Superbia: 31 Ways to Create Sustainable Neighborhoods

Superbia! is a book of practical ideas for creating more socially, economically, and environmentally sustainable neighborhoods. It is about remaking suburban and urban neighborhoods to serve people better and to reduce human impact on the environment.

The authors first trace the history of the suburbs, showing how they fail to meet many peoples' needs. They then describe how existing neighborhoods can be transformed, offering cohousing and new urbanist communities as examples. The reader is then guided through the transformation of a fictitious neighborhood that adopts the authors' thirty-one steps. Ideas for the blossoming of the suburb are described in order of difficulty, from easy to boldest, including:

the creation of a neighborhood newsletter to foster a sense of neighborhood identity and cooperation
regular community dinners, discussion groups, and baby-sitting co-ops
the removal of backyard fences to create park-like spaces for community play areas, or gardens
retrofitting homes for energy efficiency, and installing community energy systems.

Examples from all over North America and beyond provide real-life proof that citizen planners can create Superbia! And the most comprehensive resource listing imaginable puts all the tools needed at your fingertips.

Well-illustrated and reader-friendly, Superbia! is written primarily for the millions who live in urban areas or existing suburbs. It will also be of major interest to environmentalists, planners, and all who want to create a more humane and nurturing lifestyle.

Dan Chiras is the author of nineteen books including The Natural Plaster Book (New Society Publishers, 2003) and over 200 articles, a contributing editor to Mother Earth News, and an adjunct professor at Colorado College.

Dave Wann has produced six video programs on community, is coauthor of Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic and two other books about design. Both live in Colorado.

But, these challenges provide numerous opportunities for positive change! People can reinvent their neighborhoods based on economic, environmental, and social values. Superbia! provides a checklist of Easy, Bolder, and Boldest Steps that can lead to safer, friendlier, livelier, healthier, more productive, diverse and vibrant neighborhoods. Neighbors can chose the steps they think will create a stronger sense of place and connection to people, nature, and culture.

Easy Steps include sponsoring community dinners, establishing a community newsletter, and creating car and van pools for work commutes. Some neighbors have started book and investment clubs. For example, the Hillcrest Neighborhood Association in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, sponsors a book club where neighbors "get together with fellow book enthusiasts to converse, discuss, and debate current bestsellers and classics," according to the group's website. Superbia! describes how there are hundreds of potential links between people within neighborhoods - links that can reduce time, human energy, and money spent by individuals on tight schedules as well as tight budgets. Easy Steps help people know one another better helping them discover links that lead to Bolder Steps.

Planting a community garden or orchard is a Bolder Step. A composting project can serve the community garden and individual yards. Planting shade trees and windbreaks reduces energy costs, provides wildlife habitat, and increases property values. The Highlands Neighborhood in Littleton, Colorado, took a Bolder Step by tearing down fences. There was already a neighborhood tradition of parties in backyards, but neighbors decided to go a step further and took down their six-foot fences and opened the space to the neighbors creating a better sense of community.

Boldest Steps include creating a community energy system and creating a common house and community-shared office. A Boldest Step was taken by New York's Darrow School when the failure of a conventional wastewater system provided an opportunity to install a Living Machine - a greenhouse-contained biological waste treatment facility that uses natural methods rather than harmful chemicals to recycle human waste. This system is also used as a hands-on laboratory for a variety of classes including science, chemistry, mathematics, and even art.

With a history of how the suburbs came to be, 31 ways to make the suburbs better, examples of people who have created more sustainable neighborhoods, and a Resource Guide, readers can actively transform their suburbia into Superbia!

Authors Chiras and Wann walk their talk. Chiras built and lives in a sustainable, solar home, and Dave Wann helped develop and lives in Harmony Village co-housing. They are also co-directors of the Sustainable Futures Society's Sustainable Suburbs project. Visit www.sustainablecolorado.org to learn more.

Susan Bilo is an energy and resource conservation consultant with Sustainable By Design, LLC.


Hopeful prescription for Improving Uninspired Neighborhoods   March 5, 2004
Bruce Rhodes (near Toronto)
12 out of 12 found this review helpful

To inject life, fun and spontanaeity into North American suburbs will not be easy. Many neighbourhoods were built after WW II, when land and resources such as electricity and gasoline were plentiful and cheap; developers, government and the public were not very conscious of there being limits to, or issues with, creating vast car-centric suburbs. Now, many of us live in an energy-inefficient home on a long, straight street that forms one line in a grid that is populated by far more motor vehicles than pedestrians. Here, we easily grow fat and sedentary, often not knowing who lives one or two doors away.
In Superbia!, the authors prescribe 31 steps to transform neighborhoods into places where there is a true sense of community, and where hard resources (e.g. cars, washing machines) can ultimately be shared by groups of families, and consumable resources (electricity, gasoline) are used in more environmentally responsible ways.
The encouraging news is that neighborhoods in the USA, Europe and elsewhere have implemented these 31 steps. It often took a lot of persuasion of local politicians and bureaucrats to, for example, tear up existing streets to make them narrower, for the purpose of calming traffic. While the authors, to their credit, indicate that some of the 31 steps are plainly challenging to implement, and ential people changing their mental models, the authors at times neglect to address the role and response of some key stakeholders as neighborhoods transform themselves. For example, as I read the steps about removing fences between people's yards, and subsequent encouragement of kids in the neighborhood to congregate in certain areas of this newly-created 'open' space, I visualized the trepidation that the insurance companies covering these homes might have; what happens when you encourage everyone onto your property, and then someone gets hurt? In general terms, I felt that the book could at times have been more rigorous in tipping off the reader as to what to expect from other stakeholders relevant to the transformation process.
I support what the authors propose. The main message I got from the book is: don't wait for politicians or developers to be the ones to build or retrofit neighborhoods that are environmentally sustainable, and offer building structures and juxtapositions to foster social cohesiveness; rather, strike out on your own, with the modest first step being to organize a potluck supper for your immediate neighbors. From there, transformation events can evolve; the authors have demonstrated, through numerous anecdotes, that this process can indeed work.


From Suburbia to Superbia!   February 5, 2004
Susan L. Keen (Golden, CO United States)
15 out of 15 found this review helpful

Superbia! is a strikingly simple book, proposing that neighbors can create
friendlier and healthier neighborhoods by getting to know each other and
working together. The beginning Steps it suggests are easy - things like
having neighborhood potlucks and baby-sitting coops - but the advanced steps
will take some real teamwork. You and your neighbors won't set up a
neighborhood energy system or buy a house for use as a common building until
a high level of trust is established. By the time the advanced steps are
taken on, the neighborhood will be like an extended family, with all its
benefits -- as well as liabilities.

But Chiras and Wann argue that the benefits far outweigh the liabilities.
For example, they don't propose a loss of privacy, but rather an increase in
options and flexibility. What do we do when the car won't start, we go on
vacation and the plants need watering, or we just need someone to talk to?
Call a neighbor.

This book is well-researched, documenting how neighborhoods took the shape
they did, with wide streets, huge lawns, and barricade-like garage doors.
The 50 million suburban homes in the U.S. (and all their associated
infrastructure) are then seen in the book as ingredients for cooking up a
better neighborhood. As the authors suggest, why can't we create common
areas for the kids and a community garden by donating parcels of our
backyards and creating a pathway where alleys used to be? Why can't we
establish a neighborhood recycling system, a carpooling and even car-sharing
system? Why shouldn't part of our yards also become low-maintenance, "edible
landscapes" that provide cherries and grapes rather than just grass
clippings?

As the book compellingly asks, Why can't we work together to save time,
money, and human energy, and in the process, have some fun? In the median
income U.S. household budget, $3,000 a year could be saved if our costs for
food, energy, entertainment, health, and transportation were reduced through
neighborhood efforts that also meet an often- expressed need for a sense of
community, and a sense of place.

What Superbia! is about is basic improvements in the quality of our
lifestyles. Less of an emphasis on buying our lives, and more on just living
our lives. Far from being just a Utopia-like dream, the book's ideas are
already being implemented in neighborhoods across the country, and several
chapters in the book are dedicated to case studies of each Step - where and
how it was implemented. Another series of chapters presents a fictitious
neighborhood that walks the reader through the evolution of the Fox Run
neighborhood, from suburbia to Superbia!

If your neighborhood association needs a spark of energy, get a copy of this
book and form a discussion group around it. At the very least, you'll
emerge with a roster of neighbors and a fresh perspective on what a
neighborhood can be.