From today’s last week’s BD magazine:
Housing Corporation chief executive Jon Rouse, who controls a £3.6 billion development budget over the next two years, outlined seven reasons for a return to suburbia and said anyone who believes the country’s housing crisis can be met through the expansion of urban centres is “frankly kidding themselves”. He said policy makers should admit that Barking Reach, the Thames Gateway’s flagship development, is not a “landmark urban development” but a suburb …
The seven reasons:
- Suburbia is the dominant form that British culture aspires to.
- Only suburban design can give us mixed communities.
- Only suburbia can reconcile national and local planning objectives.
- Suburbs are what people with no choice choose.
- Suburbs can protect the rural domain.
- Suburbs can be very sustainable.
- Good suburban design is very flexible and adaptable.
“There’s been a tendency – it’s the mainstream tendency – to describe places which are and should be suburban as urban.”
Dear Jon, I couldn’t agree more.