This paper argues for an alternative model of a “beyond sustainable” approach to sub-urban living, rejecting the postwar Levitt style single-family home of the American Dream, to instead consider an alternative future founded on the making of alternative communities. It questions how architecture may engender lasting opportunities for resilient and non-anthropocentric approaches to sub-urban life, while simultaneously meeting the fundamental needs of its inhabitants. This “beyond sustainable” rewriting of the Dream suggests a less individualized, more collaborative, more inclusive notion of sub-urban living, questioning many typical arrangements of inside/outside, front/back, public/private, production/consumption, individual/collective, etc., as seen in American sub-urban tract housing. It will utilize the concept of the “productive landscape” conceived as a catalyst and/or armature for reconstituting the production of food, water, energy, recreation and social interactions. The direct incorporation of these concerns back into sub-urban life addresses the Buell Hypothesis,[i] as put forth by Reinhold Martin, in which he maintains that to change the city or the suburbs – to change the way we live – we must change the narrative,[ii] we must adopt a new vision that rewrites the American Dream away from one of individual consumerism and conformity, toward one that engenders actual self-realization while also acknowledging our participation as an interdependent community actor.[iii] This approach is illustrated through the work of several third-year undergraduate design studios taught in recent years at the University of Cincinnati, School of Architecture and Interior Design which maintained similar “beyond sustainable” ambitions. The location for these tests has been Greenhills, OH, one of three “Greenbelt Towns” built as part of Roosevelt’s New Deal Resettlement Administration. While Greenhills was envisioned in part as a response to the question of urban and rural poverty, today, the expanded role of the car, neo-liberal global commerce and the expanded expectations of sub-urban living, alongside its aging, outdated and undersized existing housing stock, have resulted in its decline as a desirable sub-urban living destination. However, its original small-scale walkable planning, many tree lined streets and cul-de-sacs, central park green, and still intact surrounding greenbelt provide substantive community assets and provide the basis for reconsidering the sub-urban dwelling and its relationship to the broader ecological context – a world in the midst of radical change due to anthropogenic global warming, climate destabilization and ecological degradation. In this way both its specific history and current shortcomings make Greenhills a timely locale for testing a “beyond sustainable” sub-urban living. [i] Reinhold Martin, Leah Meisterlin, and Anna Kenoff, eds., The Buell Hypothesis (New York: The Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, 2011) and Barry Bergdoll & Reinhold Martin, Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012). [ii] Ibid, 8. [iii] This term is in reference to Actor-Network Theory (ANT) that regards both human and non-human, living and non-living, social and natural phenomena all as actors, existing in constantly shifting networks of relationships. Objects, ideas, processes, and other relevant factors are as capable as humans of contributing to the making of social interactions.
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