The Future is the Past?

Where to we go from here? Is Suburbia dead? This article thinks so:

http://finance.yahoo.com/family-home/article/106732/Suburbia-R-I-P

And the recent concept of Suburbia may be dead. Of people living in bigger and bigger houses with more land, living farther and farther away from the center of cities. But is there a new model of suburbia that will work? Here is my idea:

1. Cities will build new communities within their center. Projects like Co-op city in NY (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-op_City,_Bronx) but on a much smaller scale. These communities will house many different people. There will be students, young singles, married couples with small families, professionals and some older residents. The buildings will have garages, playgrounds, pools and open space area.

There will be small, multi family housing, this may go back to the days of families living in separate houses but on common property. Zoning laws will need to be changed to accommodate this. In addition, some larger houses will need to be modified to multiple occupancy. The challenge to zoning laws is will this be restricted to relatives or opened up to anyone?

For standard single family housing, children will stay longer and contribute to the household costs. Houses will be retrofitted with energy saving devices. There will be more solar collectors for heating. Second floors will be converted to storage and sealed off with doors to keep the main floor either cool or warm depending on the location. People will live simpler, with less grandiose houses. Americans will start looking around the world for ideas and then in our own manner, adapt and expand on them to suit our desires.

As the infrastructure changes, transportation will also change. Highway design will freeze as extra lanes will no longer be necessary. Car will be come smaller with rentals becoming more popular with shorter rental times. You might carry an entertainment center and plug it into a generic rental car. These rental centers will be centrally located. So you may take your car to a train, take the train to destination nearby where you want to go, and then rent a car locally. Or maybe, we will see more auto trains that can carry smaller autos between common destinations, like New York to Boston, or New York to Chicago.

Industrial Parks will move back within city lines and production will move back closer to the final distribution point. There will be more car pooling and buses, but only where the volume of use will make economic sense. In other locations, people will still have multiple cars, but they will be more diverse in thier function. One might be a small truck and the other a high mileage hybrid.

More ideas on the city of the future to come.....