Will Suburbs be the New Cities

 

As I read Dunham-Jones and Williamson's Retrofitting Suburbia, I was led to wonder just how successful this ideology will be. Let me paint a theoretical situation. The year is 2100, new laws protecting undeveloped land in the United States have been in place since the early 2040's, leading to the densification of the suburbs. As the population continued to grow, simply retrofitting existing structures like shopping malls have reached the point where there are simply no more shopping malls to retrofit. Does the solution become the construction of new high rises in the middle of what was once the stereotypical cookie cutter suburbs of America? How would the extreme density adjacent to the low density blocks work in practice. Would there be more benefits or drawbacks? In my eyes, it would be a better version of Atlanta, where everything is currently so spread out that you need a car to get around a majority of the time. The positive side however, is that with so many business areas spread out, there are more people that live within 2 miles of their job, allowing for bikeable microcities within the urban fabric of Atlanta. If you break down Atlanta into its sub cities, it seems to me to be a successful template for others to follow (with better public transit so that the traffic wasn't a thing.)