Retrofitting Suburbia

‘A little house in the suburbs’ used to have a nice ring to it. Nowadays the word is more apt to incite the feeling of horror of a quaint neighborhood as Tom Hanks depicted in the 1980′s hit ‘Burbs.  The hit series Desperate housewives has sensationalized the lives behind the perfectly tended lawns of suburban American.  At Chronos, our team has written about the subject in sociological terms. The rising the cost of transportation added to the cost of housing no longer makes suburbia attainable for middle-class Americans. (Read: The end of Desperate Housewives.)

For years warnings were ignored that suburbia was unsustainable. The lone voices were, however, silenced by companies with ulterior motives in the name of social advancement and upward mobility. In the documentary Taken for a Ride, the (once?) mighty General Motors was outed as the company responsible for systematically wiping out the rail system nation-wide.  The irony is that same company now finds itself hat-in-hand asking for a bail out from the very people to whom they sold the white-picket-fence, sprawl, car-dependence model as “the American Dream.”

Today, there is no shortage of people ready to vehemently criticize the American suburban model. Artists like Kevin Bauman of Detroit are capturing the dysfunctional landscape of abandoned houses in photographs; Civically and environmentally minded developers like Jonthan Rose promote plans to “repair the fabric of communities” through re-densifying transit rich urban centers; and out-spoken authors like James Howard Kunstler, who calls suburban sprawl “the greatest mis-allocation of resources the world has ever known” draws a clear connection between our dilapidated built environment and “places not worth caring about.”

Although, with all this seemingly forward momentum, American’s are still successfully pulling the wool over unsuspecting people around the world. A US contractor from California of Afghan decent has sold his cookie cutter gated community to the redeveloping nation of Afghanistan. It is hard to believe that what that nation needs at this time is to follow a path of proven unsustainability.

This silver lining to this problem is that the explosion of the price of oil coupled with the economic crisis have provided an opening for The End of Suburbia. “The days where we’re just building sprawl forever… those days are over. Everybody recognizes that that’s not a smart way to design communities” stated President Obama.  But if everyone realizes it was a mistake, why didn’t someone try to stop it? More importantly, what do we do now to fix it?

Solutions are vast and varied. Some seek to encourage urban renewal as in Balitmore, where debates are taking place to offer free college tuition to city dwellers. Still others seek to facilitate suburbanite’s lives by created “third places.” By renting “on-demand” and “drop-in” office spaces like a club memberships, property managers aim to cash in on the nomade generation while reducing workers’ commutes. Finally, a promising and unprecedented collaboration between the Department of Housing and the Department of Transportation aims to more cohesively establish transit rich, healthy, sustainable communities in the United States.

Originally published at: Trajectoires Fluides | Groupe Chronos

Sharing is a Dirty Word

Sharing is a dirty word. “Do we call hotels ‘bed sharing’? That’s way too intimate. Do we call bowling ‘shoe sharing’? Who would want to bowl?” The semantics of the word proved to be a major obstacle for Robin Chase when launching Zipcar. After conducting a sociological study, Chase learned that 40% of the people she talked to had an extremely negative reaction to… sharing. “The word makes people nervous.”

To be fair, sharing isn’t that easy after all. You have to cooperate. You don’t get what you want all the time. And you certainly can’t make any money by sharing, right? What if we were to throw those assumed truths out the window? What if, in 2009, sharing were easy? Yeah, it meant you had to cooperate (i.e. clean up after yourself, be on time, etc.) But what if, you could get what you wanted (almost) all the time? And finally, (are you listening entrepreneurs?) what if you could actually make money by sharing?

Chase’s first lot of Zipcars were eye-catchers – lime green VW beetles sporting the jazzy Z logo. She wanted to make her users feel they were in the know; that they were the ones who had figured it out. Sharing was cool and owning a car was “stupid.” Mark Levine from the New York Times described this transformational sociological shift where, “Sharing is clean, crisp, urbane, postmodern; owning is dull, selfish, timid, backward.”

The way we share, what we share, and who we share things with is undergoing a transformational revolution thanks to advances in recent technology. The social networking internet based tools used in sites such as Twitter and Facebook have broken ground for innovating new ideas such as GoLoco and Connect by Hertz. Companies outside the mobility sector are marketing closed-loop products, such as Tandus, who has found a way to use old carpets to make new ones. Sharing? Maybe not exactly, but the fact that company’s interests are now more closely aligned with the consumer’s means: better quality, cooperation, providing services consumers want, and revenues which allow for company success.

Originally published at: Tragectoires Fluids | Groupe Chronos