Hi I am Priyank Shah from Mumbai in India. As we know about India, India is one of the examples of the sprawl neighborhood. To some of the extent, it also has some traces of the traditional neighborhood. Yes, I live in the area which people call traditional neighborhood. I am a suburban resident. There are many modes of transportation from the suburb abs. We can travel either by trains or vehicles. So, we do not face much problem even if accident occurs because there are large distributions of networks. The houses here are well organized. People live in apartments and there are shops below these apartments. So, the people can go directly to the stores. We can say even that the houses here are blended. People here also have a strong aversion to live near the Quick-Mart as highlighted in the book because they think it occupies the place and make it useless such as the parking lots. There are also offices apartments and shops beneath those offices.The open spaces are utilized to a great extent over here. The people use it for agriculture. The roads are gnerally curved over here so that they can see the beautiful flowers or verdure if they pass through that area or they can see the traditional India.
Hi,my name is Shaurya Singh.I am from a place called Singapore,which you guys would or would not have heard of.It is one of the contestant for the smallest countries in the world.In this country the concept of a sprawl neighbourhood is non-existent.To be more precise in my analysis it is a perfect gel of the sprawl neighourhood and traditional neighourhood that are present in the USA.Singapore has a combination of apartments and single family homes. In the documentary "Blueprint America" the concept of getting stuck in traffic or living far from work is alien for me.Hence,all this is kind of information does not register and further more the pulic transport of Singapore was rated in the top 3 in the world.So it only takes us about 1hour for us to get from one end of Singapore to another.But as the topic requires an explanation(description) of my neighbourhood,I will try my best.Just imagine you have merged New York and Washington DC,you get Singapore.It is a miracle of architecture,it has combined the traditional neighbourhood with modernistic way of living.On the other hand the concept of sprawl is totally ignored.When a government has to make a 100 Square Kilometer land mass livable for 4 million,it can't afford to set up sprawl development.As we know from the book "Suburban Nation",sprawl is a total waste of space and resources.This kind of problems made it a big hindrance for it to spread in Singapore.People this is all I can think about my country right now in terms of the book and documentary.Wait till the next blog and you guys will learn more.
My name is Oliver. I have lived most of my life in a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama named Mountain Brook. It was initially developed as a housing subdivision by Robert Jemison in 1929, but has expanded much since then. The community was eventually incorporated in 1942. It is in contrast to Cumming, Georgia in that it consists of a mix of traditional neighborhoods and suburban sprawl. "The Tiny Kingdom," as some people call it, is heavily wooded and hilly with several rivers and creeks such as the Cahaba River intersecting it. These characteristics make it a rather popular place for bouldering, canoeing, and hiking. Most of the originally developed areas in Mountain Brook are connected by recreation paths, used often for walking, jogging, or riding bikes. There are three "villages" throughout the suburb and city of Mountain Brook -- Crestline Village, English Village, and Mountain Brook Village. Each of these villages is organized with a main street, shops, and restaurants towards the center, and houses in the surrounding areas. The shops, restaurants, and houses are fairly diverse in style but not in size because of strict height regulations. There are hardly any strip malls, apartments, or big box retailers in the city. Unless one lives right outside of one of the villages, a car is necessary to get to any shops or restaurants as there is not a very reliable and prevalent mass transportation system. The city is particularly affluent and is the wealthiest and best educated in Alabama. With the median income for a family being around $160,000, no one lives below the poverty line. Racial diversity is nonexistent, with about 99% of the 21,000 person population being white. Around 30% of the population is below age 18, while 16% of the population is 65 years of age or older. There are about 10% more females than males. From my experiences in the suburb, I can say that it definitely supports the idea that traditional neighborhoods are generally better to live in than suburban sprawl. For more information on the neighborhood I grew up in, you can visit its Wikipedia page.
Hi all, my name is Peihsun Yeh, but I just go by Ben. I moved around a lot, so there's no "one" place that I can really say I grew up in. I was born in Taiwan, and I moved into the States when I was 7 or so, and from then I have moved to Massachusetts, to Georgia....back to Massachusetts....back to Georgia, which is where I am now. I spent the longest time in the neighborhood I live now, which is a neighborhood called Creekside, in the city of Cumming in Forsyth County, and unfortunately I dont' remember much of where I lived before then.
Here is a mapquested image of my neighborhood (circled by black):
The starred spot is my house. Creekside and the surrounding area are a textbook definition of sprawl . There are shopping plazas neighborhorhoods and roads galore. There is no place outside my neighborhood accessible by foot. In fact, my neighborhood is situated at the intersection of two heavily used roads, and there is a Publix and other shops right across the road, yet not a crosswalk in sight. The two streets that cross are always busy, and even busier around rush hour which makes going in and out of the neighborhood a giant hassle.
As for the neighborhood itself, Suburban Nation mentions that neighborhoods seemingly go under no planning, as characterized by a multitude of curved roads and such - Creekside is guilty of that. Creekside is also plagued by planning with complete disregard to the sporadic elevation, which further discourages walking to even inside the neighborhood. The houses themselves were not like the "cookie cutter" houses that were described in Suburban Nation (houses that looked exactly like the one next to it) - they do exhibit a certain degree of architectural variety.
I would like to point out that I'm (or used to be) an avid runner, and in all my years of running in that neighborhood, I don't think I've seen more than 20% of the residents there. BThe people are friendly enough to smile and nod should you pass them by, but people mostly keep to themselves. Even at the neighborhood pool (which isn't more than a 10-15 minutes walk away from even the farthest corner of the neighborbood, yet people would prefer to drive there), a common gathering ground of children and adult alike, the people, detached, do not display any sense of community.
Creekside does seem to support the contention that is presented in Suburban Nation, which is that urban sprawl is "bad". Creekside is not an old neighborhood. My family and I must have moved there just a few years after it was built. The fact that I had to drive to get anywhere outside the neighborhood is more frustrating than anything else. It would be easily more livable if the area isn't so automobile dependant. And despite the sprawl, my friends and I often have a hard time finding interesting places to go within the city.
We are a group of four students in an English course at Georgia Tech. We will be making posts here usually having to do with the focus of the course, suburban sprawl.
