A few brazen architects are trying to reinvent the white-picket-fence dream. Without the fence.

With over half of the U.S.’s 300 million people now living outside of urban centers, the suburbs are starting to get crowded. They’re no longer a place where kids can play in endless meadows and limitless land is available for the latest housing developments.
Today, suburban growth accounts for close to 90 percent of all construction, and, the houses being built, with an average size of 2,456 square feet, are the biggest ever. Add to that ever-increasing demand for roads and parking lots to accommodate a burgeoning fleet of SUVs and minivans, and community-oriented space gets hard to come by.
Discover the problems with suburban communities and these architects’ unique solutions in our interactive graphic.It’s reached a tipping point, as all of this unsustainable development has started to threaten the white-picket suburban dream. The bad news is that developers still haven’t gotten the point. And the Center for Urban Policy Research estimates that the population of the U.S. will grow to over 360 million people by 2025, mostly in regions that are already enveloped in suburban sprawl.

A New Vision
These scenarios have led suburban architects like Shane Coen of Coen + Partners, Paul Lukez of Paul Lukez Architecture and David Lewis of LTL Architects to dream up a new vision of suburbia, redefining it as sustainable, community-centric and respectful of the natural landscape.
Watch landscape architect Shane Coen and architects Paul Lukez and David Lewis explain their new conceptions of suburban living through their innovative plans.This new suburbia is “about recognizing the situation as it is and saying, ‘how might we tweak it,’ not ‘how can we erase it,” said Tracy Myers, co-curator with Andrew Blauvelt of the Walker Art Center’s World’s Away exhibition that highlights art and architecture inspired by suburbia.
But what do we do? Do we take back the asphalt fields and turn them into meadows? Or do we create a three-dimensional pseudo-urban suburb?
At the center of discussions about how to rethink the suburban landscape are “dead malls”—shopping centers that have been abandoned by their original anchor stores and lie dormant.

Rethinking the Mall
The pictures of new media artist Julia Christensen reveal how some of the empty, warehouse-style stores that define malls have been reincarnated into community centers, showing it is possible to think inside the big box. Examples of these suburban renewal projects include a HeadStart Child and Family Development Center in a renovated K-Mart in Hastings, Neb., and another old K-Mart building that is now the Spam Museum in Austin, Minn.
Interboro, a New York-based architecture firm, has spent years figuring out how to adapt dead malls for reuse by building a landscape that encourages sustainable growth.
One of the firm’s proposals, In the Meantime, Life with Landbanking, which won the LA Forum for Architecture’s “Dead Mall” Competition, focuses on the abandoned Dutchess Mall in Fishkill, N.Y., which was built in 1974. By the early 1990s, the mall had lost half of its retail outlets, and by 1998, it had officially closed.
By spending countless hours observing the mall, the Interboro team discovered that it really wasn’t “dead” at all. For better or worse, it played host to a flea market, driver’s license practice and testing, food venders, prostitutes looking for tricks, truckers who needed a place to park their rigs overnight and even the occasional UFO watcher.
So instead of tearing everything down and starting from scratch, Interboro proposed something much less resource-intensive and quite a bit cheaper: “saving” the mall by turning it into a distribution or research center or a condo community.
“These are nonheroic approaches to the built environment,” Myers said. ®These architects offer a degree of humility that is not necessarily characteristic of the field.”
As Myers concluded, “there’s potential in suburbia that most of us probably don’t recognize. And for me, that’s the point.”

Reimagining the Pastoral
Shane Coen specializes in building idyllic landscapes that echo traditional farmlands while still remaining starkly modern.
His landscape architecture firm’s latest development, which is still being built, is a 120-unit development on 220 acres in Rochester, Minn., called Mayo Woodlands.
In constructing their vision of the new suburbia, the group paid particular attention to the site’s traditional agricultural patterns. The tree lines, fences and buildings are arranged in an east-west orientation to mimic it’s previous incarnation as farmland, and architect David Salmella designed homes that echo the typical American farmhouse.
The design is already attracting attention and acclaim, including winning Architecture Magazine’s Progressive Architecture Award in 2003 and a 2004 ASLA Merit Award.

Recycling Suburbia
The word “transform” looms large over the work of Paul Lukez. He believes that we should look at how places change and the individuality this gives rise to.
In his view, it’s ironic that developments typically mask the landscapes on which they’re built, as it was that landscape that drew us there in the first place.
He focuses on fixing the harm that suburban growth has done to the natural ecology, like when parking lots are built on top of aquifers, which then constantly sink.
The projects he has built—many of which have been catalogued in his book, Suburban Transformations—rely on what he calls the Adaptive Design Process.
It’s a new way of thinking that considers the past, present and future of a site in order to determine the best way to transform it.

Three-Dimensional Living
While imagining new ways to construct suburbia, LTL Architects came up with a surprisingly urban vision.
Based on the age-old urban formula of retail on the first floor and residential on the second, their speculative project, New Suburbanism, brings the city to the suburbs by building single-family houses with yards and swimming pools on top of the traditional big-box retailers.
Ultimately, the architects are trying to develop “sections” that intertwine residential and commercial properties in a way that allows a sense of community to form.
Their vision also includes roadways designed to “hide” trucks and cars from everyday life by having them operate on separate levels from the stores and houses. By doing so, they create a less cluttered living environment while encouraging residents to get out of their vehicles and walk around.

Watch documentaries of these problems through the eyes of the people who inhabit the suburbs.