This is a problem I’ve been discussing elsewhere on the question of why it’s so difficult, if not virtually impossible in some cases, to build progressive and sustainable architecture in the city -why sustainable and alternative architecture is so often pushed to the edge of wilderness of necessity. The architectural follies of Dubai -so much a parallel to the American skyscraper craze of the early 20th century- are reflective of a cultural situation where the top of the upper-class controlling so much of the urban property, economics, and politics actually live in that urban environment, see the urban society as an audience, and thus use urban architecture for their own self-expression, whereas in the western world the top wealthy -increasingly culturally divergent and insulated from the mainstream society- have come to live in increasing personal isolation on the edge of wilderness and see the city as merely an economic tool to be exploited for profit with the most cost-efficiency using the most banal risk-less architecture possible. And so in Dubai we see model high-tech eco-citiy projects and in America we get generic urban architecture and multi-million-dollar straw-bale mansions in the wilderness.

There is similar inertia in the suburban environment created by the social dysfunction of that habitat -the inability of suburbanites to function as coherent communities and resulting social resistance to architectural experimentation driven by fear over property value impact. This is why progressive and sustainable architecture is just as rare in suburbia as it is in major cities -if not more so. We do have this common problem of suburban housing associations resisting such simple things as people putting up clothes lines to dry clothes, not to mention solar panels, wind turbines, and victory gardens.

Still, I fully agree with your observations. As dysfunctional as suburbia is, we may be beyond the point of feasible wholesale obsolescence of it without hardship and so the more likely change may be an incremental evolution of it relying on the leverage of production localization. The hard part may be necessary cultural evolution.

I’ve approached from the perspective of whether it has the potential to transform into something “resilient” in light of energy descent in a four part series “Resilient Suburbia?” here:

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4720
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4741
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4774
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4844