Rebuilding our Suburbs: Pros and Cons for Reconfiguring Strategies

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Rebuilding our Suburbs: Pros and Cons for Reconfiguring Strategies
With cities and urban neighborhoods making a comeback, poverty, economic distress, and a host of social problems are increasingly afflicting the suburbs than cities. Besides, economic growth is faster in cities than suburbs partly because of obsolete buildings and inadequate data and mass transit infrastructure. Proposed strategies include changing zoning of affected districts, demolishing obsolete buildings, creating walkable mixed-use “downtowns”, and creating additional mass transit linkages. In most suburbs, more focus has been on automobile traffic than mass transit and “walkability”, and the aim of this paper is to provide the pros and cons to the current proposed strategies for reconfiguring.
One of the proposed strategies for reconfiguring suburbs is the change of zoning of the afflicted districts from large lot single-family housing, density retail or commercial office to mixed use that incorporates higher density apartments or industrial. In every zoning district, including commercial, residential, mixed-use, and industrial, zoning ordinances and codes specify permissible usage, scales, and sizes of buildings. This approach facilitates growth by opening up regions that lag behind in development but with significant residential density. However, zoning in existing residential areas may set density levels that are below the infrastructural and market levels they can support.
Secondly, in a circular economy, structural design focus has been to reduce the potential environmental impact of development by minimizing building materials. The reuse or structural components is a re-emerging strategy that aims to rebuild suburbs by demolishing obsolete buildings and reconfiguring them to hotels, industrial or self-storage. Obsolescence is another motive for demolitions as old buildings become obsolete or lose fashion. Nevertheless, this strategy of rebuilding suburbs could in...