Subrban Intervention

Abstract

Today’s way of life is leading away from recognizing and appreciating the surrounding world. Architecture and planning is providing nothing more than a mere shelter which is cutting off the human sensatory experience from the surrounding natural world. Today’s development of technologies has lead to the formation of edge cities that are replacing the natural landscape and substituting them with a false sense of reality. The architectural planning of today is creating generic spaces that are merely providing people with shelter from the landscape. They are becoming separated from the character and experience of where they live, work, and play. When the people are in these generic spaces they could be anywhere, these places don’t allow the natural character and elements of a place to be experienced in its architecture and planning, thus losing the connection to the place. The development of the suburban environment has created a division between people and the landscape. Usable green spaces in the developing suburban areas are being paved over for parking lots, shopping centers, and subdivisions. These edge cities develop with the mindset of escaping the urban environment to live in a semi rural area. As the people move out of the city they discover they miss the convenience of urban living and start to develop the land around them not considering the need to incorporate the landscape into the developments, thinking that they are live out in the country and there are trees, farmland, and open green space all around. Only to realize a few years later that there is no more natural landscape, as it has all been replaced with subdivisions and strip malls, leaving only the difficult to develop lots that have become forgotten and overgrown. The fact is that human development and the creation of edge cities are going to continue even though it is doing damage to the relationship with the natural landscape. To repair the relationship with the landscape in today’s society, people need to revalue the roles of these developments in architecture and planning. There is a need to intelligently and patiently change these roles to create better architectural planning that uses technology to inspire and generate a better sensatory relationship with the landscape, There is a need to create public spaces that encourage not only human interaction with each other but with landscape. Human senses need to be brought into architecture to create spaces that bring a tension between humans and the world around them to reorient this relationship.