Designing via detours: Why patterns may save the suburb

Abstract

There is a growing public concern over the high societal costs of the suburban dwelling dream. At the same time, there is a growing despair among spatial planners on how to retrofit suburban dwelling environments to reduce these costs. All their strategies seem to strand in resistance. This article proposes to shift focus; from trying to change suburbia, to trying to steer the suburban dwelling dream. Our main argument is that such a shift would require making visible how dwelling cultures interdepend. We will discuss how we relied on patterns to start 'expanding' this interdependency and how the participatory development of a suburban pattern language helps to support this process of expansion. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing • Interaction design • Interaction design process and methods • Participatory design KEYWORDS Retrofitting suburbia, radical interdependence, expansive learning, pattern language 1 Suburbia needs to transform We, spatial planners, have a problem with suburbia. The societal costs of this dispersed, homogeneous and low density mode of urbanization are simply too high. In Flanders, the region where this project took place, the amount of infrastructure per building is 3 to 9,5 times higher in a suburban than in an urban environment [1]. As a consequence, Flemish municipalities spent, in 2018, on average, 19% of their budget on the maintenance of roads, leaving a mere 3% for culture [2]. Suburbanites make more than 70% of their trips by car and spend, on average 5 hours per person per week in a car, whereas urbanites limit this to 50% and 3.3 hours, making the societal cost per family for mobility twice as high in suburbia [1]. Buildings in suburban developments count on average 1700 m2 paved surface, whereas buildings in an urban context only 370 m2 [1], making Flanders the region in Europe with the highest percentage of sealed surface, namely 14% [3]. Is it surprising then that spatial planners have a problem with suburbia? And that we, already since the sixties, argue that suburban developments need to transform? There even is a consensus on the directions that these transformations need to take. The Flemish Planning Department [4] summarizes it as 'doing more with less space' and explains how we all need to increase the spatial efficiency of our built environment by stimulating the multifunctional use of space, the sharing of space, the reuse of space, etc. This consensus is not limited to Flanders, but returns in the rest of Europe [5]. What also returns is that we, planners, cannot seem to find the leverages to make these transformations happen. We tried new legislation, tailored taxes, information campaigns and even nudging. We explored participatory design approaches such as participatory mapping sessions [6], prototyping experiments [7], neighborhood charters [8], etc. But still, developers keep on building subdivisions at the same pace, be it slightly more compact and certainly more expensive [3]. The suburban dwelling dream is simply too obdurate [9].