German photographer Christopher Gielen reveals haunting images of our endlessly repetitive development through aerial views of American urban sprawl.
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Well, not sprawl exactly, according to the author.
The Sun Belt suburbs depicted in these images are “absolutely self-contained,” Gielen suggests; “many of them,” he adds, are “not changing anymore.” They are static, crystalline and inorganic. Indeed, many of these streets frame retirement communities: places to move to once you’ve already been what you’ve set out to be.
This isn’t sprawl, properly speaking. They are locations in their own right, spatial endpoints of certain journeys.
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Has Gielen been to Mexico?
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In 2000, Mexican presidential candidate Vicente Fox Quesada proposed an unprecedented plan to build two million low-income homes throughout the country during his six-year term. …
To enact this initiative, the federal government agency INFONAVIT ceded the construction of low-income housing to a small group of private real estate investors. Then, almost overnight, grids of 20 to 80,000 identical homes sprouted up, and they continue to spread in remote agrarian territories throughout the country.
We need to acknowledge that some people, many in fact, most perhaps prefer a single family house with a yard to a denser midrise or high rise condo !
We need to cater to both demands , not just density !
Most people would prefer to live in a palatial estate on acreage rather than in a pedestrian house on a standard sized city lot. But that doesn’t mean we should be basing our urban policy around that desire.
Yes we should base urban policies on what people want to buy .. and of course we need to price it properly, i.e. roads, gas lines, water/sewer, public transit, … and as such some cities might be mispricing those services provided.
And if we do price it properly, and yes that includes pricing environmental impacts, then the vast majority will end up living in high-density situations anyway, and being quite happy about it if it’s done right.
But mostly right now it’s not what people want to buy that’s driving the market, it’s what builders want to build, and that includes those so-called desirable single family homes, which just happen to also be the easiest and cheapest thing builders can do.
And let’s remember: while people may want to live on a palatial estate, they certainly don’t want everyone else to live on a palatial estate: that would be a traffic nightmare, there would be no cool places to drive to from their palatial estate, and they would probably have to put their palatial estate too far from the city because, hey, if everyone lives in palatial estates that takes up a lot of space.
So yes, we should base our urban policy on what’s best for the whole of the city, not just what one individual would like if given a no-constraints choice.
Builders build what is selling.
Many people, and people with kids, prefer leavy suburbs over noisy dense neighborhoods. As such sound urban planning has to provide all types : palaces, mere estates, single family homes, duplexes, townhouses, mid rises, highrises .. And if you look around MetroVancouver that is exactly what we need. As such, with 1M more folks coming here we need more of all of it, and with land scarce land will be more and more expensive and as such we automagically get higher density as many folks cannot afford the bungalow in the burbs with a sizable yard although they prefer to, and so they settle into a more affordable townhouse or condo. Vancouver essentially has no more new land to develop, and as such even a shack in E-Van is now $1M+ … and folks that can’t pay as much move further east or south.
Sound urban planning to me is accommodation of all of those residential demands, plus land for food production, recreation, offices, industry and retail all over the place in various densities, too.
Residential land is overly expensive in Vancouver due to heavy regulation, and far too many restrictions. MetroVan could create easily 50-100 sq km of new land (for residential, recreational, industrial or retail use) by
a) reducing land that is currently in the agricultural reserve, and
b) creating land in the vast marsh land / tidal land in Mud Bay, off UBC or west of Delta and Richmond
c) reducing public golf courses
d) building a small network of fast trains into Delta, Surrey, Langley, Maple Ridge or even Abbotsford and then creating housing along the stations
If the political will were there housing affordability could be vastly improved in MetroVan.
Sure Thomas,
Where do you put them all?
East or south. LOADS of land in Surrey, Delta, Langley, MapleRidge and Abbotsford, on pubic golf courses, on now agricultural land and into the tidal flats of MudBay, off UBC and west of Delta and Richmond .. loads of land that could be utilized if the political will were there with associated public high speed train infrastructure to get from Abbotsford to downtown Vancouver in 30 minutes with 5-8 stops along the way and nodal development. All doable.
And where do we grow food for all these people, Thomas Beyer? And do you really believe that here, as opposed to everywhere else, our sprawl will be associated with high speed rail and low car use?
We grow food where land is less expensive, say Fraser Valley or Okanagon or NZ or CA or AZ or TX or Mexico !
Sprawl is a biased word. It implies it is bad. If millions of people live in a city, one needs space for it. I prefer the term “leafy suburb”. MetroVan has done a poor purposeful design beyond the current reach of the SkyTrain, i.e. further into Surrey, to UBC, to Tsawwassen, to White Rock, to N-Van, to Landlgley and beyond, to Maple Ridge and beyond.
We rather grow blueberries on land that is worth $10M an acre. It is stupid.
Care use is too cheap and too convenient still. As such only higher car use prices coupled with fast alternatives (i.e. subways or rail lines) need to be built.
What is stupid is paving over the most agriculturally productive land in the province when we have absolutely no need to do so. Most of that most expensive land is also our most productive land, including in the Okanagon Valley and the Fraser Valley where the pressures are also very strong on agricultural land. Without protection, we’ll lose that, not only here but also in California, Arizona, Texas, Mexico and New Zealand. When we pave over land we lose that land forever – it won’t ever be useful for agriculture again, even if the situation changes.
But beyond that, I’m guessing from your previous posts that you simply don’t acknowledge the negative impacts of importing all our food (waste of energy and fuel, Co2 emissions, lack of secure supply), but if nothing else, what about jobs and money? The agricultural industry in B.C. is big business and employees thousands and that simply can’t be relocated. If we lose land, we lose those jobs, and our food budgets start getting shipped overseas. The same can’t be said for other industrial development or office parks – those are uses that could be built elsewhere on any land.
You seem to believe that we can build “leafy suburbs” while getting rid of car use. There are very few examples of that in the world, and none that I can think of where the population density is actually as low or lower than somewhere like Langley district. We have so much space that we could use more efficiently simply by connecting rail to places like downtown Langley and Cloverdale, but you want to invest money into building rail to productive farmland, destroying that farmland by building houses over it, when there are much better, more sensible ways to go about converting existing suburbs from excessive car dependency to other forms of transportation.
And it might help if you pressed the reply button.
MetroVan needs an intelligent debate where to put all the new people and about housing affordability and where to grow. Not everyone wants to live in high-rises. Decade, sometimes even century old policies need re-visiting, such as creating land in oceans, removing select (sub-standard) land from the agricultural reserve near a big city, removal of underused public areas (say public golf courses) and/or filling spaces between existing nodes, say White Rock or Delta with more housing along newly created transportation corridors.
BC is a huge province, but 60%+ of its population lives in MetroVan. What makes sense elsewhere in BC, i.e. protecting farmland, for example, may not make sense close to a big city.
Cheaper blueberries or cheaper housing ? That is what the populace and its elected governments have to decide !
Proposing that a suburban subdivision could be “absolutely self-contained,” makes art seem illegitimate as a way of understanding and interpreting urban space. Gielen produces beautiful images, but has he learned anything from them? The essence of the suburb is this illusion: that they are independent in every sense of an outside and “Other” urban world. If your presentation of his work here is accurate, Gielen must fall for what is patently a myth: that suburbs, because their housing developments were [are?] marketed as timeless, are themselves time capsules. Of course, conventional suburbs are the basic mode of development in many developed and, troublingly, many developing countries, and make up [I understand] the bulk of the existing housing and commercial building stock in North America. This makes them the fundamental urban environment in which our successes and dramas proceed. They are always changing [socially, economically etc.] even if they remain convenient metaphors for the torpor of middle-class material politics. Thanks for posting this.