Found this cartoon summing up my view of living in the suburbs via agentnifty on The Twitter.

It’s from this Danish site and you’ll probably have to click it to see it properly.

As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t like suburbs, even if they do make for some amazing pictures; there just isn’t enough space for wabi-sabi.

Luckily, Andrew Maynard has the answer – suburb eating robots. There’s a great slideshow here describing how – and why – they work (fuelled by liposuctioned fat from chubbies):

Perhaps more practically, the Build a Better Burb competition is looking at ways of improving the ‘burbs of Long Island. You can view all the entries and vote for your favourite.

My favourite is the idea of the Hub-urb, which is fairly self-explanatory (?) It reminds me of how things are organised in the suburbs of Tokyo, which works pretty well.

I’m also pretty keen on the idea of Clover-Stomping (which involves using all that dead space in and around clover-leaf intersections). Annoyingly, it’s all done in Flash, so I can’t link to the entries direct – but here’s some screengrabs below – as usual, click for embiggenisation:

Finally, Andrew Maynard doesn’t only dream of destroying suburbs with chubbie-powered robots, but of replacing them with dynamic, reconfigurable living spaces comprised of shipping containers that move according to the whims and needs of residents:

A good piece on Andrew Maynard and suburbs in general is here on the Landscape + Urbanism blog.

The Suburb-Eating Robot is also here on this PDF (with further elucidation on the chubbie-chasing ethos).

I found the links to Andrew Maynard via Treehugger.

All the images from above (and some more) are below in this gallery.

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