Suburbia

I read a rather unfortuneate article in Macleans this week, about suburbs and how 'they aren't THAT bad.'

Please!

It's economically inefficient, it's environmentally damaging, it's socially inequitable, and aesthetically it's ugly. Yes, those are the four arguments against suburbs, and he tries to deconstruct each one.

It's not that he does a poor job at it, it's that he hasn't accounted for the negative impact the suburbs have had on urban development and the environment.

Particularly in regards to the environmental issues. His argument runs as such:

"The notion that you'd have a very dense city that's environmentally friendly is very difficult to sustain. A whole bunch of apartment buildings that rely on big, centralized energy systems for all the heating and cooling and elevators, and everything else? By contrast, let's say everybody lived at two-acre densities. What could happen if they got all their energy right on site -- geothermal, wind, solar? You wouldn't need these huge systems of waste-water treatment and water delivery. You could have a more-or-less self-sufficient kind of situation."

Brilliant, if that were the case, but I don't know any suburbians who are about to put up a solar factory in their back yard, or start harvesting the earth's heat. As well, even though the burbs could rely on well water (ones in the country do), most rely on water from a central source, and have sewage treated at a central source.

So the same problems exist with the suburbs as do in high-density buildings, however, burbs stretch out over VAST expanses of land, whereas high-rises have a small footprint. High-rises are also transit-friendly, which the burbs are not. Many people in high-rises opt out of owning a vehicle of their own, but such a luxury isn't possible in suburbs, where density is so low that it makes running routes economically unsound.

I'm not going to comment on the ugliness of suburbs, because not all burbs are. But certainly urban-sprawl cities have lost a lot of magic and history with dowtowns going the way of the dodo in favour of a 'central business district' that in many cases is just a mall (Scarborough Town Centre, Square One, Pickering Mall, North York Centre, umm... whatever is in Ajax).

Be kind to your environment and don't buy into the suburb lifestyle. It's not a healthy choice, regardless of what Macleans says.