reburb

http://www.re-burbia.com/finalists/

J sent me this link. The the entrants mean well. Can we affirm the motives of the competition, and laud their efforts to provoke the imagination? It's hard, this is cart-before-the-horse environmentalism, cake-and-eat-it environmentalism, sticky-plaster-on-cancer environmentalism. I'll sound like a cracked record if I say, we should address the root of suburbanisation, we drive out sprawling car-scaled suburbs on the basis of unwarranted notions of entitlement and exaggerated claims to 'need'. It is essentially a fear of specificity, an existential fear of Being in one place. If we answer this fear, people will pursue the healing of suburbia indigenously, choosing to farm their own plots, to green their own roads, to know and love their own neighbours and find their own energy together separate from the dream-selling imperial force of turbo-consumerism hyper-capitalism.The suburban problem is not a problem of form, it is a heart problem. rant rant.. There are good ideas there, the smallest scale are the most convincing.