Customer Reviews

Suburban Transformations

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Suburban Transformations looks critically at suburban development and prescribes a method for turning these ubiquitous environments into unique communities. Lukez calls his method the adaptive design process, which consists of 6 stages.

Chapters of the book are broken down amongst these stages. I was really excited about this book, however I now believe that it should utilized as a useful companion in the design process. Just like following the elements of plot doesn't guarantee a good fictional story, a paint-by-numbers approach to planning should only serve as a framework- often one that needs broken in order to expose new possibilities.

Take the first stage, MAPPING. Decisions have to be made about what information is important when creating maps, and this ultimately becomes a case of doling out designed benefits, with losers and winners. As many urban planners will admit, though not the author, there is no definitive solution, only possibilities.

In the second step, EDITING, Lukens finally concedes that the process is value laden, yet is remiss in highlighting how a client group's (free market corporations') ulterior motives will undermine a projects success. Instead he naively summarizes the same generic set of values: density, connectivity, open public space, and "integrating pedestrian and Auto-mobile traffic". EDITING -the decision making process- is crucial to the title's goal of TRANSFORMING yet is the shortest chapter at just 2.5 pages in a 192 page book. This is my biggest critique of the book, a blindspot that risks perpetuating the cycle of meaningless sprawl.

A competent understanding of the forces contributing to society's ills aside, the book succeeds if viewed as a catalog of possible maps and typologies that can be employed when designing. Exhaustive as it may be, one should be careful to not be limited by the author's techniques.

The introduction for SUBURBAN TRANSFORMATIONS was the most useful portion to me. In examining the history of city growth, Lukez cites Venice's 1,000 year transformation - built, torn down, repaired, etc- where open spaces are sculpted and refined in response to growing demands. The author succeeds in showing why the best city is a naturally-evolved landscape where identity slowly comes into it's own. His distillation of this concept into the equation, IDENTITY= SITE+TIME, however, falls into the modernist trap of distilling complexity into a simple framework. Informal process, improvisation, and unpredictability can't be expressed in an equation, or if they are, the equation has no rational correlation. The optimistic take-away, however is that our suburbs may in fact be at "the very early stages of new types of communities". If so, let's hope they go beyond the transformations envisioned in this book.

As a graduate level student majoring in architecture, I found this book to be extremely helpful. Not only was there a critical look into the formation and transformation of spaces, but the graphic techniques and diagrams used are excellent precedents in ways of presenting urban design.

A step-by-step procedure, beautifully visualized and mapped, for remaking suburban built environments. Augumented by case studies. A rare combination of creativity and precision focused on a critical problem. Bravo!

I like this book because it suggests ways that we can make our suburbs better places to live. I really like books that tell us about how we can improve the status quo, and/or about better alternatives to the status quo, and/or about solutions to problems. I would really like all of North America's suburbs to become pedestrian-friendly, like small towns surrounding each big city.

Paul Lukez's unique approach to city design is for inter-connective vertical and horizontal evolution of increasing city densities. This is a comprehensive sustainable strategy for social and environmental humane urban environments. Lukez's perspective drawings demonstrate a three dimensional utilitarian and aesthetic response for urban growth that exceeds projected plan; the addition of space-time strategies elicits the fourth dimension in urban design.