Andres Duany Lecture. Suburban Sprawl.

I basically just parroted Nathan Lewis, who has a great blog series on the topic: link It's virtually the same message from Andres Duany. His talk from 30 years ago is still so eerily precise and comprehensive: ▶ this video When I feel presumptuous, I email this to people (deaf ears, mostly). Leon Krier bangs the same drum, and adds a more sophisticated, architectural perspective: link

Suburban sprawl is exactly as required by law, from the mutually exclusive land uses right down to the paint on the strip-mall parking lots. Market forces would love to build walkable mixed-use districts. A proud tradition of highly effective grassroots activism makes sure that they don't. You may find this talk [0], or the speaker's book Suburban Nation, enlightening. It's not at all the case that market forces need to be adjusted here. It's public policy which is broken. [0] ▶ this video

Suburban sprawl is the law. These subdivisions off the side of the highway full of large lot single family homes aren’t even what developers think people want. They are prescribed by the building and planning codes of nearly every jurisdiction. Developers do sometimes build new places in the urban style but every element of that is a hard-fought battle against the government for variances, zoning changes, special permits, etc. The New Urbanists have an interesting approach to this: “open source” planning codes that prescribe urbanism rather than sprawl, which they try to convince municipalities to adopt as their default. They don’t seem to have much uptake though. The postwar sprawl style is what was popular when the regulatory regimes as we know them today came to be, and there’s a lot of inertia behind that, whether or not people actually like it. ▶ this video