Ideas for shifting American Dream

"Housing Development at Different Stages, Las Vegas, NV, March 2005" by Alex Maclean at the jen bekman gallery

...that's right, suburbs! The finalists from Build a Better Burb competition are up, and the People's Choice vote is open till October 4. Love that this competition merges planning and design thinking.

I recently spent some time in suburbs myself and personally dislike (verging on hate) the experience, but am endlessly fascinated by how people LOVE living in that environment. Visiting is one thing, but living? That's all I can think of when we drive through the endless streets of detached houses located a drive away from anything else - people love living like this. It's truly a dream come true for many.

But when you piece together what they go through to live this dream, it seems to be a huge hassle and expensive too. On an individual level, I guess people like choosing the hassles they're willing to live with. On a community level though, the multitude of individual choices just don't mesh well, never mind the long-term problems with supporting developments of this type...and on and on. So these competition ideas each have great potential, each a creative spin on some au courant planning basics. There were only a few out of the 20 odd finalists that dealt more deeply with regionalism.

Postscript: I had a suspicion I've written about the American Dream before, the immigrant experience seems to frame things in a way that's unavoidable for me: how a city in another country thinks about its life dreams, how housing development companies capitalized on the american dream and then on the disillusionment with this dream. Whoa.