No longer can the simplistic idea of 9-5 commuting to the city centre and role of the local shop define suburbia. Increasingly suburbia presents the perfect location for personalised cities built on a modern day mantra of choice and personal mobility. This shift in behaviour has significant impact on the nature of how we understand and classify suburbs, and how we comprehend the infrastructures which support suburbia.

This project aims to develop a series of integrated ‘next practice’ toolkits that can span the design of the built environment, social software, policy and service delivery in line with the interdependent challenges of sustainability. In process, developing a series of propositions that are based on the effective design of supply chains – water, energy etc and the efficient use of mobility – rather than seeking to rebuild romantic notions of the local.

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In a special February 2008 edition of Science on cities, UCL CASA researcher Mike Batty writes about progress in building a robust theory of cities built from the bottom up which has much more potential for addressing urban problems than current top-down approaches. There is a video clip on the Science page and you can see this by clicking here.

In the 1960s, the predominant approach to cities and city planning changed from a concern for form over function to one in which cities were considered as machines for living. Social engineering and the systems approach were seen as providing a more considered and relevant way of generating effective plans which met our quest to make the functioning of the city more efficient and the way resources were distributed within it more equitable.

It has taken much longer than we ever expected to make progress using these ideas and progress is still painfully slow. But progress there is. Mike Batty charts some of this in his short paper in Science where he argues that the systems approach has been enriched by a massive shift in perspective in the last 20 years from considering cities as organisations and ecologies structured from the top down to emergent orders which arise from the bottom-up.

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The suburbs we're building no longer even reflect what people want or how we live, says Alex Steffen of worldchanging.com. There's a giant opportunity here to forge a new market preference, a demographic shift, new technologies and

Cities outperform suburbs on nearly every measure of environmental well-being, and, though it may sound surprising to 20th century ears, social well-being, even in most cases health. Compact communities are so much better than sprawling ones that a quite credible argument can be made that land use reform is the most important environmental policy in the North America. We ought to be practically paying people to live in cities.

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A structural change is under way in the housing market—a major shift in the way many Americans want to live and work. It has shaped the current downturn, steering some of the worst problems away from the cities and toward the suburban fringes. And its effects will be felt more strongly, and more broadly, as the years pass. Its ultimate impact on the suburbs, and the cities, will be profound.

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