Mixing Metabolisms: New People in Aging Sprawl

The historically white postwar suburbs of the United States and Canada are now the first destination for new residents from abroad. Because they are relatively safe, affordable, and, as they became ethnic enclaves, culturally familiar, these peripheral communities, have gradually replaced the center city as the desired landing place for new arrivals. Using scholarly and popular literature with empirical field observation, this paper examines a set of aging postwar suburbs in California and one in Arizona to illustrate the largely positive effects of such immigration. In addition to an injection of diverse and energized cultures, the changes can point towards a set of materially strategic options for renewing all aging low density-built environments. Such cultural shifts are an opportunity to imagine a socially healthy, though repurposed, and spatially altered, future for all aging urban peripheries. Finally, regarding the development of a productive architectural and urban discourse on the subject, it is vital to note that the current nascent transformation in aging postwar environments is common to that of many cities and settlements throughout history. More specific to the case of renewal of postwar sprawl with its’ increase in the density of social interaction, the current ethnic changes to the settlement pattern often make the largely private built environments of Anglo-American suburbs more “urban” and in the process reveal a more nuanced definition of this term.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.110.86

Volume Editors
Robert Gonzalez, Milton Curry & Monica Ponce de Leon

ISBN
978-1-944214-40-1