ReBurbia – re-imagining suburbia

Last night Transition St Albans hosted a screening of ‘The End of Suburbia’, a film exploring the unsustainability of suburban sprawl in an age of peak oil. The film mentions New Urbanism at the end, the revival of pre-automobile town planning, walkable cities and local high streets.

With the suburbs on my mind, I was interested to see that Inhabitat have teamed up with Dwell Magazine to launch a competition called ReBurbia:

Calling all future-forward architects, urban designers, renegade planners and imaginative engineers:
Show us how you would re-invent the suburbs! What would a McMansion become if it weren’t a single-family dwelling? How could a vacant big box store be retrofitted for agriculture? What sort of design solutions can you come up with to facilitate car-free mobility, ‘burb-grown food, and local, renewable energy generation? We want to see how you’d design future-proof spaces and systems using the suburban structures of the present, from small-scale retrofits to large-scale restoration—the wilder the better!

For more information, visit the ReBurbia site.