Imagining a Denser Suburbia

Abstract

Anthropogenic climate change requires immediate solutions. In 2021, the building and construction sectors accounted for over 34 percent of energy demand and around 37 percent of CO2 emissions, totaling ten gigatons (Skeikh, 2022). These figures have continued to grow year after year despite concerted technological efforts to increase energy efficiency, but technological advances have proven no match to a society that builds at an unchecked pace (Iturbe, 2019). Increasing density, however, provides a straightforward path to more compact and efficient cities: small apartments require less materials, people drive less in urban communities, and reduced sprawl means less habitat destruction. The urban fabric of American cities that predate the automobile offer a ready solution, and Chicago — with its 1837 motto urbs in horto (city in a garden) — is a prime example. The sobering reality, however, is that roughly sixty percent of Americans live in energy-intensive, low-density suburban settlement patterns characterized by single-family detached homes and automobile dependence. Global warming is a crisis that demands immediate and decisive changes, but any solutions that don’t consider, accommodate, and build upon deep-seated American ideals of living will certainly fail. America is a faux-bucolic suburban nation, and while the suburbs need to change — that is, they need to be densified — the solution to densification must be quintessentially suburban.