay attention to the urban landscape that it is contributing to. We need to be able to think about this topic in terms of its performance as a man made landscape, and how that interfaces with the spaces these building-scapes may border, whether they are natural or urban. Furthermore, we should be trying to hone in on asking the right questions--like how does this landscape of buildings contribute to the value of a city or town, or it’s value as a historic place? Since we only have so much land to develop, is this an efficient use of land? How do large scale suburban developments affect storm water runoff and the watersheds in my area? (It’s a long discussion on sedimentation, too long for here.) Who exactly is profiting from these developments? What kinds of things happen to nearby bodies of water and surrounding land if we disrupt watersheds? What will this do to my local fisheries, birds, or beaches if we keep building at this rate? These questions need to be asked so we can design for these real life scenarios--so we can capitalize on the benefits of ecological performance within our own cities, as designing with ecology offers massive potential for use in watershed management, storm water runoff management, waterborne pollutant mitigation, erosion mitigation, etc. Ideally we can strive to densify and disrupt less of the natural ecological landscapes, yet when we have to remove natural ecological landscapes, we should be more cognizant of what purposes they served for the local ecosystem and how they may have had an effect on managing natural environmental hazards--so that we can know what needs need to be replaced by designed ecological solutions that can be embedded into the urban fabric.


And I don’t want people to perceive this as just hippy bullshit, to be super frank here--we should all be selfishly motivated to get this right, so we don’t accidentally destroy the things about an area that we value the most. The ecological and environmental performance of our landscapes is extremely poor when they are covered in traditional suburban developments, and that devalues areas and poses environmental risks, especially for coastal areas, which have an intricate relationship with water. To be clear, these risks are two fold, it's not just our own developments at risk, but the surrounding compromised landscapes as well--places many people want to be able to recreate in. It's worth thinking critically about.