Richard Rogers comment in the Guardian

Interesting comment from Richard Rogers in The Guardian online on ‘How to build intelligent suburbs‘. Noteworthy is his comments about subrub:

“Urban renaissance needs to spread out beyond our city centres. Most of our city-centre population growth consists of young and single people. To draw families back to cities, we need to create beautiful and family-friendly suburbs too. Architects and planners have often neglected, or even derided, suburbs. They may lack the urban vitality and mix many of us enjoy, but they provide a quieter, greener environment for families and can enhance the mix of housing that a city can offer. The best suburbs – linked to the city by good public transport – already offer a model for a different style of environmentally sustainable urban living. We need to bring all of them up to this standard, through intensification and new infrastructure.

But to make our suburbs work, you need intelligent and design led planning. One only has to look at the dreadful suburban strip that stretches along the Mediterranean coast from the south of France to Spain and Italy, let alone the sprawl outside our own cities, to realise how important it is to use our planning laws intelligently, not to let rip.”

Other comments in the piece are (not surprisingly) emphasising the importance of the built environment. Also, some of the comments on the page discuss some perceptions on the suburbs and what should be done with them.