3/20/13 - Designing Around Life's Transitions

Earlier in one of my journal entries I posted about how the suburbs are still exponentially costly when driving the car compared to living in the city and the energy use associated with that…

In class today, Stephen talked about how each part of our city is sort of designed (in a way) around our life’s transitions. This sounds confusing initially, so let me explain. 

Time and time again, Stephen has been telling us that every day we need to build housing for 1,000,000 new residents… Talk about huge growth! So, basically this concept of the city being designed for our transitional lives was drawn out of him talking about the population growth. Think about how when you are in college you are most likely to live as close as possible to your school (to save costs such as commuting/transit), so you are will probably either live on campus or downtown – at least with specific to the University of Utah students… 

Furthermore, when you are middle-aged and have kids, you might want to move out to the suburbs to raise those kids so they can play in the yard. Then, when you get older, you might want to move back into the city for all of its necessities and close proximity (access to transit, access to food, entertainment, etc). 

So, basically we are all at certain points of our lives where we want or need certain spaces to live. Since Salt Lake City and Salt Lake County (even Utah County) is really, for the most part, a suburban city, it makes sense to have all sorts of types of housing available. Depending on where you are in your life, you might choose to live in an apartment over a suburban single-family home. Whereas, in a different point in your life, you might choose to live in a suburban home to raise your kids and then after they move out, you might choose to move closer to the city in a condominium or something.

After our discussion, I learned that it is OK to have suburbia. However, we need to design our cities (Salt Lake City, specifically) in a way that allows dense growth while, at the same time, allows people to live in suburban homes, depending on where they are in their life. 

I think this is almost a three-dimensional perspective on transition strategies. I love it. It is a whole new perspective on the role suburbia has on our cities and in our lives.