Somewhere That's Green? visions of sustainable suburbia

Abstract

Conceived and represented throughout its history as a primarily residential landscape combining the best aspects of city and country, suburbia has traditionally been painted with the rhetorically green brushstrokes of leaves, gardens and grass. In more recent decades, coinciding largely with rapid mass suburbanization sprawling across North America, suburban development has rather come to be seen as antithetical to the preservation and appreciation of the natural world, indicative of a lifestyle spatially and experientially alienated from nature's amenities despite its many trees and lawns. Contemporary environmental movements promoting a "green" agenda often dismiss suburbia as a wholly unsustainable paradigm. However, emergent trends in planning, building, marketing, consumption, and entertainment attempt to reconcile long held desires for suburban places that bring everyday life closer to nature with ecological pressures to live in greater harmony with nature. This project examines tensions and synergies between suburbia as it has been physically and culturally constructed since the mid-twentieth century and some of the many hypothetically greener conceptions either currently in development or envisioned as on the horizon. Through analysis of popular media discourses and representational practices positioning subdivisions and single-family homes as symbolic as well as symptomatic of this iconic privatized built environment, this project explores how and why various solutions posed for suburbia's perceived ecological problems envision compromises that either only peripherally address the substance of many environmental critiques, or are fundamentally at odds with what continues to make suburbia so desirable as a residential choice.