THE SUBURBS WON.

Alan M. Berger and David Gordon contemplate sustainable suburbia.

The communities where most new development is taking place are not just suburbs, they’re exurbs, suburbs of the suburbs.

At MIT’s Center for Advanced Urbanism we just completed a two year-plus project which not only confirms the demographic primacy of suburbia, but points to its profound environmental implications. Our research team replaced flawed, 19th century methods with a novel technique, successfully peer reviewed and then tested in Canada and Australia. We looked at neighborhoods for all 350 U.S. Metropolitan Areas—the places where 86% of American households live—using census data, Geographical Information Systems, Google Earth and Google Street View.

Here’s what we found: Most—63%—of those the U.S. Census defines as “urban” Americans are actually suburbanites who commute by car from auto-dependent places. An additional 18% live in exurbia and also commute by car. People that live relatively close to city centers and ride in by public transit are another 13%. Still, even they rely on cars in their home communities.

Any realistic route to a sustainable urban future needs to harness this combined population, a racially and economically diverse 92% of U.S. “metropolitan” residents, and their automobile-based mind-set. It’s these suburbanites in their much-dissed ‘bedroom’ communities and anything-but-iconic houses that can create the radical changes we need.

Transportation is key. The mass adoption of the automobile was the primary catalyst for the design of 20th century suburbs, and our infrastructure was built to support it.

Today, we need a different catalyst.

There's not enough money to maintain all those roads, let alone the parking lots and strip malls. Some of the exurbs, though, were once upon a time streetcar or interurban suburbs.  Perhaps those corridors for autonomous cars and guided buses will be their contemporary equivalents.