In this opinion piece from The Huffington Post, Alex Becker argues that retrofitting suburban landscapes with denser development trumps all other sustainability agendas as the single most important path to a more sustainable future.
Becker highlights suburban areas as a prime starting point in the movement towards more sustainable, resilient cities in the United States. He states that the answer to how we should best utilize our existing suburban infrastructure is "simple," and that planners and policymakers should aim first and foremost to "Move things closer together!"
Becker continues:
"Calls to be greener and use less energy are all well and good, but ultimately mean nothing unless we can fundamentally restructure the suburban environment in which a large swath of the American public lives. In suburbia, overconsumption may seem like a choice (and perhaps at a certain extreme level it is), but the physical reality remains that large-scale resource consumption is the only way to survive in the environment which we've built for ourselves. 50% of Americans live in suburban spaces only inhabitable with a large dollop of natural resources."
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