From suburbs to "instant urbanism"

Below is an excerpt from an interview by Smart Planet with professor of Architecture and Urban Design at Georgia Tech, Ellen Dunham-Jones.  Dunham-Jones wrote a a book titled, "Retrofitting Suburbia".  In this interview Dunham-Jones talks about what it takes to make the transition from suburbs to dense communities: "instant urbanism".   See if you agree with her analysis of urban-suburban planning.  How does it compare with your own experience - or is Dunham-jones using stereotypes to make her points?  (Note: Emphasis in old and italics below are mine.)

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Q&A: Ellen Dunham-Jones on retrofitting suburbia

By Christina Hernandez Sherwood | March 11, 2013, 4:00 AM PDT | Smart Planet

Imagine a suburban backyard swimming pool as a tilapia farm. Or rail transit on every big city corridor. That could be the future of “retrofitting suburbia,” a method of transforming existing suburban developments into sustainable, more urbanized locales. From Austin to Washington, D.C., cities across the country are already converting unused strip malls into libraries and dead suburban malls into college campuses. The future could be even more innovative.

I spoke recently with Ellen Dunham-Jones, professor of architecture and urban design at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the author with June Williamson of Retrofitting Suburbia. Below are excerpts from our interview.

How do you respond to the criticisms of these communities, for instance, that they’re instant urbanism?
Any new development project is often accused of being instant urbanism or faux downtown. There are lots of reasons we feel that way. I think most of us would prefer our urbanism to be incremental. That diversity makes you feel like you belong to something bigger than just yuppie gratification from a place that feels instant. Incremental urbanism works great if you have a walkable infrastructure. If you’re in a city with that network of streets and some transit, it’s great to continue to evolve. In a suburban condition, if you redevelop one parcel at a time, it’s not getting to anything more sustainable. You’re not getting the density you need to make the transit work. You’re probably not getting affordable housing built in. You’re not going to get the public space built in or the environmental protections if you do it one piece at a time. In suburbia, we need to do the big transformation, the instant urbanism. But we as designers and planners need to figure out how to do a better job of it. We are seeing people get much more innovative. We’re seeing more forward-looking architecture in places where there is more density. We’re seeing the retrofits evolve to become much more authentic and real places.

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The "instant urbanism that Dunham-Jones refers to can only happen through a large infusion of public money.  The typical source of funds is the Tax Increment Financing (TIF) that comes with an Urban Renewal District (URD).  Other sources of money are state, regional and federal grants for transit, Town Center creation, bike and pedestrian paths, and electric car charging stations, etc.  The money all comes with strings attached, and the developments look all the same.  Authenticity has nothing to do with Smart Growth or "sense of place."  Just sayin'.