Suburban Housing Development Research Articles

Unravelling the spatial directionality of urban mobility.

As it is central to sustainable urban development, urban mobility has primarily been scrutinised for its scaling and hierarchical properties. However, traditional analyses frequently overlook spatial directionality, a critical factor in city centre congestion and suburban development. Here, we apply vector computation to unravel the spatial directionality of urban mobility, introducing a two-dimensional anisotropy-centripetality metric. Utilising travel data from 90 million mobile users across 60 Chinese cities, we effectively quantify mobility patterns through this metric, distinguishing between strong monocentric, weak monocentric, and polycentric patterns. Our findings highlight a notable difference: residents in monocentric cities face increasing commuting distances as cities expand, in contrast to the consistent commuting patterns observed in polycentric cities. Notably, mobility anisotropy intensifies in the outskirts of monocentric cities, whereas it remains uniform in polycentric settings. Additionally, centripetality wanes as one moves from the urban core, with a steeper decline observed in polycentric cities. Finally, we reveal that employment attraction strength and commuting distance scaling are key to explaining these divergent urban mobility patterns. These insights are important for shaping effective policies aimed at alleviating congestion and guiding suburban housing development.

Beyond entrepreneurialism: revealing multiple logics of suburban housing development politics in the global city

ABSTRACT There is a burgeoning literature in urban studies on the role of suburbs in the development of global cities. For too long, it is argued, suburbs have been marginalised within urban theory and research. At the same time, planning systems are increasingly driven by growth-centred arrangements that seek to boost private investment and convert complex places into development spaces. Such approaches are built on the experiences of urban centres and the market conditions found within them. Drawing on the London example, the paper develops existing work on global suburbanisms to identify the multiple logics and variable practices of housing policy and delivery that exist within global cities. It makes three contributions. First, it highlights the continuing significance of place-based representative local government in shaping suburban variability. Second, it develops a typology of political clusters to demonstrate the variables that shape the diversity of approaches to housing development policy and delivery that exist. And third, it analyses the interactions between physical landscapes and the rolling-out of market-led models and planning systems. Collectively, the paper points to a methodology for the analysis of suburban environments in cities beyond London, especially those in which political boundaries and physical environments act as a constraint on spatial expansion.

Policy-Induced Suburbanization: Mass-Produced Housing and Location Choices in Tijuana, Mexico

ABSTRACT Mexican cities began an urban expansion process fueled principally by public mortgage supply in the early 2000s. The new urban landscape, comprising mass-produced suburban housing developments for low-income families, deepened socioeconomic differences. For years, developers have claimed land prices are the reason for suburban expansion in Mexico, not policy-enabled construction economies. This study tests the hypothesis that cost reduction strategies through scale economies explain the suburban location and the homogeneous landscape built under the reformed mortgage system. Using data on housing production costs for Tijuana, the results show that building homes using technology developed during policy implementation yields scale economies and reduces building costs. Additionally, statistics on housing developers’ location decisions illustrate how production economies have contributed to a landscape that increased segregation, exclusion, and housing vacancy in Mexican cities.

Dispersion Patterns and Sample Size Estimates for Egg Masses of Spotted Lanternfly (Hemiptera: Fulgoridae).

The spotted lanternfly, Lycorma delicatula (White), is a new invasive pest in the United States. To quantify spotted lanternfly population abundance, one must understand this pest's dispersion pattern, that is, the spatial arrangement of individuals within a population. Spotted lanternflies overwinter in egg masses from late fall to May, making this life stage suitable for population assessments. We measured the dispersion pattern of egg masses at two types of sites: a suburban housing development, where we used individual trees as the sampling unit, and rural woodlots, where we used individual trees and also plots with 5.64 m radius as sampling units. Plots were the same size as those recommended for monitoring the gypsy moth, a well-studied pest with similar egg laying habit to the spotted lanternfly. Egg masses in both sampling units were counted up to a height of 3 m. With trees as the sampling unit, egg masses were aggregated in 12 of 20 rural sampling universes, randomly dispersed at 6, and completely absent at 2. Similar patterns were seen when using the 5.64-m radius rural sampling units and for suburban sampling universes. We calculated sample size requirements for a range of mean densities at a precision of 25 and 30%. Additionally, the vertical distribution of egg masses was characterized on the invasive tree of heaven [Ailanthus altissima (Mill.) Swingle], a preferred host for spotted lanternflies. For small trees, there was a positive relationship between number of egg masses in the bottom 3 m of the tree and the total count.

The France of the Little-Middles: A Suburban Housing Development in Greater Paris

The France of the Little-Middles: A Suburban Housing Development in Greater Paris

Scott W.AllardPlaces in Need: The Changing Geography of PovertyNew York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2017. 288 p. $32.50 (pbk.).

Scott W.AllardPlaces in Need: The Changing Geography of PovertyNew York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2017. 288 p. $32.50 (pbk.).

Do Stormwater Basins Generate co-Benefits? Evidence from Baltimore County, Maryland

An often-cited advantage of green infrastructure projects is the potential for “co-benefits” generated from its natural features, which depend on the generation of positive house price capitalization. Using housing transactions data and exploiting variation in placement and design, we examine the capitalization of stormwater retention basins, a common green infrastructure project in suburban housing developments. Results show adjacency causes decreases in housing prices between 13 and 14% for the average home. Additionally this negative effect exacerbates with basin age. Rather than providing co-benefits, we find that stormwater basins generate a cost for proximate households.

Suburban Housing Development and Off-Grid Electric Power Supply Assessment for North-Central Nigeria

Energy infrastructures in North-Central Nigeria are inadequate and grid electricity is unable to meet suburban housing electricity demand. The alternative power-supply options proposed by government for the region require appropriation analysis for selection. Four public housing estates in suburban Abuja are selected for electricity demand analysis under conventional and energy-efficient lighting scenarios; then techno-economic parameters of two off-grid electric power supply systems (PV and Diesel-powered generation) to meet these electricity demands are evaluated. An energy techno-economic assessment methodology is used. The study determines the energy-efficient lighting system is appropriate with 40% energy savings relative to the Conventional Lighting Systems. The diesel generator alternative power-supply option has Life Cycle Costs almost 4 times those of the PV option. The study established the PV-energy-efficient lighting system as the most feasible off-grid electric power supply alternative for implementation.

Expected role of public transportation services in securing residents’ accessibility to the city center in suburban housing development areas

Abstract This study aims to examine an expected role of public transportation services in suburban housing development areas of Kobe City in Japan, through calculation of accessibility to the city center using a utility-based measure. The calculation results suggest that, (1) residents’ high dependency on car use is evident and leads to a decrease in accessibility for the elderly who may not use a car because of the decline of public transportation services, and (2) although most housing areas have been developed adjacent to railway station, some nearby railway lines do not always contribute to residents’ accessibility because of their low level of service and competition with alternative railway or bus services. Under such circumstances, an integrated public transportation network plan is required to be made in these housing areas.

From Places Between to Industrialized Countryside: Creating Enriched Uranium and Coal-Fired Energy in the Ohio Valley in the Early Cold War Era, 1952–65

From Places Between to Industrialized CountrysideCreating Enriched Uranium and Coal-Fired Energy in the Ohio Valley in the Early Cold War Era, 1952–65 Megan Chew (bio) In southern Ohio in late 1952, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) broke ground on a uranium-enrichment plant on the farmland of Pike County. Piketon, the new plant’s main location, is about twenty-five miles north of the small industrial Ohio River city of Portsmouth, Ohio, along the Scioto River’s route from Portsmouth to Columbus. Plant construction began in Piketon in December 1952 as part of AEC’s expansion for Cold War defense purposes, and occurred simultaneously with a major industrialization of the Ohio Valley. The industrial transformation of this area of the Ohio Valley had implications for the environment, for national security, for the region’s labor force, and for the future development of the power industry. This article considers the environmental, social, political, and economic aspects of the development in the Ohio Valley during the 1950s. The new atomic plant site in the Piketon area and the new power plants in Ohio and Indiana created an industrialized countryside out of farmland, something between metropolitan and rural, and a new type of environment in the early Cold War era. This article focuses on the early years of optimism and construction of the enrichment site and steam electric power plants in rural spaces of southern Ohio and southern Indiana. The forces behind the projects—the electric companies creating power plants and the AEC—sought [End Page 26] the water, labor, coal, land, and location necessary for the creation of large amounts of enriched uranium and electricity available in the valley. Two forces—the AEC and the group of electric utilities that came together as the Ohio Valley Electric Corporation (OVEC)—worked together on a joint public-private project that made use of both farmland and waterways in the region to produce large amounts of electricity for the energy-intensive process of uranium enrichment. Locals negotiated and at times courted these developments for the struggling areas, and local boosters emphasized the desirability of the industrial countryside as a place to live and work. The location in the countryside—close to major populations but with open land—met the needs of coal and atomic production. This specific type of countryside environment attracted the industrial sites, and the new plants changed the countryside. The countryside, as developed here, refers to the land between cities and the “wildlands,” following Samuel P. Hays’s division in his postwar study of environmentalism and environmental policy, Beauty, Health, and Permanence. Hays utilized these categories because the “perception and experience, from which distinct ideas and action flow” differed based on the physical environment.1 Hays noted that “until World War II the American countryside was land nobody wanted.”2 After the war, it became an area under dispute—whether it should be used for its scenery or for the open land and resources it offered. Hays’s categorization fits the valley’s situation after 1945 because the environmental qualities of the countryside—open land, natural resources, less traffic, and lower population density—drew new industry to the Ohio Valley. Politicians and business leaders specifically categorized the development within a “countryside” discussion and emphasized its superiority to cities in expanding industry after World War II. Rather than discussing the land within a “wildlands” context, these leaders looked to make this countryside useful, a common impulse in the second half of the twentieth century. [End Page 27] This study joins others in social and environmental history in considering the role of the hinterland or countryside in postwar U.S. history. Urban environmental histories have provided some of the important groundwork in developing connections between social life and the path of industry in the physical environment, and this study seeks to use a social and environmental perspective to consider a more neglected environment.3 Adam Rome, in The Bulldozer in the Countryside, has considered the effects of postwar suburban housing development on the “open land” around sprawling cities.4 Rome’s work considers the way middle-class people became increasingly aware of the environmental movement through development of the countryside, while...

“Our Bungalow Dreams”: Housing and Occupation in the United States West, 1920

This study compares the spatial and occupant employment distribution of Craftsman bungalows in Pocatello, Idaho; Missoula, Montana; and Pasadena, California, in 1920. These distributions reflect major trends in urban and suburban housing developments in the Western United States during this period, in contrast with prior developments in India and Britain. Current scholarship on bungalows in the United States West focuses on major urban centers such as Seattle and Los Angeles. This study shifts the analysis to the understudied Intermountain West, and refocuses away from discussions of prominent architects or the bungalow as one of many housing types in a specific place or time, to emphasize instead the modest homes built by local builders and developers in small towns. In addition, the study provides quantitative data affirming that bungalows found broad appeal across economic groups, and that these homes and their owners were not geographically segregated within their cities and towns, again in contrast to their predecessors in Britain and India.

Managing Canada Thistle (Cirsium arvense) in a Constructed Grassland with Aminopyralid and Prescribed Fire

Green spaces such as golf courses that intermingle within or exist on fringes of urban landscapes can provide opportunities for increasing the ecological value of urban areas. To that end, more naturalistic and less input-intensive “links”-style golf courses have recently gained favor over input-intensive parkland courses. The Osgood Public Golf Course in Fargo, ND is a links-style golf course set adjacent to suburban housing developments. This course incorporated large areas of prairie plantings, or “constructed grasslands,” which over time became dominated by fescue species and infested with Canada thistle. Our objective was to explore the efficacy of using prescribed fire combined with aminopyralid herbicide to control Canada thistle and promote a more diverse mix of warm-season C4 and cool-season C3 grasses. Aminopyralid was applied during fall 2010 and prescribed fire was applied during spring 2011. We found that aminopyralid provided excellent control of Canada thistle 1 and 2 yr post-treatment. Open niches created from Canada thistle control were readily filled by C3 grasses, primarily fescue species, which were the dominant species on the constructed grasslands prior to treatment. Fire intensity was variable within and across plots and was associated with reductions of litter and C3 grasses, but was not associated with increases of C4 grasses within the time frame of this study. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of aminopyralid for Canada thistle control in constructed grasslands. Prescribed fire maintained C3 grass dominance while removing litter, but C4 grass response was variable and appeared dependent on pretreatment C4 species abundance. Reduction of litter in constructed grasslands dominated by fescue could potentially lead to microsite conditions that would favor C4 and other C3 species, especially if short-term management promoted additional facilitation efforts, such as repeat spring fire treatments and seeding.

La mer à courir par Jean-Luc Marty

Reviews 275 qui se trouve pris entre État et islamistes, autrement dit entre la peste et le choléra, explique Adam. À la fin du véritable tour de force qu’est ce roman, le lecteur, malheureusement, demeure peu convaincu du succès du personnage. Il se trouve que le dernier des Sijilmassi échoue sur une plage, nu comme Adam, mais on se pose la question de savoir s’il lui reste suffisamment de conscience pour comprendre s’il a ou non réussi dans sa quête. Western Kentucky University Karin Egloff Marty, Jean-Luc. La mer à courir. Paris: Julliard, 2014. ISBN 978-2-260-02075-2. Pp. 260. 19 a. This novel puzzles the reader in its early chapters. We seem to be reading three different stories. The first is about a young couple on the Atlantic coast of France, Josse and Livia. They get into a boating accident in which the wife, who we learn later was pregnant, is killed. The second story involves Paul, a young Tahitian who has come to Paris to do university studies in geography. Paul lives in an apartment in a suburban HLM as the guest of Eddy, a young Frenchman whom we and Paul never see. During his brief stay in Tahiti, before the time of the novel, Eddy invited Paul to come to France to study. The third narrative concerns Virginie, a young woman who has a temporary job at a news information agency, which is also located in the suburbs of Paris. Virginie is obsessed with the history of Bolivia and the loss of its coastline in a war with Chile. She yearns for the return to Bolivia of the territory its neighbor stole from her.As the novel progresses, all these different threads are brought together. The unifying agent is the journal which once belonged to Paul’s stepfather Josse and which his mother Tokahi asked him to take to a certain person in France. It turns out that Josse, now dead, a physician in Tahiti, was the young man in the boating accident and that Virginie, who was safely delivered in spite of her mother’s death, is his long-lost daughter. Virginie was raised by her grandparents in France after Josse in his grief sought refuge like Gauguin in the faraway tropics of the South Pacific. Josse’s travel account is filled with emotional addresses to his late wife about the places he sees. Livia was originally from Bolivia, and this explains her daughter’s obsessive interest in that country’s fortunes. Paul and Virginie, destined by their emblematic names to come together, become slowly acquainted after he deposits her father’s diary at her place of work. They lay eyes on each other for the first time while each is walking along the river. Virginie is at first both attracted to and frightened by the athletic young Tahitian. In the course of time they become friends and, after much hesitation, lovers at the novel’s end. In addition to being a love story, Marty’s novel is a stark portrayal of life in the suburban housing developments of Paris. The people of color from France’s former colonies who live there survive in poverty and misery on the margins of French society. They are the victims both of the police, who harass them in the name of the established order, and the criminal elements among themselves. Theirs is a Dantean hell from which there appears to be no hope of escape. University of Denver James P. Gilroy Matthieussent, Brice. Luxuosa. Paris: P.O.L., 2015. ISBN 978-2- 8180-2178-1. Pp. 384. 18 a. As he boards the Luxuosa, Matthieussent’s namesake narrator is transformed into a crane, and this metamorphosis gives a fantastical twist to the invitation au voyage the writer offers us. From now on he is Lola, a Converse-wearing, Tati-bag-toting, Persolsunglass -wearing, Pelikan-smoking, common crane, who, as an outsider to the human species, is poised to analyze the peculiar entertainment experience promised by modern-day cruises. Toward this end, Lola has forsaken her aviary migratory habits and eschewed the scenic stops on the ship’s Mediterranean journey in...

Suburbia: social and spatial trends that emerged in Celtic Tiger Ireland.

Long after the roar of the “Celtic Tiger” has become inaudible; its effects remain in the form of ghost estates, incomplete rural development and inadequate service provision across the Irish landscape. This paper will give a brief account of suburban housing development in Ireland as a whole, followed by a detailed discussion of development in a specific Irish case study, Clerihan, Co. Tipperary. Through the analysis of data produced from resident questionnaires, an evaluation and discussion of the key motivations of Clerihan’s “Celtic Tiger” in-migrants shall emerge for the purpose of comparison with international suburban migration incentives. These incentives shall be addressed under four overarching themes; suburbia as an idyllic space and place, suburbia as an exclusive community while maintaining previous social networks, suburbia as a product of social and economic competition, and suburbia as an interdependent product of transport availability.

Suburban neighbourhood design: Associations with fear of crime versus perceived crime risk

Strategies that reduce fear of crime may contribute to improved health outcomes; however interventions require a better understanding of the neighbourhood correlates of both emotional responses to crime (i.e., fear of crime) and cognitive assessments of crime (i.e., perceived crime risk). This study explored the association between objective measures of suburban design and two safety outcomes: perceived crime risk and fear of crime, for participants who lived in new suburban housing developments in Perth, Western Australia. The characteristics of a walkable neighbourhood, particularly retail land, were associated with less fear of crime, but greater perceived crime risk. One interpretation is that ‘strangers’, attracted to the neighbourhood by diverse land-uses, might influence the emotional and cognitive aspects of ‘fear of crime’ differently. Researchers interested in the impact of the built environment on ‘fear of crime’, and any subsequent influence of these perceptions on health, should be mindful that the environment appears to impact these constructs differently.

Effect of High Gasoline Prices on Low-Density Housing Development

Real estate development in suburban and exurban fringe areas defined the latest housing boom in the United States. The development of vast subdivisions of greenfield parcels in counties distant from urban cores and employment centers led to an upward trend in driving distances. A gradually developing and then dramatic run-up in the price of oil from 2003 to 2008 precipitated a gasoline price shock. The convergence of rising gasoline prices and a glut of newly constructed, low-density tract housing led to an equally dramatic decline in new housing starts in areas far from center cities and the older suburbs. Whereas the gasoline price shock affected the number of housing starts, the recession is responsible for the decline in housing prices; the two concepts act independently of one another. By correlating gasoline prices, housing starts in rural counties as compared to urban centers, vehicle efficiency, and vehicle miles traveled data, I have determined that the demand for sprawl development declines substantially as the price of gasoline rises over time. Households not seeking to move are not likely to move purely because of changes in gasoline prices; however, people who have plans to change residence take gasoline prices into account when choosing a new neighborhood. The recent global peak oil production milestone acknowledged by the International Energy Agency (IEA) has significant implications for transportation costs and, therefore, the future efficacy of auto-oriented suburban housing development. Whether these emerging trends continue into the future remains to be seen.

Trips to Strips: Walking and Site Design in Suburban Multifamily Housing

With over nine million units in the country, suburban multifamily housing is a widespread and overlooked example of density located within walking distance of commercial development in suburbia. This paper reports on resident demographics, attitudes, and perceptions as they relate to mode choice in 14 suburban multifamily sites in Eugene, Oregon. Through site analysis and resident surveys, this study shows that residents of well-connected suburban multifamily housing developments walk or bike for nearly half of their trips to the local commercial area (LCA). In addition, residents of well-connected multifamily developments reported walking to their LCA 60% more (one more trip per week) than residents of less-connected developments who took a similar number of total trips. Quantifying the degree to which site design, and specifically connectivity, makes a difference in residents' mode choice is a first step towards increasing the amount of active transportation in these areas. The results of this research provide planners and designers a basis for re-evaluating suburban multifamily site design and zoning codes.

Romanian Suburban Housing: Home Improvement through Owner-building

The new suburban housing developments in post-socialist cities have been ubiquitous icons of socioeconomic and physical change. This paper examines suburban owner-built housing as a long-term strategy of home improvement in Romania. It analyses residents’ motivations and financial strategies to move up the housing ladder through owner-building and their responses to key neighbourhood problems, in particular poor public infrastructure and non-existent public facilities. It is argued that owner-builders generally benefitted from the economic informality, the relaxed legal culture and the unregulated housing context of the Romanian post-socialist transition; but the absence of public actors has weakened their achievements, which is most apparent at neighbourhood level. The paper draws attention to a context of politico-economic reforms and a set of socio-cultural values of housing privatism in which resident responses may frequently generate consequential (collective) problems localised at the level of streets, neighbourhoods or even the whole society.

Complicating the Identity Narrative

The potential for individual experience each human carries is crucially unique, surpassing the increasingly categorical modes of identity that have become our covenant with human culture. While partially inaccessible to anyone else, the complex meaning each of us finds in this world is detectable to others through our interaction with that meaning. In our image-based contemporary world, meaning is expressed and gathered more and more through pictures. Photography remains an increasingly democratic medium of expression, documentation, and inibrmation dissemination, and the world is connected through an unending chain of images. We probably consume as many photographs in a day as we do calories, says Kitty Hubbard, an artist, an associate professor of Art at The College at Brockport: State University of New York, and curator of Regarding Place: Photo Media Invitational, an exhibition recently held at Brockport's Tower Fine Arts Gallery. Amid so much photographic noise, says Hubbard, the four exceptional artists included in this exhibition give us pause to consider and explore the many implications of the power of photo-based media. (1) In Regarding Place, diverse applications of the photographic image were used to explore issues of identity, and time. Transpiring within an academic context, the initial spark of active engagement generated by the exhibit was reignited within the gallery space through the month of February and into March. Hubbard designed an experience for students that included weekly Skype chats with the artists and a forum page dedicated to the exhibition on the as-yet uneclipsed social media force of Facebook. Angela Kelly's current body of work, shared in this exhibit, is a series of contemporary documentary photographs of places in Northern Ireland paired with diminutive portraits from the artist's own family album. Photographs resonate with me as repositories of history beckoning the viewer to a new understanding of place, explained Kelly's artist's statement. Catharsis: Images of Post Conflict Belfast 2010 11 connects the history of a place through the juxtaposition or modern urban and rural landscapes, their geographic coordinates, and traditional family portraits and snapshots taken by her father in Belfast in the 1960s. The private experience of the artist in these environs and their meaning exist only in the realm of memory--not quite tangible to t he viewer, but anchored for our exploration by each photographic pairing. The then-and-now groupings relate the personal and particular to a public aftermath of conflict, where psychic scars on the war-torn landscape remain for Kelly despite the fbrward march of time. In Bird's Eye View .f om The Black Mountain of the Peace Wall divide between the catholic and Protestant West Belliist and beyond (2010), an aerial shot of a suburban housing development is paired with a snapshot of a trio of seated ladies, each of whom bears stories associated with the space undetected by viewers of the landscape. In another shot, adolescent boys loiter amid towers of shipping pallets and mounds of tires under a heavy sky, and we wonder how their youth compares to that of the 1960s children in the smaller accompanying image. Kelly's oeuvre points at t he intangible meaning of tethered somewhere between the boundaries of what is seen, sensed, and remembered. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The inner-outer dichotomy offered in i he works of Pinky Bass leads the viewer to regard the precious mysteries of the body in more conscious ways, amid increased cultural fixation upon all things skin-deep. In Zodiac Perceptions (2008), an installation of four colorful and plush organs made of fabric, crocheted silk, thread, and applied digital images representing the heart, lungs, uterus, and intestines were mounted to the wall, each with a looped strip of a series of photographs of bodies hanging below. …

Pedestrian-Friendly Environments and Active Travel for Residents of Multifamily Housing

This article examines the relationship of the built environment to physical activity in suburban multifamily housing developments in a medium-sized city, testing Alfonzo’s (2005) model of decisions regarding active travel. All complexes were within one-quarter mile of a shopping area with a major grocery store, but varied in pedestrian friendliness. Survey data were gathered on travel behavior to the stores, sociodemographic characteristics, preferences for an “active” environment, and perceptions of the extent to which their environment promoted activity. Multilevel analyses showed that residents in more pedestrian-friendly areas had significantly more active travel and less driving travel, indicating a substitution, rather than a supplementation, effect. Results remained when preferences for an “active” environment were controlled and, in most cases, when perceptions of the environment were controlled. It is suggested that Alfonzo’s model of decisions regarding walking behavior be amended to include direct influences of urban form on travel behavior.