The Value of Collaboration in Education During Suburbia’s Retrofit
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The challenge of retrofitting American suburbs into more responsible developments I think will be the collective legacy of America’s design and planning professionals in the twenty-first century. It will be a difficult challenge, but a necessary one to tackle because of our changing climate and demographics. I agree with Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson’s notion that this retrofit will be accomplished incrementally. I don’t see any other viable solution that doesn’t involve Disneyland-like developments of New Urbanism or careless, unimpeded suburbs. The success of the incremental conversion of suburbia into sustainable places will be dependent on the design and planning community ability to collaborate effectively. The fertilization and irrigation of barren soil can’t occur in an isolated environment, it relies on coordination with neighbors on a local and regional level. This present and future necessity for effective collaboration cements the value of teaching collaboration in the academic setting. We should continue to revisit and optimize collaborative projects within our schools as a result.
Geoffrey, I totally agree with you here. We love the idea of immediate change, but our reality is in the incremental movements. And in order for industries to changes, we have to collaborate and also understand each other. This is one of my passions as an engineering architect - these disciplines are not in conflict, yet because they don't choose to collaborate well or understand what each other holds as important, conflict arises and nothing innovative can get done. I think this is so with suburbia as well. It will take time, but the more we sit together and seek to understand the viewpoints of others, the more we might reach the type of change that works.
ReplyDeleteGeoffrey, I think you are on to something here. I do believe that we as designers can help make the transformations that need to be made, but it will also take a lot of incremental work to do so. Like you said, even if the idea is great and there, people have to be willing to work together and do the work to make this happen. It isn't just designers and landscapers, we have to as a community want it to happen for it to.
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