going nowhere fast
Here’s where I’m at: Have been trying to narrow potential sites by looking at census data and housing prices and potential transit lines to figure out what might be a suburb that is both a) in danger of failing, indicating that houses might be in need of work and b) in a promising location to be worth retrofitting. This is proving to be difficult, and inconclusive.
So, I randomly picked a suburb, and looked at a couple of streets that are in the past 10 year bracket. The thing is, after talking to a landscape architecture student, I’m finding that this particular suburb may actually be an example of [relatively] progressive planning, in terms of land use anyway, and it seems to be doing pretty well. Obviously, this is the opposite of a good argument for retrofit.
Two other things to note:
This other student is currently doing a thesis involving the calculation of payback and financial benefits from utilizing LEED ND in planning. He’s actually writing a consulting manual for a nearby county which is expecting growth in the next decade. It’s not retrofitting but I wonder if something there could be useful.
Also, my chain of thought, in case you want to poke holes in it, goes something like this: A series of houses built with less attention to craft (the infamous shoddy construction we hear about in development housing) will be extremely energy inefficient, which in combination with driving distance will make it undesirable, which will cause blight as homes are unable to be sold, and meanwhile people who own them will go broke trying to pay for the energy which will lead to foreclosures. These neighborhoods cannot be salvaged without a couple of key adjustments: 1) public transit (urban planning solution), 2) greater density of residents, as well as some walkable amenities (urban planning/architecture solution) and 3) energy efficient, site responsive structural adjustments (architectural solution). I want to focus on number 3, with intelligent dabbling in 1 and 2.
What am I doing wrong??? Seriously, I’m swimming up Niagara Falls here. Not getting anywhere, spinning in too much information, but not finding an intelligent basis for this project, or any local data backing it up, despite all of the generalized articles out there in the media that seem to support the thesis concept.
Either a) it’s not happening here, which is why I’m not finding anything, or b) it is but I don’t have the statistical/data sleuthing skills to know what to look for (extremely likely), or c) it doesn’t matter to the scope of my project and I shouldn’t even worry about it. But if c is true, then what on earth is the point of my project? Is it just that “sometime in an energy-scarce future people are going to want to retrofit their suburban homes, here are some ideas?”
Maybe I should start there, and just do a completely visual analysis, using other people’s data to guide my design, and come up with 100 design solutions.
No Comments
No comments yet.
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.