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In the Suburbs

41 images in this album on 5 pages

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Gallery: Tinotopia Gallery

Album: Urban Planning

Most of these photos were taken within a radius of a few miles, in a place variously called 'Sterling', 'Cascades', 'Dulles', and God knows what else. It's fitting that this place doesn't have a definite name, as it's a very indefinite place. The area has quite a lot to offer; there's a very good variety of shops, a better-than-average selection of chain restaurants, a large mall, and plenty of fairly nice houses. There's even been a number of conspicuous attempts to make the place less of a hell of suburban sprawl; that all of these have failed, and that all of these could have been predicted to fail ahead of time because every good effort is totally isolated behind a giant parking lot, makes it all the sadder.

The Marketplace at South Bank Commons. Of course, this isn't a real marketplace at all, and it's certainly not a 'commons'. It's a strip mall. The developers tried to do a better-than-normal job with it, though. They ultimately failed, possibly for reasons beyon their control.

At the entrance to the Marketplace at South Bank Commons. You're looking at a quarter-mile-long blank wall enclosing the 'commons', and the six-lane divided road -- with a 35 mpg speed limit -- that runs past on the back side. Note that this road is not the main drag, but just an access road for the 'commons' and the tract houses nearby.

Inside the Marketplace strip mall, you find a number of nice touches like this phone box, part of an actual culture transplanted into this sham one. Of course, nobody actually uses this phone, because nobody walks past it except on the way from their cars to the Starbucks.

The developers obviously tried their best. Most strip malls consist of a single large strip, and a number of what they call 'outparcels', i.e. parcels of land out in the parking lot. This particular strip mall consists mainly of two strips at right angles, with some particularly large outparcels in the middle of the lot. These are arranged so as to create a little crossroads in the middle of the parking lot, pictured in this panorama. With no context, the only clue you'd have that this isn't a functional place is that most of the structures are only one story tall.

Be sure to view the full version, as this is a panorama. The thumbnail is just a detail shot.

If you look in the other direction, toward where I was standing when I took the panorama, you see the problem. The biggest outparcel the strip mall has is for a Home Depot, which faces in the other direction. To hide their loading dock and lumber storage area, they have this tall fence stretching for a quarter-mile in both directions.

Just off the right edge of the panoramic photo, there's a vest-pocket park with a fountain in the middle. On the side of the Hallmark store next to that, there's this mural. Note the gray-painted bricks, meant to suggest that you could walk right into the picture. There are more people in this picture than I saw on foot in the whole strip mall when I was there on a Saturday afternoon.

Someone involved in the planning of this strip mall understood that people tended to like vistas -- in this case the main east-west 'road' through the strip mall -- that are terminated, particularly by public buildings. This is a library.

Unfortunately, the vista is terminated by the crooked orange 'DRUG FREE ZONE' sign in front of the library's jive-Palladian facade. The actual entrance to the library faces the parking lot on the side, but they've paid homage to the New Urbanist ideal with stairs and the obligatory wheelchair-access ramp.

The wheelchair entrance to the library. I would imagine that anyone actually in a wheelchair would enter via the more-convenient parking lot and not the deserted street, but the thing is probably put to good use by skateboarders.

The intention was to terminate the vista with the library, but because you can't mess with the sacred form of the strip mall, the library faces on this street. Across the street are loading docks, concealed by more quarter-mile-long fences.

The street is mainly used to store trailers and trucks.

Gallery: Tinotopia Gallery

Album: Urban Planning

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