Over the past decades, city planners and
policymakers have enacted suburban zoning
regulations aimed at restricting affordability
as a means to protect predominantly
white middle-class neighborhoods from
other races and the lower-class. This has
resulted in a built suburban environment
that is exclusionary and environmentally
untenable by design, promoting a housing
model characterized by sprawled land use,
conformity, and individualism that has been
carried to the present day. New design
practices will radically rethink the low-density
and deprived suburban condition
to open up new architectural opportunities
towards more socially equitable and
environmentally conscious communities.
This thesis builds upon a suburban site
that is generic by design. It was modeled
in accordance to the typical conditions
and constraints found in suburban zoning
regulations throughout the country. A series
of modular residential and commercial
units are then sewn into this prototypical
fabric, creating more adequate levels of
density which give opportunity to more
contemporary ideas of social and financial
equity. This increase in neighborhood
sociability will in-turn promote the sharing
of energy and resources in a reinvented
model of environmental stewardship,
where entire communities can operate self-sufficiently.