Fixing Levittown's Flaws

Christine McLaren, a freelance journalist based in Vancouver, British Columbia, has been traveling the world as resident blogger for BMW Guggenheim Lab, a mobile think tank examining solutions to urban problems.

When McLaren arrived in Levittown, New York, the most famous town of the postwar homebulding boom, she says she was "caught off guard by how benevolent the residential sections of Levittown seemed when compared with the modern sprawling suburban neighborhoods that were modeled after it."

She particularly liked the modest size of the houses, which, even after additions, are "a far stretch from the 3000-square-foot McMansions we've come to associate with modern suburbia," she wrote in her first Levittown blog.

In a follow-up blog recirculated on SpacingVancouver, however, she acknowledged that the commercial strips within and surrounding Levittown "suffer from the same problem that sprawling suburban outposts do: the hollow lifelessness of a car-oriented landscape."

That led her to interview Galina Tachieva of Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co, author of Sprawl Repair Manual, and June Williamson, a faculty member at the City College of New York architecture school who co-authored Retrofitting Suburbia. 

How, she asked Tachieva and Williamson, can the worst aspects of automobile-dominated design be overcome? Some of the answers, she was told, involve placing lively commercial activities in buildings that would be constructed close to the streets, rather than sitting behind large, dull parking lots.

Better separation between vehicular traffic and pedestrians would also help, McLaren learned. 

The designers also suggested increasing the density, creating accessory dwelling units, and adding courtyard-like extensions to the fronts of existing houses. The conclusion: "The suburbs, just like the city, don't have to stay the way they are."

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