A City in the Suburbs?

 

  As suburbs evolve eventually one becomes a city built around a government center, an airport, or other regional amenity. The surrounding suburbs while enjoying the suburban life style use the city amenities intensively creating the bulk of the traffic near the city amenities. Valley Fair/Santana Row is fed by the whole suburban south bay.

Suburbanites will always have a personal vehicle and will drive it from home to somewhere.  Good urban planning means that the somewhere is sufficient to meet the needs of the suburbanite for the day however long the day is.  If it is a workday, lunch, coffee breaks, a stroll in the park, and dinner and entertainment if that is part of the day should be in walking distance from the parking.  If it is a weekend day the destination should have the main event for the day, a park, a gathering place (see placemaking) and again dinner and evening entertainment if desired.  In both cases the parking should be remote with a variety of last mile options to the urban center.

  Nevertheless suburbanites resist the city's efforts to deal with traffic and other city issues with the greater density.  The urban spaces must be carefully planned and essentially forced into the suburban spaces.  It is never easy, and "community involvement" is usually dysfunctional as the only community that will bother to go to the meetings will be those with an agenda to put the city somewhere else.   

 With regard to the developments on Stevens Creek one vocal opponent cites traffic on Stevens Creek that prevents her from getting to her city amenity of a Safeway and other stores in the once suburban shopping center that San Jose wants to turn into an urban village.

  Santa Clara objects to our listing a bike route on Pruneridge that they created by modifying traffic lanes on that once important East West thoroughfare further contributing to congestion on Stevens Creek. But no way, no how can we build the density to pay for our own urban bike corridor.    

 Cupertino wants a hotel to support their suburban businesses as long as it won't cast a shadow in someone's back yard.    They like their city amenities and use them intensively, but don't want to give up even a daylight plane to get them.

A vocal group rants about school impact of development but Lynbrook, Miller, and Dilworth in District 1 are considering redistricting due to declining enrollments.  Lynbrook canceled AP Music Theory this year, a critical pre-requisite for top colleges.

  This suburban thinking is the very antithesis of regional planning. We would be happy to add our neighbors to our planning groups and did so.  Their NO WAY, NO HOW interminable rants disrupted our planning meetings and made reasonable planning impossible.

 The solution is unfortunately to ignore the community input, or rather use the community input to cover substantive conversations on the periphery between city officials and developers pursuant to building the necessary density for the project to work.