USA Sprawl Festival continued: St. Louis

[James Bond Agent 007]

Link to the first thread in this series.
USA Sprawl Festival

Or, click on the following links to see just individual cities in that thread:

Kansas City
Some northern Denver suburbs
Albuquerque
Seattle
Las Vegas
Dallas-Fort Worth
Some western & southern Minneapolis suburbs
Orange County, Kollyfornia
Philadelphia
Tucson
Orlando
Northern Virginia/DC
Cleveland
Houston
Atlanta
Indianapolis
Long Island, New York
Jacksonville
Boston

And the 2nd round ones:

Phoenix-East
Phoenix-South
Phoenix-North
Phoenix-West
Portland
Silicon Valley
Los Angeles
San Bernardino County, Kollyfornia
San Diego - south
San Diego - north
Buffalo
Broward County, Florida
Dallas-Fort Worth II
Riverside County, Kollyfornia
Denver - south suburbs
Orange County II
Bergen and Passaic Counties, New Jersey
Milwaukee
Columbus
El Paso, with some Juarez
San Antonio
Detroit
Tampa
Cincinnati
East Bay, Kollyfornia
Sacramento, Kollyfornia
Memphis

Some of these older links are starting to expire. If you want to see a thread whose link has expired, make a note of it here and I'll give you the corresponding link in SSC.

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ST. LOUIS

I thought I'd make this one a bit educational, with a few stats thrown in for context.

In a typical year, between 1 and 1.5 million new single-family houses are built in the US. With numbers like that, it's little surprise we get so many cookie-cutter houses.


In a typical year, about 300,00 to 350,000 new multifamily units are built in the US. Hence, we get mass-produced, cookie-cutter apartments, too.


American consumers spent $369.9 billion just in December. Total retail sales for all of 2006 came to $4.4 trillion, up 6% from 2005. In comparison, the size of the entire economy of Japan is a little over $4 trillion. No wonder we see so much of this.


The Chrysler assembly plant in Fenton. In 2005, the US produced 4,321,272 cars and 7,202,978 light trucks.


In 2005, suburban markets added 12.4 million square feet of new office space.


The top 130 US metros contain 12.7 billion square feet of industrial space.


A record total of 76,043,902 fans attended Major League Baseball games in the 2006 regular season, representing a 1.5 percent increase over the previous record set in 2005. The Cardinals sold out every game, with 3,407,104 attending the new Busch stadium.


For the 2005-2006 season, a record 17,340,879 people attended regular-season NFL games, for an average of more than 67,000 fans per game.


I tried to find out how many residential demolition permits were issued nationwide in any recent year but couldn't find anything. It's fairly easy to find it for states, cities and metro areas, but I had no luck nationally.


I also tried to find out how many miles of new freeway were constructed in any recent year, but had no luck there, either.


In 2005, airlines carried 660,480,345 domestic passengers on 10,090,274 flights.


Well those are the basic stats, on with the rest of the pics . . .







New and old sprawl.




This looked kinda interesting. Couldn't figure out what those green terrace things were.




More cookie-cutter apartments . . .


. . . followed by more cookie-cutter houses.


Close-up of the cookie-cutter houses.


And some cookie-cutter trailers, too.






Getting a site ready for more.


South and west of the city there were lots of hills with subdivisions platted on the crest of the hills but with the valleys in-between left intact.


Another one of that type.


Another close-up.




The obligatory mall. This one with an office attached.


And yet another mall. This is where some of that $4.4 trillion went last year.


Yuck.




Close-up of some of those cookie-cutter apartments.


Respite from the sprawl. Nice.


I think this is a high school.


Another respite from the sprawl.


I suppose I should have looked up how many acres of farmland were lost to residential development in any recent year, but I got lazy.




McHouses and McMansions.




Another one of those developments-on-the-ridge in the southwest metro. You can't really tell from these particular shots that there's a little valley or gully in-between the streets, but if you look at the aerial you can tell this is the case.




At least the streets are straight.






These townhouse thingys look OK.

[hauntedheadnc]

It's interesting to see that so many of the cul-de-sacs have greenery in the middle.

[Jeff_in_Dayton]

The sprawl frontier south of Dayton. This thread is themed around the proposed Austin Road interchange on I-75, which is proposed to really open up this area for intensive development...a Mike Davis/neomarxist interpretation of local sprawl:

Au$tin Road

The soon-to-be-replaced Austin Road overpass over I-75.




terraserver c. 2000:




property ownership c 1997: 




"...just speculating..."



...controlled sprawl....



The Postmetropolitan Realm is the urban condition of Horizontality". In it, the Rural is replaced by the Exurban. The Postmetropolian Realm is decongested and open. The Postmetropolitan Realm covers the Earth, but in certain areas of great accumulation, it takes the form of a Megacity




The concentration of populations and the centralization of information defies predictions that the Internet and new technologies will undo cities. On the contrary, the reliance of contemporary communications on fiber creates a new centrality with a massing of strategic resources in giant metropolitan areas, or Megacities, acting as command points in the organization of the world economy.   





The internal telecommunications structure of Megacities itself mirrors that of country-wide territories. Megacities bypass large areas of disconnected local populations. Uneven development will be the rule as the invisible city determines the economy above.






Information is capital and data on networks is proprietary, a matter too important for corporations to allow free access to. Moreover, the complexity emerging with the massive proliferation of connections increasingly makes it hard even for corporations to understand the dimensions of their world....Even for the corporate hive mind, the map has now been exceeded by the hypercomplexity of reality.





"The first of these is networked capital: late capitalism has entered a new phase. Data and capital are now inextricably intertwined, creating a new spatiality. Location in telecommunicational space is as important as real space. Second is the importance of the invisible city and the eclipse of form.




The shimmering, ghostly computer-generated shapes of recent architecture only detract us from the less visible, but more real, work of programming and organizational processes. ..






"...Horizontality destroys skyscrapers and kills cities..."





"...The culture of horizontality does not undo hierarchy, it just makes it harder to read..."





"....The increasingly horizontal corporation, organized along super-Taylorist and cybernetic principles of communicational efficiency, would construct low, spreading buildings for its offices in the suburbs. Consequently, in Los Angeles as in other cities, the congested vertical urban core began to empty.





Ville Radieuse Redux







"In his essay “The Fluid Metropolis,” [Domus 496, March 1971] Andrea Branzi tracks the downfall of the skyscraper and the urban core. He observes that “the skyline becomes a diagram of the natural accumulation which has taken place of capital itself.”

Branzi concludes that the horizontal factory and the supermarket – in which the circulation of information is made optimum and hierarchies disappear – would replace the tower as the foundational typologies for the fluid metropolis."[/i]



Once capital takes over “the empty space in which [it] expanded during its growth period” and when “no reality exists any longer outside of the system,” the skyscraper’s representation of the accumulation of capital becomes obsolete.






Looking through the Mead Corporation holding, to the hills of the Miami Valley...



Waldruhe, a gift from the Shantz family, I think..this was their rural retreat at one time...



South on 741, toward the Austin Road intersection





"subsidized housing" disguised as a spec development





...part of the old Waldruhe estate...but now a community center?



Next door:



"As exurban areas develop over time, their insular nature allows for a new kind of urban diversity.  Adjacent neighborhoods develop and coexist which are radically different, creating almost self-contained worlds where interaction is hardly necessary or likely among its residents".

 



"Unlike the districts of cities, the transportation network that feeds commuters into exurban areas makes it unnecessary for residents to travel through adjacent neighborhoods or even to have knowledge of them."




Three degrees of seperation between the subsidized and market rate housing...vegitation screen, chain link, and board fence...



"Exurbia is not suburban sprawl. Rather, it is a type of land development which occurs in formerly rural regions where agricultural production is no longer profitable. Exurbia recolonizes the land, taking a working landscape and making it a landscape of visual consumption".





The term Exurbia was originally used by Playboy Magazine’s associate publisher and general editor Auguste Comte Spectorsky in his 1956 book,
the Exurbanites

It is currently used to describe low-density regions that maintain the benefits of an urban way of life (a mode of existence which is primarily consumptive in nature), yet are detached from major cities and metropolitan areas.







"
As connections between cities grew into fully functioning communication networks and interstate highways enabled the shipping of goods and materials across any distance, the idea of city life could be exported to any location. Exurbs are the low-density self-sustaining communities that spring up in the middle of nowhere as a result of this infrastructure.  "

[img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v240/Jeff59c/Austin%20Road/32AR.jpg[/iimg]





...rears to the clear zone



Dayton Wright Brothers Airport









Looking toward the 741 intersection and down Austin towards the interstate



"Exurban areas, like urban districts, are generally networked together, forming virtual clusters of similar areas throughout the world."



"As the most visible products of society that literally shape our environment, buildings provide social cues. "Architecture structures group relationships by articulating moods and milieus within the ubiquitous horizontality of the contemporary urban realm. In the continuous construction of the postmetropolitan realm architecture now takes on the same role that Muzak played within the office block. It adds color to our lives. Sometimes it is fast, sometimes it is slow. On rare, special occasions, it is engaging, more often it is banal and background."



"Contemporary architecture since the mirror glass building creates a catalogue of prefigured affective conditions that allow for variation while accepting that mass difference is a fundamental requirement for living with total universalization"



"...Rem Koolhaas and other members of the post-avant-garde maintain that architecture should do nothing more than embody the flows of capital. Instead of enslaving itself to capital, as it does now, and instead of fulfilling the master-slave dialectic to become capital’s master, as it always wished to be under modernism, architecture now decides to end the game and achieve oneness with capital..."










Gas station at end of runway



Dayton...birthplace of aviation.....







"Exurban areas are far less costly and burdensome to run than the metropolis and have little need for heavy infrastructure. Crime, traffic, urban decay, and social tension hardly exist among its residents who effectively maintain a distance from the troubles of metropolitan life without the loss of any of its benefits."





People flee cities and suburbs for exurban communities of people just like themselves: neo-hippies, Klansmen, snow skiers, and elderly retirees. Purchasing patterns, shared identity, and lifestyle interests produces the voluntary homogeneity of exurbia.





Individual works of architecture now become examples of Atmospherics: a relationship between emotional forms whereby a sense of movement, from effect to effect, is generated  …The variation of stimuli within the built environment helps us to remain engaged with the world, by adjusting to constant change













..pleasantly landscaped sidewalk on 741









...the network plans to open an outpatient facility in Springboro at Pennyroyal Road and state Route 741, said Kevin Lavoie, spokesman for the network. The facility will be used for lab work and women's services, such as mammograms and imaging, Lavoie said. A group of general practitioners and specialists will work at the center, he said.

The Springboro facility will be part of Village Park at Settlers Walk, a planned 80-acre office, retail and residential park being developed by Coffman Development Co., just across state Route 741 from Settlers Walk, another Coffman development. The center will be "an anchor" to the office park...
Kettering Medical Center looking to Expand South



The next OH 725...looking south toward Springboro & the Clear Creek Valley....





"And was Jerusalem/
Builded here/
In Ohio's green and pleasant land"



Gazebo in the Settlers Walk traffic circle....






systems of communication...infrastructure....

"If the dawn of the bourgeois era is marked by the development of the metropolis, it ends with the complete transformation of the world into a postmetropolitan condition in which the metropolis becomes secondary to systems of computation and communication...












empty nester housing facing the airfield.....



....the Clear Creek valley....





...impoved Pennyrile Road....



Noah Cross (to Jake Gittes): " Either you bring the water to L.A. or you bring L.A. to the water." (in Roman Polanski's "Chinatown"



"...the United States won the Cold War because it understood that the nature of production changed from physical objects to a virtual system of networks. The Cold War served the United States as a massive fiction, allowing it to develop the world’s most thorough system of networks..."

[/i]Already, Eisenhower saw the importance of networks when he spearheaded the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 to ensure the construction of the world’s first transcontinental highway system. In submitting the documents to Congress, Eisenhower wrote:

“Our unity as a nation is sustained by free communication of thought and by easy transportation of people and goods. The ceaseless flow of information throughout the republic is matched by individual and commercial movement over a vast system of interconnected highways crisscrossing the country and joining at our national borders with friendly neighbors to the north and south.[/i]



Together, the united forces of our communication and transportation systems are dynamic elements in the very name we bear - United States. Without them, we would be a mere alliance of many separate parts.”[/i]



"Cut-rate detailing and low-cost prefabricated elements made Guild House a stark reminder that modernism won its battle not because of ideology but because it was cheaper to build than neo-classicism. Later projects by the firm that followed this methodology would be condemned as “ugly and ordinary… the ideas of the decorated shed and ugly and ordinary architecture proved too controversial for even the most avant-garde architects"



...modular housing is the realization of the "radical architecture" of the European 1960s....collectives like Archigram (UK) and Archizoom (Italy) proposed "no stop cities" of grids of services where you would just "plug in' temporary accomodations..partly as ironic critique/diagram...



....and as executed:



"Value is now a commodity in and of itself, regularly sought out and consumed. All objects and all people are members of a giant stock exchange, not as investors on the floor, but as flickering numbers running across a banner, some rising, some falling, but always moving up and down. "









"..Exurbia is marked by the homogeneity and clustering of its residents.
Residents of exurbia want to avoid situations in which they encounter individuals unlike themselves. They maintain a distance from other groups in order to decrease the likelihood of chance encounters with strangers and dissimilar people that typify urban life. In exurbia, group identity is formed by a collective sameness rather than group interaction and communication..."






..the "Dayton Daily News" with a lot of security....their editorial positions are not popular in the area:





"…. The space of global technological flows does not desire to become visual or apparent: perhaps only some spray-paint or a flag in the ground marks the presence of fiber below, sometimes even that is elusive...."




--------->  source for most of the quoted/italicized narrative in this thread is the audc website


$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Update:

ODOT Plans for the interchange and proposed continuous flow interchange, first in Ohio....








Au$tin Road (red circle at left) and some nearby land under residential developement



24 Dec news article:

"MIAMI TWP., Montgomery County — A small sign advertising 54 acres of mixed-use development only hints at the boom projected on more than 1,100 acres surrounding the proposed Austin Pike interchange.

The sign, posted by R.G. Properties, concerns a fraction of the land in Springboro, Miamisburg and Miami Twp. that is part of the development expected to create as many as 28,000 jobs....

.....Zoning regulations shared by the three communities allow for everything from homes to industrial parks, all on some of the last large, undeveloped tracts along the Warren-Montgomery line."

[chrizow]

why would you post a giant photo thread about Dayton in a St. Louis thread?

[James Bond Agent 007]

^
It's the Midwest. Close-enough.

Anyway, great comment Jeff. That pretty much describes it all. It's all about mass-produced and commoditized everything, not just objects but even systems and relationships.

[Xing]

Was this all Missouri only? I know you can see parts of Illinois with the Birds Eye View now, including a lot of East St. Louis. For some reason, this country has a lot of interest in seeing how bad East St. Louis is. I thought people here would want to join the bandwagon of traffic accident viewing.

[niwell]

Good stuff (to both Bond and Jeff). It brought my level of hope for this society down to near zero though. I think I might have cried a bit.

[James Bond Agent 007]

Originally Posted by Xing

Was this all Missouri only? I know you can see parts of Illinois with the Birds Eye View now, including a lot of East St. Louis. For some reason, this country has a lot of interest in seeing how bad East St. Louis is. I thought people here would want to join the bandwagon of traffic accident viewing.

Yes, this is just the Missouri side of the river. The bird's eye coverage didn't really go far east enough to capture any Illinois-side "sprawl," just some areas of East St Louis.

[yakumoto]

Jesus christ, this thread is depressing...

[Buckeye Native 001]

Where's the soul?

[john3eblover]

By your definition, every single type of houseing in the world must be cookie cutter. I can't imagine anything you haven't labeled as cookie cutter yet. Tell me, do you expect people to make drastic changes to their houses to ensure that they are NOT cookie cutter? What do you want them to do, build their house out of logs or legos? I understand that some houses look very similar, but cmon, get over it. Everything can't be drastically different. There are a lot of people living in this country.

[James Bond Agent 007]

^
Technically speaking, yes, nearly every mass-produced housing type is "cookie cutter" housing. When I called them "cookie cutter," I did not intend that to be a value statement, it was just an informal and shorthand was of saying "mass produced" housing. As I pointed out in my very first caption for the very first pic, given the numbers involved, it is understandable and inevitable we get "cookie cutter" or "mass produced" housing.

[Jeff_in_Dayton]

Anyway, great comment Jeff. That pretty much describes it all. It's all about mass-produced and commoditized everything, not just objects but even systems and relationships.

Thanks! I appreciate your appreciation!...sorry, too, if this was to be only St Louis....i thought other cities could be posted as well.

Some of what is happening in suburbia, or the "thinking" around it, reminds me a bit of that Situationalist book "The Society of the Spectacle"....

[i]In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.[i]

...in short the world in quotation marks. People don't "see" what is there, they see the quotation, or, if you will, the "brand".

[john3eblover]

Originally Posted by James Bond Agent 007

^
Technically speaking, yes, nearly every mass-produced housing type is "cookie cutter" housing. When I called them "cookie cutter," I did not intend that to be a value statement, it was just an informal and shorthand was of saying "mass produced" housing. As I pointed out in my very first caption for the very first pic, given the numbers involved, it is understandable and inevitable we get "cookie cutter" or "mass produced" housing.

still, why even use the term then? It's a negative connotation associated word. It gets old when you see it show up so much on these forums. As if somehow anyone NOT living in some kind of huge condo building, or a rare old house in the middle of an urban metro is at fault for the "similar" construction techniques used everywhere.

[James Bond Agent 007]

^
Well OK, maybe in the future I'll use it more sparingly. Whatever.

[chrizow]

there is no more "cookie-cutter" form of housing than the classic east coast rowhouses that forumers on this board treasure so much. there are blocks upon blocks of literally the SAME building in philly, boston, baltimore, brooklyn, etc.

"cookie-cutter" isn't the issue - it's scale, connectedness to the urban environment, materials, etc. thus, brick rowhomes that all look the same receive approval because they are in an urban, pedestrian-friendly environment.

by contrast, the homes and townhouses in these "sprawl" threads are certainly cookie-cutter, but more troublingly they are detached from any idea of human-scaled development. it would probably take 20 minutes just to walk out of the subdivision - and for what? to walk down a congested 4-lane feeder road with no sidewalks? to walk to the Jiffy Lube or Wendy's three miles away?

cookie-cutter isn't the problem - the urban planning is.

[STLtrent]

^That's what I was gonna say.

Also, many of those old rowhouses of yesteryear are of much higher quality that the current stock of houses being built. Those old city row houses in Boston, Philly and even St. Louis will still be going strong years from now, whereas the current housing being massed produced will become waste.

[waterloowarrior]

Great thread as always Bond - the amount of exurbia in some parts of the US is mindboggling (not that Canada is immune in any way). Also, thanks for that posting Jeff - very depressing though